He was strangling me.
“Don’t you feel any compassion for me? She ripped out my eyes, she sucked them out the way she sucks everything, so that my eyes couldn’t express a need for anything other than blood, nor sympathy for anything other than the night. .”
I tried to bite the hand that gagged me and forced me to listen to this incredible and ancient story, though I feared, like an idiot, that to draw the blood of a vampire was to tempt the devil himself. Vlad tightened his grip over my body.
“Children are all inner strength, Mr. Navarro. A part of our vital force is contained inside each child, and we waste it. We want them to stop being children and to become adults, workers, people ‘useful to society.’ ”
He let out a revolting laugh.
“History! Think about the history I just recounted to you, and tell me if that garbage dump of lies — those screens we erect around the terrified mortality that we call careers, politics, economics, art, even art, Mr. Navarro — can save us from idiocy and from death! Do you know what my plan is? To let your daughter grow up, acquire the shape and beauty of a woman, but never to allow her to stop being a girl, a source of life and purity. .
“No, Minea will never grow up,” he said, sensing my confusion. “She is the eternal girl of the night.”
He turned me around so that I faced him, and he showed me his shining gums and his ivory fangs polished into mirrors.
“I am waiting for your daughter to grow up, Navarro. She will stay with me. She will be my. . girlfriend. One day she will be my wife. She will be brought up to be a vampire.”
The evil monster flashed an acerbic smile.
“I don’t know if we’ll be giving you any grandchildren.”
He let me go. He extended his arm and pointed the way.
“Wait for your wife in the living room. And keep in mind one thing. I have been feeding on your wife while the little girl has been growing accustomed to her new home. But I won’t want to keep her around much longer. Only just so long as she is useful to me. Frankly, I don’t understand what you see in her. Elle est une femme de ménage!”
Chapter 14
I walked like a somnambulist to the white living room with black furniture and numerous drains, and there I sat and waited. When my wife appeared, dressed in black, her hair let down, her gaze fixed, I felt sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion, vast tenderness and an equally great fear.
I stood and offered my hand to draw her closer to me. Asunción rejected the invitation and sat across from me with a vacant look. She didn’t touch me.
“Darling,” I said, leaning my head and torso forward until my hands clasped my knees, “I’ve come for you. I’ve come for our girl. I think all of this is just a nightmare. Let’s collect Magda. The car is parked right outside. Asunción, quick, let’s get out of here quick.”
She looked at me in just the way I had looked at her when she came in, except that she displayed only half of my feelings: antipathy, repulsion, and fear. Which reduced my hand to fear alone.
“Do you love my daughter?” she asked in a new voice that sounded as though she’d swallowed sand, banishing me from our shared parenthood with that cruel, cold possessive: my daughter.
“Asunción. . Magda,” I managed to mumble.
“Do you remember Didier?”
“Asunción, he was our son.”
“Is. He is my son.”
“Ours, Asunción. He died. We loved him, we remember him, but he no longer is. He was.”
“Magdalena won’t die,” Asunción declared with an icy calm. “The boy died. The girl will never die. I will never again have to live through that grief.”
How, under these circumstances, could I say something to her along the lines of “we’re all going to die, someday”—when in my wife’s voice and eyes, she had already conjured something like an eternal flame, this belief that she kept repeating. .