“No, Navarro. I’m going to lose myself in Mexico City, just as in the past I lost myself in London, in Rome, in Bremerhaven, in New Orleans, wherever my imagination and the fear of mortals like you have led me. Now I will lose myself in perhaps the most populous city on the planet. I will blend in with the nocturnal crowds, already savoring the abundance of fresh blood, ready to make it mine, to resume my thirst, the thirst for the ancient sacrifice that is at the origin of all history. . But don’t forget this: my friends always call me Vlad.”
I turned my back on this vampire, on his horror, on his fatalism. Yes, I was going to choose life and work, even though my heart had already died forever. And yet, a sacred voice, hidden until that moment, whispered into my ear, from within my soul, that the secret of the world is that it’s unfinished, because God himself is unfinished. Perhaps, like the vampire, God is a nocturnal and mysterious being who has not yet manifested or understood Himself, and that is why he needs us. To live so that God doesn’t die. To carry on living the unfinished work of a yearning God.
I gave a last sidelong glance at the gully of felled trees that had been turned into stakes. Magda and Minea laughed and swung between the stakes, singing:
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
and I will sing a lullaby:
rock them, rock them, lullaby. .
I felt my will to live drained, slipping away like the blood down the drains of the vampire’s mansion. I didn’t even have the will to accept the deal Vlad had offered. Work, the rewards of life, the pleasures. . Everything had escaped me. I was defeated by all that remained undone. I felt the pain of the terrible nostalgia for what was not and would never be. What had I lost on this awful day? Not love, which persisted in spite of everything. Not love, but hope. Vlad had left me without hope, with no consolation except to feel that what happened had happened to another, the feeling that everything came from somewhere else, even though it had happened to me: I was the sieve, an intangible mystery had passed through me but had come and gone, from somewhere to somewhere else. . And yet, might its passage not have changed me nevertheless, and forever?
I went out onto the street.
The wrought-iron gate shut behind me.
I could not resist a final look at Count Vlad’s mansion.
Something even stranger than everything I had already seen was happening.
The Bosques de las Lomas house, its airy modern glass façade and its clean geometric lines, were dissolving before my eyes, as if they were melting. As the modern house dissolved, another house appeared little by little in its place, changing the new into the old, glass into stone, the substitution of one form for another.
There was appearing, little by little, behind the veil of the visible house, the shape of an ancient, ruined, uninhabitable castle, already pervaded with that smell I knew from the coffin-lined tunneclass="underline" an unstable edifice, creaky like the hull of a very old ship run aground amid rugged mountains, a castle with a ruined watchtower, with eatenaway battlements, with threatening towers flanking it on all sides, with moldy gates, with a dry and slimy moat, and with the highest tower, the tower of homage, bearing the castle’s master, Vlad watching me with his dark sunglasses, telling me he would leave this place and that I would never recognize it if I returned, summoning me back into the catacomb, warning me that I would never again be able to live a normal life, no matter how hard I struggled, because despite everything I would know that my life force was already buried in a tomb, that I myself would thenceforth live, wherever I was, in the vampire’s tomb, and that however much I affirmed my will to live, I was condemned to death because I would live with the knowledge of what I had undergone so that Vlad’s black tribe would not perish.
Then, from a side tower, they flew clumsily away, clumsily because they were like monstrous rats endowed with varicose wings, the blind Vespertilios, the bats guided by the power of their filthy, long, hairy ears, emigrating to a new sepulcher.
Were Asunción, my wife, and Magda, my daughter, among the flock of blind rats?
I approached my parked car.
Something was moving inside the vehicle.
Someone.
A blurred figure.
When I could finally make it out, I screamed in a mixture of horror and joy.
I raised my hands to my eyes, I hid my gaze, and I could only mutter:
“No, no, no. .”
About the Authors
The author of more than a dozen novels and collections of stories and essays, CARLOS FUENTES (1928–2012) was Mexico’s most celebrated novelist and critic. He received numerous honors and awards throughout his lifetime, including the Miguel de Cervantes Prize and the Latin Literary Prize.
E. SHASKAN BUMAS wrote the story collection The Price of Tea in China, a finalist for PEN America West Fiction Book of the Year. He teaches at New Jersey City University.
ALEJANDRO BRANGER is a writer and filmmaker. He lives in New York City.