Coming in through a long, narrow corridor put him at the midpoint of the great cathedral. A stretched nave ran like a causeway between the colossal altar and the Door of Mercy through which the faithful came and went; halfway along it, a small door.
Cárcel dipped his head slightly as he entered through the door used by young priests and acolytes. The door closed behind him.
For a while he didn't look at Emiliano but at the nave. While Cárcel quietly took in the colored lights pouring down to the floor from the high stained glass, and the way most of the ceiling remained gray, uncarved and unpainted, Emiliano slowly unknotted his work apron, folded it, and set it aside.
Soon Cárcel walked past him toward the altar.
From each pier along the wall, statues of the eight Apostles looked down on them. A single, gargantuan carving covering the whole rear wall of the altar was in a state like a pictureless frame—its frame alone delicately completed—and if you climbed the ladder up to the ceiling, there was a work platform installed high above, the size of a small room where several grown men could lie down at once.
He fixed his gaze on the portion already completed in sumptuous color, as if flames had spread outward from the spot where Emiliano's platform was set. A piece of a great sacred painting that reached higher still. The under-drawing continued across the colorless gray stone; it flowed as one with the cartoon drawn for the monumental relief below.
"Splendid."
"…Thank you."
"In five years it'll be more splendid yet."
"Yes. Probably by then."
His clear, gentle tenor—soft, as he looked—was rigid and stiff. Was it, as my friend said, that he was cowed in advance by the honor? Or, like my friend, simply nervous to be facing someone of a great ducal house for the first time…?
Any reason you might hang on it would read as natural, but none of it was the answer. Because this was not their first meeting.
"Do you have any other ties in Calstera?"
"…"
"Three years ago—ah. By the year count, that makes it four now. You came all the way from Oli García to that far place and laid down a medal that wasn't even for sale."
No answer came back. With the altar right before him, Cárcel turned around. A loose blue linen shirt mottled with old patterns from oil and paint, tousled light-brown fringe falling over his brow, and the grimy apron clenched tight in his hands.
Below the sleeves rolled to the elbow, the wiry forearms were bunched with strain. He stared for a moment at the painter's hand, gone white from how hard he gripped, then lifted his eyes.
Still a face indecently—infuriatingly—clean, as if the world had spared only him. Feeling instead that he wanted to laugh, Cárcel opened his mouth.
"Were you in Pérez as well?"
"…"
"Earlier than when you came to Calstera. Say…"
"…No. I've only heard of it; I've never been."
It meant he intended, for now, to speak of the "present." And Cárcel had no taste for taking the first step over a cliff he knew was there. He threw an impassive gaze straight into Emiliano's eyes.
"From eight years ago to four years ago—between then."
As if he hadn't heard the answer that he'd never been there, and yet he, too, spoke of the "now." Even as he thought that there was, in truth, no longer "someone from those days."
From the year Ines turned sixteen, eight years ago, to the year she turned twenty, four years ago. The time when she not only lived shut off from the world, but vanished from it.
The loneliness of Pérez—for which the likes of him had, from the outset, no grounds, no worth, no need, no reason, no right to know.
In any case, that man lay in a story much older than that. "Were you in Pérez?"—what those unguarded words had meant, tossed out like a knife dropped on the floor without thought, he knew of himself from the start.
Had you been in Pérez? Say, long ago—back in that madman's-dream of a tale from the past. In the keep of Pérez, in those days when the daughter of Valeztena, long betrothed to the Crown Prince, had less than even a hundred days left before her wedding. When a painter's assistant, a mere nobody, dared come under imperial command to paint her portrait. A lowborn fellow, beneath contempt.
Do you remember that that was you.
Cárcel looked at the man, stilled and silent, weathered like a mural on a sea-blown wall.
Even laying aside that first meaning, it was laughable. Even without such a preposterous tale, his state was already laughable. If we are to speak of the present, all the more—
He knew the words he couldn't bring himself to spit out.
Did you two meet that way again this time—giving each other that time, that season, those years…
"…Whatever the time might be, it was not then, and I have never been there."
—Did you meet again, and did you love each other.
"As long as we are within the sanctuary of Bilbao, we cannot accept it. But because the years you supported us were so very long, and we repaid you so poorly… after this, we wish to belong to that patron once more."
"…"
"Emiliano as well, and I."
Because that was how it had been from the beginning.
So—was it me you chose now? Because you needed a man easier to cast aside than the Crown Prince. Because you needed a man from whom you could take only the name and then abandon it; a man who would draw you away from your parents, and draw that man away from your house…
Because you needed a man who would let you go safely.
So that you could return yourself entirely to your love.
"I meant it when I said you never had to mind me, no matter whom you met. I have no interest in you anyway…"
The question aimed at the Emiliano before his eyes had, before he knew it, turned toward that peaceful face asleep in his arms at dawn in Mendoza.
Ines, my poor Ines…
If so, then you should never have chosen a man like me. This time, I should have kept myself from knowing you. I should have kept myself from knowing the fullness of you coming into my arms, the rapture of you kissing me and smiling.
From knowing what it is to have you. From knowing what it is that I am yours.
From knowing what it feels like to be chosen by you, what a damned benediction it is that you finally want me.
I should have been kept from all of it. Ines—so that I would not, again, love you…
From you, you should have pried off the likes of me first.
Cárcel let out a low laugh. His lovely mouth twisted in self-mockery and then, at last, went cold.
Four years of Pérez into which that man never once set foot "again."
"…If you were not there those four years, then it means Ines loved you alone."
"…"
"Or else she mourned you—who aren't even dead and are alive and well."
"Lord Escalante."
"Do you remember me?"
Already ridiculous as he was, in the end he stretched his leg over the cliff.
The man who had guided him here had, to the last, not known who he was; introduced as a knight—no more than a noble errand boy from House Escalante—he was nonetheless addressed, as if it were only natural, as "Lord Escalante." He had squeezed the question like a hand at a throat, but the answer was no different from what he had already heard.
"…"
Docile, gentle brown eyes held a silence that felt like the faintest resistance as they looked at him. As if he could not say anything. Was he worried he might put Ines in a difficult position? Now, of all times. Cárcel snorted a thin breath of laughter again.
As if he knew how dogged men dig into their wives' former lovers, how they take issue with the past and will stoop to anything… yes. This was a world full of such fools.
Be grateful, perhaps, that dull head has at least that much caution in it. That he has the sense to doubt and guard against him. That he did not already slip into Pérez to whisper love, that he did not again seize Ines's ankle and drag her down, did not take her again and—
Back into that mire, wrenching her whole life up by the roots…
Swallowing a dull ache like his skull splitting, Cárcel retraced the memory that had stopped in utter darkness where nothing could be seen. He felt aggrieved. Beyond laughable—childish.
That weak, foolish fellow—that base, paltry man—was resisting him. To protect Ines. Daring, from him, to say he would protect her… For Ines's sake, he was wary of him. As if he might harm her; as if no man lived who thought of her more than himself; still—
As if he loved her.
Cárcel shortened the distance between them.
"Emiliano."
"…"
"How much do you remember of me?"
The best thing would be to know the answer never—to be forever unable to ask.
To never know Ines's love, her life-blood kind of love, that terrible thing. To not know that this marriage began entirely in falsehood.
To not know that, in truth, she still does not desire him.
"…Lord Escalante, I…"
And if he were to reach out this instant and seize his throat, Ines's old love would die like a bug crushed underfoot.
Cárcel gauged how easy it would be to kill Emiliano here. The most laughable part was this: had Emiliano not, in at least so paltry a way, acted as though he gauged Ines's situation—had he not shown even that much caution—then truly, he would have wrung that neck.
If the man whom "Ines" had staked the life of her young days to love had been no more than that. If, to that man, Ines were no longer the most precious being. He felt he could never forgive it.
But even if he were not that kind of man—
A wretch who once couldn't even keep his own life. That feeble man who couldn't even keep my wife…
Ah.
"…What is it that you remember?"
Wife.
Emiliano's wife, Ines.
That man's false Juana.
Cárcel suddenly recalled Sevilla's "Juana," who was no longer his wife—recalled the "Juana" waiting for that man at the little port, an infant in her arms. Juana. Juana… A hollow smile slipped out like air escaping. The small child in her arms.
The child who resembled that man and Ines just as they were. The child who, seeing him, burst into laughter, not knowing its parents' hardships.
What became of that child. Ines—
The fog lifted for a moment and settled once more.
"I am, unfortunately, in possession of the memory of everything that has happened to me, Lord Cárcel."