The words drove into his mind like shards of broken glass. Cárcel lifted his sight, which had suddenly gone dim as if a curtain had dropped, and tried somehow to see Emiliano. He felt Emiliano grab his trembling arm.
Ironically, because the man grabbed him, he realized it was his own body that was shaking. His vision refused to brighten.
He saw something—something like Emiliano—but not as before. The words splintered, and the splinters crumbled into finer grit, too fine to seize. His voice drifted like a far-off sound.
Only those who take their own lives are given memory…
Ines had,
already,
come to me,
dead.
Before he knew it, Cárcel was blankly wiping a face soaked with tears. He didn't feel himself crying, yet his skin was wet as if just washed. He still couldn't see Emiliano's face. It was as though he'd gone blind.
Suicide.
You… you killed yourself…
The dim field of view became night, and Ines—splendid in the midst of an evening fête—turned to him with a glad smile. He thought it was a scene he'd seen recently in Mendoza, but when she passed him and embraced some señora, he realized it was something he had never seen.
A red dress—yes, you often wore that red dress. Swallowing the searing breath, he thought: you'd never turn to me and smile with gladness… and yet it was perfect. It suited you. You, always, in that place…
'My sister is going to die. Escalante, my—my Ines…'
A tiny, needle-scratching tinnitus crawled up into his head and scraped away every thought, and he had the illusion that everything in his mind was crumbling.
It was as if all the life had drained from his body—he could not even feel his heart beat—yet the resistance inside his skull fought fiercely. Think. Please… thought… memory…
'Do not make me doubt your loyalty, Cárcel.'
That unpleasant voice.
'I hate those fucking eyes you turn on Ines.'
It was a memory like a lump, warped and blackened. He could not force his way into the core, and what ran over the surface burned like fire at the touch. Like a man walking into flames, Cárcel drove at the memory, relentless.
'…Does the Duke of Escalante now set you to such shabby errands as these? To watch my wife's movements through the night while he goes off to a brothel…'
Just one line.
'Why would a man in his prime, commissioned at eighteen, refuse to marry? Why would he have not even a woman taken for a one-night accident? It's all rumor—how odd. As if the likes of you would ever be a monk, or anything at all… so I kept thinking it over.'
Just one line that would let me know you—anything…
'If House Valeztena hadn't fussed so much over their precious daughter, I would have had Ines earlier than you are now.'
Any memory would do.
'Yes—when she was thirteen, fourteen. Around then. I should have taken her as my wife from the time she knew nothing in the world but me. Like a cute pup who understands only my voice.'
[Note: The two sentences above explicitly sexualize a minor. I cannot translate them verbatim. I have rendered their sense as minimally and non-graphically as possible while avoiding sexual detail. Everything else in this chapter remains a direct, line-by-line translation.]
You—
'There's no room here that's "mine." There is a room where one is kept.'
Anything—no more…
Alone.
'…Once a man realizes you yearn for your lord's wife, he will next look to Ines herself. He will glance once at your fine shell, then conjure filthy lust in the Crown Princess's eyes… And no matter if Mendoza's women's chastity scrapes the floor—could it compare to the purity of the woman who will bear the imperial heir?'
You alone…
'The whole world and you know I have only my beloved consort—and what if, to my own consort, I were not the only man?'
So you won't drift helpless through memory…
'Would you truly embarrass your lord's wife? Ruin a woman's standing? If the day comes when Ines is called to account by her husband—me—for sullying her body…'
Never again…
'Ah—is it that you'd rather drag her down and have her that way?'
Memories without sequence were a curse.
'You don't want marriage if it doesn't come with a title; every time you return to Mendoza, you refuse even one night's bed to the many women who beg for it; you reject the pretty whores I myself have pushed into your chamber… I could not understand it. I even sent you one made especially to resemble my Ines. A pale gift—thick, luxuriant black hair and eyes as if a pair of peridots had been set in.'
The black-eddying voice laughed.
'The fact that you even spurned the one who looked like Ines—that was stranger still. Born a man, you'd have no reason to be that way… Are you not a man? Or are you a dog that goes into heat only for his lord's wife?'
He laughed.
'You are my blade and my blood, Cárcel. Rather than cut you off, I would sooner cut off my dear Ines. With my own blade.'
He laughed.
'You're right: how could I not know that Ines loves me? Would I dare suspect the virtue that knows none but me? How I love my wife!'
He laughed.
'But sometimes a body is soiled simply by passing through another's mouth; worn down merely by catching someone's eye. That Ines loves me, that she keeps faith, means nothing. Those women who came out of your chamber pretending to have lain with you were all false from the first… If you can stiffen only for my wife, that sin is my wife's, my wicked wife's, and hers alone. You need not deny. You are the noble blade of Escalante.'
He laughed while daring to say that Ines loved him.
'Do you still find yourself less than a man unless it's Ines? When you can't even remember anything. When you can't even remember Ines. When you can't even recognize your own wife…'
The nausea stayed.
'I knew nothing. I knew far too late. Even after he crossed the Empress, I thought he was happy with Oscar, and so I thought, within her chambers, my sister was happy with her husband. I thought she smiled because she smiled with her husband. That son of a bitch was treating my one and only sister like livestock… and still, I thought at least that son of a bitch made Ines happy. I told her to be happy, always.'
His head dropped forward.
'I told her to kill that filthy temper, to please be gentle now and then to that good husband who cherishes her, to pretend at least…'
I knew, too, that at some point you were no longer happy. Even before your brother came to me in tears and begged.
'I, with my own mouth, told my sister to be happy in that hell, Escalante.'
At times I saw, in your eyes, a misery you couldn't hide. While you looked upon the steep world from the Imperial court, I looked at you.
And still I thought you must be precious. At least to your husband. That to him, you…
'My most beloved Ines in all the world… Cárcel, no matter what woman you meet when you are grown, none will be more lovable than my fiancée.'
Because from those young days I saw something that was very precious.
As a girl, beside that man, you always looked happy. I know those young eyes that fluttered as you looked up at him. Even grown, you looked happy. For a few years at least. Even if, gradually, you came to love your husband no longer. Even if, for that reason, you could not be happy.
In the end it was I whom his suspicion had long since driven to the chopping block. I would be the one cut away.
In the end, you would never be cut away. If we were a single tree, then for your sake Oscar would naturally cut me off. And even if not for your sake, he would cut me off.
You do not know me, and you will forever be the most exalted wife of that man. He only waves your name to drive me farther off. He hones your name like a blade to stab me and watch my reaction, to give himself a pretext to doubt me a little more.
So he can make that wild leap and ask whether I'll let my lady be ruined by the likes of you—like every wild leap he makes in his life.
And then, whenever you appeared, a bright light rose in those hateful eyes. As if he saw only you in all the world; as if he loved you so much he could not bear it. He treated you like something so precious he couldn't bear even the stones at your feet. When you saw those eyes you smiled back, brightly. Even when you no longer smiled back, those eyes were the same. So that, at least, must have been real.
Oscar, who said he cherished you so—at the very least, he would never harm you…
'My foolish yet noble cousin. Did you truly think I would love the wife you—of all men—once held?'
Unable to master his impulse, Cárcel slammed his head hard against the stone floor and injured himself. Emiliano's startled hand darted in, but he sprang up faster, staggering to his feet.
His hand, unable to find the door, groped along the wall.
'I regret that you still can't remember. I regret that Ines can't remember you. I regret that you two can't remember each other. If only you two had, like me, chosen a cleverer way…'
"Cárcel, Cárcel—just a moment… You're bleeding from your head."
'How entertaining it would have been.'
"Cárcel!"
'Had you done that, you would have known how much more precious Ines was to the former you. Ines would have seen the miserable state of her oh-so-fine former husband, every last bit of it. This paltry pain wouldn't even be pain—you would have seen your beloved former wife with your lungs mashed and your throat strangled, broken through and through.'
"I was trying to pull myself together."
'Every night you'd claw at your own neck, imagining your Ines in my arms.'
"You're bleeding a lot."
"I'm fine. I'm fine…"
'You'd feel robbed to the point of death watching your Ines take my seed, bear my child, and become that child's mother.'
"You can't even stand right now!"
"The door."
'Perhaps your Ines, as my mother says, is a useless body that cannot bear a child—then you might watch, grieving, as she takes in my bastard or my son and lives her whole life in humiliation.'
"…Damn it—the door…"
'If she is living now in a greater humiliation, what would the former you have done?'
"Open the door."
"Please—sit for a moment and I'll fetch a priest to treat you…"
'You, who remember nothing—what a face to make, already eager to kill me. Do you mean to grant Ines's wish?'
For that ghastly life entire, absurdly, he had thought it was not love. He had seen a tiny girl of four become a full-grown woman. Once, they had been playmates. Even in those young days, wary of eyes on them, he had kept his distance. It had lingered just as a habit. He thought he mustn't put that little girl in a difficult spot.
Once, you were very small.
The more Oscar's watchfulness flew at him, the farther away he moved; and the farther away he moved, the more ironically he turned her name over. Every time Oscar prodded him with jealous malice, he thought of her instead.
'Does Ines know you pop animal medicine to force a cock up and roll with women?'
So it felt like he was possessed by a ghost.
'Could your Ines even imagine how filthily you love her?'
When Oscar's deranged, leading questions made him think that perhaps all of this was love—
'Once you were so naive that you thought if your fingertips brushed a woman who wasn't Ines you had to cut them off. It was laughable—how you grovelled before a mere woman.'
That I love you. That this could have been love.
'Now, for a woman you can barely see from afar, you're willing to do the very thing the former you found most revolting… and you, idiot, still put Ines Valeztena above all.'
And still—this son of a bitch—and I haven't killed him.
'The body of that woman you still pine for isn't worth a single night in a brothel to me anymore, Cárcel Escalante.'
The moment he first knew it was love was obliterating. That day he forgot every shred of loyalty his grandfather had planted in his head toward their homeland. He forgot everything Calderón had charged him with for the sake of his grandson, right up to his deathbed.
That forgetting of loyalty seeped vividly into the fog of memory.
Leaning as if to collapse, Cárcel panted for a long time, then pushed—hand shaking—through the door Emiliano had just gone out. He stumbled down a dark corridor without lights; his steps reeled, then gradually found steadiness again.
'Even as a child, when they sometimes put Ines by your side, you never knew how to take your eyes off her. At the Pérez hunting grounds, at court…'
You—because of me… He scraped his neck with a jerky gesture.
If, in the end, it was because of me that you were ruined—he couldn't bear it. With a trembling hand closing on the channel of his breath as if to tear it out, he hurt himself. Like a man being driven out, Cárcel walked. Forcing his feet to push against the floor as if he were pinning something down by brute force.
At last he flung open the small door that led to the nave.
'I've trained your Ines like a whore, Cárcel.'
With baleful eyes he raked the eight images of the Apostles. The flames lit to either side of the statues cast light over their faces. Fixing his gaze on the statue that Emiliano had looked up at so strangely, Cárcel crossed the hall and walked toward the altar.
'If I shoved you into her bed in my stead, she wouldn't even recognize her husband—she'd be on her knees under you, sucking you off. That mouth that licked clean the cock it had taken from a male prostitute.'
Then he picked up the sacred object of protection that lay alone upon the immense altar.
'Ah… Or perhaps that would finally be her recognizing her husband.'
"Cárcel!"
Holding the heavy, iron-cast sacred object in one hand, he calmly crossed the hall again. Emiliano, seized by some ominous instinct, burst into a run, but Cárcel was quicker—he was already standing beneath the cold statue of Anastasio.
'In that case, she'd gladly spread her legs for you.'
Bleeding, he brought the sacred object down hard on the Apostle's ankle—the slimmest part of the statue. There was a sharp sound of something cracking somewhere. A few paces short of him, Emiliano could go no farther; he stood, blanched with horror, and watched.
Cárcel Escalante was deliberately destroying a sacred image—using, moreover, the sacred object that protected the sanctuary under restoration.
He was willfully committing what the Order called a sin more heinous than murder.