Chapter 241
"Right. Kill the Crown Prince...."
Even with his mind half gone, the voice that spoke treason was the clearest thing of all. Emiliano lowered his gaze from the wound to his eyes as if startled—but not so much as when he had witnessed the unbelievable sight of Cárcel smashing the icon. He only held his breath, as if he had heard a word he'd dimly suspected, and found it far from welcome.
"In those early days, when that boy from Pérez still had so many good days ahead of him… if only I had cleared him out of Ines's life like that."
"..."
"And if only I had erased, from Ines's life, the traitor who killed him."
"..."
"If it had been so, then at least when she came back, there would have been a quiet life where nothing had happened. Without me, without Oscar."
"…You could never wish for such a thing…"
"Then Ines would have met you and lived sweetly in Mallorca forever."
"..."
"If I'd been a little luckier, if I could have disappeared in the life before that."
If only…. Cárcel, among the noble bloodlines she might have wed, thought of a few men who were at least decent. If it could have been so, Ines would never have known Oscar. She would not have known that pain, that cliff's edge where she took her own life.
Yes. By the side of a man decent enough to respect her—even if she did not burn with love the way she had for Emiliano….
...Perhaps she could have come to love him. And what would that have to do with me. Whatever the case, it was better that she be placed within conditions that assumed her happiness, within a household that knew no fear. If only she could slip out of this horrific frame—no matter whom she loved….
"..."
It was wretched that he could not truly think it didn't matter. In truth, he could not even bear to imagine her loving another man. And yet, it really was all right.
So long as all of that came after you had shaken off this terrible nightmare.
"Would that, in the end, be the same as dragging him back from the grave? Our God does not will it."
"…It may be that man's fate, but please do not stake your precious life on what you cannot know."
"What kind of foolish wish did I make to Anastasio, to bring me here."
"Surely He did not ask for anything as powerless as I am. Never."
"'Never'…"
Cárcel slowly closed his eyes and opened them.
"Even in your eyes, I've never once died properly, have I."
Emiliano could not answer at once, but in the end he nodded.
"Yes. I had no idea that Lady Ines had been that man's wife. I only suspected there was something… and only before the Apostle did I learn that it had been the misfortune of another life. From what you said just now, perhaps, Lord Cárcel, you…"
"In other words, I must have died and been born again many times."
He supplied what Emiliano could not bring himself to say. While pressing down on Cárcel's bleeding to stanch it, Emiliano sank down beside him, as if his strength had left him.
"…Yes. The times when you saw me, and in those days I don't know."
"I wish it were any punishment at all."
"..."
"I wish that even the fact this only now comes back to me were itself a punishment. That in the end I could have it all come back."
"If one does not forget on account of sin, then memory is simply complete from the start. It doesn't surface in broken fragments now and then like water seeping in…"
"Is your memory complete for that reason?"
"Yes. As anyone lives, one forgets some things and remembers some things more vividly than needed… so mine is irregular like that."
"It still sounds incomplete."
"Because it has always been mine, it is incomplete; and because it is incomplete, it is complete. Thanks to that, sometimes it feels as if I never died in Sevilla at all."
Emiliano's gaze, which had been fixed on Cárcel's profile, drifted past it to the Apostle's shattered icon lying there.
"It wasn't that the memory of my death was faint. It's that I feel as if I am clinging to the tail end of a life already finished…. When I recall being twenty-two, the age I died, it doesn't feel like some other life I didn't know—it feels like something that happened just twenty-six years ago. I repeat the same ages; I do not grow older by the years that pass; I do not become so much the wiser; my mind just circles the same place…"
"..."
"When I try to reckon time, I suddenly find myself looking out to distances so immeasurably far. Some older memories than that will gradually be forgotten; one day, when I'm in my dotage, I may forget far more…"
"..."
"But even so, I will never, as you do, come to learn one day of things from a time I died and should rightly have forgotten. Not unless I receive the same mercy. I have always remembered the one time I died."
"…Do you truly think this madness of mine is mercy?"
Cárcel asked quietly. Emiliano nodded with a faint smile on his clean face, as if certain that God would surely love him.
"I think at last it is God's will to save you. Not to leave you only the pain of knowing, but to grant you a chance."
"A fellow like that topples an icon and still gets no answer."
"They say God sometimes answers with all the world. Did you not recover every feeling of the moments themselves, with only those fragmentary memories that rose up in the prayer room?"
"..."
"In the instant you remembered—at each heartbeat—you must have lived through countless things and felt beyond counting in that brief span of your former life. All that you piled up—you recovered it all in a single instant, with the tiniest memory."
"..."
"You did not meet a strange memory as if hearing someone else's story, as if looking on a landscape from another world… You spoke as if it were your story now. As if it were something that had just happened."
"And what does something so meager change?"
"You will be ready. With a fury not aged in the least. Never to be swept away by the seduction of knowledge, by sin, by pain."
"..."
"You will save her without sin. You will lift Lady Ines from the mire she has fallen into, and at last you will save yourself."
"I am the one who first pushed Ines into that mire."
"It was not you."
"..."
"It was only that, that day, the devil spoke your name."
Cárcel turned to look at Emiliano.
Even the lamp on the wall was dim, yet the shadow on Emiliano's face was, strangely, bright—like that of some austere priest. Cárcel lifted his hand and gently took the blood-soaked scrap of cloth from Emiliano, pressing hard on the wound himself.
His eyes left Emiliano and went to the ceiling, where no light could seep in anymore.
"…Perhaps I've gotten a bit of an answer."
"Yes?"
"I've paid for smashing the icon."
Only that the devil spoke your name.
Ridiculous as it was, those few words made it feel as though he could see Ines once more. The terror that had kept him from even daring to picture her face—as if he would never see her again—changed. Perhaps twice more, so thrice… He would stack up the courage to see you, layer by layer, enough to linger by your side for a while.
As if nothing had happened. At least for as long as they needed.
And once the cleaning up of this filthy mire was done….
"You're a damned saint, Emiliano."
"…Are you going to profane the sacred again? How could you attach such a thing to the likes of me…"
"How did Ines come to love something as good as you. With her temper."
"...I have always been scolded a great deal. For being, for a man, unbelievably slow, useless in everything, and for everything I did being frustrating."
"But she loved you, all the same."
"..."
"With all the world that was hers."
Perhaps she still loved him even now. He wiped the blood-blurred vision away with his sleeve and smiled. It was no longer sad.
If only I could have told you that you were a man worthy of her love that day. That you and she look like a picture together, that the baby will resemble his father and you and be so very pretty, that once you leave this place safely, may you live happy and untroubled forever…
Forget all of Mendoza.
If only I could have told you that, you in Sevilla.
"I never had the right to it from the start."
"Yes. You had no right to Ines."
"Because I knew that…"
"But your Ines can have whatever she wants."
"..."
"I will divorce Ines, Emiliano."
It was as if he had smashed a second icon; Emiliano stared at him in all the world's astonishment. But aside from the half of his face mottled with blood, Cárcel's features were perfectly clean.
"The price you'll get from me for this commission is one that even those famed as geniuses across all Ortega have never, while living, been paid. I cannot put your painting into the Crown Prince's maw, so whatever you paint, I will pass it on as my younger brother Miguel's wedding gift."
"..."
"With that price, sell widely, prosper, and you'll live your whole life more of a noble than the nobility—but if you mean to live with Ines, it cannot be in Ortega."
"…What madness are you speaking now?"
"Well… after Oscar's death, you could do anything. Even in this land, with nothing to hinder you."
"..."
"Even so, if she lives under her original name, life with you—who would have nothing but money—would be a very weary, grueling lifetime. Better to buy, from the outset, some faded great title in Peral and attach it to you and her. If you are no longer people of Ortega, it may be more convenient."
"..."
"The little old castles of Valoquia suit a newlyweds' house. Ines, unexpectedly, likes small houses. If you, who were distant kin to Peral, come to inherit an ownerless castle, there's nothing to arouse suspicion. You will no longer be that poor and lowly man of back then…"
"Lord Cárcel,"
Unable to bear it, Emiliano seized his shoulder. As his vision sank into a dizziness he could no longer fight, Cárcel closed his eyes slowly and smiled—as if he were only entertaining a pleasant thought.
"I mean to do for you, in Sevilla, all I could not do."
"..."
"As a gift to commemorate your union."