Chapter 244
Cárcel fixed a stiff gaze, as if a blade had been laid against his throat. Emiliano raked a hand down his face again. The composure he had barely recovered looked on the verge of collapsing at any moment.
"At that time I was out on the street every day, painting a poor woman holding her child. I don't know what I found in the way she looked down at the child. I swear it wasn't even longing."
"..."
"At some point, in the painting, the baby's face changed. Into the one that remains only in my memory…"
"Luca."
"..."
"That was your child's name."
Cárcel murmured quietly. Emiliano stared at him, dazed, then let out a strengthless smile.
"…To hear someone say that child's name again after decades—it makes me truly feel he lived. He feels like a child who truly existed."
"As is only right, if we are not mad."
"Then how intensely real must Lady Ines's days have been…"
His breath ran ragged. Out of a fogged memory, what he had dimly suspected slowly took on a sharp shape.
Ines still remembers everything—even now. Which is to say…
"Did I say that only after I died did I realize she had already been living under punishment—that even I had abandoned her."
"..."
"And yet, since I was gone, and since the child, that lump of a burden, must have been sent off somewhere… I vaguely believed without doubt that afterward her life would have returned to a fine, proper place. That though it would hurt at first, at least one day she would find peace. That she would live well…"
"..."
"Lord Cárcel, have you ever seen a painting move?"
His lids lifted from where they had dipped, and in an instant blood flushed his eyes red as he looked at Cárcel.
"Unless you were a madman, you wouldn't have. Just as the baby's face looked like Luca, the street woman who hid brown hair under a worn white kerchief turned into Lady Ines with her black hair hanging, elegant. I thought I had finally gone insane. That I hadn't escaped even a single day from back then…"
"..."
"But Lady Ines was crying. Endlessly, she only looked at the child. However much I asked why, I could get no answer. You never appeared even once, not even in dreams, no matter how I longed to see you—why are you like this now, of all times. Why are you crying."
"..."
"And then I saw Lady Ines's hand clutched around Luca's neck."
"Emiliano."
"It must have been only two months or so since he was born. If longer, three… From birth he had wearied his mother terribly with a hard labor. She kissed him over and over, calling him the fruit of my terrible pain; she loved him so. When she held him, it was as if a world for just the two of them bloomed apart. She said she had never seen anything so lovable in her life."
"Stop."
"She strangled the child she loved that much—with her own hands."
"..."
"Because she meant to die with him."
His breath burst out.
'It doesn't seem the baby resembles me much.'
Contrary to Ines's words, the child resembled her so very much. That little thing looking up at him with olive eyes like hers, smiling.
It was hard to believe that such a tiny child would one day grow up to walk and run.
'He's smiling at you… Well, he likes pretty, handsome people. He's a little snob already, I swear.'
Her first child with some other man. The fruit of a life poor and young, chosen by throwing away the place of Crown Princess… The very middle of that foolish life he had not understood at all back then.
'I took Luciano's name. Luca and Luciano share the same nickname.'
Only when he saw that smile had he truly wanted that man to live. May you keep smiling like that. With the man who makes you smile, and with the child…
"The woman stared at the dead child for a long time, and I stared at the woman for a long time. I felt trapped in a rotten dream that would never let me wake. I was already dead, with no body; like a ghost, I drifted around a strange room with nothing to do but watch them. Why would you do such a thing with your own hands—your child—how could you…"
"..."
"I woke from that damned dream when she stabbed her own throat and died."
Not living by the memory that that man died, and the child died, and you died.
Tears dripped from Emiliano's blankly open eyes.
"As if the world vanished because I had died, every scene disappeared, and before me remained only the painting of a street woman in a white kerchief killing her child—unfinished. As if I had never slept, I saw the brush that had been touching the canvas. With no memory of painting, nothing at all… As if God had stayed for a moment in my hand—or perhaps the devil had come and gone."
"..."
"At dawn I ran straight out to the street to find that woman. The woman who came out every day and sat there all day. The woman who soothed her hungry, crying baby and waited for someone… The woman who, when someone tossed a coin, murmured God's blessing with a vacant mouth… They said she killed her sick child at daybreak and then killed herself."
"..."
"The woman's eyes were the eyes of a mother looking at the child she was about to kill."
"You call that God's mercy—that through those eyes He let you know the end of Ines and your child, which you could never have known…"
"It was surely mercy."
Emiliano wept and smiled at once.
"For if not for that dawn, I would never have known Lady Ines's pain. I would not have known how I ruined her, that the only one my small judgment freed was me alone, that not knowing their end in the least, I had lived on comfortably by myself…"
"..."
"I would never have imagined that Lady Ines might be living yet again a life she cannot forget. Without ever properly finishing that life. Remembering my death. Remembering the child's death… all of it."
Only then, as if realizing he was crying, he wiped his tears away roughly with a dry hand.
"This is that lady's other ending—the one you do not remember, Lord Cárcel. It is all but everything a foolish man like me can tell you."
The face that could barely shape a smile looked as if he feared he might harbor even a little impiety toward God. As if he feared that any resentment might harm her.
"The peridot medallion was like the first token Lady Ines ever gave me. It was a keepsake of Grandmother Belinda's that she inherited as a child, and it originally had a chain. She had long since sold the chain, but the medallion she cherished to the very end; she couldn't bring herself to sell it even when she sold everything else; only when the child was born did she sell it."
"..."
"I still remember the day I stood like a fool crying in front of that jeweler's in El Tabeo. It was something I had no right to have from the start."
"How did it end up back in your hand."
"The necklace is still with Lady Ines. The medallion at El Tabeo is the fake I made. That medallion—I remembered its shape, every nick left by the decades… Lady Ines did not know the pawnshop in El Tabeo, and I thought she would never return to that city, but…"
"In the end she found it."
So in the end it had felt like a bond one could not resist. A man who sent a message from the past in an absurd way, and a woman who, come what may, found it. Lovers who did not forget each other even when reborn. And yet…
"If she never found it, I meant to think it was all a mistake. That the dawn's dreadful mercy was nothing but a mad delusion. That Lady Ines never killed the child, never killed herself again. That she could not possibly have gone back into the past like me, could not possibly remember her life with me… So I hoped she would never, ever find it. Because if she didn't remember me, she would not know that, either."
He had sought her, and yet he had never wanted to meet her.
"…But if all of it was true, then I had to tell her."
"..."
"That none of it was her fault."
Beneath Emiliano's clean features, Cárcel saw the naked face of a man crushed by punishment, hating the world.
"Because I am the one who killed that child."
The underside of a pain that could forgive nothing in the world—that could not even forgive himself. A monstrous, swollen guilt.
"I loved my son, but if that child would make Lady Ines die, I would rather he die with me."
"When your wound has healed, go to Sevilla and take Ines and the child and leave. Not now. They've come as far as Calstera."
"'Lady Ines will…'"
"'In a safe house in Sevilla.'"
"I killed the child. When I betrayed the grace you had shown us, returned there, and was caught."
"'May I dare beg one more favor?'"
"'Saving your life wasn't enough?'"
"'I'm sorry… but there is no one else I can ask but you.'"
"'Speak.'"
"'In the old quarter of El Tabeo there is a jeweler called Doña Angélica. There, a very large peridot medallion has been left—engraved with a double cross and the name of its former owner. V. O. Belinda Olivares…'"
"'The former Duchess of Valeztena. I know.'"
"When I, at my own whim, shoved Lady Ines back into their clutches…"
"'Could you find that medallion and, one day far from now, deliver it to Lady Ines? It is originally hers. The chain was sold long ago, and because I was wretchedly poor and low, short of money for medicine, I sold even the medallion for a pittance…'"
"'And how am I to deliver that to your wife? By then I won't even know where you live.'"
"'We will likely be separated before long…'"
"'…You make all this disaster and then separate? Unbelievable.'"
"'Lady Ines will soon return to the place where she belonged.'"
"'And you.'"
"'I will probably take the child and go far away. To Peral, or anywhere. Somewhere very far…'"
"'...'"
"'Somewhere that can never hurt Lady Ines again.'"
"It was the result of my choice from the very start."
"'I believe a time will come when she can forget—when good days will visit her.'"
"So it is all my sin."
"'Please deliver it with the necklace then. Tell her Emiliano will truly be all right. Tell her that's what he said.'"
"So that even now she may forget and find ease."
"'If time could be turned back, I wish Lady Ines had met, from the beginning, a man as noble and strong as you, and loved him.'"
"…But I am relieved you are at her side now."
"'May she live as herself, with the one who suits her, in the place that suits her…'"
"Will you deliver it someday? Perhaps the fact that I remember her, that I know of Luca's death… perhaps even the fact that you, her husband, now know it too—perhaps all that will torment her terribly. So not now, but someday… if the day comes when, trusting you, she confides her pain to you."
"..."
"Would you tell her that your Luca was something purely good, released early from the pains of life—and that Emiliano never blamed her in the least?"
Emiliano drew a gold necklace chain from his breast and pushed it toward him. Along with a short note for the jeweler.
"My circumstances are still so meager that even to obtain this trifling length of gold took me a few more years."
"..."
"I'm glad that at last I can return, in full, the necklace I wrongly received from a noble person at eighteen."
Cárcel closed his hand gently around the chain.
"I know nothing of how Lady Ines feels about you, but I dare to guess that, if it is you, you will always let Lady Ines be herself. If you love her enough to die, then instead—live at her side."
"..."
"Please, I beg you—do not make the same mistake I did."
Emiliano bowed his head. Without a word, Cárcel slipped the necklace and the letter into his bag. Then he drew out a cloth rolled into a tube and handed it to Emiliano. It was the painting of Sevilla.
Leaving Emiliano with the painting, Cárcel walked straight out of the room.