She looked up. Arturo was standing at the other end of the street. He saw her and hurried to her side whip quick, kneeling in front of her.
“How did you find me?” she asked, and roughly wiped her tears with the palm of her hand.
“It wasn’t that hard. Come, Alba. We must head back to church.”
“No,” she said, and pushed his hand away when he offered it to her. “No!”
She shoved him. Her hands landed on his chest. It was a hard blow, but he did not flinch. Arturo stroked her cheek with the back of his hand and looked into her eyes.
A scream caught in her throat and became a low whimper. She wrapped her arms around his neck, hugging him tight.
“I can’t stay here. It’s cursed, yes, this land is cursed. I want to go away, please, we must go away.”
“My darling,” he said as he held her. “We’ll leave this place, yes, we will. I swear it.”
“How? Where might we go?”
She turned her face and they stared at each other. She exhaled hard, couldn’t draw an even breath as she looked at him and his hand rose again to touch her cheek, this time with an open palm.
“We’ll sell that wretched farm and head back to the city. The Molinas can have it, it’s a useless mess anyway. We’ll be much happier in the capital. We can buy a house and a proper carriage. I’ll take you to the opera and buy you pretty things. You mustn’t cry, Alba. It will be fine in the end.”
“In the end,” she repeated. He smiled, nodding.
Yes,she thought.Yes, I want to sell the farm and run off.But then she imagined the difficulties of such a transaction. Even if performed quickly it might take too long.
Assuming their safe departure, what would happen to thepeople left behind? The Quirogas might escape, but the Molinas and their other neighbors would face a hungry evil that would kill and maim.
She had not seen Valentín’s corpse; the coffin was mercifully closed. Yet somehow a picture had formed in her mind of his death. Perhaps this was the product of her imagination, or perhaps it was as the old witch from Los Pinos had said: that one could dream and glimpse things that would be, and others that had been already.
Either way, it amounted to the same result. As she sat there with Arturo at her side, she knew exactly how Valentín had perished. He’d been riding toward Piedras Quebradas, heading to meet with her. At a bend of the road there had been an assailant, unseen, protected by the cover of shadows.
It shrieked, and its cry was not the cry of the barn owl or the coyote or a human being, but of all three chained and bound together. Valentín reined his horse. For one second he saw it, and then it was gone. Darkness in the shape of a person, feathers, teeth, claws, there and gone and then—
She could trace the arc of the first blow, hear Valentín’s anguished screams as he tried desperately to escape the clutches of the creature. He was tough, Valentín; his hands dug into the thing’s flesh, squeezing a sturdy neck—tendons, scales, an unholy mixture of bird and reptile and wolf that snapped at him. But it was stronger and its teeth were sharp, and when it bit into Valentín’s arm all was lost. It savaged him from elbow to wrist, and then, as Valentín tried to kick it, the monster began to gnaw at his stomach.
Much blood seeped into the ground, staining the roots of a poplar red, and she knew that as Valentín heaved and wheezed, his hands scrabbling at dirt and stones, as he looked up at the sky and the moon above, he’d been thinking of her with his last two breaths.
Alba squeezed her eyes shut. Behind her lids everything was crimson again and then it was black. Her heart was also crimsonand black, wounded so deeply that it could hardly beat inside her chest. Yet beat it she must and live she must and fight she must.
The witch would be destroyed. She’d kill it, even if she had to vanquish it all alone, all by herself. To do anything else would not only be cowardice, it would also be the most terrible betrayal of the memory of Valentín and of her brother, both of whom had perished at the hands of a monster.
A bell tolled. The service was at an end. She blinked and stood up, wobbly, like a moth that emerges from its cocoon.
She’d dropped her gloves, and now she retrieved them. She picked up the handkerchief too, folding it into a perfect square. “Let us walk back to the church.”
“We might stay here longer, so that you could rest,” he told her, and his hand found her cheek once more.
She shook her head. “No, I’m ready,” she said.
Arturo offered her his arm and they slowly made their way back together.
1934: 6
December brought us finalexams and term papers, but also plenty of social activities on campus. There were gift exchanges and faculty parties aplenty. On a chilly night, after drinking too much punch that had been vigorously spiked with gin from a hip flask, I arrived at Joyce House feeling tipsy and merry. I went into the parlor where four of the girls lounged and chatted.
“Boy, it’s late. We thought you were going to miss curfew,” Mary Ann said.
“I have fifteen minutes to spare,” I told the girls cheerily as I took off my gloves.
