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But curiosity had crawled through her like an evil serpent. Even then she had extended her arms, about to drop the diary under the bed. But something—the serpent of desired knowledge?—had stopped her, and she saw herself withdrawing her arms until the diary came back into view.
She did not stand up, and she wondered at that now. On her knees, as if in prayer, she opened the forbidden book, and read what she should never have read. Because in there, near the end, were lines of fire that seared her brain. She would have cried out then if she hadn’t immediately jammed her fist into her mouth.
Anunciata—her daughter, her only child—had been taking herself regularly to Maceo Encarnación’s bed. In horrific detail, the words of fire recounted the first time and every time thereafter. Maria-Elena slammed the diary shut. Her mind was aflame, but her heart, mortally wounded, had already fallen to ash.
She took a sheet of paper out of her handbag, unfolded it, and with a careful, cramped hand, began to write. As she did so, tears slid down her cheeks, staining the paper. She did not care. Her heart overflowed with shame and sorrow, but that did not stop her. Grimly, she kept writing until she came to the dreadful end. Then she folded the sheet away without looking at what she had written. Why bother? It was seared into her heart.
Once again, possessed by the evil serpent and having drained her atole, leaving the rest untouched, she threw some bills on the table and rushed down the sidewalk. Returning to the Piel Canela boutique, at Oscar Wilde 20, she pushed through the door, and, egged on by the serpent inside her, pulled out the credit card with which she purchased the food for Maceo Encarnación and bought her longed for purse and gloves. She ran her hands over them as the saleswoman rang up the charge, then she asked for them to be gift wrapped, watching as they were buried in layers of pastel-colored crepe paper, carefully interred in a thick box with the name of the boutique embossed in gold ink on either side. The lid was placed on and all was wrapped with a pink-and-green bow.
On the card the saleswoman handed her, she wrote the name of her beloved daughter. And below it, she wrote, “This is for you.”
Accepting her altered desire, she exited the shop into sudden blinding sunshine. She stood on the sidewalk, unable to take another step. Her legs refused to work, and now a sharp pain pierced the left side of her chest. Dios, what was happening to her? A terrible taste in her mouth. What had been in her drink?
Vertigo overcame her, and she fell. Shouts and the sounds of ru
As she lay, staring up into the dusky sky, tears came again, along with a sob torn from the depths, where the evil serpent coiled and uncoiled, flicking its forked tongue. Her mind, encased in amber, flickering on the edge of a lethal unconsciousness, retreated to the only thing that mattered: the moment of the revelation a week ago.
The catastrophe was her fault. If only she had told Anunciata, but she had wanted to spare her daughter the sordid details of her origin. Now the mother had read those same sordid details in her daughter’s diary, knowing, God help her, that both mother and daughter had shared the same colossal bed, the same monstrous, all-powerful man, the same defilement. Maceo Encarnación was Anunciata’s father. Now he was her lover as well.
That was her last thought before the poison she had ingested at the café stopped her heart completely.
Martha Christiana sat brooding on the flight back to Paris from Gibraltar. Beside her, Don Fernando leafed through the latest Robb Report.She stared out the Perspex window at the infinite blue sky. Below her, the clouds looked so billowy that she imagined she could lie down and rest on them.
Rest is what she desired most now. Rest and the deep, untroubled sleep of the righteous, neither of which, she knew, were available to her. Don Fernando had astonished her at every turn. Now, after visiting her father’s grave, after seeing what her mother had become, how could she continue on the same path she had been traveling for years? How can I not?she asked herself.
She turned to Don Fernando. “I’m thirsty. Where’s the flight attendant?”
“I sent the cabin crew back to Paris last night,” he said, not looking up.
She returned to her brooding. She realized that she had become unmoored in a world in which she had been certain she knew all the angles. She was confronted now with one she could not have anticipated and did not know how to play. She felt like a little girl again, lost and alone, wanting only to run from where she was into the void of the unknown. She was dizzied, as if falling from a great height. It was only now that she realized how completely Maceo Encarnación had fashioned a world around her, an environment in which she could function—but as what? His iron fist or his puppet, dancing to the tune of each new assignment. Death, death, and more death. She saw now how he had mesmerized her into thinking that killing was all she was good for, that without him, without the assignments he brought her, without the money she received from him, she was nothing.
“ You live for the moment of death,” Maceo Encarnación had told her. “ This makes you special. Unique. This makes you precious to me.”
She saw now the load of goods he had sold her, how he had flattered her, stroked her ego, caressing her with his words. She had a mental image of herself as a puppet, dancing to his tune. An icy wind knifed through her, and she shuddered inwardly.
“What do you think of this new Falcon 2000S?” Don Fernando said, plopping a two-page spread featuring the private jet onto her lap. “This plane is due for a major overhaul. Instead, I’m thinking of upgrading.”
“Are you serious?” She looked at him, not the photos of the Falcon. “This is what’s on your mind?”
He shrugged and took the magazine back. “Maybe you don’t have a feel for jets.”
“Maybe you don’t have a feel for what’s going on,” she said, a good deal more hotly than she had intended.
He put aside the magazine. “I’m listening.”
“What are we going to do now?”
“That’s entirely up to you.”
She shook her head, exasperated. “Do you not understand? If I don’t kill you, Maceo Encarnación will kill me.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t think you do. I won’t be able to escape him.”
“Again, I understand.”
“Then what am I—?”
“Are you still pla
She snorted. “Don’t be absurd.”
He turned toward her fully. “Martha, this sort of change of heart is not so easily accomplished.”
“No one knows that better than me. I’ve seen the mess it can make. At the last minute—”
“The person can’t go through with it.”
“Even though they want to.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “sensing no exit, they kill themselves instead.”
She looked at him levelly. “That won’t happen to me.”
He took her hand in his. “How can you be certain, Martha?”
“In Gibraltar, you took my heart and dissected it, picked out all the black bits, then put it back together.”
“No,” he said. “You did that.”
A smile formed slowly on her face. “Who handed me the scalpel?”
The plane was descending, touching the top of the clouds, and then, all at once, it was in them, the sky going gray and featureless, as if they were alone in the air, lost to the world. The drone had become a kind of silence, a shroud.
“We’ll be landing soon,” Martha said. “I’ll have to call him.”
“By all means do.”
“What will I tell him?”
“Tell him what he wants to hear,” he said. “Tell him you have completed your assignment. Tell him I’m dead.”