He pushed himself up, staggered as if drunk, and tried to go to the door. He had to get away. He stumbled against the chair he’d been sitting in, turned it over, and almost fell. He felt a powerful cramp in his gut. All that burning bile he’d swallowed gushed up into his throat in an unstoppable torrent. He fell to his knees as he shook and twisted like a poisoned animal. His vomit was a living creature, a thick serpent of lava that had devoured his bowels, drowning him, choking him as it erupted roaring from his stomach, through his mouth, through his nostrils. Crouching on all fours on the marquess’s beautiful red-and-gold carpet, he vomited out the hell he’d been swallowing gulp by gulp for hours and hours that day.
A crystal clear vision presented itself to his soul and replaced the chaos that had reigned there. Confused calculations that had seemed so misleading just a moment before aligned themselves in his mind with cruel clarity: the dates, the frigid dismissal, the flattering reconciliation, the tempered charm, the occasional crumbs of love. They explained everything he’d found incomprehensible, moments of passion broken off an instant later and replaced with indifference. Catarina had used him. Like a credulous idiot he’d played the part of a hired stud.
He got to his feet, stepped across the puddle of vomit, and walked away without looking back. He got to the door. That’s when he looked around. His esophagus burned as if he’d swallowed shards of glass, his lips were swollen, his face was still stained with the vomit that had erupted from his nostrils and mixed with his tears. His humiliation was complete. He fumbled in the pocket of his raincoat in search of a handkerchief and encountered the solid, comforting presence of the revolver. Like a miraculous remedy passed down from his ancestors, he felt its comfort running through his veins, his skin, and his blood, healing him, cauterizing him, reviving his dead flesh and zombielike body. Another wave of clear-eyed comprehension swept away his sluggish thoughts, and he knew what to do at last. His hand refused to budge from its reassuring contact with the weapon, so he wiped his face with the other sleeve of his raincoat. “That child is mine. The world will know about it.”
She sniffed and exhaled, shaking her head in negation, almost amused by these events.
He didn’t like that at all. Because he’d hoped, no, he’d been sure he would defeat her. Or at least surprise her.
“Don’t talk nonsense. The child is ours. Your contribution is complete. Your work is done, and we will not require your services in future. We’ve been very generous with your compensation, and we trusted you would be reasonable. However, if you persist in your unreasonable behavior, I will crush you.”
Vicente looked back, comforted and calmed by the cold authority of the weapon under his hand. Its influence seemed to have overcome the fever previously burning in his head and consuming his thoughts.
“You keep thinking you’re special, don’t you?” He left his post by the door and stepped forward toward them again. “You think we’re still back in the days when your people were all-powerful, that poden mexar por nós, piss all over us, and people would bow and scrape when you passed as if it were an honor to have you walk all over us. How do you propose to threaten me? Can you keep me from finding work in Galicia? Will you bankrupt my business?” He laughed loudly. “And what do I care? What’s the limit of your influence? Asturias or León; I’ll move to the other side of the country if necessary. I’ll emigrate if I have to, but that child will bear my name because it’s mine. And even if I have to sue in the court in The Hague, I will claim the paternity of my child.”
The marquess appeared to be impressed. She closed her eyes for a couple of moments. Vicente saw via the thin line below her lids that her eyes were jumping wildly, like those of a sleeping demon. She opened them then and looked at him, and at that moment he knew that he was looking directly into her soul.
“Catarina will say that you raped her.”
He didn’t react. He couldn’t.
“We had to fire you at Christmas because you behaved like a cad. But despite that, heeding Catarina’s generous spirit and her pleading, we took you back. But your fixation on my daughter-in-law only got worse. We have confirmed that several people on the estate were witness to confrontations when Catarina had to treat you firmly. She is too good-hearted, and she refused to see that you were dangerous. But then it was too late.”
He started to object.
“We’ve kept the brassiere you tore off when you raped her. The straps have traces of your DNA.”
“That’s not how it happened and you know it!” he said. He remembered the silky garment dangling from his fingers.
“My nurse swabbed poor Catarina, and we carefully preserved the evidence in a rape kit. We will both testify that we were strolling in the garden when we heard my daughter-in-law screaming for help. When we entered the greenhouse we saw you attacking her.”
“That’s not true!” He raised his voice and gripped the butt of the revolver in his pocket.
“You threatened her and said you’d come back and kill her if she said anything. She’ll still live in quiet terror as long as you remain silent, but if you talk, she will collapse and have to tell this horrible story. Tell me: Who’s the judge going to believe?”
The violent quaking of his rejection shook his head and extended to the rest of his body. “No, no . . .”
She smiled, exposing her scarlet gums, then clamped her mouth into a cruel smirk. “Forget the child. We’ve finished here. Get out! Se?or . . .” She glanced at her nurse for a prompt.
This time Vicente was the one who smiled.
He took out the revolver and aimed it at her face. “Pi?eiro. Se?or Pi?eiro. I’ll see that you never forget my name.”
He fired.
The marquess stood there motionless, shocked, then the terrified expression on her face was replaced by a smile both of appeal and panic revealing her deepest feelings as she released her breath with a whoosh and inhaled the acrid smell of gunpowder. But she hadn’t been hit. The nurse had leaped in front of her mistress, raising her right hand as if in an absurd attempt to catch the bullet. It caught her in the chest, just between the collarbone and the swell of her breast. A black hole appeared in her uniform, and the impact of the shot at close range threw her backward over the marquess. The nurse was robust, one of those German tanks, tough and loyal to the end, and she’d seized the barrel of the revolver with her left hand. If Vicente hadn’t been holding it tight, she would have torn it from his grip.
As it was, grabbing the barrel as she did changed the line of fire but yanked Vicente’s finger, firm on the trigger, all the way back. The gun discharged again. The second shot blew the nurse’s thumb off and struck her mistress in the gut. The women’s screams united in one overwhelming shriek. The marquess’s howl of pain overrode the nurse’s intense, contained groan as the woman fell lifeless between the tea table and the hearth, where the fire was roaring at last. The dowager pressed her hands to her stomach, overwhelmed by pain and then collapsed gasping back onto the sofa she’d occupied when Vicente arrived.
She screamed no longer but stared down at the open wound in her abdomen. Blood welled up in ominous slow pulses like the sluggish seep of an overflowing fountain. Vicente heard her heaving gasps, almost a parody of a pregnant woman struggling against labor pains. Her grimaces of mad desperation rendered her features pale and demonic. She was suffering; the intense pain was obvious, and the torment was eating her alive. It barred her departure and refused to let her release the groan she was suppressing so as not to go mad with pain. Her lips were moving, she was saying something. Her eyes were set, and she was whispering.
Vicente couldn’t hear what she was saying. He went to the sofa where the center cushion was already stained dark red, and he put his face close to hers.
He shouldn’t have, for as soon as he did, she opened her eyes. He realized that the demon wasn’t unconscious. She was wide awake and smiling.
“You are dismissed, se?or . . . What was the name again?”
He straddled her. Her hot blood drenched the thighs of his trousers. He raised the revolver and smashed it into that demonic face. Once; again; again and again, until that smile was gone.
Then he blew his brains out. He had to use both hands because the revolver was slippery.
A TEMPEST