WHEN SHE REALIZED what had happened, it was already too late. She heard laboured breathing behind her and turned round, but had no time to aim her revolver. A brutal impact shook her to the core. The stabbing pain took her breath away, and she fell to her knees. Only then was she able to see him clearly and understand why she hadn’t noticed him on her way in. A white mask covered his face. He was naked and carried an object that looked like some sort of industrial awl.
Alicia tried to shoot Rovira, but he skewered her hand with the metal spike. The revolver tumbled onto the floor. The man grabbed her by her neck and dragged her to the bed. He let her fall there and sat on her legs, holding them tight. He clutched her right hand, which he’d perforated with the awl, and leaned over to tie it to the metal bars of the bed with a piece of wire. As he did so, his mask slipped off and she saw his contorted face, almost touching hers. His eyes were glazed, and the skin on one side was peppered with the burns of a close-range gunshot. One of his ears was bleeding, and he smiled like a boy about to pull the wings off an insect, taking pleasure in its agony.
“Who are you?” asked Alicia.
Rovira observed her, enjoying the moment. “You think you’re so clever, and you still haven’t figured it out? I’m you. Everything you should have been. At first I admired you. But then I realized that you’re weak, that I have nothing left to learn from you. I’m better than you. I’m better than you could have ever been . . .”
Rovira had left the awl on the bed. Alicia reckoned that if she could distract him for a second she might perhaps be able to grab it with her left hand, which was free, and thrust in into his neck or his eyes.
“Don’t hurt me,” she pleaded. “I’ll do whatever you want . . .”
Rovira laughed. “My dear, what I want is precisely to hurt you. To hurt you a lot. I’ve earned it . . .”
Then he held her by her hair against the bed and licked her lips and her face. Alicia closed her eyes, groping around the blanket in search of the awl. Rovira’s hands ran down her torso and stopped at the old wound on her side. She had touched the awl’s handle when Rovira whispered in her ear: “Open your eyes, you whore. I want to see your face properly when you feel it.”
She opened her eyes, knowing what was coming and praying that she might lose consciousness before the first blow. Rovira straightened up, raised his arm, and banged his fist down on her wound with all his might. Alicia let out a deafening howl. Rovira, the room, the light, the cold she felt in her body – everything was forgotten. All that existed was the pain flashing through her bones like an electric current, making her forget who she was and where she was.
Rovira laughed to see her body tighten like a cable and her eyes roll back. He lifted her skirt far enough to reveal the scar that covered her hip like a black spiderweb, exploring her skin with the tips of his fingers. He leaned over to kiss her wound and then struck her again and again until he’d damaged his fist against her hip bones. Finally, when no more sound came out of Alicia’s throat, he stopped. Sinking into a well of agony and darkness, she’d gone into convulsions. Rovira recovered the awl and used its point to run over the web of dark capillaries visible under the pale skin of Alicia’s hip.
“Look at me,” he ordered. “I’m your substitute. I’ll be much better than you. From now on, I’ll be the favourite.”
Alicia looked at him defiantly.
Rovira winked at her. “That’s my Alicia,” he said.
He died smiling.
He didn’t get to see that Alicia was reaching for the revolver she’d kept in the left-hand pocket of her jacket. When he started to poke around in her wound with the awl, she had already placed the barrel under his chin.
“Clever girl,” he whispered.
A moment later, Rovira’s face was pulverized into a cloud of bone and blood. The second shot, at point-blank range, knocked him backwards. The naked body fell onto its back at the foot of the old bed, a smoking hole in its chest, the hand still gripping the awl.
Alicia dropped the weapon and struggled until she freed her right hand from the bedstead. Adrenaline had spread a veil over the pain, but she knew it would be short-lived. Sooner or later, when it returned, she would pass out. She had to get out of that place as quickly as possible.
She managed to straighten up and sit on the bed. When she tried to stand up, she had to wait a couple of minutes; her legs wouldn’t hold her, and she was seized by a weakness she couldn’t quite comprehend. She felt cold. Very cold. At last she managed to get to her feet, almost shivering. She leaned against the wall. Her body and clothes were covered in Rovira’s blood. She couldn’t feel her right hand except for a dull throb. She examined the wound left by the awl. It didn’t look good.
Just then, the telephone next to the bed rang. Alicia suppressed a scream.
She let it ring for about a minute, staring at it as if it were a bomb about to explode at any moment. Finally she lifted the receiver and put it to her ear. She listened, holding her breath. A long silence followed on the line. Above the light hum of the long-distance connection, she could hear slow breathing.
“Are you there?” said the voice.
Alicia felt the receiver shaking in her hands. It was Leandro.
The phone slipped from her hand, and she staggered towards the door. As she walked past the sanctuary Rovira had created, she stopped. Anger gave her enough strength to go into the workshop, find one of the kerosene cans standing next to the generator, and pour the contents on the floor. A thick liquid oozed through the room, surrounding Rovira’s corpse, spreading a black mirror from which rose swirls of iridescent vapour. When she walked past the generator, she yanked off one of the cables, letting it fall on the floor.
As she made her way through the mannequins that hung from the ceiling towards the corridor that led to the exit, she could hear the crackling sound behind her. When the blaze caught, a sudden gust of air shook the figures surrounding her. An amber glow followed her through the passageway as she advanced, swaying and lurching from one wall to the other to keep herself on her feet. She had never felt so cold.
She prayed to heaven or hell not to let her die in that tunnel, to let her reach the frame of light just visible in the distance. Her flight seemed endless, as if she were scaling the guts of a beast that had swallowed her, climbing back up to its jaws so as not to be devoured. The heat penetrating through the tunnel from the flames behind her barely thawed the icy embrace wrapping itself around her. She didn’t stop until she’d walked through the hallway and was out in the street. Feeling the rain caressing her skin, she breathed again. A figure was running towards her up the street.
She collapsed into Fernandito’s arms. The boy hugged her and smiled, but he was staring at her, terrified. She put her hand on her belly, on the place where she had felt that first blow. Warm blood ran through her fingers and dissolved in the rain. She no longer felt pain, only cold, an icy cold telling her softly to let go, to close her eyelids and abandon herself to eternal sleep, which promised peace and truth.
She looked into Fernandito’s eyes and smiled at him.
“Don’t let me die here,” she whispered.