A FEW DAYS earlier, Mauricio Valls had asked his daughter, Mercedes, to come up to his office at the top of the tower, so that he could find out what she wanted for a birthday present. The days of beautiful porcelain dolls and storybooks had passed. Mercedes, whose only remaining childlike traits were her laughter and the devotion she felt towards her father, declared that her greatest and only wish was to be able to attend the masked ball that was going to take place in the mansion that bore her name.
“I’ll have to talk to your mother,” Valls lied.
Mercedes hugged and kissed him, sealing the unspoken promise she knew she’d secured. Before speaking to her father, she had already chosen the dress she was going to wear: a dazzling wine-coloured gown made in a Parisian haute-couture workshop for her mother, which Doña Elena herself had not worn even once. The dress, like hundreds of other fine garments and jewels from the stolen life her mother had never lived, had been confined for fifteen years to one of the wardrobes of the luxurious and solitary dressing room, next to the unused marital bedroom on the second floor. For years, when everyone thought she was asleep in her bedroom, Mercedes would sneak into her mother’s room and borrow the key hidden in the fourth drawer of a chest of drawers next to the door. The only night nurse who had dared mention her presence was fired unceremoniously and without compensation when Mercedes accused her of stealing a bracelet from her mother’s dressing table – a bracelet she herself had buried in the garden behind the fountain with the angels. The others never dared open their mouths, pretending not to notice her in the permanent half-light that shrouded the room.
In the middle of the night, key in hand, Mercedes would slip into the dressing room in the west wing, an isolated, spacious room smelling of dust, mothballs and neglect. Holding a candle in one hand, she would walk down the aisles bordered by glass cabinets packed with shoes, jewellery, dresses and wigs. Cobwebs dangled over the corners of that mausoleum of garments and memories, and little Mercedes, who had grown up in the wealthy solitude of a privileged princess, imagined that all those marvellous outfits and precious stones belonged to a broken, ill-fated doll confined to a cell at the end of the first-floor corridor, who would never be able to show them off.
Sometimes Mercedes would leave the candle on the floor, put on one of those dresses, and dance to the sound of an old wind-up music box that tinkled out the melody of Scheherazade. A sudden feeling of pleasure would seize her as she imagined her father’s hands on her waist, swirling her around the large dance hall while everyone looked on with envy and admiration. When the first lights of dawn began to filter through the chinks in the curtain, Mercedes would return the key to the chest of drawers and hurry back to her bed, where she pretended to sleep until a maid roused her just before seven.
The night of the masked ball, nobody imagined that the dress hugging her figure so impeccably could have been made for anyone but her. As she slid around the dance floor to the strains of the orchestra in the arms of one or another partner, Mercedes felt the eyes of hundreds of guests upon her, caressing her with lust and longing. She knew her name was on everyone’s lips, and she smiled to herself as she picked up snatches of conversation in which she was the protagonist.
It was almost nine o’clock of that long-anticipated evening when Mercedes, much against her will, abandoned the dance floor and headed towards the staircase of the main house. She had hoped to be able to dance at least one number with her father, but he hadn’t turned up, and nobody had seen him yet. Don Mauricio had made her promise – it was his condition for allowing her to go to the dance – that she would return to her room at nine o’clock, and Mercedes was not going to upset him. “Next year.”
*
On the way she heard a couple of her father’s government colleagues talking, two senior gentlemen who hadn’t stopped staring at her with their glazed eyes all night. They were muttering that Don Mauricio had been able to buy everything in life with the fortune of his poor wife, including a strangely springlike evening in the middle of Madrid’s autumn, in which to show off his little tart of a daughter before the cream of society. Intoxicated by champagne and the twirls of the waltz, Mercedes turned to answer back, but a figure came out to meet her and gently held her arm.
Irene, the governess who had been her shadow and her solace for the past ten years, smiled warmly at her and pecked her on the cheek. “Pay no attention to them,” she said, taking her arm.
Mercedes smiled and shrugged.
“You’re looking gorgeous. Let me have a good look.”
The girl lowered her eyes.
“This dress is stunning and fits you like a glove.”
“It was my mother’s.”
“After tonight it will always be yours and nobody else’s.”
Mercedes gave a little nod, blushing at the compliment, though it came tinged with the bitter taste of guilt. “Have you seen my father, Doña Irene?”
The woman shook her head.
“It’s just that everyone is asking after him . . .”
“They’ll have to wait.”
“I promised him I’d only stay until nine. Three hours less than Cinderella.”
“In that case we’d better hurry before I turn into a pumpkin,” the governess joked half-heartedly.
They followed the path across the garden under a festoon of lamps that lit up the faces of strangers; strangers who smiled when she went by as if they knew her, their champagne flutes shining like poisoned daggers.
“Is my father going to come down to the dance, Doña Irene?” asked Mercedes.
The governess waited until she was far enough away from indiscreet ears and prying eyes before replying. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him all day.”
Mercedes was about to answer when they heard some sort of commotion behind them. They turned to discover that the band had stopped playing and that one of the two gentlemen who had muttered maliciously when Mercedes walked by was about to address the guests. Before Mercedes could ask who the man was, the governess whispered in her ear: “That’s Don José María Altea, minister of the interior.”
A young official handed a microphone to the politician, and the murmuring of the guests dropped to a respectful silence. The musicians adopted a solemn expression and looked up at the minister, who smiled as he gazed at the compliant and expectant audience. Altea surveyed the hundreds of faces observing him, nodding to himself. Finally, in a slow, deliberate manner, and with the calm and authoritarian composure of a preacher who knows the meekness of his flock, he drew the microphone to his lips and began his homily.