Cemetery, following me to my table at Munich—the least tourist-infested café on Restaurant Row. I fancied her a porteno. Her hair, red as lipstick, was wound in perfect, bushy coils about her face. Her clothes had come from the best shops. Her sunglasses made an insect of her, but also a movie star: Audrey Hepburn without the softness. As she approached it seemed the mad sounds of Sunday tourism faded. Suddenly I was Mr. Bogart, watching my latest deadly siren approach through the wisps of cigarette smoke, the endless strains of tango music. The tango never stops in Buenos Aires. It goes on and on and we all dance to it in our time, helplessly drawn when fate initiates the cabezazo.
For as long as I knew her, she wore red. Not always a bright, traffic-light hue, though on that first day it was indeed the blood-colored flash of her linen dress which alerted me to her presence among the tombs. She wore pale pink once, like the stain left on butcher’s wrap. Later she wore a sleek maroon sweater, fine and soft, covering her from throat to wrist against the encroaching gulf winds. Secretly, I called her Pandora, for hers was a red of unlocking. Of drive and of searching. You don’t understand me yet, but you will.
“Maté,” she told the waitress, and sat across from me as if we were old friends. I knew she was a tourist, then. And American. But she had none of a tourist’s awkwardness. She looked at me directly, her gaze discernable even through her enormous glasses. I folded my hands and smiled at her, but for a moment my old heart fluttered beneath its fat. It was noon. She could not have been one of them, yet she had their stillness. I imagined her ears beneath the gorgeous fall of hair perking like a listening dog’s.
“Father Peña,” she said.
Cautiously, I nodded.
“I’m sorry for haunting you,” she said. “However, you of all people must know it takes a long time to trust.”
“What can I do for you, señora?”
She smiled: red and nearly mocking.
“Have you seen the lights in the cemetery, Father?” she asked.
I grew dizzy for a moment. Had the record player skipped? No. People didn’t use records any more. The disc, then? Perhaps I’d simply aged ten years, finally lost my hearing along with my sanity. Sixty-four years in the city and no one had ever mentioned the lights. How could this woman, this outsider, know of them?
I nearly rose to go.
The woman’s hard, hungry face softened abruptly into something like pity.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I laughed. Words failed.
“I’m Cole,” she said. She extended her hand and her nails were also hard and red. “We have some friends in common.”
“Friends?”
“Or enemies. But such things are not safe to speak of in the open.”
I looked at my coffee, feeling suddenly I was being sucked down into a whirlpool. When had I become so old, so frightened? Thirty years since Maria, and only now did I feel I was truly slipping into darkness. “Safe,” I whispered. “No, señora. Not safe.”
Her red-tipped hand descended on mine, her flesh warm and dry as sunbaked stone.
“I understand,” she said.
On their wedding night Cole’s husband was taken by a vampire.
Cole and Ash were making love, the doors of their balcony open upon a summer night. The vampire drifted in from the terrace, a silent, slow-motion horror. Cole watched the gauzy curtains grow pregnant with its shape, wondering how the cloth could swell without a breeze. Then the vampire emerged. Before Cole could reconcile its floating figure, her new husband’s unawareness, and the scream, half pleasure, half fear, building in her throat, the creature—a woman—descended on Ash’s back.
Ash’s eyes widened. The last sound Cole had of him was a gasp that might have been the sound his body made as he disappeared out the window. Cole tried to follow but the vampire had done something to the room. Trying to get out of bed, Cole fell into a black fog, only waking when the afternoon sun began to burn her skin the following day.
Though his shirts and razor, trouser socks and shoes, remained in his conspicuously present suitcases, the police said Ash had run away. Their questions were ceaseless: Had he angered the government? Had he faked his own death? (This man who had spoken of children. This man who had picked out the plot where he and Cole would build their home.)
No, Cole said. No, no, no. Someone had been