the dead reached him in a place in his chest that understood, irrespective of words. In these moments of great fulfillment, he saw an intense sparkling in the periphery of his vision, and he knew he was seeing the manifestation of an unknown and powerful spirit.
Ybáñez was also an initiate, and drew the strength therefrom that made him such a singular leader of men. In the month of November of the third year of the war, he came to Yepes to meet Alejandro. The young major had left the North and gone to the castillo not knowing why he had been summoned. A few snow flurries were falling, Ybáñez seemed gloomy, and the conversation was unusual.
“Do you remember what you said the first time we met?” asked Ybáñez. “That the war would last a long time and we would have to track it down behind its successive masks? Everyone who failed to understand this is dead now.”
“Others died who were aware of what was at stake,” said Alejandro.
“Who will win?” retorted Ybáñez, as if he had been asked. “I’ve been endlessly harassed, both about the war and about victory. But no one ever asks the right question.”
He raised his glass in silence. Despite its wretchedness, the castillo boasted a cellar of perfectly aged wines, vintages once offered to Alejandro’s father Juan de Yepes, as well as to his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and so on up the line to the dawn of time. This is what happened. One morning, somewhere in Europe, a man would wake up and know that he had to set out for a certain castle in Extremadura, a place he had never heard of until now. It did not occur to him that this notion was either fantastical or impractical, and not for a moment did the voyager hesitate or doubt when he came to a crossroads. These men were prosperous winemakers whose cellars contained the fruit of their talent, and now they selected wonderful bottles that they would once have reserved for their sons’ weddings. They arrived at the gate of the castillo, handed the bottle to the father, the grandfather, or one of Alejandro’s ancestors; they were given something to eat and a glass of sherry; then without further ado, after standing for a moment at the top of the tower, they went away again. Back in their own land, every morning they would think of the glass of sherry, the generous bread, the violet ham; the day went on and their servants could see how greatly they were changed. What had happened at the castillo? As far as the counts of Yepes were concerned, nothing differed in any way from the usual customs of their rank, and they were unaware of the strange ballet by which others were lured by their castle. No one was surprised, the event occurred and was forgotten, and Alejandro was the first ever to concern himself with it. But when he inquired, no one knew what to reply, and he spent his childhood feeling like an anomaly within the anomaly of the castillo. When the feeling grew so strong that it caused a pain in his chest, he went to the cemetery and engaged once again in his commerce with the dead.
One must be grateful for this inclination for tombstones, for twenty years earlier, he was in the cemetery on the November day when his entire family perished. Men had attacked the castillo and killed everyone they found. No one knew how many of them there were, how they had come, or how they left. No lookouts—by which we mean the eyes of old women and shepherds—had seen them coming; it was as if they had come out of nowhere and returned there in the same way. Alejandro left the cemetery that day because the strange light tasted of blood, but as he headed back up to the castillo the only traces he saw in the snow were the pawprints of hares and deer. Yet before he even went through the gate into the fortress, he knew. His body urged him to fall to his knees, but he continued on his way, down his path of suffering.
He was ten years old and the only surviving descendant of his clan.
The funerals were remarkable. It was as if all of Extremadura had gathered in Yepes, their numbers swollen by travelers from the past who had managed to reach the village in time. It made for a strange crowd and, anyway, everything