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For they say that Alba Díaz de Bolaños barely survived. They say that when she stumbled down the cathedral steps, she was alive, yes—she was screaming, and all of Zacatecas heard it, their breasts chilled by how shredded and raw her voice was—but her wedding gown and all its silver was slick with blood. Gleaming with it, profane and red as cinnabar, wet as afterbirth.
His greed was different. It buried him in tomes and equations and experiments, for it was a lust for knowledge that drove him to seek more. It was a noble greed.
She had been at parties and dinners where the long gazes of older men in silks and powdered wigs left thick slime across her skin.
Whispers wove delicate lace behind her.
Alone with the one man—the only man—whose presence made her feel as clumsy-footed as a fawn. And she was alone with him because she had tried to kill him.
As a child, at twelve or thirteen, she entertained vivid fantasies of gilded strangers on horseback, riding into the courtyard of their house to spirit her away to some castle. But then she was forced to speak to men, and the fantasies dissolved like sugar in hot water, leaving a fading sweetness that quickly turned stale between teeth.
Was this how her soul would be damned to eternity in Hell—her giving up to a demon because she was tired?
“Shut up, you fat possum.”
“I will not be cured,” she said. Liquid dripped thick out of the corner of her mouth and streaked down her cheek. “But neither will I be caged.”
But they could not see what gazed back at her: dark pits, writhing blackness, boring out of a skull. A beauty mark, lurid against bone, affixed to one pale cheek.
And that is the faithful version. I understand why it’s less popular. A sorcerer who flaunted the priest’s murderous knife and walked again? A woman who sought revenge and death but found, in the end, both freedom and belonging? It’s fanciful.
