Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun

by Guillermo del Toro

Wolves—that’s what they were, these soldiers accompanying them. Man-eating wolves. Her mother said fairy tales didn’t have anything to do with the world, but Ofelia knew better. They had taught her everything about it.

Ofelia’s mother didn’t know it, but she also believed in a fairy tale. Carmen Cardoso believed the most dangerous tale of all: the one of the prince who would save her.

Evil seldom takes shape immediately. It is often little more than a whisper at first. A glance. A betrayal. But then it grows and takes root, still invisible, unnoticed. Only fairy tales give evil a proper shape. The big bad wolves, the evil kings, the demons, and devils . . .

But her mother didn’t see his true shape. People often grow blind when they get older and maybe Carmen Cardoso didn’t notice the wolfish smile because Capitán Vidal was handsome and always impeccably dressed in his gala uniform, boots, and gloves. Because she wished so badly for protection, maybe her mother mistook his bloodlust for power and his brutality for strength.

In consiliis nostris fatum nostrum est, the words read. “In our choices lie our fate.”

Ofelia didn’t remind her mother that for her, there was nothing better than a book. Her mother wouldn’t understand. She didn’t make books her shelter or allow them to take her to another world. She could only see this world, and then, Ofelia thought, only sometimes. It was part of her mother’s sadness to be earthbound. Books could have told her so much about this world and about places far away, about animals and plants, about the stars! They could be windows and doors, paper wings to help her fly away. Maybe her mother had just forgotten how to fly. Or maybe she’d never learned.

Sometimes the objects we hold dear give away who we are even more than the people we love.

Only books talked about all the things adults didn’t want you to ask about—Life. Death. Good and Evil. And what else truly mattered in life.

It is often easier to find something out than to face what you’ve found.

Sometimes we need to see what we feel so we can know about it.

“To obey . . .” Ferreira chose his words carefully. “. . . just like that, for the sake of obeying, without questioning . . . that’s something only people like you can do, Capitán.”

No. There was no God. There was no magic. There was only Death.

Dead. Did the word become more or less real with every time one had to attach it to a loved one?

Pride? No, vanity—that was his weakness: the urge to constantly prove to himself and to others that nothing and no one could withstand him and that his heart didn’t know either fear nor pity. Liar. He was afraid of everything. Especially himself.

Death sighed. She was used to men begging for another few years or months, sometimes even hours. There was always something unfinished, something undone, unlived. Mortals don’t understand life is not a book you close only after you read the last page. There is no last page in the Book of Life, for the last one is always the first page of another story.

She was sure the Wolf was following her, though she couldn’t see him through the smoke drifting up from the mill. A wolf . . . No, he was not a wolf. Her fairy tales were wrong to give evil the shape of a magnificent wild creature. Both Ernesto Vidal and the Pale Man were human beings who fed on hearts and souls because they had lost their own.

History forgot Vidal, but it also forgot Mercedes, Pedro, Dr. Ferreira, and all the others who sacrificed their own happiness and sometimes their lives to fight fascism. Spain stayed under the regime of Franco for decades and the allies did betray the rebels because they didn’t consider them useful allies against their new enemy, the Soviet Union.