“Everybody is here. Mercedes wore her new long dress, and I’m told she danced with the son of the British ambassador. They’re all asking after you and send you their love.”

While he reeled off his ritual of banalities, his eyes rested on the small tray lying on the metal table next to her bed, holding medical instruments and syringes. The table was covered with a piece of red velvet, and in the dim light the morphine phials shone like precious stones. His voice became suspended, his empty words lost in the air. Elena’s eyes had followed his and were now fixed on him imploringly, her face covered in tears. Valls gazed at his wife and sighed. He leaned over to kiss her forehead.

“I love you,” he whispered.

When she heard those words, Elena turned her head and closed her eyes. Valls stroked her cheek and stood up. He drew the veil and walked across the room, buttoning up his dinner jacket and cleaning his lips with a handkerchief, which he dropped onto the floor before leaving.

2

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 toward 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-colored 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, jewelry, 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 marvelous 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.