The Dark Bride Read Online Free PDF

half asleep.
    â€œThe one with the beard.”
    â€œThat’s not a man, it’s Christ. Trust in him. Ask him to watch over your sleep.”
    Trust in the enemy? She’d rather die. Maybe if she didn’t look at him . . . she covered her head with the pillow and closed her eyes, but she immediately guessed that Christ had stopped smiling and was making horrendous faces at her. Uncovering her eyes quickly, she tried several times to catch him in the act, but he was clever and never let her. He smiled at her, the hypocrite, and no sooner than she had closed her eyes, he began to threaten her again with evil faces.
    â€œ Madrina, Christ is making faces at me.”
    â€œHush, child. Let me sleep.”
    The girl put the pillow where her feet had been, turned on her mattress, and lay with her face toward the other wall, which had no portraits. But the palpitations of the candle reached even the far wall, wavering in slowly burning veils. Despite her struggles to stay alert, waves of sleep began to cloud her eyes. From time to time she turned quickly, to keep Christ under control, but he only looked at her with that melancholy smile and with his wounded heart in his hand.
    â€œ Madrina, don’t you think it hurts?”
    â€œHurts?”
    â€œChrist, don’t you think his heart hurts?”
    Then Todos los Santos got up and, blowing out the candle, made Christ disappear. With him went the red shadows and the sad smiles, and at last, in the darkness of the calm room, the two women slept soundly.
    The sun came up very early and began marking the days of a new existence for both of them. The girl began not only to lose her fear of Christ, but to approach him with a strange familiarity and an attempt at dialogue that to Todos los Santos seemed theatrical and excessive.
    â€œYou must pray, child, but not too much,” she recommended.
    One day when she was cleaning the image of the bleeding Jesus with a feather duster, she found wedged between the canvas and the frame several small, strange lumps, like tiny cocoons but made of paper. She decided to unravel one and was half startled, half amazed to see that it was covered with a tight, microscopic writing that she decided to try to read with a magnifying glass. But she found no legitimate letters there, no known alphabet, just scribbling, elongated in some places, flat in others, but always with a lot of curlicues.
    â€œCome here,” she called out to the girl. “Can you explain this to me?”
    â€œThey are messages that I write.”
    â€œTo whom?”
    â€œTo the man with the beard.”
    â€œI’ve told you that’s Christ.”
    â€œTo Christ, then.”
    â€œAnd what kind of writing is this?”
    â€œOne that he knows how to understand.”
    â€œYou never went to school?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou don’t know how to write like other people?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI’m going to start teaching you right now. Get a pencil and some paper.”
    Many tense and fatiguing hours were dedicated to reading and writing lessons with the square-ruled notebook that Todos los Santos used to keep accounts, with an old chart they bought at the apothecary, with a number-two Mirado pencil, and with disastrous results. The girl looked around the room, she rocked nervously in her chair, she bit her fingernails and cuticles, she wouldn’t concentrate for anything in the world. She had no idea, it seemed, what Todos los Santos, who was clenching her teeth in order not to lose control and give her a whack, was saying.
    â€œJust teach me how to work, madrina . I can’t waste any time.”
    â€œAll in due time, now settle down and read here: The dwarf im-itates the mon-key.”
    â€œWhat dwarf?”
    â€œAny dwarf, it doesn’t matter.”
    Lunchtime came and the girl, who hadn’t read a single syllable, was still asking about the dwarf, so Todos los Santos put off the