Blood and Vows.

Chapter 25 — A Table Set for Loyalty

The villa had two kinds of quiet. The first was the moneyed hush that made marble seem soft and knives seem ornamental. The second—tonight’s quiet—had an edge. It was the silence of a house that had watched a performance and was waiting for the curtain to rise again. The long dining room drank that silence like wine. A runner of pale linen cut the table in two, threading past bowls of twisted citrus branches and low candles that turned their own smoke into gold. Staff moved with the choreography of people trained to be invisible. Plates arrived without clatter, glasses refilled without inquiry, doors breathed instead of swinging. Selma sat where the room told her to: at the head, under the portrait that had stopped looking like her years ago and had never been told. Silk folded around her like a decision. The ring on her middle finger tipped when she lifted her glass, the stone catching candlelight and returning it as approval. She did not look at the empty chair on her right. The door at the far end opened. Sebastian crossed the room as if it belonged to him in theory and to the woman at the head in fact. The cut along his cheekbone was gone; there was nothing on his tuxedo that remembered broken glass or gunpowder. He had shaved the day into order and buttoned restraint into place. “Son,” Selma said, and the word was a gloved hand: warm enough to soften, tight enough to hold. “Mother,” Sebastian answered, the syllable shaped like courtesy and offered like distance. He took the chair on her right and let the room arrange itself around that choice. The staff translated it into service: wine for him, water beside it, the slightest bow from the captain as if to remind everyone that hierarchy was a language fluent in the smallest gestures. Sebastian did not look at the door again. He did not look anywhere that might have looked like listening for footsteps below the floor. The second door opened. “Forgive me,” said the young man who arrived too late and exactly on time. “Traffic in the south corridor.” Ernesto looked like the answer to a question no one at this table liked to hear out loud. He was younger by years and by a kind of practiced ease—shoulders that had not yet learned to carry other men’s debts, a mouth that smiled as if it had been taught on straighter stories. He wore black that fit without trying, hair glossy in a way that could only be either inheritance or work; he allowed the room to see both possibilities and commit to neither. “Come,” Selma said, with the air of someone forgiving a child and instructing a court at once. “Sit where I can see your face.” He took the chair opposite Sebastian. It would have been polite to nod at his brother. Ernesto did not; he smiled instead, a small, bright thing that did not choose a target. He poured his own water, unasked. He liked small rebellions that looked like manners. The first course arrived—something green and careful. Selma lifted her spoon and the room complied. For several minutes the only conversation was silver whispering against porcelain and the sound restraint makes when it decides to prove it exists. “How was your evening?” Selma asked at last, as if they had all just returned from the theater. “Educational,” Ernesto said before Sebastian could. “The house enjoys drama.” “The house enjoys obedience,” Selma corrected gently. “Drama is what disobedience calls itself when it wants to be admired.” Ernesto’s smile turned a degree. “Then it was an obedient drama. Everyone bowed at the end.” “Not everyone,” Selma said. She set her spoon down and touched the stem of her glass, the ring doing its private work of tipping truth. “Some people had to be brought to posture.” Sebastian let the corner of his mouth move—either amusement or acknowledgment; the room could choose. “Containment,” he said. “It’s done.” “Containment is not the same as control,” Selma said, and the smile she offered her eldest son was luminous and exact. “But I commend your appetite. You kept it.” “Dinner’s on the table,” Ernesto observed, too lightly to be mistaken for innocence. “Hard to lose it when the chef is so insistent.” Selma’s gaze slid to him and warmed. “Your brother eats whatever is served,” she said. “Do you, Ernesto?” Ernesto grinned. “I sample. Commitments give me hives.” “Commitments keep you out of cages,” Selma said, pleased to be asked for a lesson. “If you dislike hives, you will enjoy prison less.” The plates changed hands. Salmon arrived beneath an interpretation of citrus that tried too hard; the peel oil rose and made the air polite. Sebastian cut his portion into precise triangles. A family that taught knives to be gentle had never seen one it didn’t want to keep. “The guests,” Selma said to Sebastian, the article doing the kind of heavy lifting money expects of grammar, “will need reassurance.” “They’ve had it,” Sebastian said. “The ones who stayed long enough to ask.” He lifted his glass and tipped it as if to salute boredom. “Continuity. Their favorite word.” Ernesto tilted his head. “And the ones who didn’t ask?” “They’ll ask tomorrow,” Sebastian said, and the contempt in tomorrow was so small only the trained could taste it. Selma took the word and folded it away. “Good. The market likes men who can count to ten when others prefer to shout ‘fire.’” Across the table, Ernesto’s gaze had started cataloguing and refused to stop. He watched the way Sebastian’s thumb rested on the stem of his glass—a fraction lower than polite, a fraction higher than careless. He watched the way his brother did not glance at the floor the way men who hear ghost-noises do. He watched and learned. He set his fork down. “I saw Elma on the landing,” he said softly, as if the name were a prayer or a password. “She looked… hungry.” Selma’s ring tipped. “Elma is working.” “On what dish?” Ernesto asked, the grin making it a joke he did not expect anyone to laugh at. Selma moved a lemon slice with her knife and let its oils envy her skin. “On truth,” she said. Ernesto looked delighted. “And who is tonight’s truth? I heard… rumors. A banker whose numbers learned to sing. A woman without a badge who still behaves as if she wears one.” “Rumors are for people who cannot afford facts,” Selma said, and turned her face toward Sebastian as if she were offering him the second half of the line. Sebastian folded his napkin with a half turn of his wrist and put it down close to the plate, not on it. “An intruder was apprehended,” he said. “Both the banker and the intruder are contained.” “Contained,” Ernesto repeated, tasting the word the way some men taste the air before rain. “A word that suits this house. It has so many rooms.” Selma let the metaphor pass. “Her name is Alex,” she said calmly. “She will remember it correctly when the questions end.” The knife in Sebastian’s hand did not hesitate. That was the trick: teaching muscles to refuse meaning. He returned the piece of fish to the sauce and chewed as if he had heard nothing at all. “Alex,” Ernesto said, savoring the syllables as if he had just discovered a song he expected everyone else to know. “Short for Alexandra? Alexander? Alexi? Names that travel well. How nice for her.” “Names are keys,” Selma said. “This one opens several doors.” “Downstairs,” Ernesto said, unbothered by the way the word picked up weight and brought it to the table. “She’s downstairs.” “Don’t lift rugs in public,” Selma said, reproving but fond. “We are not in the habit of speaking about janitorial matters at dinner.” Ernesto poured himself wine without asking. It was insolence in a house that weaponized courtesy; he enjoyed the shape of it. He raised the glass at Sebastian, as if toasting a fellow graduate of an expensive school. “To janitors,” he said lightly. “The only people who know where everything is.” Sebastian raised his glass the prescribed centimeter. “And to kitchens,” he said, as if to prove the joke had died properly. “If they stop, the house remembers it’s just walls.” Selma listened to the edge in his voice and filed it for later. “You had a visitor from Sálmo today,” she said, as if changing the subject would flatten it. “How did his daughter enjoy the story you invented on her behalf?” Sebastian’s smile left a thin, elegant line. “Stories sell better when the cast is small. Elena seemed to like that part. Her father liked the arithmetic.” “And the part where you do not embarrass me,” Selma said. Not a question. A command that pretended to be retrospective. “It’s a short part,” Ernesto observed. “Mother rarely writes it into a second act.” Selma’s eyes did something almost imperceptible—approval, irritation, both—and then decided to be amused. “You think you’re the only funny man in this family,” she said. “You are the only one who is allowed to believe that.” He grinned. “I’ll take it.” The courses kept arriving—meat that wanted to be remembered, vegetables that wanted to be forgiven. Staff brought a bottle of something that announced its pedigree through weight alone. Selma didn’t let the room forget what it had done tonight, but she let the food pretend not to know. Ernesto swapped his fork to his left hand and steepled fingers for a moment, thinking. “I keep trying to imagine her,” he said. “The agent without a badge. The woman who decided to bleed in our house. Is she very beautiful?” Sebastian’s pulse did not change. He cut the meat into identical rectangles. “She is very stubborn.” “Is there a difference?” Ernesto asked, all innocence. “A small one,” Selma said. “The eyes tell you which you should fear.” “And which do hers tell?” he asked her. He rarely asked his mother questions that invited her taste; he was asking to learn the rules. “That she has already measured your throat,” Selma said, and the ring did not tip this time. “And that she is waiting to see if you remember to breathe.” Ernesto leaned back, pleased. “I would like to meet her.” “After she stops wasting our time,” Selma said. “Not before.” “And if she keeps wasting it?” Ernesto asked. Selma picked up her knife again. She touched the blade to the meat and did not press. “Then we will use her time for her,” she said. “This house teaches all beginners how to learn.” Ernesto fell briefly, considerately silent. He had the look of a boy who had once listened at critical keyholes and had been allowed to keep the habit when it proved useful. “Fernando said—” he began. “Fernando makes noise when he wants attention,” Selma said without looking at him. “He will have it later.” Ernesto snorted. “He has it now.” “In the wrong rooms,” Selma said. “Do not confuse rehearsal with applause.” He lifted his glass and took a small, necessary sip to hide a smile. Fernando had a way of making people think they were participating in something when they were only being introduced to it. Ernesto admired the trick and had learned a quieter version of it. Across the linen, Sebastian’s posture announced that he had never been introduced to anything; he had only ever been expected to pronounce it finished. He had put the weapons away and was using forks because the house insisted; he did not permit the house to think it had insisted correctly. “Tell me something that will make me sleep,” Selma said to him suddenly, as if bored. “One sentence.” Sebastian let a breath pretend to be a thought. “Tomorrow’s market will open on time,” he said. “The buyers will be entertained by the story we have prepared. The police will forget the streets I told them to forget.” Ernesto’s eyebrows went up, small as secrets. “You told them?” Sebastian tipped his glass just enough to move the surface. “They like to be asked nicely,” he said. “I am polite when it buys silence.” Selma watched his mouth and heard the degree of truth it had decided to show. She loved that about him: the way he had learned to give exactly what the moment demanded, no more, and still found ways to spend himself on things the room had not sanctioned. She also hated it. Love and hate in mothers are two names for the same tool. “You are your father’s son when you count,” she said, almost idle. “And mine when you decide what counts.” Ernesto cut a piece of meat and let it wait on his fork while he considered whether the line had been meant to include him. It hadn’t. He was, after all, the spare—useful for reminding the eldest of mortality, inconvenient for conversations about legacy. He ate the piece and chewed slowly. “Do you ever get tired,” he asked the ceiling, as if it were a person he trusted more than either of the humans at the table, “of pretending the house is a country?” Selma smiled. “It is,” she said. “And all countries are houses if you can afford enough rooms.” Ernesto nodded, as if a lesson had landed where he wanted it. “Then who is prime minister tonight? Mother? Brother? Or the woman downstairs who will teach us whether we drafted the right constitution?” Selma lifted her glass. “To constitutions,” she said, and the word did not laugh at itself because it had learned not to. Sebastian raised his. “To continuity,” he said. Ernesto raised his higher. “To comedy,” he offered, and earned the smallest real laugh of the night from his mother. They drank. The candles did their slow work—consuming themselves politely—and the staff changed the plates as if plates were seasons. Somewhere far below, a bolt slid and slid back; the sound did not reach the dining room, but it changed the weight of the air by a feather. Selma set her napkin down. “We are finished,” she announced, which meant the meal and also, possibly, kindness. The captain appeared as if conjured. Coffee arrived in cups thin enough to make heat look fragile. The dessert—something that smelled of almond and childhood—waited in the doorway and was waved away. “Walk with me,” Selma said to Sebastian, and to Ernesto she added, “Go and learn the names of the men who will call tomorrow to ask what they must think. Write them on a card for your brother. He will enjoy seeing how much they resemble each other.” Ernesto stood with courtly speed. “Of course,” he said, and bowed the bow that made the staff grin privately when he could not see them. He left by the long door and let it enjoy itself closing. Selma rose. Sebastian did the same and offered an arm. She did not take it. She did not need assistance when geography obeyed her. They walked to the far end where a window swallowed a slice of garden and returned it as reflection. “You are very calm,” she said without turning. “I should be proud.” “You are,” he said. “I am,” she agreed. “And suspicious.” “Of what?” he asked, though they both knew the answer. “That you still believe you can keep two truths alive in one room,” Selma said. “You cannot. One kills the other eventually. Decide which you prefer to bury.” “The useful one,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Good,” she said, approving the sentence and not the man. “Then begin by not caring who she is.” He was quiet. Selma looked at the black glass and saw herself—the version that had outlawed regret as bad grammar—and then she turned her head so she could place his face in the reflection beside her own. “She is nobody,” Selma said. “Say it.” “She is nobody,” he repeated. “Say it again,” she said, and smiled. “Quietly this time, to the part of you that likes to be loud.” He did not oblige her. He let the sentence remain a line on the table they had just left, written in condensation and vanishing with the heat. “Goodnight, Sebastian,” Selma said at last, and let the word night roll through the room like a wheel. “Do not come downstairs.” “I won’t,” he said. She left through the near door, and the staff reassembled in the wake of her departure like a nervous system reclaiming a limb after anesthesia. Sebastian stayed where the window turned garden into shadow. He did not move. He could have gone down the hall toward his study and the ledger that had learned to be blank. He could have gone down the other hall toward the rooms that held thunder and pretended it was prayer. He did neither. He stood, fingers resting on the back of a chair no one had used, and counted a minute the way some men count coins—slowly, as if time accrues interest when you insist on noticing it. In the floor—no sound. The villa’s builders had made certain of that when they turned a monastery into a machine. He closed his eyes once, briefly. When he opened them, the room looked the same and he had taught his face the sentence it needed to wear. He walked out by the short door and did not choose the stairs. Behind him, the candles breathed and the table forgot everything it had learned. The house resumed the kind of quiet it preferred. Somewhere beneath it, a woman was asked questions by another woman who believed in correct answers. Somewhere above, a brother took down names from men who would repeat them back tomorrow as if they were their own thoughts. Selma, in a different room, poured herself a very small drink and did not touch it. She looked at the glass until it apologized for existing and then dismissed it. The villa waited, trained and beautiful. Tonight it was a country with only one law: loyalty is what you can prove at dinner. Tomorrow it would write another.