La Luna Negra

"The mask eats the face." That is what they all said. Then came the warning. "Whatever you do, don't choose a mask. You may take it off before dawn, but the face you walked in with--you will never wear that face again."

That was the warning. In Tazones, everyone knew it, and no one said it without laughing.

The fishmonger gave it to Gabriel with his hake wrapped in paper. At the sidrería, Mateo recited it while pouring cider from above his head, missed the glass, and blamed the black moon. Two old women called it after Gabriel in the street, one taking the first half and the other the second, as if it were a verse from Mass.

"Then what face does Tomás have?" one of them asked.

"The same ugly one he started with."

They laughed until they had to lean against each other.

The company came from Mexico every few autumns in the days surrounding Día de Muertos. Old fishermen insisted the first performers had arrived by sea, though the painted wagons always appeared on the coast road. For three nights they transformed the cave beyond the eastern bluff into a theater of music, candlelight, and the dead. They called themselves La Luna Negra. The villagers called the whole affair “the carnival” because it made it easier not to believe.

Gabriel heard the warning four times that day. Each time he laughed a moment after everyone else.

For the better part of a month now he had awakened every day thinking Isabella lay beside him. Then his hand would find the cold sheet, and memory would arrive all at once: Miguel alive. Miguel home. Isabella sitting at their table with the military letter crushed beneath both hands.

The army had declared Miguel dead six years before. Isabella had stopped eating. Gabriel brought caldo from his mother, repaired the shutters she had let bang for two nights, and sat with her when neither of them had anything to say. He postponed a train to Madrid, then missed it. Months later, when grief had loosened its hands from her throat, they discovered they had fallen in love inside it.

Now Miguel had returned, thin and limping, with a scar beneath one eye. Inconveniently alive.

That evening Gabriel found Father Alejandro locking the church.

"They say the carnival makes you forget," Gabriel said.

Alejandro pulled the iron handle twice. "People say Mateo's cider makes them sing. You have heard Mateo sing."

"Have you been?"

"Once."

"Did you choose one?"

The priest slipped the keys beneath his coat. "Look at me, guaje. Do I seem like a man who chose well?"

Gabriel almost smiled. "I'm serious."

"So am I."

Points of orange light moved along the bluff beyond the tiled roofs. Alejandro watched them for a while.

"I don't want her brought back," Gabriel said.

"No?"

"Not like that. I only want..." He rubbed his thumb against his wedding band. "One night when it doesn't keep happening."

"Ah."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you came here for permission. If I give it to you, whatever happens will be my fault. The way I see it there’s nothing in this for me but blame, either way."

"Will you?"

Alejandro looked toward the rectory. "Your mother sent fabada because you won't answer her door. Eat it before you go anywhere."

"Father."

"And if they offer you a mask, say no."

"You don't believe that."

"Tonight, Gabi, it does not matter what I believe."

By midnight the tide had withdrawn from the cave mouth, leaving the rocks black and shining. Papel picado fluttered between poles driven into the sand. A path of cempasúchil petals led through the entrance, their orange bright enough to seem lit from within.

Just inside stood an ofrenda built on wooden crates and covered with embroidered cloth. Candles burned before photographs of musicians, dancers, an old woman with silver braids, a boy holding a wooden horse. There was pan de muerto, fruit, salt, water, copal, and a bottle of mezcal with one glass poured.

This was not the grotesque festival promised by the posters in town. It felt private. Tender, even. These were not decorations meant to frighten the living. They were provisions for the journey home.

Gabriel bowed his head without knowing why.

"Which one is yours?"

The woman beside him was tall and dressed in black. White embroidery traced the bones of her hands across her gloves. An ivory calavera mask covered her face, flowers painted around its eyes and a small red heart over the brow.

"I don't know any of them."

"That wasn't what I asked."

He studied the photographs again.

"Lucía Barbera," she said. "You took your time."

"Do we know each other?"

"Not yet."

She led him deeper into the cave. A bar stood against one wall. Across from it, mismatched chairs faced a low stage painted to resemble a village square. The audience wore sailors' coats, wedding dresses, military uniforms, and masks of lacquered wood or painted papier-mâché. Some masks smiled. Others wept. The candlelight made all of them appear to breathe.

Onstage, Rosalind sat at a piano the color of dried blood. She wore a crimson suit and no mask. A guitarist tuned beneath the banners while a trumpet player worried the same low note.

Lucía handed Gabriel a dark red drink.

"What is it?"

"Jamaica. Orange. Mezcal."

He tasted it. "It's bitter."

"That part is you, corazón."

"And what happens now?"

"Now? Music. Later, who knows? With luck, dancing."

The lamps dimmed. Rosalind placed her fingers on the keys and began so quietly that the audience leaned forward to meet her.

Gabriel knew the first six notes.

He had written them at seventeen on his mother's upright piano. He had written dozens of songs after that and sung them in cider houses where no one stopped talking. At twenty-six, a producer from Madrid heard him, gave him a card, and offered him an audition. The train had left three mornings after Miguel's memorial Mass.

Isabella had not asked Gabriel to miss it. She had only asked whether he could stay until morning.

He had stayed ever since.

Rosalind played the seventh note.

Gabriel set down his glass. "Where did she get that?"

Lucía followed his gaze. "Get what?"

"My song."

"Is it?"

"No one has heard it. Not that part."

"Then perhaps it isn't yours yet."

The guitarist joined her. Painted doors on the stage acquired hinges and shadows. A window opened onto a blue afternoon Gabriel remembered, and two actors entered the square.

The man was too handsome to resemble him. The woman looked nothing like Isabella.

Then she tucked her hair behind her left ear.

Gabriel stopped breathing.

The couple sat at a café table in Villaviciosa. They danced in Gabriel's kitchen. They argued beside the harbor. With each change, the actress looked more like Isabella. Her shoulders narrowed. Her hair darkened. A small pale scar appeared beside her mouth.

Gabriel rose so quickly that his chair struck the stone.

"Enough."

No one turned.

Onstage, Isabella opened a yellow envelope. Her hands began to shake.

Lucía remained seated. "You're imagining things."

"I never told anyone about the letter."

"Then no one here could know."

The painted square folded inward. Gabriel stood in his own dining room while rain pressed against the windows. Isabella sat across from him, the letter between them. Only the musicians remained, playing softly where the kitchen wall should have been.

"Gabi," she said.

Her voice broke exactly where it had that night.

He reached for her. The table lengthened beneath his hand.

"Are you her?"

"Would it help if I said yes?"

"No."

"There, then. One honest thing."

She turned the wedding ring on her finger but did not remove it.

"Come home," he said.

"I am home. That's the trouble."

"Isabella-"

"No, let me... I had this better before you came in." She pressed her fingers to her eyes. "When they told me Miguel was dead, you kept me alive. Do you know that? Of course you know. Everyone knows. Your mother brought soup. Alejandro brought prayers. You brought yourself and left it there, every day, like bread."

"I loved you."

"I know. And I loved you. I love you now. That's why this is..." She stopped. "Ay, Gabi. Why did he have to come back alive? Listen to me. What kind of woman says that?"

"One whose husband is sitting in front of her."

"And what is he?"

Gabriel looked at the military envelope.

"He was my first love," she said. "I watched them lower an empty coffin. I promised him things over a box with nothing in it. Now he stands at my sister's door looking at me as if he walked right out of hell to find me again. What do I do with that? Tell me."

"Choose me."

She gave a small, wounded laugh. "You make it sound so clean."

"It isn't clean. It's our life."

"Our life." She glanced toward the piano in the next room. Its lid had been closed so long that a pale line marked the dust. "You had another one once."

"Don't."

"You think I don't remember the train?"

"I missed a train."

"You missed Madrid. Then Barcelona. Then every place after that."

"I chose you."

"You chose a woman who could barely stand because it felt cruel to leave her. Later we loved each other. Truly. But first... first you stayed. And I let staying become who you were."

"I didn't ask your permission."

"No. You only gave me the blame."

He pulled back.

"I don't mean-" She covered her mouth, then began again. "Maybe I do. A little. That is the ugly part. I was afraid if you heard people applaud one of your songs, this village would never hold you again. Or I wouldn't. So when you said you were happy, I believed you quickly. Too quickly."

"And now Miguel has come back, so we both get another chance. Is that it?"

"I don't know what it is." Her eyes filled. "I don't know whether I want him or only the girl I was before they told me he was dead. I don't know whether you want me or the man you became by saving me. I have to go see him. I have to know."

"And us?"

"Us is real." She looked down at their hands, separated by the impossible length of the table. "Real things end too. I can't promise anything."

“We’re married, Isa.”

“I know.”

“We made vows.”

She looked down. “Miguel and I made promises too. Before God, even if there was no priest. Do those count for nothing?”

The trumpet swallowed her last words.

Lucía clapped once.

The dining room collapsed into canvas. The cave returned. At the center of the stage stood two masks.

Lucía touched the pale one. "The Husband." Then the blue. "The Wanderer."

The first was pale wood, brushed with gold around the eyes. Behind it appeared Gabriel's house with smoke rising from the chimney. Isabella opened the door. Whether she had returned from Miguel or never gone to him, Gabriel could not tell. He saw children, winter stews, feast days, his father's boat drawn up for repair. He saw himself play piano at weddings and sing the old Asturian songs everyone knew.

But beneath them he heard the seventh note. The man beside Isabella heard it too. He loved her. He loved the children. Some nights that made the music quieter. Some nights it made him hate himself for hearing it at all.

The second mask was midnight blue, crossed by a thin white road. Behind it lay railway platforms, rented rooms, bad pianos, rehearsals, and stages glaring beneath white light. Gabriel saw himself sing to twelve people in León and twelve hundred in Mexico City. He saw songs finished, songs stolen, songs no one remembered. He saw applause. He saw failure. He ate alone more often than not.

Isabella was there too, inside every love song. Sometimes she occupied an empty seat. Sometimes she passed him on a foreign street and did not see him. Once, much older, she waited at the end of a platform as his train began to move.

"They're both lies," Gabriel said.

"Naturally."

"Then what am I choosing?"

Lucía stood behind the masks. Her dress had become indistinguishable from the darkness of the cave.

"You tell me."

"No. I won't choose."

"Bueno." She gestured toward the cave mouth. "Then go home."

The exit appeared behind him, opening onto the moonlit shore.

Gabriel hesitated. "That's all?"

"Were you hoping I would wrestle you?"

He took one step toward the opening.

"Only don't call it escape," Lucía said. "Refusing is a choice too."

He turned. “Father Alejandro said—”

“Mateo’s cider makes men sing,” Lucía said. “You have heard Mateo sing.”

Gabriel stared at her.

Lucía removed the calavera. Beneath it was not another face, but many: his mother, Alejandro, Isabella, and for an instant the frightened face he had worn at seventeen when he first sang something he had written.

"Go back exactly as you came," she said. "Wake tomorrow. Open the shop. Wait for Isabella or don't. Keep the piano closed. Tell yourself there was no choice because nobody made you say it aloud."

"And if I choose the Wanderer, I can never come home."

"Who told you that?"

"The mask."

"The mask showed you pictures. You made a prison out of them."

"Then I could leave and still come back?"

"Of course. Trains run in both directions."

"I could be her husband?"

Lucía glanced toward the actress, whose scar had vanished and whose eyes were now the wrong shade of brown.

“If she chooses you. If you choose her again.” Lucía glanced toward the actress. “But those two—the man who comes back and the woman who opens the door—where are they? Not here. Not yet.” She lifted one shoulder. “A great many ifs, corazón. No mask owns a railway.”

"So nothing is final."

"The road? No. The man who had not taken it?" Lucía shook her head. "That poor man dies where he stands."

Rosalind began Gabriel's melody again.

The actress looked at him. "Go," she said.

He could not tell whether she meant home or away.

Gabriel picked up the blue mask. It was only papier-mâché, cloth, and paint. He placed it over his face.

The cave inhaled.

Music rushed through the stone. Birds cut into the papel picado tore themselves free and circled above the crowd. Skeletons stepped from the scenery as revelers, taking one another by the hand. The dead descended from their photographs. The old woman with silver braids kissed Lucía's cheek. The boy rode his wooden horse through a field of marigolds that opened beneath Gabriel's feet.

The white road painted on the mask unrolled before him. It crossed cities, mountains, deserts, and black water. It divided a thousand times. Each branch vanished when he passed it, and with every disappearance Gabriel mourned a life he had never lived.

He felt Isabella waking beside him in a house he might still enter. He missed children who might still be born. He heard audiences that might never exist. None of it was prophecy. That was worse. Every life remained possible, and choosing one would make ghosts of the others.

Gabriel tore off the mask.

The music stopped.

He stood at the cave entrance with dawn thinning the sky above the water. The stage was canvas and timber again. Musicians packed their instruments into worn black cases.

Lucía stood beside the ofrenda, refilling the small glass of mezcal.

"It's off," he said.

"Sí."

"I can still go home."

"Nothing is stopping you."

"And if Isabella comes back?"

"Open the door. Or don't."

"Then what did it do?"

Lucía set the bottle among the photographs. "Go home, Gabi. Sit beside your wife. Wait until the house is quiet."

He understood.

In the quiet, he would hear the train.

Outside, the tide was returning. Gabriel carried the Wanderer's mask across the wet stones and climbed toward the coast road. Behind him lay the village, still blue with morning. Ahead, one road bent inland toward the railway. The other followed the cliffs back to Tazones.

He stood between them long enough for the sun to touch both.

Then he chose without reading the sign.

Behind him, a woman called his name.

Gabriel stopped. For one wild moment he thought Isabella had returned before he had even managed to leave.

He looked back. The road was empty. Tazones remained where it had always been: harbor, church tower, red roofs, every door still open to him.

From the cave below came the first six notes of his unfinished song.

This time, Gabriel knew the seventh.