Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun(9)

“Please allow me not to answer your question,” Cintolo said. “I don’t know yet whether my hands will be able to create what I see in my mind. I hope, though, that despite my silence you will agree to sit for me so I may sculpt you.”

“Me?” The Faun was surprised by Cintolo’s request. But in the old man’s face he saw passion, patience, and the most valuable virtue of all in desperate times: hope. So he dismissed all other duties—of which the Faun had many—to sit patiently for the sculptor.

Cintolo didn’t use stone for this sculpture. He carved the Faun’s likeness from wood, for wood always remembers it was once a living tree, alive and breathing in both kingdoms, the one above and the one below.

It took Cintolo three days and three nights to finish the sculpture and, when he told the Faun to rise from his chair, so did his wooden image.

“Tell it to find her, Your Horned Highness,” the sculptor said. “I promise it will neither rest nor die before he does.”

The Faun smiled, for he noticed another rare quality in the old man’s face: faith. Faith in his art and in what it could do. And for the first time in many years the Faun dared to hope again.

But there are many roads in the Upper Kingdom and, although the sculptor’s creature walked through forests and deserts and crossed plains and mountains, it couldn’t find the lost princess and fulfill its creator’s promise. Cintolo was devastated, and when Death knocked at his workshop door, he didn’t send Her away, but followed Her, hoping to forget his failure in the land of oblivion.

Cintolo’s creature felt his death like a sharp pain. Its wooden body, aged and weathered by wind and rain and all the miles it had traveled in its search, stiffened with sadness and its feet wouldn’t take another step. Two columns rose from the ferns lining the path it had followed. They wore the sad faces of the king and queen, for whose daughter it had searched in vain for so long. Determined to fulfill its quest, the creature plucked out its right eye and laid it on the forest path. Then it walked stiffly into the ferns and turned to stone next to the king and queen it had failed, its mouth open in a last petrified sigh.

The eye, forever bearing witness to the old sculptor’s skills, lay on the wet ground for countless days and nights. Until one afternoon three black cars came driving through the forest. They stopped under the old trees and a girl climbed out. She walked down the path until she stepped on the eye Cintolo had carved. She picked it up and looked around to see from where it might have come. She saw the three weathered columns, but didn’t recognize the faces they wore. Too many years had passed.

But she did notice one of the columns was missing an eye. So she walked through the ferns until she was standing in front of the column that had once been Cintolo’s wooden faun. The eye from the path fit perfectly into the hole that gaped in the weather-beaten face and at that moment, in a chamber so deep underneath the girl’s feet only the tallest trees could reach it with their roots, the Faun raised his head.

“Finally!” he whispered.

He picked a ruby flower from the royal gardens to lay on Cintolo’s grave and sent one of his fairies up to find the girl.





6


Into the Labyrinth


Ofelia woke to the sound of fluttering wings. A dry, chitinous rustle: angry, brief, then the rattling of something moving in the dark. The candles and the fire had burned down. It was so cold.

“Mother!” Ofelia whispered. “Wake up! There’s something in the room.”

But her mother wouldn’t wake. Dr. Ferreira’s drops had given her a sleep as deep as a well and Ofelia sat up shivering, although she still wore her woolen sweater over her nightgown, listening. . . .

There!

Now it was right above her! Ofelia pushed the blankets aside to switch on the light, but she hastily drew her legs back into the bed when she felt something brush against her.

And then she saw her.

The insect Fairy was sitting atop the footboard, her long antennae quivering, her spindly front legs gesturing, her mouth chirping softly in a language that, Ofelia was sure, came straight out of the stories in her books. She held her breath as the winged creature climbed down the bed frame and scampered over the blanket on her stiff legs. She crossed the vast field of wool to finally stop barely a foot away from Ofelia, who noticed with surprise that all her fear had vanished. Yes, it was gone! All she felt was happiness, as if an old friend had found her in this cold, dark room.

“Hello!” she whispered. “Did you follow me?”

The antennae twitched and the strange clicking sounds her visitor made reminded Ofelia of her father’s sewing machine and of his needle softly tapping against a button he was attaching to a new dress for her doll.

“You are a Fairy, right?”

Her visitor seemed to not be sure.

“Wait!” Ofelia took one of her fairy-tale books from the bedside table and flipped through to find the page that showed the black cut-paper silhouette she’d looked at so often.

“Here!” She turned the open book to her visitor. “See? That’s a Fairy.”

Well. If the girl thought so. Ofelia’s visitor decided to play along. She raised herself to her hind legs and, turning her back on the girl, lost her antennae and made her dry, elongated body resemble the tiny woman in the illustration. In transforming herself, she gave her wings a slightly different shape. She made them resemble leaves. Then she raised her now-human hands and, brushing her pointed ears with her newly grown fingers, compared her silhouette one more time with the illustration. Yes. The metamorphosis had been successful. Actually, this body might prove to be a new favorite, although she’d taken many shapes in her immortal life. Change was in her nature. It was part of her magic and her favorite game.