Dr. Hannibal Lecter had promised her a pleasant dinner. Clarice Starling had dined in pleasure ever since. And there on the high terrace of the Palacio Duhau, she accepted every dance he offered after dinner. Dining and dancing, dancing and dining. Without fail, our handsome couple ached for the most exacting dance, hungered for the most delicious course.
That their communion of two grew into three did not surprise their pious servants. The generous Señor and Señora were naturally rewarded with a miracle. Body and blood. Holding Dr. Lecterʼs face in her small hands once again, soft laughter ringing in his ears, was Mischa. Mischa whom he found in the worthiest place. The teacup had shattered completely, yes, a return to its first form impossible. But perhaps it had been rebuilt, with veins and arteries of honey gold lacquer filling the old fissures.
When our eyes survey the rugged, steep slopes of a monumental challenge, sometimes accompanying the feverish pulsations beneath our skulls is a retaliatory, selfish, and hopeful recognition that it is also a chance. And so with infinite care, it was taken.
Ever the judicious architects, Starling and Dr. Lecter took turns in molding Mischa. When she did not run to great distances with her mother, the little cub sat across from her father at the high terrace, giddy every time he carried and arranged his best present on the marble table. In the afternoon sunʼs glow, the hard glass pieces always glistened, as did her white teeth whenever she stretched a hand over that flat theater of war before commencing. Tournament etiquette was what her father called it.
Once, Starling heard Mischa weep, her rapid sniffs all too familiar. Soaked with her loss, she shivered. Dr. Lecter however was not angry, he could never be, and when Mischa saw that he was not, she wiped herself dry and played again.
"What did that?" Starling asked when the den was finally quiet, a fatherʼs elegant fortepiano lullaby finished: the second movement of Franz Schubertʼs Piano Trio No. 2 in E-Flat Major.
Dr. Lecter brushed a few hair strands off Mischaʼs sleeping face with his left forefinger. "I ate her queen," he answered gently, guiltlessly. "She is a quick study, Clarice, quite like yourself."
Starling smiled. Before Mischa, it had been her alone sitting opposite him. "She is yours, too, Hannibal." She eyed him. "How does it feel, contending with your own?"
A thoughtful beat. Dr. Lecter indulged her needle. "Endearing. I have yet a hundred openings to teach her. She is stubborn with the Sicilian." He kissed Mischaʼs forehead. Looking towards Starling at last, he took and kissed her right hand.
It was on that night that Clarice Starling dreamt of the thick national forest, the frosty crunchy gravel, the hellish wailing from the boom box radio, the agitated bristled backs and curved tusks, the distinct stench of the barn at Muskrat Farm. She dreamt she had passed through the double doors late, with Dr. Hannibal Lecter trapped and forked, both of his feet chewed off, his lower limbs a gnarly, shredded red curtain of flesh and bone. She dreamt Mason Verger and his chain of pawns kept her conscious merely long enough to witness the good doctorʼs grand demise. When she raged awake, the darkness was malicious, suffocating. Acid gripped her throat.
Dr. Lecter subsequently caught Starling brooding ahead of the high terraceʼs entrance, her back to the bed, to him and Mischa. Her silhouette possessed an eerie sternness, an air of ascendance invoked by the billowing of her dressing gown. He had seen it before. A statue sculpted by Leonidas Drosis. A single blink and there was a spear in one of her hands and a shield in the other. He stood behind her and held her waist. "It was a false oubliette," she began. "A room that should not exist."
He perched his imperial nose on her right shoulder, inhaled, and exhaled her scent. "Tell me what you were dreaming, Clarice." His metallic, electric summon seemed to burn the buried gunpowder on her cheek.
Starlingʼs liquid gaze remained onward. The vivid hues of the Argentine nightscape with its sprawling neoclassical structures were as stunning as an ocean of molten anthracite. The view radiated such dense energy, life. A tremor passed, and she steeled herself to speak.
"You were... bound. Your blood was all over the soil, all over those goddamned pigs. I felt something sharp, and I spun. I was sure I was falling. When I came to, I knew I would be forced to watch. I did. You... You never begged them or yelled. Never. Not even in the final moments when you still could. I could have lost you, Hannibal. I could have failed."
Dr. Lecterʼs maroon eyes crackled at her revelation. Ah, Muskrat Farm. A midwinter plight so long ago. A perverse sort of delight engulfed him. The pain that bloomed in her voice was pure, raw. It was a manifestation of that which he must graciously receive and reverently give. Quid pro quo. He moved his sly mouth close to her ear, his sweet breath sidewinding upon her cheekʼs black spot.
"Yet I am here, Clarice. Alive and whole. A king defended by and indebted to his queen. For your enemies, Clarice, wherever square they stand, there is only death. You are a warrior, and you have won."
In the silence that followed, he felt the tension gradually leave Starlingʼs muscles. Athena Promachos, disarmed. The hand that he had earlier kissed reached back to caress the graying hairs on the side of his head, just above his temporal bone. Touching them languidly as though they were mink fur or stalks of a wheat field.
"We did, Hannibal. Thank you."
Dr. Lecter, eyes shut and losing himself in her congratulatory fondling, involuntarily crawled his hands downward, to the supple section far below her waist. Silk still and not skin. There were rules for ruling.
"Is there anything else you need, Clarice?"
Heat blossomed inside Starling now, but of a different kind, much more dangerous to him than her regal ire. The evidence of his desire pressed her, but she sparred with a mock innocence.
"What are you offering?"
"I believe you can tell, darling Starling."
There, on the high terrace of that cream mansion in the heart of the Recoleta district the monster always worshipped his worthy bride. There, their little cub became a lioness without ever being forsaken. We may very well see it as an altar and a battlement—sacred and safe solely to its occupiers.
A/N: This piece is attributed to Claridad, sung by Argentinian artist Natalia Clavier.
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