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“I’ve already done my prayers, Mom.”
Hearing a knock at the door, Elysium hurriedly pulled the Bible out from under his desk. Fortunately, he wasn’t a moment too late; his mother, seeing her son studying diligently, nodded approvingly. Immediately afterward, the stern woman scanned the bedroom, which was less than ten square meters, from top to bottom, trying to find any evidence on the bookshelf that he had disobeyed his parents’ orders, but apparently found none.
Elysium held his breath, not daring to make a sound, though his heart was already pounding in his throat. If she’d come back just a little earlier, she would have seen the erotic novel tucked under his butt—the one he’d bought on the black market for twenty pesetas.
“Not bad.”
Hearing those words, Elysium let out a long sigh of relief, shifted forward slightly, and nervously peered at his mother’s expression. Both his parents were civil servants who didn’t come home until very late every day; recently, due to the unstable situation, they’d been out on patrol night after night. Yet they could never quite put their minds at ease and would watch him handle his schoolwork whenever they had a moment.
Elysium glanced up at the clock; it was now 10:30, an hour later than usual. Today was Sunday and they must have gone to make a donation to the church. According to his mother, prices had skyrocketed since fighting broke out in other regions. If they found out their son had spent the money on erotic novels, the consequences wouldn’t be so simple.
After a while, Elysium sensed the tense atmosphere gradually easing, and his parents at the door began to show signs of leaving. He glanced at the book clamped tightly behind his back, but then heard his mother suddenly speak:
“We’ve found you a tutor. If there’s anything you don’t understand, go and ask her.”
Elysium looked up abruptly to find a woman in her fifties standing before him. She was very tall, with two strands of bangs hanging over her forehead. As he looked up at her from below, her figure seemed to fade in and out of the darkness. Her lips were tightly pressed together, her face expressionless; judging by her appearance, she was likely not Catalan.
Elysium was momentarily at a loss for words. “I forgot to introduce her,” his mother said, giving him a stern look. “She’s mute. Just call her Mantra.” The woman nodded.
Her name sounded North African, and her features were completely different from those of people from the Iberian Peninsula, yet she was actually older than both his parents.
“Don’t even think about slacking off. I’ll be checking up on your schoolwork every day.”
With that, his mother walked away with her hands behind her back.
Only the two of them remained in the room. Elysium didn’t know how to start a conversation, so he cleared his throat awkwardly twice. Mantra’s arrival was clearly a bit ill-timed; she surely had no idea that just a few days ago, he’d had a huge argument with his parents over his studies. His mother was adamant that her son had ulterior motives and spent all day researching strange and obscure topics. The woman in front of him kept her lips tightly sealed and looked extremely serious, as if she were agreeing with his mother. He almost forgot to breathe.
After a long moment, Elysium finally spoke in a low voice: “...Hello, ma’am. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Mantra didn’t say anything, so Elysium stuffed the novel he was holding into the desk drawer. Just then, he saw her lips move, making a “hissing” sound, and several phrases pieced together from Spanish suddenly popped into his mind. “You’re younger than I imagined.” He was certain that was what she’d said. Elysium rubbed his eyes, hardly believing his ears, but his mouth beat him to it, blurting out, “Ma’am, I’m only fifteen!”
Then they both froze. He saw Mantra’s eyebrows arch, her face betraying utter astonishment, and she let out a soft snort.
“...You can hear me speaking?”
Elysium was certain he wasn’t lying. This mute woman possessed mysterious abilities; though unable to speak, she had taught herself Spanish, English, and Latin. On top of that, she knew the contents of the Old and New Testaments inside and out. Most importantly, he could understand what Mantra was saying.
At first, Elysium thought it was a hallucination, but he tested it several times: every morning when he woke up, he would greet her and always hear the same response. After finishing his morning prayers, he could hear her recite the day’s tasks. Whenever he tried to slack off, she would always scold him sternly. These words were transmitted directly into his mind. His parents were completely unaware of this; they could only communicate through sign language and writing.
At this thought, a hint of secret delight welled up in Elysium’s heart. To be honest, he wasn’t afraid of Mantra; from the moment he saw her, he had sensed a beauty in her that didn’t belong to this continent, and her age lent that beauty a unique charm. Compared to his parents, his communication with her flowed very smoothly. He confirmed this: only he could hear her voice.
The Church referred to this method of receiving information in one’s mind without speaking as “divine communication,” but Elysium scoffed at the notion. Now that he possessed this ability with such ease, he couldn’t help but feel ecstatic. A subtle feeling welled up within him. Perhaps he and Mantra truly shared an unbreakable bond, and his cheeks flushed crimson.
For as long as Elysium could remember, Barcelona had always been overcast, with unemployed people wandering the streets everywhere. In recent years, martial law had not eased but intensified; his parents said people were being taken away every night. He spent his sixteenth birthday in a state of high tension, overhearing his mother and Mantra communicating through gestures. “She says you’re doing well in your studies,” his mother remarked, sounding quite pleased. Then he heard Mantra say, “I don’t think so.”
Elysium lowered his head in frustration and snorted inwardly. Fortunately, he’d recently earned A’s in both Latin and Chinese, and his family had stopped harping on him for forgetting to say his prayers. “Don’t go out much at night lately,” they said. “The streets are full of strange people; don’t let them lead you astray.”
Elysium knew his parents were referring to the “vagrants” on the streets, among whom were idle youths, including some of his classmates. When he saw them, they were spitting on the Bible. “I’ve already slept with Rosalia,” they boasted, “I guarantee you’ll never experience anything like that.” He walked away irritably, yet felt uneasy inside.
“Don’t worry, I never hang out with them.”
Elysium replied absently, glancing up at Mantra: she seemed not to have heard the earlier conversation at all.
Watching her unconcerned demeanor, Elysium was suddenly overcome by a strange feeling.
Elysium couldn’t shake the sense that something was off.
His sixteenth birthday had been a miserable one; his parents had taken away his allowance, citing yet another round of price hikes for milk and eggs. They asked Mantra about him almost every day: “As usual, his Latin has quite a few grammatical errors.” Because of this, Mantra supervised his study sessions every night until late.
Once they’d gotten to know each other better, Elysium took advantage of a break to fire off several questions in quick succession: Where was she from? How long had she been in Barcelona? What had she done for work before this? But the woman could only shake her head blankly: “I don’t know.” Finally, Elysium mustered the courage to ask her age. “I’m about 55 this year,” she said.
Like other tutors, Mantra strictly followed the wife’s instructions, guiding Elysium’s studies by the book. However, she would occasionally turn a blind eye, especially when she discovered those erotic novels while checking the bookshelf; she even asked if she should help him hide them. “Don’t worry, I’ll put in a good word for you,” she assured him. And she certainly did: at least his parents’ criticism had lessened considerably since then.
After entrusting Elysium to her care, his parents began coming home later and later each time. Elysium could always see patrols searching every house day and night, and public discourse about the city was growing. Elysium knew that the reason his family had chosen Mantra as his guardian was because she no longer possessed the sexual allure of a woman, not to mention that she was North African. Elysium hadn’t expected to care so much about his parents’ opinion of her, and this weighed heavily on him. He tried to speak up for Mantra, but she politely declined.
“If I get an A on my Latin test this time, will you let me skip school?”
One day after class, Elysium suddenly asked. To his surprise, she agreed immediately. Sensing his gaze fixed on her, Mantra sighed: ever since they’d reached a sort of secret agreement, he’d become increasingly bold, acting nothing like a student.
Fortunately, Elysium truly kept his promise—it was the best Latin grade he’d ever received. He admitted that ever since he’d learned Mantra came to tutor him every day, he’d been waiting by his bedside, eager to recite scripture to her. He took great pleasure in challenging her authority, doing everything he could to impress her. He’d become obsessed with eavesdropping on her inner thoughts, constantly trying to listen in on Mantra’s mind while she did her homework. But she was too calm, and he was frustrated to find he couldn’t hear a thing.
Elysium could clearly sense that deep within him lay a restlessness unique to adolescence, transforming into a fervor with no outlet. His heartbeat grew faster and faster.
Elysium noticed that he’d been masturbating more frequently lately.
He attributed it all to the pressure of schoolwork. Clearly, in his parents’ eyes, masturbation was a cardinal sin, so he had no choice but to wrap himself in his blanket and grit his teeth as he released his unending desire.
For a teenager going through puberty, suppressing his hormones was no good, especially with the black market in Barcelona becoming increasingly regulated; these days, you couldn’t even find anything decent for twenty pesetas. Elysium wrapped the blanket tighter around himself, anxiously stroking his already reddened and swollen shaft, helplessly watching as the engorged flesh at the tip turned crimson where his fingers gripped it. Then he thought of his classmates’ jeers, so he rolled over and picked up the pace, hoping to release himself quickly.
Yet Mantra’s face always appeared in his dreams, staring at him expressionlessly like a statue of the Virgin Mary in a church. He couldn’t help but break out in a cold sweat; he bolted upright from the bed and stared blankly at the stain on the sheets.
To make matters worse, several schools had already suspended classes. Every day brought news of rebels attacking churches, and Elysium’s parents had locked him away on the second floor. All he could see was the dark, surging crowd below—people armed with guns, their expressions grave, hurling sharp insults in the Catalan dialect, with the occasional corpse lying on the street.
Then, in July, the brief lull was shattered. Elysium woke to the sound of gunfire and was startled to see chaos outside his window. The streets were packed with marching workers and students, armed with rifles, shotguns, and bladed weapons, locked in a silent standoff with the patrols. The cold war quickly turned into a hot one; no one knew which side fired first, and the situation spiraled completely out of control. In less than half a day, the boulevard had turned into a sea of blood.
Elysium had never witnessed such a scene. Summer had arrived earlier than usual in Barcelona that year, and the entire city was engulfed by a massive heat wave; soon, the corpses lining the streets began to emit an unbearable stench of decay.
His parents didn’t come home until very late that night, claiming that those damned rebels had blown up the bus system. Elysium locked the door and lay in bed, tossing and turning. Even with the curtains drawn, the intense light still made his head spin, and the smell of blood mixed with rust seeped into the room. The clock in the bedroom ticked away; it was now 1:00 a.m.
Wearing only a tank top, Elysium felt an unprecedented sense of restlessness. He’d dreamed of her again, but this time the dream had been cut short. He hadn’t been able to fall back asleep, so he simply reached down toward his stiff lower body. But just as he pulled down his underwear, he heard footsteps outside the door—
The locked door swung open. Elysium awkwardly pulled the blanket up over himself, only to discover that it wasn’t his parents standing outside the door, but Mantra.
“You haven’t done your homework.”
Mantra crossed her arms over her chest, but out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at his legs, where the blanket was tucked between them in a futile attempt to cover up the obvious. Elysium swallowed nervously and pulled the blanket up a little higher. He watched as she locked the door again, sat down at the desk, and calmly fixed her gaze on him. That almost interrogative stare sent a sudden chill down his spine, and he instinctively clamped his legs together.
“Master and Mistress are out again. They told me to keep an eye on you.”
The more she spoke in that matter-of-fact, businesslike tone, the more anxious Elysium became. Mantra showed no sign of leaving; she had all the time in the world to wait. As Barcelona entered the late hours of the night, order gradually returned to the city, while the two of them remained in a silent standoff in the cramped bedroom. The aching sensation in Elysium’s lower body grew more intense, yet she pressed closer, glancing in his direction from time to time. He couldn’t tell if he was feeling fear or excitement, and as she was about to reach the bedside, he blurted out instinctively:
“Ma’am… Can you… do it with me tonight…?”
The moment the words left his mouth, they were both stunned. Elysium thought she must have lost her mind to say something like that. But Mantra didn’t object, as if she’d known all along that he’d think that.
“Okay.”
Mantra lifted her long skirt, revealing her veiny thighs, and straddled Elysium.
Elysium watched as she removed her lower garments, then parted her thighs; her vulva, slightly closed like an oyster, was now squarely in front of him. The woman pressed her thighs against the bulge in the blanket, leaned forward, and pulled the corner of the blanket back with her mouth. “What are you going to do?” A cool hand enveloped his shaft, and her fingers prodded his burning scrotum. Elysium shuddered all over—he’d only ever seen scenes like this in erotic novels.
In that moment of distraction, he saw Mantra squinting as she gripped his erect penis with all ten fingers. One hand clearly wasn’t enough, so she could only move it up and down with difficulty. Elysium, aroused by her teasing, spread his legs to actively meet her movements, thrusting hard against the palm of her hand. Thin prostate fluid trickled through the gaps between her fingers; Mantra naturally parted his labia, spreading the fluid the boy had released evenly over his contracting inner walls. Elysium was somewhat transfixed; in a daze, he heard her say, “Faster. We don’t have much time to rest.”
Their first sexual encounter hadn’t been well-prepared. Elysium hadn’t even imagined Mantra would agree, and to make matters worse, he still showed no signs of climaxing. To make him feel a little better, she placed her crotch on his knees and ground against them, using her fingers to test the width of his inner walls. Just then, the sound of a key turning in the lock came from downstairs. Elysium was on edge, but the woman told him to stay quiet, then positioned herself over his shaft and lowered herself onto him—
It was too tight. Cold sweat broke out on Elysium’s forehead; he wanted nothing more than to pull out immediately. Mantra didn’t show the slightest sign of discomfort; he pressed his hands against the boy’s bare shoulders, and Elysium could still feel the sticky sensation. The woman didn’t move right away; she sat on top of him for quite a while, sucking him so hard it made his scalp tingle. Elysium could hear her panting, her chest rising and falling.
“Wanna give it a try?” The woman’s invitation caught Elysium off guard. “You’re in charge tonight.”
Elysium suddenly got the hint. He rolled over, pinning Mantra to the bed, spread his legs wide, grabbed his ankles, and thrust deep inside with wide, forceful strokes. He clumsily imitated the way the male and female protagonists came together in erotic novels, thrusting without any rhythm, each time reaching a depth he hadn’t reached before. He heard his parents’ footsteps drawing closer, followed by the sound of leather shoes clacking on the wooden stairs, echoing across the second floor. Elysium covered his mouth with his hand and bit down hard on the web between his thumb and index finger; thankfully, no one but him could hear the woman’s gasps.
Mantra remained unflustered, lying beneath the boy like a puppet at his mercy. Her inner walls contracted in waves, producing a sticky, wet sound with each thrust deeper inside her. Her expression was blank, though her cheeks were flushed a few shades more than before. In the blink of an eye, the footsteps grew even closer. Elysium forgot to breathe, staring intently toward the door, the pain beneath him growing more intense. He was just a hair’s breadth away from release. He buried his face in her chest and bit down on her flushed nipple: Just hold on a little longer—don’t give it away...
He heard the footsteps reach the doorway, but they stopped abruptly. The figure turned and walked back toward the first floor. Before the footsteps had even faded, the part of him buried inside her began to stir again, continuously releasing a clear fluid. Elysium knew his endurance had reached its limit; he could no longer suppress the urge. He simply hoisted her legs onto his shoulders and recklessly pushed their bodies to their limits. He saw the woman’s expression change slightly; her mouth was wide open, yet not a sound escaped her. He placed his hand on her neck and felt the “rustling” friction as her vocal cords vibrated.
They climaxed at the exact same moment. Afterward, their limbs were tangled together, their pressed-together skin glistening with beads of sweat. Mantra hooked her leg around Elysium’s. “They’re asleep,” she said. Elysium knew she was referring to his parents. It took a great deal of effort for them to separate. She quickly helped him adjust his clothes, and just as she was about to get out of bed, gunshots rang out again from outside the window.
Elysium glanced toward the door. It was four in the morning; the sky was turning pale. Downstairs, corpses were piled high, their original forms no longer recognizable. Immediately afterward, the sound of explosions mingled with people’s screams. “Want to do it again?” he heard the woman ask.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Elysium agreed.
The situation in Barcelona was worse than he’d imagined.
Every day, Elysium heard news of railway tracks being blown up; schools were forced to close, and the streets were filled with the shrill wail of air raid sirens. The fighting quickly spread from Barcelona to the Basque Country. The news no longer reported casualty figures; all he knew was that there were strikes and demonstrations every day, and the town’s only church had been burned to the ground.
But none of this concerned them. Elysium actually felt a sense of relief, because his parents were busy salvaging the church and the railroad from the rubble, leaving him more time to spend with Mantra. So they hid in the cramped bedroom on the second floor, making love wildly in every position imaginable, the creaking of the bedboards mingling with the hail of gunfire.
Elysium could no longer tell day from night; whenever he woke, he would entwine himself with her body. He would pin her to the bed, or sometimes she would straddle him, looking down from above, and the two of them did nothing but make love. Whenever they were about to finish, he could always feel the woman’s inner walls sucking tightly on his member, preventing him from pulling out, so he thrust into her once more until they both collapsed, exhausted, beneath the covers. Afterward, he spotted the Bible lying by the pillow and tore its pages to shreds right in front of her.
When they were relaxing, Mantra lay beside Elysium, idly playing with the young man’s newly developed scrotum. Elysium let out intermittent whimpers, hooking the instep of her foot around Mantra’s calf.
“When do you think they’ll be back?”
“In an hour. Just like last time, I suppose.”
This summer felt longer than ever. The scorching sun of Barcelona had been beating down for three whole months, and during that time, the sound of gunfire in the streets had never ceased. Her parents said they’d found several bullet holes in the walls. Because money was urgently needed to repair the church, the family had to cut back on expenses, switching their daily lunch from chickpeas to potatoes. Other than that, Elysium had no tangible sense of the war. Because of the war, he and Mantra actually had more opportunities to be alone together; he even fantasized that the current chaos wouldn’t end anytime soon.
There was one thing, however, that worried him greatly. After months of a standoff between the rebels and workers in Barcelona, the city’s supplies were gradually running out. He had heard his parents suggest more than once that if the war continued, they would have no choice but to send Mantra away.
On this matter, they were showing an uncharacteristic hesitation. “She really is a good teacher,” his father explained. Elysium had become a completely different person. He no longer defied his orders, and even the complaints from school had dropped significantly.
Elysium remained deeply troubled, though fortunately, his family hadn’t discovered the special relationship between him and Mantra. After they were done each time, she would restore the room to its original state, then time her departure to coincide with his parents’ return, slipping out on tiptoe.
Elysium knew that in half a year, he would turn seventeen. After graduating from the church school, he wasn’t sure where he would go. Thinking about this, a hint of worry crossed his face.
However, the thing Elysium feared most eventually happened.
One night, he miscalculated the timing, and Mantra, just as she was leaving the bedroom, bumped into his mother. Seeing Elysium on the bed, not yet dressed in his pajamas, the woman at the door immediately understood everything. In fact, seeds of suspicion had been planted in her mind long ago. A neighbor had mentioned that their son hadn’t left the house in quite some time, and once, while hanging laundry, she’d caught a glimpse of him lying naked by the window with an older woman. At first, she didn’t believe it, but her intuition told her that Elysium was doing something behind her back that he couldn’t reveal.
The mother’s premonition was entirely correct. Before she completely lost her composure, Mantra took the initiative to sign that she would leave home—and Barcelona—that very night. Elysium silently witnessed the entire exchange; though he had known this outcome was coming, he felt a surge of intense anger. Watching Mantra’s receding figure, Elysium heard his mother’s hysterical sobs and his father’s sighs; all that remained in his heart was restlessness.
As Elysium went downstairs, he saw Mantra packing her bags and stepped forward to grab her hand. “Let’s go.”
Without looking back, he led her away from home.
Elysium and Mantra left Barcelona that very night.
They practically had to step over corpses to get away. Gunfights broke out daily on that narrow path, and the two had no choice but to weave their way through the hail of bullets. Elysium hadn’t brought much with him; he ran nonstop, holding Mantra’s hand the whole time. Fortunately, they narrowly avoided the fighting and discovered a makeshift railway crossing before the city’s transportation system completely collapsed.
Elysium was absolutely certain that if they’d gone in the wrong direction, given Mantra’s background, she would have been thrown in jail by the Southerners. So, just before the entire rail network shut down, he jumped onto the last train bound for the Basque Country.
Once aboard the train, Elysium was still shaken, while Mantra was clearly much calmer, obediently clinging to his arm. The car jolted along the bumpy tracks, rocking him so violently he nearly threw up. Elysium gripped the handrail tightly; he had clearly underestimated the difficulty of this escape. Crammed into the train with them was a group of North Africans; the stifling space was thick with the stench of sweat.
This was Elysium’s first time traveling far from home, and he finally gained a visceral understanding of war. An invisible fear gripped his throat, and he could only hold Mantra’s hand in a daze: he had no idea where this train would take them.
The train finally came to a stop in Guernica.
It was an ordinary afternoon, but Elysium had waited far too long: they had spent seven full days and nights on the tracks. The moment he stepped off the train, he felt nothing but long-overdue relief.
Mantra remained on the train; she said she wanted to rest for a while. Elysium couldn’t wait to rush out the door. It was his first time experiencing a Basque spring. Unlike Barcelona, this small northern town was still quite cool in April. Elysium daydreamed about the life he and Mantra would share from then on. He was going to take a job at a small tavern and save up enough money to take her on a trip around the world. Yet when he thought about the future, he said nothing; his mind went completely blank.
His thoughts were quickly interrupted. Elysium suddenly heard screams as people scattered in all directions. To his horror, he saw a dark cloud of bombers filling the sky, and air raid sirens blared all around.
“Run!”
The first bomb was dropped, striking the train on the platform head-on. The cries of men and women rang out nearby as the train car was split in half. Elysium suddenly remembered that Mantra was still on the train; he frantically pushed his way through the fleeing crowd and forced his way inside. There, he witnessed the most horrifying sight of his life:
The train, split in two, was like an anthill with its inhabitants spilling out—the mangled bodies lay scattered haphazardly inside the cars, gushing out in layers from the fracture, turning into a chaotic cascade of flesh and blood. Amid the piled-up remains, he recognized Mantra’s clothes with horror; they had been reduced to shreds, drifting helplessly into the sky.
He wanted to take one last look, but in an instant, he was pushed outward layer by layer by the surging crowd; he could no longer speak, his chest aching from the pressure. Before he could even process what was happening, he was squeezed out of the crowd.
He watched as people fled into the fields and down into alleys, desperately scrambling into underground shelters, only to be blown to pieces by fighter jets that pursued and blocked their escape. His left arm was also injured, and he narrowly escaped death several times. He could do nothing but run on instinct. He saw bomb after bomb fall into the crowd, and in the blink of an eye, everything within sight was utterly destroyed.
Elysium exhausted all his strength and was pinned beneath the ruins of a church, where the thick bricks and stones served as a makeshift shelter. Peering through a crack, he saw raging fires all around him, and the thick black smoke choked him until he could hardly breathe.
He passed out from severe oxygen deprivation.
Shortly afterward, patrol officers dug a young man out from beneath the rubble. He had been buried for several days, and they were delighted to discover he was still breathing.
By the time the teenager regained consciousness, he was already in the hospital. Unfortunately, likely due to excessive smoke inhalation, his brain tissue had suffered irreversible cognitive damage. He had completely lost his memory; he could not accurately state his name or even form a complete sentence. No matter what questions they asked, he would only stare blankly at the ceiling and make “ah-ah” sounds.
The patrol officers in Guernica surmised that the young man had run away from home; he appeared to be a minor and was certainly Catalan. They tried to contact his family, but no one answered. During this time, they tried other methods as well. To their bewilderment, the only words the boy could piece together were a series of nouns they couldn’t understand: M, A, N, T, R, A.
“What does that mean?”
“Sounds like a person’s name, definitely not Basque.”
In the end, they sent the boy to the church, where he was confined with other disabled orphans. Every night, people could hear the sound of him banging against the wall as he repeated that single phrase over and over: M, A, N, T, R, A.
The priest said the poor child was possessed, surely bewitched by the power of the devil. To be on the safe side, they placed the young man in solitary confinement. However, his condition worsened rather than improved, and he eventually lost the ability to move freely.
There is no need to elaborate on what happened next; the boy spent the rest of his life in the church’s isolation cell. People never gave up trying to exorcise the evil from him, hoping he would return to normal and go back to his hometown, but their efforts yielded little result, and in the end, the matter was simply left unresolved.
Whether this church was later destroyed in the war, we have no way of knowing.