It is a saying in the capital of Mexico that Dr. Malsufrido carries more family secrets under his hat than any archbishop, which applies, of course, to family secrets of the rich. The poor have no family secrets, or none that Dr. Malsufrido would trouble to carry under his hat.
It is imperative that the character of Dr. Malsufrido—by which is meant the way he is apprehended by the community—is established early on. Everything in the story ultimately depends upon the character of this doctor being established and accepted as a given. If any questions linger or ambiguity remains or doubt enters, the whole fragile construction of this deceptively complex story falls apart. Gradually, the reader will learn that this is a story where not being able to maintain a confidence—and, for that matter—not being able to successfully project a reputation for being able to strictly maintain a confidence can become literally a matter of life or death.
“But it seems to me a blessed stigma, Señorita, this delicate, wine-red vine-leaf, staining a surface as pure as the petal of any magnolia. With permission, I should say that the god Bacchus himself painted it here in the arch of this chaste back, where only the eyes of Cupid could find it; for it is safely below the line of the most fashionable gown.”
The “Senorita” in question has come under the veil of privacy and security of identification to seek both the services of Malsufrido as a physician and a keeper of secrets. She has a birthmark—a blemish, she calls it—in the shape of the titular vegetation. It is of utmost importance to understand that this blemish upon her skin is not in a place where it would ever, under any circumstances beyond the most unexpected, be seen in public. The privacy of the birthmark is very well established—barring assault, it is entirely up to her judgment to determine who will and will not see it. And yet it is imperative—for her—that the good doctor engage all his skill to remove it.
“Observe you, Doctor, that the blemish is not of the texture of the skin, or bathed in its admirable atmosphere. It presents itself as an excrescence. And why? Because that color had been mixed and applied with feverish haste by the hand of a dying man, whose one thought was to denounce his assassin—she who undoubtedly bore such a mark on her body, and who had left him for dead, after carefully obliterating the portrait of herself which he had painted in the mirror.”
The Marqués is discussing the notorious and unsolved murder of a painter named Andrade. Here he describes what must have been the last act of the dying artist. Like something straight out of an Ellery Queen mystery, the artist engages every last ounce of energy he has left to exercise toward the single-minded devotion of leaving a “dying clue” as to the identity of his assassin. Adding to the portrait of the mystery woman he has just painted is the one single anatomical feature capable of identifying her that he can possibly hope to complete in the limited time he has left, whoever she might be: a birthmark in the shape of a vine-leaf. And soon after he complete the story, the wife of the Marqués enters, speaking in a voice that Dr. Malsufrido remembers very well, indeed.
