The Angel's Game

1

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood, and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.

My first time came one faraway day in December 1917. I was seventeen and worked at The Voice of Industry, a newspaper which had seen better days and now languished in a barn of a building that had once housed a sulphuric acid factory. The walls still oozed the corrosive vapour that ate away at furniture and clothes, sapping the spirits, consuming even the soles of shoes. The newspaper’s headquarters rose behind the forest of angels and crosses of the Pueblo Nuevo Cemetery; from afar, its outline merged with the mausoleums silhouetted against the horizon – a skyline stabbed by hundreds of chimneys and factories that wove a perpetual twilight of scarlet and black above Barcelona.

On the night that was about to change the course of my life, the newspaper’s deputy editor, Don Basilio Moragas, saw fit to summon me, just before closing time, to the dark cubicle at the far end of the editorial staff room that doubled as his office and cigar den. Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy moustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency. Any journalist prone to florid prose would be sent off to write funeral notices for three weeks. If, after this penance, the culprit relapsed, Don Basilio would ship him off permanently to the ‘House and Home’ pages. We were all terrified of him, and he knew it.

‘Did you call me, Don Basilio?’ I ventured timidly.

The deputy editor looked at me askance. I entered the office, which smelled of sweat and tobacco in that order. Ignoring my presence, Don Basilio continued to read through one of the articles lying on his table, a red pencil in hand. For a couple of minutes, he machine-gunned the text with corrections and amputations, muttering sharp comments as if I wasn’t there. Not knowing what to do and noticing a chair placed against the wall, I slid into it.

‘Who said you could sit down?’ muttered Don Basilio without raising his eyes from the text.

I quickly stood up again and held my breath. The deputy editor sighed, let his red pencil fall and leaned back in his armchair, eyeing me as if I were some useless piece of junk.

‘I’ve been told that you write, Martín.’

I gulped. When I opened my mouth only a ridiculous, reedy voice emerged.

‘A little, well, I don’t know, I mean, yes, I do write…’

‘I hope you write better than you speak. And what do you write – if that’s not too much to ask?’

‘Crime stories. I mean…’

‘I get the idea.’

The look Don Basilio gave me was priceless. If I’d said I devoted my time to sculpting figures for Nativity scenes out of fresh dung I would have drawn three times as much enthusiasm from him. He sighed again and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Vidal says you’re not altogether bad. He says you stand out. Of course, with the sort of competition in this neck of the woods, that’s not saying much. Still, if Vidal says so.’

Pedro Vidal was the star writer at The Voice of Industry. He penned a weekly column on crime and lurid events – the only thing worth reading in the whole paper. He was also the author of a dozen thrillers about gangsters in the Raval quarter carrying out bedroom intrigues with ladies of high society, which had achieved a modest success. Invariably dressed in impeccable silk suits and shiny Italian moccasins, Vidal had the looks and the manner of a matinee idol: fair hair always well combed, a pencil moustache, and the easy, generous smile of someone who feels comfortable in his own skin and at ease with the world. He belonged to a family whose forebears had made their pile in the Americas in the sugar business and, on their return to Barcelona, had bitten off a large chunk of the city’s electricity grid. His father, the patriarch of the clan, was one of the main shareholders of the newspaper, and Don Pedro used its offices as a playground to kill the tedium of never having worked out of necessity a single day in his life. It mattered little to him that the newspaper was losing money as quickly as the new automobiles that were beginning to run around Barcelona leaked oil: with its abundance of nobility, the Vidal dynasty was now busy collecting banks and plots of land the size of small principalities in the new part of town known as the Ensanche.

Pedro Vidal was the first person to whom I had dared show rough drafts of my writing when, barely a child, I carried coffee and cigarettes round the staff room. He always had time for me: he read what I had written and gave me good advice. Eventually, he made me his assistant and would allow me to type out his drafts. It was he who told me that if I wanted to bet my number on the Russian roulette of literature, he was willing to help me and set me on the right path. True to his word, he had now thrown me into the clutches of Don Basilio, the newspaper’s Cerberus.

‘Vidal is a sentimentalist who still believes in those profoundly un-Spanish myths such as meritocracy or giving opportunities to those who deserve them rather than to the current favourite. Loaded as he is, he can allow himself to go around being a free spirit. If I had one hundredth of the cash he doesn’t even need I would have devoted my life to honing sonnets, and little twittering nightingales would come to eat from my hand, captivated by my kindness and charm.’

‘Señor Vidal is a great man!’ I protested.

‘He’s more than that. He’s a saint, because although you may look like a ragamuffin he’s been banging on at me for weeks about how talented and hard-working the office junior is. He knows that deep down I’m a softy, and besides he’s assured me that if I give you this break he’ll present me with a box of Cuban cigars. And if Vidal says so, it’s as good as Moses coming down from the mountain with the lump of stone in his hand and the revealed truth shining from his forehead. So, to get to the point, because it’s Christmas, and because I want your friend to shut up once and for all, I’m offering you a head start, against wind and tide.’

‘Thank you so much, Don Basilio. I promise you won’t regret it…’

‘Don’t get too carried away, boy. Let’s see, what do you think of the indiscriminate use of adjectives and adverbs?’

‘I think it’s a disgrace and should be set down in the penal code,’ I replied with the conviction of a zealot.

Don Basilio nodded in approval.

‘You’re on the right track, Martín. Your priorities are clear. Those who make it in this business have priorities, not principles. This is the plan. Sit down and concentrate, because I’m not going to tell you twice.’

The plan was as follows. For reasons that Don Basilio thought best not to set out in detail, the back page of the Sunday edition, which was traditionally reserved for a short story or a travel feature, had fallen through at the last minute. The content was to have been a fiery narrative in patriotic vein about the exploits of Catalan medieval knights in which they saved Christianity and all that was decent under the sun, starting with the Holy Land and ending with the banks of our Llobregat delta. Unfortunately the text had not arrived in time or, I suspected, Don Basilio simply didn’t want to publish it. This left us, only six hours before deadline, with no other substitute for the story than a whole-page advertisement for whalebone corsets that guaranteed perfect hips and full immunity from the effects of buttery by-products. Faced with such a dilemma, the editorial board had opted to take the bull by the horns and make the most of the literary excellence that permeated every corner of the newspaper. The problem would be overcome by bringing out a four-column human-interest piece for the entertainment and edification of our loyal family-orientated readership. The list of proven talent included ten names, none of which, needless to say, was mine.

‘Martín, my friend, circumstances have conspired so that not one of the champions on our payroll is on the premises or can be contacted in due time. With disaster imminent, I have decided to give you your first crack at glory.’

‘You can count on me.’

‘I’m counting on five double-spaced pages in six hours’ time, Don Edgar Allan Poe. Bring me a story, not a speech. If I want a sermon, I’ll go to Midnight Mass. Bring me a story I have not read before, and if I have read it, bring it to me so well written and narrated that I won’t even notice.’

I was about to leave the room when Don Basilio got up, walked round his desk and rested a hand, heavy and large as an anvil, on my shoulder. Only then, when I saw him close up, did I notice a twinkle in his eyes.

‘If the story is decent I’ll pay you ten pesetas. And if it’s better than decent and our readers like it, I’ll publish more.’

‘Any specific instructions, Don Basilio?’ I asked.

‘Yes: don’t let me down.’

I spent the next six hours in a trance. I installed myself at a table that stood in the middle of the editorial room and was reserved for Vidal, on the days when he felt like dropping by. The room was deserted, submerged in a gloom thick with the smoke of a thousand cigarettes. Closing my eyes for a moment, I conjured up an image, a cloak of dark clouds spilling down over the city in the rain, a man walking under cover of shadows with blood on his hands and a secret in his eyes. I didn’t know who he was or what he was fleeing from, but during the next six hours he was going to become my best friend. I slid a page into the typewriter and, without pausing, I proceeded to squeeze out everything I had inside me. I quarrelled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again. My only company was the incessant clacking of the typewriter echoing in the darkened hall and the large clock on the wall exhausting the minutes left until dawn.

Shortly before six o’clock in the morning I pulled the last sheet out of the typewriter and sighed, utterly drained. My brain felt like a wasps’ nest. I heard the slow, heavy footsteps of Don Basilio, who had emerged from one of his controlled naps and was approaching unhurriedly. I gathered up the pages and handed them to him, not daring to meet his gaze. Don Basilio sat down at the next table and turned on the lamp. His eyes skimmed the text, betraying no emotion. Then he rested his cigar on the end of the table for a moment, glared at me and read out the first line:

‘Night falls on the city and the streets carry the scent of gunpowder like the breath of a curse.’

Don Basilio looked at me out of the corner of his eye and I hid behind a smile that didn’t leave a single tooth uncovered. Without saying another word, he got up and left with my story in his hands. I saw him walking towards his office and closing the door behind him. I stood there, petrified, not knowing whether to run away or await the death sentence. Ten minutes later – it felt more like ten years to me – the door of the deputy editor’s office opened and the voice of Don Basilio thundered right across the department.

‘Martín. In here. Now.’

I dragged myself across as slowly as I could, shrinking a centimetre or two with every step, until I had no alternative but to show my face and look up. Don Basilio, the fearful red pencil in hand, was staring at me icily. I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. He picked up the pages and gave them back to me. I took them and turned to go as quickly as I could, telling myself that there would always be room for another shoeshine boy in the lobby of the Hotel Colón.

‘Take this down to the composing room and have them set it,’ said the voice behind me.

I turned round, thinking I was the object of some cruel joke. Don Basilio pulled open the drawer of his desk, counted ten pesetas and put them on the table.

‘This belongs to you. I suggest you buy yourself a better suit with it – I’ve seen you wearing the same one for four years and it’s still about six sizes too big. Why don’t you pay a visit to Señor Pantaleoni at his shop in Calle Escudellers? Tell him I sent you. He’ll look after you.’

‘Thank you so much, Don Basilio. That’s what I’ll do.’

‘And start thinking about another of these stories for me. I’ll give you a week for the next one. But don’t fall asleep. And let’s see if we can have a lower body count this time – today’s readers like a slushy ending in which the greatness of the human spirit triumphs over adversity, that sort of rubbish.’

‘Yes, Don Basilio.’

The deputy editor nodded and held out his hand to me. I shook it.

‘Good work, Martín. On Monday I want to see you at the desk that belonged to Junceda. It’s yours now. I’m putting you on the crime beat.’

‘I won’t fail you, Don Basilio.’

‘No, you won’t fail me. You’ll just cast me aside sooner or later. And you’ll be right to do so, because you’re not a journalist and you never will be. But you’re not a crime novelist yet, even if you think you are. Stick around for a while and we’ll teach you a thing or two that will always come in handy.’

At that moment, my guard down, I was so overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude that I wanted to hug that great bulk of a man. Don Basilio, his fierce mask back in place, gave me a steely look and pointed towards the door.

‘No scenes, please. Close the door. And happy Christmas.’

‘Happy Christmas.’

The following Monday, when I arrived at the editorial room ready to sit at my own desk for the very first time, I found a coarse grey envelope with a ribbon and my name on it in the same recognisable font that I had been typing out for years. I opened it. Inside was a framed copy of my story from the back page of the Sunday edition, with a note saying:

‘This is just the beginning. In ten years I’ll be the apprentice and you’ll be the teacher. Your friend and colleague, Pedro Vidal.’

2

My literary debut survived its baptism of fire, and Don Basilio, true to his word, offered me the opportunity to publish a few more stories in a similar style. Soon the management decided that my meteoric career would have a weekly outlet as long as I continued to perform my duties in the editorial room for the same price. Driven by vanity and exhaustion, I spent the days going over my colleagues’ stories and churning out countless reports about local news and lurid horrors, so that later I could spend my nights alone in the office writing a serialised work that I had been toying with in my imagination for a long time. Entitled The Mysteries of Barcelona, this Byzantine melodrama was a farrago shamelessly borrowed from Dumas and Stoker, taking in Sue and Féval along the way. I slept about three hours a night and looked like I’d spent those inside a coffin. Vidal, who had never known that kind of hunger which has nothing to do with the stomach though it gnaws at one’s insides, was of the opinion that I was burning up my brain and that, at the rate I was going, I would be celebrating my own funeral before I reached twenty. Don Basilio, who was unmoved by my diligence, had other reservations. He published each of my chapters reluctantly, annoyed by what he considered to be an excess of morbidity and an unfortunate waste of my talent at the service of plots and stories of dubious taste.

The Mysteries of Barcelona gave birth to a fictional starlet in instalments, a heroine I had imagined as one can only imagine a femme fatale at the ripe age of seventeen. Chloé Permanyer was the dark princess of all vamps. Beyond intelligent, and even more devious, always clad in fine lingerie, she was the lover and evil accomplice of the mysterious Baltasar Morel, king of the underworld, who lived in a subterranean mansion peopled by automatons and macabre relics with a secret entrance through tunnels buried under the catacombs of the Gothic quarter. Chloé’s favourite way of finishing off her victims was to seduce them with a hypnotic dance during which she removed her clothes, then kiss them with a poisoned lipstick that paralysed all their muscles and made them die from silent suffocation as she looked into their eyes, having previously drunk an antidote mixed in a fine-vintage Dom Pérignon. Chloé and Baltasar had their own code of honour: they killed only the dregs of society, cleansing the globe of bullies, swines, fanatics and morons who made this world unnecessarily miserable for the rest of mankind in the name of flags, gods, tongues, races and other such rubbish in order to serve their own greed and meanness. For me Chloé and Baltasar were rebellious heroes, like all true heroes. For Don Basilio, whose literary tastes had settled in the Spanish verse of the Golden Age, it was all a monstrous lunacy, but in view of the favourable reception my stories enjoyed and the affection which, despite himself, he felt towards me, he tolerated my extravagances and attributed them to an excess of youthful ardour.

‘You have more zeal than good taste, Martín. The disease afflicting you has a name, and that is Grand Guignol: it does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it’s all downhill. You should read the classics, or at least Don Benito Pérez Galdós, to elevate your literary aspirations.’

‘But the readers like my stories,’ I argued.

‘You don’t deserve the credit. That belongs to your rivals: they are so bad and pedantic that they could render a donkey catatonic in less than a paragraph. When are you going to mature and stop munching the forbidden fruit once and for all?’

I would nod, full of contrition, but secretly I caressed those forbidden words, Grand Guignol, and I told myself that every cause, however frivolous, needed a champion to defend its honour.

I was beginning to feel like the most fortunate of creatures when I discovered that some of my colleagues at the paper were annoyed that the junior and official mascot of the editorial room had taken his first steps in the world of letters while their own literary ambitions had languished for years in a grey limbo of misery. The fact that the readers were lapping up these modest stories more than anything else published in the newspaper during the last twenty years only made matters worse. In just a few weeks I saw how the hurt pride of those whom, until recently, I had considered to be my only family now transformed them into a hostile jury. They stopped greeting me and ignored me, sharpening their malice by aiming phrases full of sarcasm and spite at me behind my back. My inexplicable good fortune was attributed to Pedro Vidal, to the ignorance and stupidity of our readers and to the widely held national belief that achieving any measure of success in any profession was irrefutable proof of one’s lack of skill or merit.

In view of this unexpected and ominous turn of events, Vidal tried to encourage me, but I was beginning to suspect that my days at the newspaper were numbered.

‘Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it responds to the worries that gnaw at them and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude – and destroy if possible – those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.’

‘Amen,’ Don Basilio would agree. ‘Had you not been born so rich you could have become a priest. Or a revolutionary. With sermons like that even a bishop would fall on his knees and repent.’

‘You two can laugh,’ I protested. ‘But the one they can’t stand the sight of is me.’

Despite the wide range of enmity and distrust that my efforts were generating, the sad truth was that, even though I gave myself the airs of a popular writer, my salary only allowed me to subsist, to buy more books than I had time to read and to rent a dingy room in a pensión buried in a narrow street near Calle Princesa. The pensión was run by a devout Galician woman who answered to the name of Doña Carmen. Doña Carmen demanded discretion and changed the sheets once a month: residents were advised to abstain from succumbing to onanism or getting into bed with dirty clothes. There was no need to forbid the presence of the fair sex in the rooms because there wasn’t a single woman in all Barcelona who would have agreed to enter that miserable hole, even under pain of death. There I learned that one can forget almost everything in life, beginning with bad smells, and that if there was one thing I aspired to, it was not to die in a place like that. In the low hours – which were most hours – I told myself that if anything was going to get me out of there before an outbreak of tuberculosis did the job, it was literature, and if that pricked anyone’s soul, or their balls, they could scratch them with a brick.

On Sundays, when it was time for Mass and Doña Carmen went out for her weekly meeting with the Almighty, the residents took advantage of her absence to gather in the room of the oldest person among us, a poor devil called Heliodoro whose ambition as a young man had been to become a matador, but who had ended up as a self-appointed expert and commentator on bullfighting, in charge of the urinals on the sunny side of the Monumental Bullring.

‘The art of bullfighting is dead,’ he would proclaim. ‘Now it’s just a business for greedy stockbreeders and bullfighters with no soul. The public cannot distinguish between bullfighting for the ignorant masses and an authentic faena only connoisseurs can appreciate.’

‘If only you’d been allowed to show your skills as a bullfighter, Don Heliodoro, things would be very different.’

‘Truth is, only the useless get to the top in this country.’

‘Never better said.’

After Don Heliodoro’s weekly sermon came the fun. Piled together like a load of sausages by the small window of his room, we residents could see and hear, across the inner well, the exertions of Marujita, a woman who lived in the next building and was nicknamed Hot Pepper because of her spicy language and the shape of her generous anatomy. Marujita earned her crust scrubbing floors in second-rate establishments, but she devoted her Sundays and feast days to a seminarist boyfriend who took the train down from Manresa and applied himself, body and soul, to the carnal knowledge of sin.

One Sunday, my pensión colleagues were crammed against the window hoping to catch a fleeting sight of Marujita’s titanic buttocks in one of those undulations that pressed them like dough against the tiny window pane, when the doorbell rang. Since nobody volunteered to go and open the door, thereby losing their spot and a good view of the show, I gave up my attempts at joining the chorus and went to see who had come. When I opened the door I was confronted with a most unlikely sight inside that miserable frame: Don Pedro Vidal, cloaked in his panache and his Italian silk suit, stood smiling on the landing.

‘And there was light,’ he said, coming in without waiting for an invitation.

Vidal stopped to look at the sitting room that doubled as dining room and meeting place and gave a sigh of disgust.

‘It might be better to go to my room,’ I suggested.

I led the way. The shouts and cheers of my co-residents in honour of Marujita and her venereal acrobatics bored through the walls with jubilation.

‘What a lively place,’ Vidal commented.

‘Please come into the presidential suite, Don Pedro,’ I invited him.

We went in and I closed the door. After a very brief glance around my room he sat on the only chair and looked at me with little enthusiasm. It wasn’t hard to imagine the impression my modest home had made on him.

‘What do you think?’

‘Charming. I’m thinking of moving here myself.’

Pedro Vidal lived in Villa Helius, a huge modernist mansion with three floors and a large tower, perched on the slopes that rose up to Pedralbes, at the crossing between Calle Abadesa Olzet and Calle Panamá. The house had been given to him by his father ten years earlier in the hope that he would settle down and start a family, an undertaking which Vidal had somewhat delayed. Life had blessed Don Pedro Vidal with many talents, chief among them that of disappointing and offending his father with every gesture he made and every step he took. To see him fraternising with undesirables like me did not help. I remember that once, when visiting my mentor to deliver some papers from the office, I bumped into the patriarch of the Vidal clan in one of the hallways of Villa Helius. When he saw me, Vidal’s father told me to go and fetch him a glass of tonic water and a cloth to clean a stain off his lapel.

‘I think you’re confused, sir. I’m not a servant…’

He gave me a smile that clarified the order of things in the world without any need for words.

‘You’re the one who is confused, young lad. You’re a servant, whether you know it or not. What’s your name?’

‘David Martín, sir.’

The patriarch considered my name.

‘Take my advice, David Martín. Leave this house and go back to where you belong. You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble, and you’ll save me the trouble too.’

I never confessed this to Vidal, but I immediately went off to the kitchen in search of tonic water and a rag, and spent a quarter of an hour cleaning the great man’s jacket. The shadow of the clan was a long one, and however much Don Pedro liked to affect a Bohemian air, his whole life was an extension of his family network. Villa Helius was conveniently situated five minutes away from the great paternal mansion that dominated the upper stretch of Avenida Pearson, a cathedral-like jumble of balustrades, staircases and dormer windows that looked out over the whole of Barcelona from a distance, like a child looking at the toys he has thrown away. Every day, an expedition of two servants and a cook left the big house, as the paternal home was known among the Vidal entourage, and went to Villa Helius to clean, shine, iron, cook and cosset my wealthy protector in a nest that comforted him and shielded him from the inconveniences of everyday life. Pedro Vidal moved around the city in a resplendent Hispano-Suiza, piloted by the family chauffeur, Manuel Sagnier, and he had probably never set foot in a tram in his life. The creature of an elite environment and good breeding, Vidal could not comprehend the dismal, faded charm of the cheap Barcelona pensiones of the time.

‘Don’t hold back, Don Pedro.’

‘This place looks like a dungeon,’ he finally proclaimed. ‘I don’t know how you can live here.’

‘With my salary, only just.’

‘If necessary, I could pay you whatever you need to live somewhere that doesn’t smell of sulphur and urine.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

Vidal sighed.

‘He died of suffocation and pride. There you are, a free epitaph.’

For a few moments Vidal wandered around the room without saying a word, stopping to inspect my meagre wardrobe, stare out of the window with a look of revulsion, touch the greenish paint that covered the walls and gently tap the naked bulb that hung from the ceiling with his index finger, as if he wanted to verify the wretched quality of each thing.

‘What brings you here, Don Pedro? Too much fresh air in Pedralbes?’

‘I haven’t come from home. I’ve come from the newspaper.’

‘Why?’

‘I was curious to see where you lived and besides, I’ve brought something for you.’

He pulled a white parchment envelope from his jacket and handed it to me.

‘This arrived today at the office, with your name.’

I took the envelope and examined it. It was closed with a wax seal on which I could make out a winged silhouette. An angel. Apart from that, the only other thing visible was my name, neatly written in scarlet ink, in a fine hand.

‘Who sent this?’ I asked, intrigued.

Vidal shrugged his shoulders.

‘An admirer. Or admiress. I don’t know. Open it.’

I opened the envelope with care and pulled out a folded sheet of paper on which, in the same writing, was the following:

Dear friend,

I’m taking the liberty of writing to you to express my admiration and congratulate you on the success you have obtained this season with The Mysteries of Barcelona in the pages of The Voice of Industry. As a reader and lover of good literature, it has given me great pleasure to discover a new voice brimming with talent, youth and promise. Allow me, then, as proof of my gratitude for the hours of pleasure provided by your stories, to invite you to a little surprise which I trust you will enjoy, tonight at midnight in El Ensueño del Raval. You are expected.

Affectionately

A.C.

Vidal, who had been reading over my shoulder, raised his eyebrows, intrigued.

‘Interesting,’ he mumbled.

‘What do you mean, interesting?’ I asked. ‘What sort of a place is this El Ensueño?’

Vidal pulled a cigarette out of his platinum case.

‘Doña Carmen doesn’t allow smoking in the pensión,’ I warned him.

‘Why? Does it ruin the perfume from the sewers?’

Vidal lit the cigarette with twice the enjoyment, as one relishes all forbidden things.

‘Have you ever known a woman, David?’

‘Of course I have. Dozens of them.’

‘I mean in the biblical sense.’

‘As in Mass?’

‘No, as in bed.’

‘Ah.’

‘And?’

The truth is that I had nothing much to tell that would impress someone like Vidal. My adventures and romances had been characterised until then by their modesty and a consistent lack of originality. Nothing in my brief catalogue of pinches, cuddles and kisses stolen in doorways or the back row of the picture house could aspire to deserve the consideration of Pedro Vidal – Barcelona’s acclaimed master of the art and science of bedroom games.

‘What does this have to do with anything?’ I protested.

Vidal adopted a patronising air and launched into one of his speeches.

‘In my younger days the normal thing, at least among my sort, was to be initiated in these matters with the help of a professional. When I was your age my father, who was and still is a regular of the most refined establishments in town, took me to a place called El Ensueño, just a few metres away from that macabre palace that our dear Count Güell insisted Gaudí should build for him near the Ramblas. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard the name.’

‘The name of the count or the brothel?’

‘Very funny. El Ensueño used to be an elegant establishment for a select and discerning clientele. In fact, I thought it had closed down years ago, but I must be wrong. Unlike literature, some businesses are always on an upward trend.’

‘I see. Is this your idea? Some sort of joke?’

Vidal shook his head.

‘One of the idiots at the newspaper, then?’

‘I detect a certain hostility in your words, but I doubt that anyone who devotes his life to the noble profession of the press, especially those at the bottom of the ranks, could afford a place like El Ensueño, if it’s the same place I remember.’

I snorted.

‘It doesn’t really matter, because I’m not planning to go.’

Vidal raised his eyebrows.

‘Don’t tell me you’re not a sceptic like I am and that you want to reach the marriage bed pure of heart and loins; that you’re an immaculate soul eagerly awaiting that magic moment when true love will lead you to the discovery of a joint ecstasy of flesh and inner being, blessed by the Holy Spirit, thus enabling you to populate the world with creatures who bear your family name and their mother’s eyes – that saintly woman, a paragon of virtue and modesty in whose company you will enter the doors of heaven under the benevolent gaze of the Baby Jesus.’

‘I was not going to say that.’

‘I’m glad, because it’s possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realise that you’re no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres, or a bed of white roses leading towards the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh – a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world, where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.’

I allowed a solemn pause by way of silent ovation. Vidal was a keen opera-goer and had picked up the tempo and style of the great arias. He never missed his appointment with Puccini in the Liceo family box. He was one of the few – not counting the poor souls crammed together in the gods – who went there to listen to the music he loved so much, a music that tended to inspire the grandiloquent speeches with which at times he regaled me, as he was doing on that day.

‘What?’ asked Vidal defiantly.

‘That last paragraph rings a bell.’

I had caught him red-handed. He sighed and nodded.

‘It’s from Murder in the Liceo,’ admitted Vidal. ‘The final scene where Miranda LaFleur shoots the wicked marquis who has broken her heart, by betraying her during one night of passion in the nuptial suite of the Hotel Colón, in the arms of the Tsar’s spy Svetlana Ivanova.’

‘That’s what I thought. You couldn’t have made a better choice. It’s your most outstanding novel, Don Pedro.’

Vidal smiled at the compliment and considered whether or not to light another cigarette.

‘Which doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth in what I say,’ he concluded.

Vidal sat on the windowsill, but not without first placing a handkerchief on it so as to avoid soiling his classy trousers. I saw that his Hispano-Suiza was parked below, on the corner of Calle Princesa. The chauffeur, Manuel, was polishing the chrome with a rag as if it were a sculpture by Rodin. Manuel had always reminded me of my father, men of the same generation who had suffered too much misfortune and whose memories were written on their faces. I had heard some of the servants at Villa Helius say that Manuel Sagnier had done a long stretch in prison and that when he’d come out he had suffered hardship for years because nobody would offer him a job except as a stevedore, unloading sacks and crates on the docks, a job for which by then he no longer had the requisite youth or health. Rumour had it that one day, Manuel, risking his own life, had saved Vidal from being run over by a tram. In gratitude, when Pedro Vidal heard of the poor man’s dire situation, he decided to offer him a job and the possibility of moving, with his wife and daughter, into a small apartment above the Villa Helius coach house. He assured him that little Cristina would study with the same tutors who came every day to his father’s house on Avenida Pearson to teach the cubs of the Vidal dynasty, and his wife could work as seamstress to the family. He had been thinking of buying one of the first automobiles that were soon to appear on sale in Barcelona and if Manuel would agree to take instruction in the art of driving and forget the trap and the wagon, Vidal would be needing a chauffeur, because in those days gentlemen didn’t lay their hands on combustion machines nor any device with a gaseous exhaust. Manuel, naturally, accepted. Following his rescue from penury, the official version assured us all that Manuel Sagnier and his family felt a blind devotion for Vidal, eternal champion of the dispossessed. I didn’t know whether to believe this story or to attribute it to the long string of legends woven around the image of the benevolent aristocrat that Vidal cultivated. Sometimes it seemed as if all that remained for him to do was to appear wrapped in a halo before some orphaned shepherdess.

‘You’ve got that rascally look about you, the one you get when you’re harbouring wicked thoughts,’ Vidal remarked. ‘What are you scheming?’

‘Nothing. I was thinking about how kind you are, Don Pedro.’

‘At your age and in your position, cynicism opens no doors.’

‘That explains everything.’

‘Go on, say hello to good old Manuel. He’s always asking after you.’

I looked out of the window, and when he saw me, the driver, who always treated me like a gentleman and not the bumpkin I was, waved up at me. I returned the greeting. Sitting on the passenger seat was his daughter, Cristina, a creature of pale skin and well-defined lips who was a couple of years older than me and had taken my breath away ever since I saw her the first time Vidal invited me to visit Villa Helius.

‘Don’t stare at her so much; you’ll break her,’ mumbled Vidal behind my back.

I turned round and met with the Machiavellian face that Vidal reserved for matters of the heart and other noble parts of the body.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Never a truer word spoken,’ replied Vidal. ‘So, what are you going to do about tonight?’

I read the note once again and hesitated.

‘Do you frequent this type of venue, Don Pedro?’

‘I haven’t paid for a woman since I was fifteen years old and then, technically, it was my father who paid,’ replied Vidal without bragging. ‘But don’t look a gift horse in the mouth…’

‘I don’t know, Don Pedro…’

‘Of course you know.’

Vidal patted me on the back as he walked towards the door.

‘There are seven hours left to midnight,’ he said. ‘You might like to have a nap and gather your strength.’

I looked out of the window and saw him approach the car. Manuel opened the door and Vidal flopped onto the back seat. I heard the engine of the Hispano-Suiza deploy its symphony of pistons. At that moment Cristina looked up towards my window. I smiled at her, but realised that she didn’t remember who I was. A moment later she looked away and Vidal’s grand carriage sped off towards its own world.

3

In those days, the street lamps and illuminated signs of Calle Nou de la Rambla projected a corridor of light through the shadows of the Raval quarter. On either pavement, cabarets, dance halls and other ill-defined venues jostled cheek by jowl with all-night establishments that specialised in arcane remedies for venereal diseases, condoms and douches, while a motley crew, from gentlemen of some cachet to sailors from ships docked in the port, mixed with all sorts of extravagant characters who lived only for the night. On either side of the street, narrow alleyways, buried in mist, housed a string of brothels of ever-decreasing quality.

El Ensueño occupied the top storey of a building. On the ground floor was a music hall with large posters depicting a dancer clad in a diaphanous toga that did nothing to hide her charms, holding in her arms a black snake whose forked tongue seemed to be kissing her lips.

‘Eva Montenegro and the Tango of Death’, the poster announced in bold letters. ‘The Queen of the Night, for six evenings only – no further performances. With the guest appearance of Mesmero, the mind reader who will reveal your most intimate secrets.’

Next to the main entrance was a narrow door behind which rose a long staircase with its walls painted red. I went up the stairs and stood in front of a large carved oak door adorned with a brass knocker in the shape of a nymph wearing a modest clover leaf over her pubis. I knocked a couple of times and waited, shying away from my reflection in the tinted mirror that covered most of the adjoining wall. I was debating the possibility of hotfooting it out of the place when the door opened and a middle-aged woman, her hair completely white and tied neatly in a bun, smiled at me calmly.

‘You must be Señor David Martín.’

Nobody had ever called me ‘señor’ in all my life, and the formality caught me by surprise.

‘That’s me.’

‘Please be kind enough to follow me.’

I followed her down a short corridor that led into a spacious round room, the walls of which were covered in red velvet dimly lit by lamps. The ceiling was formed of an enamelled crystal dome from which hung a glass chandelier. Under the chandelier stood a mahogany table holding an enormous gramophone that whispered an operatic aria.

‘Would you like anything to drink, sir?’

‘A glass of water would be very nice, thank you.’

The lady with the white hair smiled without blinking, her kindly countenance unperturbed.

‘Perhaps the gentleman would rather a glass of champagne? Or a fine sherry?’

My palate did not go beyond the subtleties of the different vintages of tap water, so I shrugged my shoulders.

‘You choose.’

The lady nodded without losing her smile and pointed to one of the sumptuous armchairs that were dotted round the room.

‘If you’d care to sit down, sir. Chloé will be with you presently.’

I thought I was going to choke.

‘Chloé?’

Ignoring my perplexity, the lady with the white hair disappeared behind a door that I could just make out through a black bead-curtain, leaving me alone with my nerves and unmentionable desires. I wandered around the room to cast out the trembling that had taken hold of me. Apart from the faint music and the heartbeat throbbing in my temples, the place was as silent as a tomb. Six corridors led out of the sitting room, each one flanked by openings that were covered with blue curtains, and each corridor leading to a closed white double door. I fell into one of the armchairs, one of those pieces of furniture designed to cradle the backsides of princes and generalissimos with a certain weakness for coups d’état. Soon the lady with the white hair returned, carrying a glass of champagne on a silver tray. I accepted it and saw her disappear once again through the same door. I gulped down the champagne and loosened my shirt collar. I was starting to suspect that perhaps all this was just a joke devised by Vidal to make fun of me. At that moment I noticed a figure advancing towards me down one of the corridors. It looked like a little girl. She was walking with her head down, so that I couldn’t see her eyes. I stood up.

The girl made a respectful curtsy and beckoned me to follow her. Only then did I realise that one of her hands was false, like the hand of a mannequin. The girl led me to the end of the corridor, opened the door with a key that hung round her neck, and showed me in. The room was in almost complete darkness. I took a few steps, straining my eyes. Then I heard the door closing behind me and when I turned round, the girl had vanished. Hearing the key turn, I knew I had been locked in. For almost a minute I stood there, without moving. My eyes slowly grew used to the darkness and the outline of the room materialised around me. It was lined from floor to ceiling with black cloth. On one side I could just about make out a number of strange contraptions – I couldn’t decide whether they looked sinister or tempting. A large round bed rested beneath a headboard that looked to me like a huge spider’s web from which hung two candle holders with two black candles burning, giving off that waxy perfume that nests in chapels and at wakes. On one side of the bed stood a latticework screen with a sinuous design. I shuddered. The place was identical to the fictional bedroom I had created for my ineffable femme fatale Chloé, in her adventures in The Mysteries of Barcelona. I was about to try to force the door open when I realised I was not alone. I froze. I could see the outline of a silhouette through the screen. Two shining eyes were watching me and long white fingers with nails painted black peeped through the holes in the latticework. I swallowed hard.

‘Chloé?’ I whispered.

It was her. My Chloé. The operatic and insuperable femme fatale of my stories, made flesh – and lingerie. She had the palest skin I had ever seen and her short hair was cut at right angles, framing her face. Her lips were the colour of fresh blood and her green eyes were surrounded by a halo of dark shadow. She moved like a cat, as if her body, hugged by a corset that shone like scales, were made of water and had learned to defy gravity. Her slender, endless neck was circled by a scarlet velvet ribbon from which hung an upside-down crucifix. Unable to breathe, I watched her as she slowly approached, my eyes glued to those lusciously shaped legs under silk stockings that probably cost more than I earned in a year, ending in shoes with points like daggers, tied round her ankles with silk ribbons. I had never, in my whole life, seen anything as beautiful, or as frightening.

I let that creature lead me to the bed, where I fell for her, literally, on my backside. The candlelight hugged the outline of her body. My face and my lips were level with her naked belly and without even realising what I was doing I kissed her under her navel and stroked her skin with my cheek. By then I had forgotten who I was or where I was. She knelt down in front of me and took my right hand. Languorously, like a cat, she licked my fingers one by one and then fixed her eyes on mine and began to remove my clothes. When I tried to help her she smiled and moved my hands away.

‘Shhh.’

When she had finished, she leaned towards me and licked my lips.

‘Now you do it. Undress me. Slowly. Very slowly.’

I then understood that I had survived my sickly and unfortunate childhood just to experience that instant. I undressed her slowly, as if I were pulling petals off her skin, until all that was left on her body was the velvet ribbon round her throat and those black stockings – the memory of which could keep a poor wretch like me going for a hundred years.

‘Touch me,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Play with me.’

I caressed and kissed every bit of her skin as if I wanted to memorise it forever. Chloé was in no hurry and responded to the touch of my hands and my lips with gentle moans that guided me. Then she made me lie on the bed and covered my body with hers until I felt as if every pore was on fire. I placed my hands on her back and followed the exquisite line of her spine. Her impenetrable eyes were just a few centimetres from my face, watching me. I felt as if I had to say something.

‘My name is-’

‘Shhhhh.’

Before I could make any other foolish comment, Chloé placed her lips on mine and, for the space of an hour, spirited me away from the world. Aware of my clumsiness but making me believe that she hadn’t noticed, she anticipated each movement and directed my hands over her body without haste, and with no modesty either. I saw no boredom or absence in her eyes. She let herself be touched and enjoyed the sensations with infinite patience and a tenderness that made me forget how I had come to be there. That night, for the brief space of an hour, I learned every line of her skin as others learn their prayers or their fate. Later, when I had barely any breath left in me, Chloé let me rest my head on her breast, stroking my hair for a long time, in silence, until I fell asleep in her arms with my hand between her thighs.

When I awoke, the room was still in darkness and Chloé had left. I could no longer feel the touch of her skin on my hands. Instead I was holding a business card printed on the same white parchment as the envelope in which my invitation had arrived. Under the emblem of the angel, it read:

ANDREAS CORELLI

Éditeur

Éditions de la Lumière

Boulevard St.-Germain, 69, Paris

On the back was a handwritten note:

Dear David, life is filled with great expectations. When you are

ready to make yours come true, get in touch with me. I’ll be

waiting. Your friend and reader,

A.C.

I gathered my clothes from the floor and got dressed. The door was not locked now. I walked down the corridor to the sitting room, where the gramophone had gone silent. No trace of the girl or the woman with white hair who had greeted me. Complete silence. As I made my way towards the exit I had the feeling that the lights behind me were going out, the corridors and rooms slowly growing dark. I stepped out onto the landing and went down the stairs, returning, unwillingly, to the world. Back on the street, I made my way towards the Ramblas, leaving behind me all the hubbub and the nocturnal crowds. A warm, thin mist floated up from the port and the glow from the large windows of the Hotel Oriente tinged it with a dirty, dusty yellow in which passers-by disappeared like wisps of smoke. I set off as Chloé’s perfume began to fade from my mind, and I wondered whether the lips of Cristina Sagnier, the daughter of Vidal’s chauffeur, might taste the same.

4

You don’t know what thirst is until you drink for the first time. Three days after my visit to El Ensueño, the memory of Chloé’s skin still burned my very thoughts. Without a word to anyone – especially not to Vidal – I decided to gather up what little savings I had and go back there, hoping it would be enough to buy even just one moment in her arms. It was past midnight when I reached the stairs with the red walls that led up to El Ensueño. The light was out in the stairway and I climbed cautiously, leaving behind the noisy citadel of cabarets, bars, music halls and random establishments which the years of the Great War had strewn along Calle Nou de la Rambla. Only the flickering light from the main door below outlined each stair as I ascended. When I reached the landing I stopped and groped about for the door knocker. My fingers touched the heavy metal ring and, when I lifted it, the door gave way slightly and I realised that it was open. I pushed it gently. A deathly silence caressed my face and a bluish darkness stretched before me. Disconcerted, I advanced a few steps. The echo of the street lights fluttered in the air, revealing fleeting visions of bare walls and broken wooden flooring. I came to the room that I remembered, decorated with velvet and lavish furniture. It was empty. The blanket of dust covering the floor shone like sand in the glimmer from the illuminated signs in the street. I walked on, leaving a trail of footsteps in the dust. No sign of the gramophone, of the armchairs or the pictures. The ceiling had burst open, revealing blackened beams. The paint hung from the walls in strips. I walked over to the corridor that led to the room where I had met Chloé, crossing through a tunnel of darkness until I reached the double door, which was no longer white. There was no handle on it, only a hole in the wood, as if the mechanism had been yanked out. I pushed open the door and went in.

Chloé’s bedroom was a shadowy cell. The walls were charred and most of the ceiling had collapsed. I could see a canvas of black clouds crossing the sky and the moon projected a silver halo over the metal skeleton of what had once been a bed. It was then that I heard the floor creak behind me and turned round quickly, aware that I was not alone in that place. The dark, defined figure of a man was outlined against the entrance to the corridor. I couldn’t distinguish his face, but I was sure he was watching me. He stood there for a few seconds, still as a spider, time enough for me to react and take a step towards him. In an instant the figure withdrew into the shadows, and by the time I reached the sitting room there was nobody there. A breath of light from a sign on the other side of the street flooded the room for a second, revealing a small pile of rubble heaped against the wall. I went over and knelt down by the remnants that had been devoured by fire. Something protruded from the pile. Fingers. I brushed away the ashes that covered them and slowly the shape of a hand emerged. I grasped it, and when I tried to pull it out I realised that it had been severed at the wrist. I recognised it instantly and saw that the girl’s hand, which I had thought was wooden, was in fact made of porcelain. I let it fall back on the pile of debris and left.

I wondered whether I had imagined that stranger, because there were no other footprints in the dust. I went downstairs and stood outside the building, inspecting the first-floor windows from the pavement, utterly confused. People passed by laughing, unaware of my presence. I tried to spot the outline of the stranger among the crowd. I knew he was there, maybe a few metres away, watching me. After a while I crossed the street and went into a narrow café, packed with people. I managed to elbow out a space at the bar and signalled to the waiter.

‘What would you like?’

My mouth was as dry as sandpaper.

‘A beer,’ I said, improvising.

While the waiter poured me my drink, I leaned forward.

‘Excuse me, do you know whether the place opposite, El Ensueño, has closed down?’

The waiter put the glass on the bar and looked at me as if I were stupid.

‘It closed fifteen years ago,’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. After the fire it never reopened. Anything else?’

I shook my head.

‘That will be four céntimos.’

I paid for my drink and left without touching the glass.

The following day I arrived at the newspaper offices before my usual time and went straight to the archives in the basement. With the help of Matías, the person in charge, and going on what the waiter had told me, I began to check through the front pages of The Voice of Industry from fifteen years back. It took me about forty minutes to find the story, just a short item. The fire had started in the early hours of Corpus Christi Day, 1903. Six people had died, trapped in the flames: a client, four of the girls on the payroll and a small child who worked there. The police and firemen believed that the cause of the tragedy was a faulty oil lamp, although the council of a nearby church alluded to divine retribution and the intervention of the Holy Spirit.

When I returned to the pensión I lay on my bed and tried in vain to fall asleep. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out the business card from my strange benefactor – the card I was holding when I awoke in Chloé’s bed – and in the dark I reread the words written on the back. ‘Great expectations’.

5

In my world, expectations – great or small – rarely came true. Until a few months previously, the only thing I longed for when I went to bed every night was to be able to muster enough courage to speak to Cristina, the daughter of my mentor’s chauffeur, and for the hours that separated me from dawn to pass so that I could return to the newspaper offices. Now, even that refuge had begun to slip away from me. Perhaps, if one of my literary efforts were a resounding failure, I might be able to recover my colleagues’ affection, I told myself. Perhaps if I wrote something so mediocre and despicable that no reader could get beyond the first paragraph, my youthful sins would be forgiven. Perhaps that was not too high a price to pay to feel at home again. Perhaps.

I had arrived at The Voice of Industry many years before, with my father, a tormented, penniless man who, on his return from the war in the Philippines, had found a city that preferred not to recognise him and a wife who had already forgotten him. Two years later she decided to abandon him altogether, leaving him with a broken heart and a son he had never wanted. He did not know what to do with a child. My father, who could barely read or write his own name, had no fixed job. All he had learned during the war was how to kill other men before they killed him – in the name of great and empty-sounding causes that seemed more absurd and repellent the closer he came to the fighting.

When he returned from the war, my father – who looked twenty years older than the man who had left – searched for work in various factories in the Pueblo Nuevo and Sant Martí districts. The jobs only lasted a few days, and sooner or later I would see him arrive home, his eyes blazing with resentment. As time went by, for want of anything better, he accepted a post as nightwatchman at The Voice of Industry. The pay was modest, but the months passed by and for the first time since he came back from the war it seemed he was not getting into trouble. But the peace was short-lived. Soon some of his old comrades in arms, living corpses who had come home maimed in body and soul only to discover that those who had sent them off to die in the name of God and the Fatherland were now spitting in their faces, got him involved in shady affairs that were too much for him and which he never really understood.

My father would often disappear for a couple of days, and when he returned his hands and clothes smelled of gunpowder, and his pockets of money. Then he would retreat to his room and, although he thought I didn’t notice, he would inject himself with whatever he had been able to get. At first he never closed his door, but one day he caught me spying on him and slapped me so hard that he split my lip. He then hugged me until there was no strength left in his arms and lay down, stretched out on the floor with the hypodermic needle still stuck in his skin. I pulled out the needle and covered him with a blanket. After that, he began to lock himself in.

We lived in a small attic suspended over the building site of the new auditorium, the Palau de la Música. It was a cold, narrow place in which wind and humidity seemed to mock the walls. I used to sit on the tiny balcony with my legs dangling out, watching people pass by and gazing at the battlement of weird sculptures and columns that was growing on the other side of the street. Sometimes I felt I could almost touch the building with my fingertips, at others – most of them – it seemed as far away as the moon. I was a weak and sickly child, prone to fevers and infections that dragged me to the edge of the grave, although, at the last minute, death always repented and went off in search of larger prey. When I fell ill, my father would end up losing his patience and after the second sleepless night would leave me in the care of one of the neighbours and then disappear. As time went by I began to suspect that he hoped to find me dead on his return, and so free himself of the burden of a child with brittle health who was no use for anything.

More than once I too hoped that would happen, but my father always came back and found me alive and kicking, and a bit taller. Mother Nature didn’t hold back: she punished me with her extensive range of germs and miseries, but never found a way of successfully finishing the job. Against all prognoses, I survived those first years on the tightrope of a childhood before penicillin. In those days death was not yet anonymous and one could see and smell it everywhere, devouring souls that had not even had time enough to sin.

Even at that time, my only friends were made of paper and ink. At school I had learned to read and write long before the other children. Where my school friends saw notches of ink on incomprehensible pages, I saw light, streets, and people. Words and the mystery of their hidden science fascinated me, and I saw in them a key with which I could unlock a boundless world, a safe haven from that home, those streets and those troubled days in which even I could sense that only a limited fortune awaited me. My father didn’t like to see books in the house. There was something about them – apart from the letters he could not decipher – that offended him. He used to tell me that as soon as I was ten he would send me off to work and that I’d better get rid of all my scatterbrained ideas because otherwise I’d end up being a loser, a nobody. I used to hide my books under the mattress and would wait for him to go out or fall asleep so that I could read. Once he caught me reading at night and flew into a rage. He tore the book from my hands and flung it out of the window.

‘If I catch you wasting electricity again, reading all this nonsense, you’ll be sorry.’

My father was not a miser and, despite the hardships we suffered, whenever he could he gave me a few coins so that I could buy myself some treats like the other children. He was convinced that I spent them on liquorice sticks, sunflower seeds or sweets, but I would keep them in a coffee tin under the bed and, when I’d collected four or five reales, I’d secretly rush out to buy myself a book.

My favourite place in the whole city was the Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. It smelled of old paper and dust and it was my sanctuary, my refuge. The bookseller would let me sit on a chair in a corner and read any book I liked to my heart’s content. He hardly ever allowed me to pay for the books he placed in my hands but, when he wasn’t looking, I’d leave the coins I’d managed to collect on the counter before I left. It was only small change – if I’d had to buy a book with that pittance, I would probably only have been able to afford a booklet of cigarette papers. When it was time for me to leave, I would do so dragging my feet, a weight on my soul. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed there forever.

One Christmas Sempere gave me the best gift I have ever received. It was an old volume, read and experienced to the full.

‘Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens…’ I read on the cover.

I was aware that Sempere knew a few authors who frequented his establishment and, judging by the care with which he handled the volume, I thought that perhaps this Mr Dickens was one of them.

‘A friend of yours?’

‘A lifelong friend. And from now on, he’s your friend too.’

That afternoon I took my new friend home, hidden under my clothes so that my father wouldn’t see it. It was a rainy winter, with days as grey as lead, and I read Great Expectations about nine times, partly because I had no other book at hand, partly because I did not think there could be a better one in the whole world and I was beginning to suspect that Mr Dickens had written it just for me. Soon I was convinced that I didn’t want to do anything else in life but learn to do what Mr Dickens had done.

One day I was suddenly awoken at dawn by my father shaking me. He had come back from work early. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled of spirits. I looked at him in terror as he touched the naked bulb that hung from the ceiling.

‘It’s warm.’

He fixed his eyes on mine and threw the bulb angrily against the wall. It burst into a thousand pieces that fell on my face, but I didn’t dare brush them away.

‘Where it is?’ asked my father, his voice cold and calm.

I shook my head, trembling.

‘Where is that fucking book?’

I shook my head once more. In the half-light I hardly saw the blow coming. My sight blurred and I felt myself falling out of bed, with blood in my mouth and a sharp pain like white fire burning behind my lips. When I tilted my head I saw what I imagined to be pieces of a couple of broken teeth on the floor. My father’s hand grabbed me by the neck and lifted me up.

‘Where it is?’

‘Please, father-’

He threw me face-first against the wall with all his might, and the bang on my head made me lose my balance and crash down like a bag of bones. I crawled into a corner and stayed there, curled up in a ball, watching as my father opened my wardrobe, pulled out the few clothes I possessed and threw them on the floor. He looked in drawers and trunks without finding the book until, exhausted, he came back for me. I closed my eyes and pressed myself up against the wall, waiting for another blow that never came. I opened my eyes again and saw my father sitting on the bed, crying with shame and hardly able to breathe. When he saw me looking at him, he rushed off down the stairs. His footsteps echoed as he walked off into the silence of dawn and only when I was sure he was a good distance away did I drag myself as far as the bed and pull my book out of its hiding place under the mattress. I got dressed and went out, clutching the book under my arm.

A sheet of sea mist was descending over Calle Santa Ana as I reached the door of the bookshop. The bookseller and his son lived on the first floor of the same building. I knew that six o’clock in the morning was not a good time to call on anyone, but my only thought at that moment was to save the book, for I was sure that if my father found it when he returned home he would destroy it with all the anger that boiled inside him. I rang the bell and waited. I had to ring two or three times before I heard the balcony door open and saw old Sempere, in his dressing gown and slippers, looking at me in astonishment. Half a minute later he came down to open the front door and when he saw my face all trace of anger disappeared. He knelt down in front of me and held me by my arms.

‘God Almighty! Are you all right? Who did this to you?’

‘Nobody. I fell.’

I held out the book.

‘I came to return it, because I don’t want anything to happen to it…’

Sempere looked at me but didn’t say a word – he simply took me in his arms and carried me up to the apartment. His son, a twelve-year-old boy who was so shy I didn’t remember ever having heard his voice, had woken up at the sound of his father going out, and was waiting on the landing. When he saw the blood on my face he looked at his father with fear in his eyes.

‘Call Doctor Campos.’

The boy nodded and ran to the telephone. I heard him speak, realising that he was not dumb after all. Between the two of them they settled me into an armchair in the dining room and cleaned the blood off my wounds while we waited for the doctor to arrive.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me who did this to you?’

I didn’t utter a sound. Sempere didn’t know where I lived and I was not going to give him any ideas.

‘Was it your father?’

I looked away.

‘No. I fell.’

Doctor Campos, who lived four or five doors away, arrived five minutes later. He examined me from head to toe, feeling my bruises and dressing my cuts as delicately as possible. You could see his eyes burning with indignation, but he made no comment.

‘There’s nothing broken, but the bruises will last a while and they’ll hurt for a few days. Those two teeth will have to come out. They’re no good any more and there’s a risk of infection.’

When the doctor had left, Sempere made me a cup of warm cocoa and smiled as he watched me drink it.

‘All this just to save Great Expectations, eh?’

I shrugged my shoulders. Father and son looked at one another with a conspiratorial smile.

‘Next time you want to save a book, save it properly; don’t risk your life. Just let me know and I’ll take you to a secret place where books never die and nobody can destroy them.’

I looked at both of them, intrigued.

‘What place is that?’

Sempere gave me a wink and smiled at me in that mysterious manner that seemed to be borrowed from an Alexandre Dumas romance, and which, people said, was a family trait.

‘Everything in due course, my friend. Everything in due course.’

My father spent that whole week with his eyes glued to the floor, consumed with remorse. He bought a new light bulb and even told me that I could turn it on, but not for long, because electricity was very expensive. I preferred not to play with fire. On the Saturday he tried to buy me a book and went to a bookshop on Calle de la Palla, opposite the old Roman walls – the first and last bookshop he ever entered – but as he couldn’t read the titles on the spines of the hundreds of tomes that were on show, he came out empty-handed. Then he gave me some money, more than usual, and told me to buy whatever I wanted with it. It seemed the perfect moment to bring up something that I’d wanted to say to him for a long time but had never found the opportunity.

‘Doña Mariana, the teacher, has asked me whether you could go by the school one day and talk to her,’ I said, trying to sound casual.

‘Talk about what? What have you done?’

‘Nothing, father. Doña Mariana wanted to talk to you about my future education. She says I have possibilities and thinks she could help me win a scholarship for a place at the Escolapios…’

‘Who does that woman think she is, filling your head with nonsense and telling you she’s going to get you into a school for rich kids? Have you any idea what that pack is like? Do you know how they’re going to look at you and treat you when they find out where you come from?’

I looked down.

‘Doña Mariana only wants to help, father. That’s all. Please don’t get angry. I’ll tell her it’s not possible, end of story.’

My father looked at me angrily, but controlled himself and took a few deep breaths with his eyes shut before speaking again.

‘We’ll manage, do you understand? You and me. Without the charity of those sons-of-bitches. And with our heads held high.’

‘Yes, father.’

He put a hand on my shoulder and looked at me as if, for a split second that was never to return, he was proud of me, even though we were so different, even though I liked books that he could not read, even if mother had left us both to face each other. At that moment I thought my father was the kindest man in the world, and that everyone would realise this if only, just for once, life saw fit to deal him a good hand of cards.

‘All the bad things you do in life come back to you, David. And I’ve done a lot of bad things. A lot. But I’ve paid the price. And our luck is going to change. You’ll see…’

Doña Mariana was razor sharp and could see what was going on, but despite her insistence I didn’t mention the subject of my education to my father again. When my teacher realised there was no hope she told me that every day, when lessons were over, she would devote an hour just to me, to talk to me about books, history and all the things that scared my father so much.

‘It will be our secret,’ said the teacher.

By then I had begun to understand that my father was ashamed that others might think him ignorant, a residue from a war which, like all wars, was fought in the name of God and country to make a few men, who were already far too powerful when they started it, even more powerful. Around that time I started occasionally to accompany my father on his night shift. We’d take a tram in Calle Trafalgar which left us by the entrance to the Pueblo Nuevo Cemetery. I would stay in his cubicle, reading old copies of the newspaper, and at times I would try to chat with him, a difficult task. By then, my father hardly ever spoke at all, neither about the war in the colonies nor about the woman who had abandoned him. Once I asked him why my mother had left us. I suspected it had been my fault, because of something I’d done, perhaps just for being born.

‘Your mother had already left me before I was sent to the front. I was the idiot; I didn’t realise until I returned. Life’s like that, David. Sooner or later, everything and everybody abandons you.’

‘I’m never going to abandon you, father.’

I thought he was about to cry and I hugged him so as not to see his face.

The following day, unannounced, my father took me El Indio, a large store that sold fabrics on Calle del Carmen. We didn’t actually go in, but from the windows at the shop entrance my father pointed at a smiling young woman who was serving some customers, showing them expensive flannels and other textiles. ‘That’s your mother,’ he said. ‘One of these days I’ll come back here and kill her.’

‘Don’t say that, father.’

He looked at me with reddened eyes, and I knew then that he still loved her and that I would never forgive her for it. I remember that I watched her secretly, without her knowing we were there, and that I only recognised her because of a photograph my father kept in a drawer, next to his army revolver. Every night, when he thought I was asleep, he would take it out and look at it as if it held all the answers, or at least enough of them.

For years I would have to return to the doors of that store to spy on her in secret. I never had the courage to go in or to approach her when I saw her coming out and walking away down the Ramblas, towards a life that I had imagined for her, with a family that made her happy and a son who deserved her affection and the touch of her skin more than I did. My father never knew that sometimes I would sneak round there to see her, or that some days I even followed close behind, always ready to take her hand and walk by her side, always fleeing at the last moment. In my world, great expectations only existed between the pages of a book.

The good luck my father yearned for never arrived. The only courtesy life showed him was not to make him wait too long. One night, when we reached the doors of the newspaper building to start the shift, three men came out of the shadows and gunned him down before my very eyes. I remember the smell of sulphur and the halo of smoke that rose from the holes the bullets had burned through his coat. One of the gunmen was about to finish him off with a shot to the head when I threw myself on top of my father and another one of the murderers stopped him. I remember the eyes of the gunman fixing on mine, debating whether he should kill me too. Then, all of a sudden, the men hurried off and disappeared into the narrow streets trapped between the factories of Pueblo Nuevo.

That night my father’s murderers left him bleeding to death in my arms and me alone in the world. I spent almost two weeks sleeping in the workshops of the newspaper press, hidden among Linotype machines that looked like giant steel spiders, trying to silence the excruciating whistling sound that perforated my eardrums when night fell. When I was discovered, my hands and clothes were still stained with dry blood. At first nobody knew who I was, because I didn’t speak for about a week and when I did it was only to yell my father’s name until I was hoarse. When they asked me about my mother I told them she had died and I had nobody else in the world. My story reached the ears of Pedro Vidal, the star writer at the paper and a close friend of the editor. At his request, Vidal ordered that I should be given a runner’s job and be allowed to live in the caretaker’s modest rooms, in the basement, until further notice.

Those were years in which blood and violence were beginning to be an everyday occurrence in Barcelona. Days of pamphlets and bombs that left bits of bodies shaking and smoking in the streets of the Raval quarter, of gangs of black figures who prowled about at night shedding blood, of processions and parades of saints and generals who smelled of death and deceit, of inflammatory speeches in which everyone lied and everyone was right. The anger and hatred which, years later, would lead such people to murder one another in the name of grandiose slogans and coloured rags could already be smelled in the poisoned air. The continual haze from the factories slithered over the city and masked its cobbled avenues furrowed by trams and carriages. The night belonged to gaslight, to the shadows of narrow side streets shattered by the flash of gunshots and the blue trace of burned gunpowder. Those were years when one grew up fast, and with childhood slipping out of their hands, many children already had the look of old men.

With no other family to my name but the dark city of Barcelona, the newspaper became my shelter and my world until, when I was fourteen, my salary permitted me to rent that room in Doña Carmen’s pensión. I had barely lived there a week when the landlady came to my room and told me that a gentleman was asking for me. On the landing stood a man dressed in grey, with a grey expression and a grey voice, who asked me whether I was David Martín. When I nodded, he handed me a parcel wrapped in coarse brown paper then vanished down the stairs, the trace of his grey absence contaminating the world of poverty I had joined. I took the parcel to my room and closed the door. Nobody, except two or three people at the newspaper, knew that I lived there. Intrigued, I removed the wrapping. It was the first package I had ever received. Inside was a wooden case that looked vaguely familiar. I placed it on the narrow bed and opened it. It contained my father’s old revolver, given to him by the army, which he had brought with him when he returned from the Philippines to earn himself an early and miserable death. Next to the revolver was a small cardboard box with bullets. I held the gun and felt its weight. It smelled of gunpowder and oil. I wondered how many men my father had killed with that weapon with which he had probably hoped to end his own life, until someone got there first. I put it back and closed the case. My first impulse was to throw it into the rubbish bin, but then I realised that it was all I had left of my father. I imagined it had come from the moneylender who, when my father died, had tried to recoup his debts by confiscating what little we had in the old apartment overlooking the Palau de la Música: he had now decided to send me this gruesome souvenir to welcome me to the world of adulthood. I hid the case on top of my cupboard, against the wall, where filth accumulated and where Doña Carmen would not be able to reach it, even with stilts, and I didn’t touch it again for years.

That afternoon I went back to Sempere & Sons and, feeling I was now a man of the world as well as a man of means, I made it known to the bookseller that I intended to buy that old copy of Great Expectations I had been forced to return to him years before.

‘Name your price,’ I said. ‘Charge me for all the books I haven’t paid you for in the last ten years.’

Sempere, I remember, gave me a wistful smile and put a hand on my shoulder.

‘I sold it this morning,’ he confessed.

6

Three hundred and sixty-five days after I had written my first story for The Voice of Industry I arrived, as usual, at the newspaper offices but found the place almost deserted. There was just a handful of journalists – colleagues who, months ago, had given me affectionate nicknames and even words of encouragement, but now ignored my greeting and gathered in a circle to whisper among themselves. In less than a minute they had picked up their coats and disappeared as if they feared they would catch something from me. I sat alone in that cavernous room, staring at the strange sight of dozens of empty desks. Slow, heavy footsteps behind me announced the approach of Don Basilio.

‘Good evening, Don Basilio. What’s going on here today? Why has everyone left?’

Don Basilio looked at me sadly and sat at the desk next to mine.

‘There’s a Christmas dinner for the staff. At the Set Portes restaurant,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t suppose they mentioned anything to you.’

I feigned a carefree smile and shook my head.

‘Aren’t you going?’ I asked.

Don Basilio shook his head.

‘I’m no longer in the mood.’

We looked at each other in silence.

‘What if I take you somewhere?’ I suggested. ‘Wherever you fancy. Can Solé, if you like. Just you and me, to celebrate the success of The Mysteries of Barcelona.’

Don Basilio smiled, slowly nodding his head.

‘Martín,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t know how to say this to you.’

‘Say what to me?’

Don Basilio cleared his throat.

‘I’m not going to be able to publish any more instalments of The Mysteries of Barcelona.’

I gave him a puzzled look. Don Basilio looked away.

‘Would you like me to write something else? Something more like Galdós?’

‘Martín, you know what people are like. There have been complaints. I’ve tried to put a stop to this, but the editor is a weak man and doesn’t like unnecessary conflicts.’

‘I don’t understand, Don Basilio.’

‘Martín, I’ve been asked to be the one to tell you.’

Finally, he shrugged his shoulders.

‘I’m fired,’ I mumbled.

Don Basilio nodded.

Despite myself, I felt my eyes filling with tears.

‘It might feel like the end of the world to you now, but believe me when I say that deep down it’s the best thing that could have happened to you. This place isn’t for you.’

‘And what place is for me?’ I asked.

‘I’m sorry, Martín. Believe me, I’m very sorry.’

Don Basilio stood up and put a hand affectionately on my shoulder.

‘Happy Christmas, Martín.’

That same evening I emptied my desk and left for good the place that had been my home, disappearing into the dark, lonely streets of the city. On my way to the pensión I stopped by the Set Portes restaurant under the arches of Casa Xifré. I stayed outside, watching my colleagues laughing and raising their glasses through the window pane. I hoped my absence made them happy or at least made them forget that they weren’t happy and never would be.

I spent the rest of that week pacing the streets, sheltering every day in the Ateneo library and imagining that when I returned to the pensión I would discover a note from the newspaper editor asking me to rejoin the team. Hiding in one of the reading rooms, I would pull out the business card I had found in my hand when I woke up in El Ensueño, and start to compose a letter to my unknown benefactor, Andreas Corelli, but I always tore it up and tried rewriting it the following day. On the seventh day, tired of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to make the inevitable pilgrimage to my maker’s house.

I took the train to Sarriá in Calle Pelayo – in those days it still operated above ground – and sat at the front of the carriage to gaze at the city and watch the streets become wider and grander the further we drew away from the centre. I got off at the Sarriá stop and from there took a tram that dropped me by the entrance to the Monastery of Pedralbes. It was an unusually hot day for the time of year and I could smell the scent of the pines and broom that peppered the hillside. I set off up Avenida Pearson, which at that time was already being developed. Soon I glimpsed the unmistakeable profile of Villa Helius. As I climbed the hill and got nearer, I could see Vidal sitting in the window of his tower in his shirtsleeves, enjoying a cigarette. Music floated on the air and I remembered that Vidal was one of the privileged few who owned a radio receiver. How good life must have looked from up there, and how insignificant I must have seemed.

I waved at him and he returned my greeting. When I reached the villa I met the driver, Manuel, who was on his way to the coach house carrying a handful of rags and a bucket of steaming-hot water.

‘Good to see you here, David,’ he said. ‘How’s life? Keeping up the good work?’

‘I do my best,’ I replied.

‘Don’t be modest. Even my daughter reads those adventures you publish in the newspaper.’

I swallowed hard, amazed that the chauffeur’s daughter not only knew of my existence but had even read some of the nonsense I wrote.

‘Cristina?’

‘I have no other,’ replied Don Manuel. ‘Don Pedro is upstairs in his study, in case you want to go up.’

I nodded gratefully, slipped into the mansion and went up to the third floor, where the tower rose above the undulating rooftop of polychrome tiles. There I found Vidal, installed in his study with its view of the city and the sea in the distance. He turned off the radio, a contraption the size of a small meteorite which he’d bought a few months earlier when the first Radio Barcelona broadcast had been announced from the studios concealed under the dome of the Hotel Colón.

‘It cost me almost two hundred pesetas, and it broadcasts a load of rubbish.’

We sat in chairs facing one another, with all the windows wide open and a breeze that to me, an inhabitant of the dark old town, smelled of a different world. The silence was exquisite, like a miracle. You could hear insects fluttering in the garden and the leaves on the trees rustling in the wind.

‘It feels like summer,’ I ventured.

‘Don’t pretend everything is OK by talking about the weather. I’ve already been told what happened,’ Vidal said.

I shrugged my shoulders and glanced over at his writing desk. I was aware that my mentor had spent months, or even years, trying to write what he called a ‘serious’ novel far removed from the light plots of his crime fiction, so that his name could be inscribed in the more distinguished sections of libraries. I couldn’t see many sheets of paper.

‘How’s the masterpiece going?’

Vidal threw his cigarette butt out of the window and stared into the distance.

‘I don’t have anything left to say, David.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Everything in life is nonsense. It’s just a question of perspective.’

‘You should put that in your book. The Nihilist on the Hill. Bound to be a success.’

‘You’re the one who is going to need a success. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ll soon be short of cash.’

‘I could always accept your charity.’

‘It might feel like the end of the world to you now, but-’

‘I’ll soon realise that this is the best thing that could have happened to me,’ I said, completing the sentence. ‘Don’t tell me Don Basilio is writing your speeches now. Or is it the other way round?’

Vidal laughed.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Don’t you need a secretary?’

‘I’ve already got the best secretary I could have. She’s more intelligent than me, infinitely more hard-working and when she smiles I even feel that this lousy world still has some future.’

‘And who is this marvel?’

‘Manuel’s daughter.’

‘Cristina.’

‘At last I hear you utter her name.’

‘You’ve chosen a bad week to make fun of me, Don Pedro.’

‘Don’t look at me all doe-eyed. Did you think Pedro Vidal was going to allow that mediocre, constipated, envious bunch to sack you without doing anything about it?’

‘A word from you to the editor could have changed things.’

‘I know. That’s why I was the one who suggested he should fire you,’ said Vidal.

I felt as if he’d just slapped me on the face.

‘Thanks for the push,’ I improvised.

‘I told him to fire you because I have something much better for you.’

‘Begging?’

‘Have you no faith? Only yesterday I was talking about you to a couple of partners who have just opened a new publishing house and are looking for fresh blood to exploit. You can’t trust them, of course.’

‘Sounds marvellous.’

‘They know all about The Mysteries of Barcelona and are prepared to make you an offer that will get you on your feet.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course I’m serious. They want you to write a series in instalments in the most baroque, bloody and delirious Grand Guignol tradition – a series that will tear The Mysteries of Barcelona to shreds. I think that this is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. I told them you’d go and talk to them and that you’d be able to start work immediately.’

I heaved a deep sigh. Vidal winked and then embraced me.

7

That was how, only a few months after my twentieth birthday, I received and accepted an offer to write penny dreadfuls under the name of Ignatius B. Samson. My contract committed me to hand in two hundred pages of typed manuscript a month packed with intrigues, high-society murders, countless underworld horrors, illicit love affairs featuring cruel lantern-jawed landowners and damsels with unmentionable desires, and all sorts of twisted family sagas with backgrounds as thick and murky as the water in the port. The series, which I decided to call City of the Damned, was to appear in monthly hardback instalments with full-colour illustrated covers. In exchange I would be paid more money than I had ever imagined could be made doing something that I cared about, and the only censorship imposed on me would be dictated by the loyalty of my readers. The terms of the offer obliged me to write anonymously under an extravagant pseudonym, but it seemed a small price to pay for being able to make a living from the profession I had always dreamed of practising. I would put aside any vanity about seeing my name printed on my work, whilst remaining true to myself, to what I was.

My publishers were a pair of colourful characters called Barrido and Escobillas. Barrido, who was small, squat, and always affected an oily, sibylline smile, was the brains of the operation. He sprang from the sausage industry and although he hadn’t read more than three books in his life – and this included the catechism and the telephone directory – he was possessed of a proverbial audacity for cooking the books, which he falsified for his investors, displaying a talent for fiction that any of his authors might have envied. These, as Vidal had predicted, the firm swindled, exploited and, in the end, kicked into the gutter when the winds were unfavourable – something that always happened sooner or later.

Escobillas played a complementary role. Tall, gaunt, with a vaguely threatening appearance, he had gained his experience in the undertaker business and beneath the pungent eau de cologne with which he bathed his private parts there always seemed to be a vague whiff of formaldehyde that made one’s hair stand on end. His role was essentially that of the sinister foreman, whip in hand, always ready to do the dirty work, to which Barrido, with his more cheerful nature and less athletic disposition, wasn’t naturally inclined. The ménage à trois was completed by their secretary, Herminia, who followed them like a loyal dog wherever they went, and whom we all nicknamed Lady Venom because, although she looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, she was as trustworthy as a rattlesnake on heat.

Social niceties aside, I tried to see them as little as possible. Ours was a strictly commercial relationship and none of the parties felt any great desire to alter the established protocol. I had resolved to make the most of the opportunity and work hard: I wanted to prove to Vidal, and to myself, that I was worthy of his help and his trust. With fresh money in my hands, I decided to abandon Doña Carmen’s pensión in search of more comfortable quarters. For some time now I’d had my eye on a huge pile of a house at number 30, Calle Flassaders, a stone’s throw from Paseo del Borne, which for years I had passed as I went between the newspaper and the pensión. Topped by a tower that rose from a facade carved with reliefs and gargoyles, the building had been closed for years, its front door sealed with chains and rusty padlocks. Despite its gloomy and somewhat melodramatic appearance, or perhaps for that very reason, the idea of inhabiting it awoke in me that desire that only comes with ill-advised ideas. In other circumstances I would have accepted that such a place was far beyond my meagre budget, but the long years of abandonment and oblivion to which the dwelling seemed condemned made me hope that, if nobody else wanted it, perhaps its owners might accept my offer.

Asking around in the area, I discovered that the house had been empty for years and was handled by a property manager called Vicenç Clavé who had an office in Calle Comercio, opposite the market. Clavé was a gentleman of the old school who liked to dress in a similar fashion to the statues of mayors or national heroes that greeted you at the various entrances of Ciudadela Park; and if you weren’t careful, he would take off on rhetorical flights that encompassed every subject under the sun.

‘So you’re a writer. Well, I could tell you stories that would make good books.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Why don’t you begin by telling me the story of the house in Flassaders, number 30?’

Clavé adopted the look of a Greek mask.

‘The tower house?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Believe me, young man, you don’t want to live there.’

‘Why not?’

Clavé lowered his voice. Whispering as if he feared the walls might hear us, he delivered his verdict in a funereal tone.

‘That house is jinxed. I visited the place when I went along with the notary to seal it up and I can assure you that the oldest part of Montjuïc Cemetery is more cheerful. It’s been empty since then. That place has bad memories. Nobody wants it.’

‘Its memories can’t be any worse than mine. Anyhow, I’m sure they’ll help bring down the asking price.’

‘Some prices cannot be paid with money.’

‘Can I see it?’

My first visit to the tower house was one morning in March, in the company of the property manager, his secretary and an auditor from the bank who held the title deeds. Apparently, the building had been trapped for years in a labyrinth of legal disputes until it finally reverted to the lending institution that had guaranteed its last owner. If Clavé was telling the truth, nobody had set foot in that house for at least twenty years.

8

Years later, when I read an account about British explorers penetrating the dark passages of a thousand-year-old Egyptian burial place – mazes and curses included – I would recall that first visit to the tower house in Calle Flassaders. The secretary came equipped with an oil lamp because the building had never had electricity installed. The auditor turned up with a set of fifteen keys with which to liberate the countless padlocks that fastened the chains. When the front door was opened, the house exhaled a putrid smell, like a damp tomb. The auditor started to cough, and the manager, who was making an effort not to look too sceptical or disapproving, covered his mouth with a handkerchief.

‘You first,’ he offered.

The entrance resembled one of those interior courtyards in the old palaces of the area, paved with large flagstones and with a stone staircase that led to the front door of the living quarters. Daylight filtered in through a glass skylight, completely covered in pigeon and seagull excrement, that was set on high.

‘There aren’t any rats,’ I announced once I was inside the building.

‘A sign of good taste and common sense,’ said the property manager behind me.

We proceeded up the stairs until we reached the landing on the main floor, where the auditor spent ten minutes trying to find the right key for the lock. The mechanism yielded with an unwelcoming groan and the heavy door opened, revealing an endless corridor strewn with cobwebs that undulated in the gloom.

‘Holy Mother of God,’ mumbled the manager.

No one else dared take the first step, so once more I had to lead the expedition. The secretary held the lamp up high, looking at everything with a baleful air.

The manager and the auditor exchanged a knowing look. When they noticed that I was observing them, the auditor smiled calmly.

‘A good bit of dusting and some patching up and the place will look like a palace,’ he said.

‘Bluebeard’s palace,’ the manager added.

‘Let’s be positive,’ the auditor corrected him. ‘The house has been empty for some time: there’s bound to be some minor damage.’

I was barely paying attention to them. I had dreamed about that place so often as I walked past its front door that now I hardly noticed the dark, gloomy aura that possessed it. I walked up the main corridor, exploring rooms of all shapes and sizes in which old furniture lay abandoned under a thick layer of dust and shadow. One table was still covered with a frayed tablecloth on which sat a dinner service and a tray of petrified fruit and flowers. The glasses and cutlery were still there, as if the inhabitants of the house had fled in the middle of dinner.

The wardrobes were crammed with threadbare faded clothes and shoes. There were whole drawers filled with photographs, spectacles, fountain pens and watches. Dust-covered portraits observed us from every surface. The beds were made and covered with a white veil that shone in the half-light. A gramophone rested on a mahogany table. It had a record on it and the needle had slid to the end. I blew on the film of dust that covered it and the title of the recording came into view: W. A. Mozart’s Lacrimosa.

‘The symphony orchestra performing in your own home,’ said the auditor. ‘What more could one ask for? You’ll live like a lord here.’

The manager shot him a murderous look, clearly in disagreement. We went through the apartment until we reached the gallery at the back, where a coffee service lay on a table and an open book on an armchair was still waiting for someone to turn over the page.

‘It looks like whoever lived here left suddenly, with no time to take anything with them,’ I said.

The auditor cleared his throat.

‘Perhaps the gentleman would like to see the study?’

The study was at the top of a tall tower, a peculiar structure at the heart of which was a spiral staircase that led off the main corridor, while its outside walls bore the traces of as many generations as the city could remember. There it stood, like a watchtower suspended over the roofs of the Ribera quarter, crowned by a narrow dome of metal and tinted glass that served as a lantern, and topped by a weathervane in the shape of a dragon. We climbed the stairs, and when we reached the room at the top, the auditor quickly opened the windows to let in air and light. It was a rectangular room with high ceilings and dark wooden flooring. Its four large arched windows looked out on all four sides, giving me a view of the cathedral of Santa María del Mar to the south, the large Borne market to the north, the railway station to the east and to the west the endless maze of streets and avenues tumbling over one another towards Mount Tibidabo.

‘What do you say? Marvellous!’ proposed the auditor enthusiastically.

The property manager examined everything with a certain reserve and displeasure. His secretary held the lamp up high, even though it was no longer needed. I went over to one of the windows and leaned out, spellbound.

The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that when I opened those windows – my new windows – each evening its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets in my ear, that I could catch on paper and narrate to whoever cared to listen. Vidal had his exuberant and stately ivory tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees and fairytale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the Rose of Fire.

What finally decided the matter was the desk that dominated the centre of the study. On it, like a great sculpture of metal and light, stood an impressive Underwood typewriter for which, alone, I would have paid the price of the rent. I sat in the plush armchair facing the desk, stroked the typewriter keys, and smiled.

‘I’ll take it,’ I said.

The auditor sighed with relief and the manager rolled his eyes and crossed himself. That same afternoon I signed a ten-year rental agreement. While workmen were busy wiring the house for electricity, I devoted my time to cleaning, tidying and straightening the place up with the help of three servants whom Vidal sent trouping down without first asking me whether or not I wanted any help. I soon discovered that the modus operandi of that commando of electrical experts consisted in first drilling holes right, left and centre and then asking. Three days after their deployment, the house did not have a single light bulb that worked, but one would have thought that the place had been infested by a plague of woodworm that devoured plaster and the noblest of minerals.

‘Are you sure there isn’t a better way of fixing this?’ I would ask the head of the battalion, who resolved everything with blows of the hammer.

Otilio, as the talented man was called, would show me the building plans supplied by the property manager when I was handed the keys, and argue that the problem lay with the house, which was badly built.

‘Look at this,’ he would say. ‘I mean, when something is badly made, it’s badly made, and there are no two ways about it. Here, for example. Here it says that you have a water tank on the terrace. Well, no, sir, you have a water tank in the back yard.’

‘What does it matter? The water tank has nothing to do with you, Otilio. Concentrate on the electrics. Light. Not taps, not water pipes. Light. I need light.’

‘But everything is connected. What do you think about the gallery?’

‘I think it has no light.’

‘According to the plans this should be a supporting wall. Well, my mate Remigio here tapped it ever so slightly and half the wall came crashing down. And you should see the bedrooms. According to this plan, the size of the room at the end of the corridor should be almost forty square metres. Not in a million years! I’d be surprised if it measured twenty. There’s a wall where there shouldn’t be a wall. And as for the waste pipes, well, best not talk about them. Not one of them is where it’s supposed to be.’

‘Are you sure you know how to read the plans?’

‘Listen, I’m a professional. Mark my words: this house is a jigsaw puzzle. Everybody’s grandmother has poked their nose into this place.’

‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to make do with what there is. Perform a few miracles or do whatever you want, but by Friday I want to see all the walls plastered and painted, and the lights working.’

‘Don’t rush me; this is precision work. One has to act strategically. ’

‘So what is your plan?’

‘For a start we’re off to have our breakfast.’

‘You only got here half an hour ago!’

‘Señor Martín, we’re not going to get anywhere with that attitude.’

The ordeal of building work and botched jobs went on a week longer than expected, but even with the presence of Otilio and his squadron of geniuses making holes where they shouldn’t and enjoying two-and-a-half-hour breakfasts, the thrill of being able to live in that old rambling house, which I had dreamed about for so long, would have kept me going for years with candles and oil lamps if need be. I was lucky in that the Ribera quarter was a spiritual home for all kinds of craftsmen: just a stone’s throw from my new home I found someone who could put in new locks that didn’t look as if they’d been stolen from La Bastille, as well as twentieth-century wall lights and taps. The idea of having a telephone line installed did not appeal to me and, judging by what I’d heard on Vidal’s wireless, these ‘new mass communication media’, as the press called them, were not aimed at people such as myself. I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence. All I took from the pensión was a change of clothes and the case containing my father’s gun, his only memento. I distributed the remainder of my clothes and personal belongings among the pensión residents. Had I also been able to leave behind my memories, even my skin, I would have done so.

The same day as the first instalment of City of the Damned was published, I spent my first official and electrified night in the tower house. The novel was an imaginary intrigue I had woven round the story of the fire in El Ensueño in 1903, about a ghostly creature who had bewitched the streets of the Raval quarter ever since. Before the ink had dried on that first edition I had already started work on the second novel of the series. By my reckoning, based on thirty uninterrupted days’ work a month, Ignatius B. Samson had to produce an average of 6.66 pages a day to comply with the terms of the agreement, which was crazy but had the advantage of not giving me much time to think about it.

I hardly noticed that, as the days went by, I was beginning to consume more coffee and cigarettes than oxygen. As I gradually poisoned my brain, I had the feeling that it was turning into a steam engine that never cooled down. But Ignatius B. Samson was young and resilient. He worked all night and collapsed from exhaustion at dawn, possessed by strange dreams in which the letters on the page trapped in the typewriter would come unstuck and, like spiders made of ink, would crawl up his hands and face, working their way through his skin and nesting in his veins until his heart was covered in black and his pupils were clouded in pools of darkness. I would barely leave the old rambling house for weeks on end, and would forget what day of the week it was, or what month of the year. I paid no attention to the recurring headaches that would sometimes plague me, arriving all of a sudden as if a metal awl were boring a hole through my skull, burning my eyes with a flash of white light. I had grown accustomed to living with a constant ringing in my ears that only the murmur of wind or rain could mask. Sometimes, when a cold sweat covered my face and I felt my hands shaking on the Underwood keyboard, I told myself that the following day I would go to the doctor. But on that day there was always another scene, and another story to tell.

To celebrate the first year of Ignatius B. Samson’s life, I decided to take the day off and reacquaint myself with the sun, the breeze and the streets of a city I had stopped walking through and now only imagined. I shaved, tidied myself up and donned the best and most presentable of my suits. I left the windows open in the study and in the gallery to air the house and let the thick fog that had become its scent be scattered to the four winds. When I went out into the street, I found a large envelope at the bottom of the letter box. Inside was a sheet of parchment, sealed with the angel motif and written on in that exquisite writing. It said:

Dear David,

I wanted to be the first to congratulate you on this new stage of your career. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the first instalments of City of the Damned. I hope you will like this small gift.

I would like to reiterate my admiration for you, and my hope that one day our paths may cross. Trusting that this will come about, please accept the most affectionate greetings from your friend and reader,

Andreas Corelli

The gift was the same copy of Great Expectations that Señor Sempere had given me when I was a child, the same copy I had returned to him before my father could find it and the same copy that, years later, when I had wanted to recover it at any price, had disappeared only hours before in the hands of a stranger. I stared at the bundle of paper which to me, in a not so distant past, had seemed to contain all the magic and light of the world. The cover still bore my bloodstained fingerprints.

‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

9

Señor Sempere put on his reading spectacles to examine the book closely. He placed it on a cloth he had spread out on his desk in the back room and pulled down the reading lamp so that its beam focused on the volume. His examination lasted a few minutes, during which I maintained a reverential silence. I watched him turn over the pages, smell them, stroke the paper and the spine, weigh the book with one hand and then the other, and finally close the cover and examine with a magnifying glass the bloodstained fingerprints left by me twelve or thirteen years earlier.

‘Incredible,’ he mused, removing his spectacles. ‘It’s the same book. How did you say you recovered it?’

‘I really couldn’t tell you, Señor Sempere. Do you know anything about a French publisher called Andreas Corelli?’

‘For a start he sounds more Italian than French, although the name Andreas could be Greek…’

‘The publishing house is in Paris. Éditions de la Lumière.’

Sempere looked doubtful.

‘I’m afraid it doesn’t ring a bell. I’ll ask Barceló. He knows everything; let’s see what he says.’

Gustavo Barceló was one of the senior members of the second-hand booksellers’ guild in Barcelona and his vast expertise was as legendary as his somewhat abrasive and pedantic manner. There was a saying in the trade: when in doubt, ask Barceló. At that very moment Sempere’s son put his head round the door and signalled to his father. Although he was two or three years older than me he was so shy that he could make himself invisible.

‘Father, someone’s come to collect an order that I think you took.’

The bookseller nodded and handed me a thick, worn volume.

‘This is the latest catalogue of European publishers. Why don’t you have a look at it and see if you can find anything while I attend to the customer?’ he suggested.

I was left alone in the back room, searching in vain for Éditions de la Lumière, while Sempere returned to the counter. As I leafed through the volume, I could hear him talking to a female voice that sounded familiar. I heard them mention Pedro Vidal. Intrigued, I put my head round the door to find out more.

Cristina Sagnier, the chauffeur’s daughter and my mentor’s secretary, was going through a pile of books which Sempere was noting down in his ledger. When she saw me she smiled politely, but I was sure she did not recognise me. Sempere looked up and when he noticed the silly expression on my face he took a quick X-ray of the situation.

‘You do know each other, don’t you?’ he said.

Cristina raised her eyebrows in surprise and looked at me again, unable to place me.

‘David Martín. A friend of Don Pedro’s,’ I said.

‘Oh, of course,’ she replied. ‘Good morning.’

‘How is your father?’ I asked.

‘Fine, fine. He’s waiting for me on the corner with the car.’

Sempere, who never missed a trick, quickly interjected.

‘Señorita Sagnier has come to collect some books Señor Vidal ordered. As they are so heavy, perhaps you could help her take them to the car…’

‘Please don’t worry…’ protested Cristina.

‘But of course,’ I blurted out, ready to lift the pile of books that turned out to weigh as much as the luxury edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, appendices included.

I felt something go crunch in my back and Cristina gave me an embarrassed look.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Don’t worry, miss. My friend Martín here might be a man of letters, but he’s as strong as a bull,’ said Sempere. ‘Isn’t that right, Martín?’

Cristina was looking at me unconvinced. I offered her my ‘strong man’ smile.

‘Pure muscle,’ I said. ‘This is just a warm-up exercise.’

Sempere’s son was about to offer to carry half the books, but his father, in a display of great diplomacy, held him back. Cristina kept the door open for me and I set off to cover the fifteen or twenty metres that separated me from the Hispano-Suiza parked on the corner of Puerta del Ángel. I only just managed to get there, my arms almost on fire. Manuel, the chauffeur, helped me unload the books and greeted me warmly.

‘What a coincidence, meeting you here, Señor Martín.’

‘Small world.’

Cristina gave me a grateful smile and got into the car.

‘I’m sorry about the books.’

‘It was nothing. A bit of exercise lifts the spirit,’ I volunteered, ignoring the tangle of knots I could feel in my back. ‘My regards to Don Pedro.’

I watched them drive off towards Plaza de Cataluña, and when I turned I noticed Sempere at the door of the bookshop, looking at me with a cat-like smile, and gesturing to me to wipe the drool off my chin. I went over to him and couldn’t help laughing at myself.

‘I know your secret now, Martín. I thought you had a steadier nerve in these matters.’

‘Everything gets a bit rusty.’

‘I should know! Can I keep the book for a few days?’

I nodded.

‘Take good care of it.’

10

A few months later I saw her again, in the company of Pedro Vidal, at the table that was always reserved for him at La Maison Dorée. Vidal invited me to join them, but a quick look from her was enough to tell me that I should refuse the offer.

‘How is the novel going, Don Pedro?’

‘Swimmingly.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it. Bon appétit.’

My meetings with Cristina were always by chance. Sometimes I would bump into her in the Sempere & Sons bookshop, where she often went to collect books for Vidal. If the opportunity arose, Sempere would leave me alone with her, but soon Cristina grew wise to the trick and would send one of the young boys from Villa Helius to pick up the orders.

‘I know it’s none of my business,’ Sempere would say. ‘But perhaps you should stop thinking about her.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Señor Sempere.’

‘Come on, Martín, we’ve known each other for a long time…’

The months seemed to slip by in a blur. I lived at night, writing from evening to dawn, and sleeping all day. Barrido and Escobillas couldn’t stop congratulating themselves on the success of City of the Damned, and when they saw me on the verge of collapse they assured me that after a couple more novels they would grant me a sabbatical so that I could rest or devote my time to writing a personal work, which they would publish with much fanfare and with my real name printed in large letters on the cover. It was always just a couple of novels away. The sharp pains, the headaches and the dizzy spells became more frequent and intense, but I attributed them to exhaustion and treated them with more injections of caffeine, cigarettes and some tablets tasting of gunpowder that contained codeine and God knows what else, supplied on the quiet by a chemist in Calle Argenteria. Don Basilio, with whom I had lunch on alternate Thursdays in an outdoor café in La Barceloneta, urged me to go to the doctor. I always said yes, I had an appointment that very week.

Apart from my old boss and the Semperes, I didn’t have much time to see anybody else except Vidal, and when I did see him it was more because he came to see me than through any effort on my part. He didn’t like my tower house and always insisted that we go out for a stroll, to the Bar Almirall on Calle Joaquín Costa, where he had an account and held literary gatherings on Friday evenings. I was never invited to them because he knew that all those attending, frustrated poetasters and arse-lickers who laughed at his jokes in the hope of some charity – a recommendation to a publisher or a compliment to soothe their wounded pride – hated me with an unswerving vigour and determination that were quite absent from their more artistic endeavours, which were persistently ignored by the fickle public. There, knocking back absinthe and puffing on Caribbean cigars, he spoke to me about his novel, which was never finished, about his plans for retiring from his life of retirement, and about his romances and conquests: the older he got, the younger and more nubile they became.

‘You don’t ask after Cristina,’ he would sometimes say, maliciously.

‘What do you want me to ask?’

‘Whether she asks after you.’

‘Does she ask after me, Don Pedro?’

‘No.’

‘Well, there you are.’

‘The fact is, she did mention you the other day.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘You’re not going to like it.’

‘Go on.’

‘She didn’t say it in so many words, but she seemed to imply that she couldn’t understand how you could prostitute yourself by writing second-rate serials for that pair of thieves; that you were throwing away your talent and your youth.’

I felt as if Vidal had just plunged a frozen dagger into my stomach.

‘Is that what she thinks?’

Vidal shrugged his shoulders.

‘Well, as far as I’m concerned she can go to hell.’

I worked every day except Sundays, which I spent wandering the streets, always ending up in some bar on the Paralelo where it wasn’t hard to find company and passing affection in the arms of another solitary soul like myself. It wasn’t until the following morning, when I woke up lying next to a stranger, that I realised they all looked like her: the colour of their hair, the way they walked, a gesture or a glance. Sooner or later, to fill the painful silence of farewells, those one-night stands would ask me how I earned my living, and when, surrendering to my vanity, I explained that I was a writer, they would take me for a liar, because nobody had ever heard of David Martín, although some of them did know of Ignatius B. Samson, and had heard people talk about City of the Damned. After a while I began to say that I worked at the customs offices in the port, or that I was a clerk in a solicitors’ office called Sayrach, Muntaner and Cruells.

One afternoon I was sitting in the Café de la Ópera with a music teacher called Alicia, helping her get over – or so I imagined – someone who was hard to forget. I was about to kiss her when I saw Cristina’s face on the other side of the glass pane. When I reached the street, she had already vanished among the crowds in the Ramblas. Two weeks later Vidal insisted on inviting me to the premiere of Madame Butterfly at the Liceo. The Vidal family owned a box in the dress circle and Vidal liked to attend once a week during the opera season. When I met him in the foyer I discovered that he had also brought Cristina. She greeted me with an icy smile and didn’t speak to me again or even glance at me until, halfway through the second act, Vidal decided to go down to the adjoining Círculo club to say hello to one of his cousins. We were left alone together in the box, with no other shield than Puccini and the hundreds of faces in the semi-darkness of the theatre. I held back for about ten minutes before turning to look her in the eye.

‘Have I done something to offend you?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Can we pretend to be friends then, at least on occasions like this?’

‘I don’t want to be your friend, David.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you don’t want to be my friend either.’

She was right, I didn’t want to be her friend.

‘Is it true that you think I prostitute myself?’

‘Whatever I think doesn’t matter. What matters is what you think.’

I sat there for another five minutes and then stood up and left without saying a word. By the time I reached the wide Liceo staircase I’d already promised myself that I would never give her a second thought, look, or a kind word.

The following afternoon I saw her in front of the cathedral, and when I tried to avoid her she waved at me and smiled. I stood there, glued to the spot, watching her approach.

‘Aren’t you going to invite me for a drink?’

‘I’m a streetwalker and I’m not free for another two hours.’

‘Well then, let me invite you. How much do you charge for accompanying a lady for an hour?’

I followed her reluctantly to a chocolate shop on Calle Petritxol. We ordered two cups of hot chocolate and sat facing one another, seeing who would break the silence first. For once, I won.

‘I didn’t mean to offend you yesterday, David. I don’t know what Don Pedro told you, but I’ve never said such a thing.’

‘Maybe you only thought it, which is why he would have told me.’

‘You have no idea what I think,’ she replied harshly. ‘Nor does Don Pedro.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘Fine.’

‘What I said was very different. I said that I didn’t think you were doing what you felt inside.’

I smiled and nodded. The only thing I felt at that moment was the need to kiss her. Cristina held my gaze defiantly. She didn’t turn her face when I stretched out my hand and touched her lips, sliding my fingers down her chin and neck.

‘Not like this,’ she said at last.

By the time the waiter brought the steaming cups of chocolate she had already left. Months went by before I even heard her name again.

One day towards the end of September, when I had just finished a new instalment of City of the Damned, I decided to take a night off. I could feel the approach of one of those storms of nausea and burning stabs in my brain. I gulped down a handful of codeine pills and lay on my bed in the darkness waiting for the cold sweat and the trembling of my hands to stop. I was on the point of falling asleep when I heard the doorbell. I dragged myself to the hall and opened the door. Vidal, in one of his impeccable Italian silk suits, was lighting a cigarette in a beam of light that seemed painted for him by Vermeer himself.

‘Are you alive, or am I speaking to an apparition?’ he asked.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve come all the way from Villa Helius just to throw that at me.’

‘No. I’ve come because I haven’t heard from you in two months and I’m worried about you. Why don’t you get a telephone installed in this mausoleum, like normal people would?’

‘I don’t like telephones. I like to see people’s faces when they speak and for them to see mine.’

‘In your case I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror recently?’

‘That’s your department.’

‘There are bodies in the mortuary at the Clínico hospital with a rosier face than yours. Go on, get dressed.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I say so. We’re going out for a stroll.’

Vidal would not take no for an answer. He dragged me to the car, which was waiting in Paseo del Borne, and told Manuel to start the engine.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Surprise.’

We crossed the whole of Barcelona until we reached Avenida Pedralbes and started the climb up the hillside. A few minutes later we glimpsed Villa Helius, with all its windows lit up, projecting a bubble of bright gold across the twilight. Giving nothing away, Vidal smiled mysteriously at me. When we reached the mansion he told me to follow him and led me to the large sitting room. A group of people was waiting for me there, and as soon as they saw me, they started to clap. I recognised Don Basilio, Cristina, Sempere – both father and son – and my old schoolteacher Doña Mariana; some of the authors who, like me, published their work with Barrido & Escobillas, and with whom I had established a friendship; Manuel, who had joined the group, and a few of Vidal’s conquests. Vidal offered me a glass of champagne and smiled.

‘Happy twenty-eighth birthday, David.’

I’d forgotten.

After the meal I excused myself for a moment and went out into the garden for some fresh air. A starry night cast a silver veil over the trees. I’d been there only for a minute or so when I heard footsteps approaching and turned to find the last person I was expecting to see: Cristina Sagnier. She smiled at me, as if apologising for the intrusion.

‘Pedro doesn’t know I’ve come out to speak to you,’ she said.

She had dropped the ‘Don’, but I pretended not to notice.

‘I’d like to talk to you, David,’ she said, ‘but not here, not now.’

Even in the shadows of the garden I was unable to hide my bewilderment.

‘Can we meet tomorrow somewhere?’ she asked. ‘I promise I won’t take up much of your time.’

‘Where shall we meet?’

‘Could it be at your house? I don’t want anyone to see us, and I don’t want Pedro to know I’ve spoken with you.’

‘As you wish…’

Cristina smiled with relief.

‘Thanks. Will tomorrow be all right? In the afternoon?’

‘Whenever you like. Do you know where I live?’

‘My father knows.’

She leaned over a little and kissed me on the cheek.

‘Happy birthday, David.’

Before I could say anything, she had vanished across the garden. When I went back to the sitting room she had already left. Vidal glanced at me coldly from one end of the room and only smiled when he realised that I was watching him.

An hour later Manuel, with Vidal’s approval, insisted on driving me home in the Hispano-Suiza. I sat next to him, as I did whenever we were alone in the car: the chauffeur would take the opportunity to give me driving tips and, unbeknown to Vidal, would even let me take the wheel for a while. That night Manuel was quieter than usual and did not say a word until we reached the town centre. He looked thinner than the last time I’d seen him and I had the feeling that age was beginning to take its toll.

‘Is anything wrong, Manuel?’ I asked.

The chauffeur shrugged his shoulders.

‘Nothing important, Señor Martín.’

‘If there’s anything worrying you…’

‘Just a few health problems. When you get to my age, everything is a worry, as you know. But I don’t matter any more. The one who matters is my daughter.’

I wasn’t sure how to reply, so I simply nodded.

‘I’m aware that you hold a certain affection for her, Señor Martín. For my Cristina. A father can see these things.’

Again I just nodded. We didn’t exchange any more words until Manuel stopped the car at the entrance to Calle Flassaders, held out his hand to me, and once more wished me a happy birthday.

‘If anything should happen to me,’ he said then, ‘you would help her, wouldn’t you, Señor Martín? You would do that for me?’

‘Of course, Manuel. But nothing is going to happen to you!’

The chauffeur bade me farewell. I saw him get into the car and drive away slowly. I wasn’t absolutely sure, but I could have sworn that, after a journey in which he had hardly opened his mouth, he was now talking to himself.

11

I spent the whole morning running about the house, straightening things and tidying up, airing the rooms, cleaning objects and corners I didn’t even know existed. I rushed down to a florist in the market and when I returned, laden with bunches of flowers, I realised I had forgotten where I’d hidden the vases in which to put them. I dressed as if I was going out to look for work. I practised words and greetings that sounded ridiculous. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that Vidal was right: I looked like a vampire. Finally I sat down in an armchair in the gallery to wait, with a book in my hands. In two hours I hadn’t turned over the first page. At last, at exactly four o’clock in the afternoon, I heard Cristina’s footsteps on the stairs and jumped up. By the time she rang the front doorbell I’d been at the door for an eternity.

‘Hello, David. Is this a bad moment?’

‘No, no, on the contrary. Please come in.’

Cristina smiled politely and stepped into the corridor. I led her to the reading room in the gallery, and offered her a seat. She was examining everything carefully.

‘It’s a very special place,’ she said. ‘Pedro did tell me you had an elegant home.’

‘He prefers the term “gloomy”, but I suppose it’s just a question of degrees.’

‘May I ask why you came to live here? It’s a rather large house for someone who lives alone.’

Someone who lives alone, I thought. You end up becoming what you see in the eyes of those you love.

‘The truth?’ I asked. ‘The truth is that I came to live here because for years I had seen this house almost every day on my way to and from the newspaper. It was always closed up, and I began to think it was waiting for me. In the end I dreamed, literally, that one day I would live in it. And that’s what happened.’

‘Do all your dreams come true, David?’

The ironic tone reminded me too much of Vidal.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘This is the only one. But you wanted to talk to me about something and I’m distracting you with stories that probably don’t interest you.’

I sounded more defensive that I would have wished. The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn’t know where to put it.

‘I wanted to talk to you about Pedro,’ Cristina began.

‘Ah.’

‘You’re his best friend. You know him. He talks about you as if you were his son. He loves you more than anyone. You know that.’

‘Don Pedro has treated me like a father,’ I said. ‘If it hadn’t been for him and for Señor Sempere, I don’t know what would have become of me.’

‘The reason I wanted to talk to you is that I’m very worried about him.’

‘Why are you worried?’

‘You know that some years ago I started work as his secretary. The truth is that Pedro is a very generous man and we’ve ended up being good friends. He has behaved very well towards my father, and towards me. That’s why it hurts me to see him like this.’

‘Like what?’

‘It’s that wretched book, the novel he wants to write.’

‘He’s been at it for years.’

‘He’s been destroying it for years. I correct and type out all his pages. Over the years I’ve been working as his secretary he’s destroyed at least two thousand pages. He says he has no talent. He says he’s a fraud. He’s constantly at the bottle. Sometimes I find him upstairs in his study, drunk, crying like a child…’

I swallowed hard.

‘He says he envies you, he wants to be like you, he says people lie and praise him because they want something from him – money, help – but he knows that his book is worthless. He keeps up appearances with everyone else, his smart suits and all that, but I see him every day, and I know he’s losing hope. Sometimes I’m afraid he’ll do something stupid. It’s been going on for some time now. I haven’t said anything because I didn’t know who to speak to. If he knew I’d come to see you he’d be furious. He always says: don’t bother David with my worries. He’s got his whole life ahead of him and I’m nothing now. He’s always saying things like that. Forgive me for telling you all this, but I didn’t know who to turn to…’

We sank into a deep silence. I felt an intense cold invading me: the knowledge that while the man to whom I owed my life had plunged into despair, I had been locked in my own world and hadn’t paused for one second to notice.

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have come…’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’ve done the right thing.’

Cristina looked at me with a hint of a smile and for the first time I felt that I was not a stranger to her.

‘What can we do?’ she asked.

‘We’re going to help him,’ I said.

‘What if he doesn’t let us?’

‘Then we’ll do it without him noticing.’

12

I will never know whether I did it to help Vidal, as I kept telling myself, or simply as an excuse to spend more time with Cristina. We met almost every afternoon in my tower house. Cristina would bring the pages Vidal had written in longhand the day before, always full of deletions, with whole paragraphs crossed out, notes all over the page and a thousand and one attempts to save what was beyond repair. We would go up to the study and sit on the floor. Cristina would read the pages out loud and then we would discuss them at length. My mentor was attempting to write an epic saga covering three generations of a Barcelona family that was not very different from his own. The action began a few years before the Industrial Revolution with the arrival in the city of two orphaned brothers and developed into a sort of biblical parable in the Cain and Abel mode. One of the brothers ended up becoming the richest and most powerful magnate of his time, while the other devoted himself to the Church and helping the needy, only to end his days tragically during an episode that was quite evidently borrowed from the misfortunes of the priest and poet Jacint Verdaguer. Throughout their lives the two brothers were at loggerheads, and an endless list of characters filed past in torrid melodramas, scandals, murders, tragedies and other requirements of the genre, all of it set against the background of the birth of modern Barcelona and its world of industry and finance. The narrator was a grandchild of one of the two brothers, who reconstructed the story while he watched the city burn from a palatial mansion in Pedralbes during the riots of the Tragic Week of 1909.

The first thing that surprised me was that the story was one that I had suggested to him some years earlier, as a means of getting him started on his most significant work, the novel he always said he would write one day. The second thing was that he had never told me he’d decided to use the idea, or that he’d already spent years on it, and not through any lack of opportunity. The third thing was that the novel, as it stood, was a complete and utter flop: not one of the elements of the book worked, starting with the characters and the structure, passing through the atmosphere and the plot, ending with a language and a style that suggested the efforts of a pretentious amateur with too much spare time on his hands.

‘What do you think of it?’ Cristina asked. ‘Can it be saved?’

I preferred not to tell her that Vidal had borrowed the premise from me, not wishing her to be more worried than she already was, so I smiled and nodded.

‘It needs some work, that’s all.’

As the day grew dark, Cristina would sit at the typewriter and between us we rewrote Vidal’s book, letter by letter, line by line, scene by scene.

The storyline put together by Vidal was so vague and insipid that I decided to recover the one I had invented when I originally suggested it to him. Slowly we brought the characters back to life, rebuilding them from head to toe. Not a single scene, moment, line or word survived the process and yet, as we advanced, I had the impression that we were doing justice to the novel that Vidal carried in his heart and had decided to write without knowing how.

Cristina told me that sometimes, weeks after he remembered writing a scene, Vidal would reread it in its final typewritten version, and was surprised at his craftsmanship and the fullness of a talent in which he had ceased to believe. She feared he might discover what we were doing and told me we should be more faithful to his original work.

‘Never underestimate a writer’s vanity, especially that of a mediocre writer,’ I would reply.

‘I don’t like to hear you talking like that about Pedro.’

‘I’m sorry. Neither do I.’

‘Perhaps you should slow down a bit. You don’t look well. I’m not worried about Pedro any more – I’m concerned about you.’

‘Something good had to come of all this.’

In time I grew accustomed to savouring the moments I shared with her. It wasn’t long before my own work suffered the consequences. I found the time to work on City of the Damned where there was none, sleeping barely three hours a day and pushing myself to the limit to meet the deadlines in my contract. Both Barrido and Escobillas made it a rule not to read any book – neither the ones they published nor the ones published by the competition – but Lady Venom did read them and soon began to suspect that something strange was happening to me.

‘This isn’t you,’ she would say every now and then.

‘Of course it’s not me, dear Herminia. It’s Ignatius B. Samson.’

I was aware of the risks I was taking, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I woke up every day covered in sweat and with my heart beating so hard I felt as if it was going to crack my ribs. I would have paid that price and much more to retain the slow, secret contact that unwittingly turned us into accomplices. I knew perfectly well that Cristina could read this in my eyes every time she came, and I knew perfectly well that she would never respond to my advances. There was no future, or great expectations, in that race to nowhere, and we both knew it.

Sometimes, when we grew tired of attempting to refloat the leaking ship, we would abandon Vidal’s manuscript and try to talk about something other than the intimacy which, from being so hidden, was beginning to weigh on our consciences. Now and then, I would muster enough courage to take her hand. She let me, but I knew it made her feel uncomfortable: she felt that it was not right, that our debt of gratitude to Vidal united and separated us at the same time. One night, shortly before she left, I held her face in my hands and tried to kiss her. She remained motionless and when I saw myself in the mirror of her eyes I didn’t dare speak. She stood up and left without saying a word. After that, I didn’t see her for two weeks, and when she returned she made me promise nothing like that would ever happen again.

‘David, I want you to understand that when we finish working on Pedro’s book we won’t be seeing one another as we do now.’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why.’

My advances were not the only thing Cristina didn’t approve of. I began to suspect that Vidal had been right when he said she disliked the books I was writing for Barrido & Escobillas, even if she kept quiet about it. It wasn’t hard to imagine her thinking that my efforts were strictly mercenary and soulless, that I was selling my integrity for a pittance, thereby lining the pockets of a couple of sewer rats, because I didn’t have the courage to write from my heart, with my own name and my own feelings. What hurt me most was that, deep down, she was probably right. I fantasised about ending my contract and writing a book just for her, a book with which I could earn her respect. If the only thing I knew how to do wasn’t good enough for Cristina, perhaps I should return to the grey, miserable days of the newspaper. I could always live off Vidal’s charity and favours.

I had gone out for a walk after a long night’s work, unable to sleep. Wandering about aimlessly, my feet led me uphill until I reached the building site of the Sagrada Familia. When I was small, my father had sometimes taken me there to gaze up at the babel of sculptures and porticoes that never seemed to take flight, as if the building were cursed. I liked going back to visit the place and discover that it had not changed; that although the city was endlessly growing around it, the Sagrada Familia remained forever in a state of ruin.

Dawn was breaking when I arrived: the towers of the Nativity facade stood in silhouette against a blue sky, scythed by red light. An eastern wind carried the dust from the unpaved streets and the acid smell from the factories shoring up the edges of the Sant Martí quarter. I was crossing Calle Mallorca when I saw the lights of a tram approaching through the early morning mist. I heard the clatter of the metal wheels on the rails and the sound of the bell which the driver was ringing to warn people of the tram’s advance. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. I stood there, glued to the ground between the rails, watching the lights of the tram leaping towards me. I heard the driver’s shouts and saw the plume of sparks that shot out from the wheels as he slammed on the brakes. Even then, with death only a few metres away, I couldn’t move a muscle. The smell of electricity invaded the white light that blazed in my eyes, and then the tram’s headlight went out. I fell over like a puppet, only conscious for a few more seconds, time enough to see the tram’s smoking wheel stop just centimetres from my face. Then all was darkness.

13

I opened my eyes. Thick columns of stone rose like trees in the shadows towards a naked vault. Needles of dusty light fell diagonally, revealing what looked like endless rows of ramshackle beds. Small drops of water fell from the heights like black tears, exploding with an echo as they touched the ground. The darkness smelled of mildew and damp.

‘Welcome to purgatory.’

I sat up and turned to find a man dressed in rags who was reading a newspaper by the light of a lantern. He brandished a smile that showed half of his teeth were missing. The front page of the newspaper he was holding announced that General Primo de Rivera was taking over all the powers of the state and installing a gentlemanly dictatorship to save the country from imminent disaster. That newspaper was at least five years old.

‘Where am I?’

The man peered over his paper and looked at me curiously.

‘At the Ritz. Can’t you smell it?’

‘How did I get here?’

‘Half dead. They brought you in this morning on a stretcher and you’ve been sleeping it off ever since.’

I felt my jacket and realised that all the money I’d had on me had vanished.

‘What a mess the world is in,’ cried the man, reading the news in his paper. ‘It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.’

‘How do I get out of here?’

‘If you’re in such a hurry… There are two ways, the permanent and the temporary. The permanent way is via the roof: one good leap and you can rid yourself of all this rubbish forever. The temporary way is somewhere over there, at the end, where that idiot is holding his fist in the air with his trousers falling off him, making the revolutionary salute to everyone who passes. But if you go out that way you’ll come back sooner or later.’

The first man was watching me with amusement and the kind of lucidity that shines occasionally only in madmen.

‘Are you the one who stole my money?’

‘Your suspicion offends me. When they brought you here you were already as clean as a whistle, and I only accept bonds that can be cashed at a bank.’

I left the lunatic sitting on his bed with his out-of-date newspaper and his up-to-date speeches. My head was still spinning and I was barely able to walk more than four steps in a straight line, but I managed to reach a door that led to a staircase on one of the sides of the huge vault. A faint light seemed to filter down from the top of the stairwell. I went up four or five floors until I felt a gust of fresh air that was coming through a large doorway at the top. I walked outside and at last understood where I was.

Spread out before me was a lake, suspended above the treetops of Ciudadela Park. The sun was beginning to set over Barcelona and the weed-covered water rippled like spilt wine. The Water Reservoir building looked like a crude castle or a prison. It had been built to supply water to the pavilions of the 1888 Universal Exhibition, but in time its vast, cathedral-like interior had ended up as a shelter for the destitute and the dying who had no other refuge from the night or the cold. The huge water basin on the flat rooftop was now a murky stretch of water that slowly bled away through the cracks in the building.

Then I noticed a figure posted on one of the corners of the roof. As if the mere touch of my gaze had alerted him, he turned round sharply and looked at me. I still felt a bit dazed and my vision was blurred, but I thought the figure seemed to be getting closer. He was approaching too fast, as if his feet weren’t touching the ground when he walked, and he moved in sudden agile bursts, too quick for the eye to catch. I could barely see his face against the light, but I was able to tell that he was a gentleman with black, shining eyes that seemed too big for his face. The closer he got to me the more his shape seemed to lengthen and the taller he seemed to grow. I felt a shiver as he advanced and took a few steps back without realising that I was moving towards the water’s edge. I felt my feet treading air and began to fall backwards into the pond when the stranger suddenly caught me by the arm. He pulled me up gently and led me back to solid ground. I sat on one of the benches that surrounded the water basin and took a deep breath, then looked up and saw him clearly for the first time. His eyes were a normal size, his height similar to mine, and his walk and gestures were like those of any other gentleman. He had a kind and reassuring expression.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Just a bit dizzy.’

The stranger sat down next to me. He wore a dark, exquisitely tailored three-piece suit with a small silver brooch on his lapel, an angel with outspread wings that looked oddly familiar. It occurred to me that the presence of an impeccably dressed gentleman here on the roof terrace was rather unusual. As if he could read my thoughts, the stranger smiled at me.

‘I hope I didn’t alarm you,’ he ventured. ‘I suppose you weren’t expecting to meet anyone up here.’

I looked at him in confusion and saw my face reflected in his black pupils as they dilated like an ink stain on paper.

‘May I ask what brings you here?’

‘The same thing as you: great expectations.’

‘Andreas Corelli,’ I mumbled.

His face lit up.

‘What a great pleasure it is to meet you in person at last, my friend.’

He spoke with a light accent which I was unable to identify. My instinct told me to get up and leave as fast as possible, before the stranger could utter another word, but there was something in his voice, in his eyes, that transmitted calm and trust. I decided not to ask myself how he could have known he would find me there, when even I had not known where I was. He held out his hand and I shook it. His smile seemed to promise redemption.

‘I suppose I should thank you for all the kindness you have shown me over the years, Señor Corelli. I’m afraid I’m indebted to you.’

‘Not at all. I’m the one who is indebted to you, my friend, and I should excuse myself for approaching you in this way, at so inconvenient a place and time, but I confess that I’ve been wanting to speak to you for a while and have never found the opportunity.’

‘Go ahead then. What can I do for you?’ I asked.

‘I want you to work for me.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I want you to write for me.’

‘Of course. I’d forgotten you’re a publisher.’

The stranger laughed. He had a sweet laugh, the laugh of a child who has never misbehaved.

‘The best of them all. The publisher you have been waiting for all your life. The publisher who will make you immortal.’

The stranger offered me one of his business cards, which was identical to the one I still had, the one I was holding when I awoke from my dream of Chloé.

ANDREAS CORELLI

Éditeur

Éditions de la Lumière

Boulevard St.-Germain, 69, Paris

‘I’m flattered, Señor Corelli, but I’m afraid it’s not possible for me to accept your invitation. I have a contract with…’

‘Barrido & Escobillas, I know. Riff-raff with whom, without wishing to offend you, you should have no dealings whatsoever.’

‘It’s an opinion shared by others.’

‘Señorita Sagnier, perhaps?’

‘You know her?’

‘I’ve heard of her. She seems to be the sort of woman whose respect and admiration one would give anything to win, don’t you agree? Doesn’t she encourage you to abandon those parasites and be true to yourself?’

‘It’s not that simple. I have an exclusive contract that ties me to them for another six years.’

‘I know, but that needn’t worry you. My lawyers are studying the matter and I can assure you there are a number of ways in which legal ties can be rendered null and void, should you wish to accept my proposal.’

‘And your proposal is?’

Corelli gave me a mischievous smile, like a schoolboy sharing a secret.

‘That you devote a year exclusively to working on a book I would commission, a book whose subject matter you and I would discuss when we signed the contract and for which I would pay you, in advance, the sum of one hundred thousand francs.’

I looked at him in astonishment.

‘If that sum does not seem adequate I’m open to considering any other sum you might think more appropriate. I’ll be frank, Señor Martín: I’m not going to quarrel with you about money. And between you and me, I don’t think you’ll want to either, because I know that when I tell you the sort of book I want you to write for me, the price will be the least of it.’

I sighed, laughing quietly.

‘I see you don’t believe me.’

‘Señor Corelli, I’m an author of penny dreadfuls that don’t even carry my name. My publishers, whom you seem to know, are a couple of second-rate fraudsters who are not worth their weight in manure, and my readers don’t even know I exist. I’ve spent years earning my living in this trade and I have yet to write a single page that satisfies me. The woman I love thinks I’m wasting my life, and she’s right. She also thinks I have no right to desire her because we’re a pair of insignificant souls whose only reason for existence is the debt of gratitude we owe to a man who pulled us both out of poverty, and perhaps she’s right about that too. It doesn’t matter. Before I know it, I’ll be thirty and I’ll realise that every day I look less like the person I wanted to be when I was fifteen. If I reach thirty, that is, because recently my health has been about as consistent as my work. Right now I’m satisfied if I manage one or two decent sentences in an hour. That’s the sort of author and the sort of man I am. Not the sort who receives visits from Parisian publishers with blank cheques for writing a book that will change his life and make all his dreams come true.’

Corelli observed me with a serious expression, carefully weighing every word.

‘I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth. Believe me when I say that throughout my professional life I’ve come across hundreds of characters for whom you wouldn’t have given a toss and who had an extremely high opinion of themselves. But I want you to know that, even if you don’t believe me, I know exactly what sort of author and what sort of man you are. I’ve been watching you for years, as you are well aware. I’ve read all your work, from the very first story you wrote for The Voice of Industry to The Mysteries of Barcelona, and now each of the instalments of the Ignatius B. Samson series. I dare say I know you better than you know yourself. Which is why I’m sure that in the end you will accept my offer.’

‘What else do you know?’

‘I know we have something, or a great deal, in common. I know you lost your father, and so did I. I know what it is like to lose one’s father when you still need him. Yours was snatched from you in tragic circumstances. Mine, for reasons that are neither here nor there, rejected me and threw me out of his house – perhaps that was even more painful. I know that you feel lonely, and believe me when I tell you that this is a feeling I have also experienced. I know that in your heart you harbour great expectations, none of which has come true, and that, although you’re not aware of it, this is slowly killing you with every passing day.’

His words brought about a long silence.

‘You know a lot of things, Señor Corelli.’

‘Enough to think that I would like to be better acquainted with you and become your friend. I don’t suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don’t trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It’s a sure sign that they don’t really know anyone.’

‘But you’re not looking for a friend, you’re looking for an employee.’

‘I’m looking for a temporary partner. I’m looking for you.’

‘You seem very sure of yourself.’

‘It’s a fault I was born with,’ Corelli replied, standing up. ‘Another is my gift for seeing into the future. That’s why I realise that perhaps it’s still too soon: hearing the truth from my lips is not enough for you yet. You need to see it with your own eyes. Feel it in your flesh. And, believe me, you’ll feel it.’

He held out his hand and waited until I took it.

‘Can I at least be reassured that you will think about what I’ve told you and that we’ll speak again?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what to say, Señor Corelli.’

‘Don’t say anything right now. I promise that next time we meet you’ll see things more clearly.’

With those words he gave me a friendly smile and walked off towards the stairs.

‘Will there be a next time?’ I asked.

Corelli stopped and turned.

‘There always is.’

‘Where?’

In the last rays of daylight falling on the city his eyes glowed like embers.

I saw him disappear through the door to the staircase. Only then did I realise that during the entire conversation I had not once seen him blink.

14

The doctor’s surgery was on a top floor with a view of the sea gleaming in the distance and the slope of Calle Muntaner, dotted with trams, which slid down to the Ensanche between grand houses and imposing edifices. The place smelled clean. The waiting rooms were tastefully decorated. The paintings were calming, with landscapes full of hope and peace. The shelves displayed books that exuded authority. Nurses moved about like ballet dancers and smiled as they went by. It was a purgatory for people with well-lined pockets.

‘The doctor will see you now, Señor Martín.’

Doctor Trías was a man with a patrician air and an impeccable appearance, who radiated serenity and confidence with every gesture. Grey, penetrating eyes behind rimless glasses. A kind, friendly smile, never frivolous. Doctor Trías was a man accustomed to jousting with death, and the more he smiled the more frightening he became. Judging by the way he escorted me to his room and asked me to sit down I got the feeling that, although some days before, when I had begun to undergo medical tests, he had spoken about recent medical breakthroughs in the fight against the symptoms I had described to him, as far as he was concerned, there was no doubt.

‘How are you?’ he asked, his eyes darting hesitantly between me and the folder on his desk.

‘You tell me.’

He smiled faintly, like a good player.

‘The nurse tells me you’re a writer, although here, on the form you filled in when you arrived, I see you put down that you are a mercenary.’

‘In my case there’s no difference at all.’

‘I believe some of my patients have read your books.’

‘I hope it has not caused permanent neurological damage.’

The doctor smiled as if he’d found my comment amusing, and then adopted a more serious expression, implying that the banal and kind preambles to our conversation had come to an end.

‘Señor Martín, I notice that you have come here on your own. Don’t you have any close family? A wife? Siblings? Parents still alive?’

‘That sounds a little ominous,’ I ventured.

‘Señor Martín, I’m not going to lie to you. The results of the first tests are not as encouraging as we’d hoped.’

I looked at him. I didn’t feel fear or unease. I didn’t feel anything.

‘Everything points to the fact that you have a growth lodged in the left lobe of your brain. The results confirm what I feared from the symptoms you described to me, and there is every indication that it might be a carcinoma.’

For a few seconds I was unable to say anything at all. I couldn’t even pretend to be surprised.

‘How long have I had it?’

‘It’s impossible to say for sure, but I presume the tumour has been growing there for some time, which would explain the symptoms you told me about and the difficulties you have recently experienced with your work.’

I took a deep breath and nodded. The doctor observed me patiently, with a kind mien, letting me take my time. I tried to start various sentences that never reached my lips. Finally our eyes met.

‘I suppose I’m in your hands, doctor. You’ll have to tell me which treatment to follow.’

I saw his despairing look as he realised I had not wanted to understand what he was telling me. I nodded once more, fighting the tide of nausea that was beginning to rise up my throat. The doctor poured me a glass of water from a jug and handed it to me. I drank it in one gulp.

‘There is no treatment?’ I said.

‘There is. There are a lot of things we can do to relieve the pain and ensure maximum comfort and peace…’

‘But I’m going to die.’

‘Yes.’

‘Soon.’

‘Possibly.’

I smiled to myself. Even the worst news is a relief when all it does is confirm what you already knew without wanting to know.

‘I’m twenty-eight,’ I said, without quite knowing why.

‘I’m sorry, Señor Martín. I’d like to have given you better news.’

I felt as if I had finally confessed to a lie or a minor sin, and the large slab of remorse that had been pressing down on me was instantly removed.

‘How much longer do I have?’

‘It is difficult to determine exactly. I’d say a year, a year and a half at most.’

His tone clearly implied that this was a more than optimistic prognosis.

‘And of that year, or whatever it is, how long do you think I’ll still be able to work and cope on my own?’

‘You’re a writer and you work with your brain. Unfortunately that is where the problem is located and where we will first meet limitations.’

‘Limitations is not a medical term, doctor.’

‘The most likely outcome is that, as the disease progresses, the symptoms you’ve been experiencing will become more intense and more frequent and, after a time, you’ll have to be admitted to hospital so that we can take care of you.’

‘I won’t be able to write.’

‘You won’t even be able to think about writing.’

‘How long?’

‘I don’t know. Nine or ten months. Perhaps more, perhaps less. I’m very sorry, Señor Martín.’

I nodded and stood up. My hands were shaking and I needed some air.

‘Señor Martín, I realise you need time to think about all the things I’ve told you, but it is important that we start your treatment as soon as possible…’

‘I can’t die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwards I’ll have a whole lifetime in which to die.’

15

That night I went up to the study in the tower and sat at my typewriter, even though I knew that my brain was a blank. The windows were wide open, but Barcelona no longer wanted to tell me anything; I was unable to finish a single page. Anything I did manage to conjure up seemed banal and empty. It was enough to reread my words to understand that they were barely worth the ink with which they’d been typed. I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose. Bit by bit, like slow, pleasant poison, the words of Andreas Corelli began to drip into my thoughts.

I still had at least a hundred pages to go for my umpteenth delivery of those comic-book adventures that had provided both Barrido and Escobillas with such bulging pockets, but in that moment I knew I was never going to finish it. Ignatius B. Samson had been left lying on the rails in front of that tram, exhausted, his soul bled dry, poured into too many pages that should never have seen the light of day. But before departing he had conveyed to me his last wishes: that I should bury him without any fuss and that, for once in my life, I should have the courage to use my own voice. His legacy to me was his considerable repertoire of smoke and mirrors. And he asked me to let him go, because he had been born to be forgotten.

I took all the finished pages of his last novel and set fire to them, sensing that a tombstone was being lifted off me with every page I threw into the flames. A moist, warm breeze blew that night over the rooftops and as it came in through my windows it took with it the ashes of Ignatius B. Samson, scattering them through the streets of the old city, where they would always remain – however much his words were lost forever and his name slipped from the memory of even his most devoted readers.

The following day I turned up at the offices of Barrido & Escobillas. The receptionist was new, almost a child, and didn’t recognise me.

‘Your name?’

‘Hugo, Victor.’

The receptionist smiled and connected to the switchboard to let Herminia know.

‘Doña Herminia, Señor Hugo Victor is here to see Señor Barrido.’

I saw her nod and disconnect the switchboard.

‘She says she’ll be right out.’

‘Have you been working here long?’

‘A week,’ the girl replied attentively.

Unless I was mistaken, she was the eighth receptionist Barrido & Escobillas had employed since the start of the year. The firm’s employees who reported directly to the artful Herminia didn’t last long because as soon as Lady Venom discovered that they had one ounce of common sense more than she had – which happened nine times out of ten – fearing she might be overshadowed, she would accuse them of theft or some other absurd transgression and make one scene after another until Escobillas kicked them out, threatening them with a hired assassin if they let the cat out of the bag.

‘How good to see you, David,’ said Lady Venom. ‘You’re looking very handsome. You seem well.’

‘That’s because I was run over by a tram. Is Barrido in?’

‘The things you come out with! He’s always in for you. He’s going to be very pleased when I tell him you’ve come to pay us a visit.’

‘You can’t imagine how pleased.’

Lady Venom took me to Barrido’s office, which was decorated like a chancellor’s palatial rooms in a comic opera, with a profusion of carpets, busts of emperors, still-lifes and leather-bound volumes bought in bulk which, I imagined, were probably blank inside. Barrido gave me the oiliest of smiles and shook my hand.

‘We’re all waiting impatiently for the next instalment. I must tell you, we’ve been reprinting the last two and they’re flying out of the window. Another five thousand copies, how about that?’

I thought it was more likely to be at least fifty thousand, but I just nodded enthusiastically. Barrido & Escobillas had perfected what was known among Barcelona publishers as the double print run, and theirs was as neatly arranged as a bunch of flowers. Every title had an official print run of a few thousand copies, on which a ridiculous margin was paid to the author. Then, if the book took off, they would print one or many undercover editions of tens of thousands of copies, which were never declared and for which the author never saw a penny. The latter could be distinguished from the official edition because Barrido had them printed on the quiet in an old sausage plant in Santa Perpètua de Mogoda, and if you leafed through the pages they gave off the unmistakable smell of vintage pork.

‘I’m afraid I have bad news.’

Barrido and Lady Venom exchanged looks but kept on grinning. Just then, Escobillas materialised through the door and looked at me with that dry, disdainful air he had, as if he were measuring you up for a coffin.

‘Look who has come to see us. Isn’t this a nice surprise?’ Barrido asked his partner, who replied with a nod.

‘What bad news?’ asked Escobillas.

‘Is there a bit of a delay, Martín, my friend?’ Barrido added in a friendly tone. ‘I’m sure we can accommodate-’

‘No. There’s no delay. Quite simply, there’s not going to be another book.’

Escobillas took a step forward and raised his eyebrows. Barrido giggled.

‘What do you mean, there’s not going to be another book?’ asked Escobillas.

‘I mean that yesterday I burned it, and there’s not a single page of the manuscript left.’

A heavy silence fell. Barrido made a conciliatory gesture and pointed to what was known as the visitors’ armchair, a black, sunken throne in which authors and suppliers were cornered so that they could meet Barrido’s eyes from the appropriate height.

‘Martín, sit down and tell me what this is about. There’s something worrying you, I can see. You can be open with us – we’re like family.’

Lady Venom and Escobillas nodded with conviction, showing the measure of their esteem in a look of spellbound devotion. I decided to remain standing. They all did the same, staring at me as if I were a pillar of salt that was about to start talking. Barrido’s face hurt from so much smiling.

‘And?’

‘Ignatius B. Samson has committed suicide. He left a twenty-page unpublished story in which he dies together with Chloé Permanyer, locked in an embrace after swallowing poison.’

‘The author dies in one of his own novels?’ asked Herminia, confused.

‘It’s his avant-garde farewell to the world of writing instalments. A detail I was sure you would love.’

‘And could there not be an antidote, or…? ’ Lady Venom asked.

‘Martín, I don’t need to remind you that it is you, and not the allegedly deceased Ignatius, who has a contract-’ said Escobillas.

Barrido raised his hands to silence his colleague.

‘I think I know what’s wrong, Martín. You’re exhausted. You’ve been overloading your brain for years without a break – something this house values and is grateful for. You just need a breather. I can understand. We do understand, don’t we?’

Barrido glanced at Escobillas and at Lady Venom, who nodded and tried to look serious.

‘You’re an artist and you want to make art, high literature, something that springs from your heart and will engrave your name in golden letters on the steps of history.’

‘The way you put it makes it sound ridiculous,’ I said.

‘Because it is,’ said Escobillas.

‘No, it isn’t,’ Barrido cut in. ‘It’s human. And we’re human. I, my partner and Herminia, who, being a woman and a creature of delicate sensitivity, is the most human of all, isn’t that right, Herminia?’

‘Indeed,’ Lady Venom agreed.

‘And as we’re human, we understand you and want to support you. Because we’re proud of you and convinced that your success will be our success and because in this firm, when all’s said and done, what matters is the people, not the numbers.’

At the end of his speech, Barrido gave a theatrical pause. Perhaps he expected me to break into applause, but when he saw that I wasn’t moved he charged on unimpeded with his exposition.

‘That is why I’m going to propose the following: take six months, nine if need be, because after all this is like a birth, and lock yourself up in your study to write the great novel of your life. When you’ve finished it, bring it to us and we’ll publish it under your name, putting all our irons in the fire and all our resources behind you. Because we’re on your side.’

I looked at Barrido and then at Escobillas. Lady Venom was about to burst into tears from the emotion.

‘With no advance, needless to say.’

Barrido clapped his hands euphorically in the air.

‘What do you say?’

I began work that very day. My plan was as simple as it was crazy. During the day I would rewrite Vidal’s book and at night I’d work on mine. I would polish all the dark arts Ignatius B. Samson had taught me and place them at the service of what little decency and dignity was left in my heart. I would write out of gratitude, despair and vanity. I would write especially for Cristina, to prove to her that I too was able to pay the debt I had with Vidal and that even if he was about to drop dead, David Martín had earned himself the right to look her in the eye without feeling ashamed of his ridiculous hopes.

I didn’t return to Doctor Trías’s surgery. I didn’t see the point. The day I could no longer write another word, or imagine one, I would be the first to know. My trustworthy and unscrupulous chemist supplied me with as many codeine treats as I requested without asking any questions, as well as the occasional delicacy that set my veins alight, obliterating both pain and consciousness. I didn’t tell anyone about my visit to the doctor or about the test results.

My basic needs were covered by a weekly delivery which I ordered from Can Gispert, a wonderful grocer’s emporium on Calle Mirallers, behind the cathedral of Santa María del Mar. The order was always the same. It was usually brought to me by the owners’ daughter, a girl who stared at me like a frightened fawn when I told her to wait in the entrance hall while I fetched the money to pay her.

‘This is for your father, and this is for you.’

I always gave her a ten-céntimo tip, which she accepted without saying a word. Every week the girl rang my doorbell with the delivery, and every week I paid her and gave her a ten-céntimo tip. For nine months and a day, the time it took me to write the only book that would bear my name, that young girl, whose name I didn’t know and whose face I forgot every week until I saw her standing in the doorway again, was the person I saw the most.

Without warning, Cristina had stopped coming to our afternoon meetings. I was beginning to fear that Vidal might have got wind of our ploy. Then, one afternoon, when I was waiting for her after about a week’s absence, I opened the door thinking it was her, and instead there was Pep, one of the servants at Villa Helius. He brought me a parcel sent by Cristina. It was carefully sealed and contained the whole of Vidal’s manuscript. Pep explained that Cristina’s father had suffered an aneurysm which had left him practically disabled, and she’d taken him to a sanatorium in Puigcerdà, in the Pyrenees, where apparently there was a young doctor who was an expert in the treatment of such ailments.

‘Señor Vidal has taken care of everything,’ Pep explained. ‘No expense spared.’

Vidal never forgot his servants, I thought, not without some bitterness.

‘She asked me to deliver this to you by hand. And not to tell anyone about it.’

The young man handed me the parcel, relieved to be free of the mysterious item.

‘Did she leave an address where I could find her if I needed to?’

‘No, Señor Martín. All I know is that Señorita Cristina’s father has been admitted to a place called Villa San Antonio.’

A few days later, Vidal paid me one of his surprise visits and spent the whole afternoon in my house, drinking my anisette, smoking my cigarettes and talking to me about his chauffeur’s misfortune.

‘It’s hard to believe. A man who was as strong as an ox, and suddenly he’s struck down, just like that. He doesn’t even know who he is any more.’

‘How is Cristina?’

‘You can imagine. Her mother died years ago and Manuel is the only family she has left. She took a family album with her and shows him photographs every day to see whether the poor fellow can remember anything.’

While Vidal spoke, his novel – or should I say my novel – rested face down on the table in the gallery, a pile of papers only half a metre away from his hands. He told me that in Manuel’s absence he had urged Pep – apparently a good horseman – to get stuck into the art of driving, but so far the young man was proving hopeless.

‘Give him time. A motor car isn’t a horse. The secret is practice.’

‘Now that you mention it, Manuel taught you how to drive, didn’t he?’

‘A little,’ I admitted. ‘And it’s not as easy as it seems.’

‘If the novel you’re writing doesn’t sell, you can always become my chauffeur.’

‘Let’s not bury poor Manuel yet, Don Pedro.’

‘That comment was in bad taste,’ Vidal admitted. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘How’s your novel going, Don Pedro?’

‘It’s going well. Cristina has taken the final manuscript with her to Puigcerdà so that she can type up a clean copy and get it all shipshape while she’s there with her father.’

‘I’m glad to see you looking happy.’

Vidal gave me a triumphant smile.

‘I think it’s going to be something big,’ he said. ‘After all those months I thought I’d wasted, I reread the first fifty pages Cristina typed out for me and I was quite surprised at myself. I think it will surprise you too. I may still have some tricks to teach you.’

‘I’ve never doubted that, Don Pedro.’

That afternoon Vidal was drinking more than usual. Over the years I’d got to know the full range of his anxieties and reservations, and I guessed that this visit was not a simple courtesy call. When he had polished off my supplies of anis, I served him a generous glass of brandy and waited.

‘David, there are things about which you and I have never spoken…’

‘About football, for example.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘I’m listening, Don Pedro.’

He looked at me for a while, hesitating.

‘I’ve always tried to be a good friend to you, David. You know that, don’t you?’

‘You’ve been much more than that, Don Pedro. I know and you know.’

‘Sometimes I ask myself whether I shouldn’t have been more honest with you.’

‘About what?’

Vidal stared into his glass of brandy.

‘There are some things I’ve never told you, David. Things that perhaps I should have told you years ago…’

I let a moment or two go by. It seemed an eternity. Whatever Vidal wanted to tell me, it was clear that all the brandy in the world wasn’t going to get it out of him.

‘Don’t worry, Don Pedro. If these things have waited for years, I’m sure they can wait until tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow I may not have the courage to tell you.’

I realised that I had never seen him look so frightened. Something had got stuck in his heart and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

‘Here’s what we’ll do, Don Pedro. When your book and mine are published we’ll get together to celebrate and you can tell me whatever it is you need to tell me. Invite me to one of those expensive places I’m not allowed into unless I’m with you, and then you can confide in me as much as you like. Does that sound all right?’

When it started to get dark I went with him as far as Paseo del Borne, where Pep was waiting by the Hispano-Suiza, wearing Manuel’s uniform – which was far too big for him, as was the motor car. The bodywork was peppered with unsightly new scratches and bumps.

‘Keep at a relaxed trot, eh, Pep?’ I advised him. ‘No galloping. Slowly but surely, as if it were a draught horse.’

‘Yes, Señor Martín. Slowly but surely.’

When he left, Vidal hugged me tightly, and as he got into the car it seemed to me that he was carrying the whole world on his shoulders.

16

A few days after I had put the finishing touches to both novels, Vidal’s and my own, Pep turned up at my house unannounced. He was wearing the uniform inherited from Manuel that made him look like a boy dressed up as a field marshal. At first I thought he was bringing me some message from Vidal, or perhaps from Cristina, but his sombre expression spoke of an anxiety that made me rule out that possibility as soon as our eyes met.

‘Bad news, Señor Martín.’

‘What has happened?’

‘It’s Señor Manuel.’

While he was explaining what had happened his voice faltered, and when I asked him whether he wanted a glass of water he almost burst into tears. Manuel Sagnier had died three days earlier at the sanatorium in Puigcerdà after prolonged suffering. At his daughter’s request he had been buried the day before in a small cemetery at the foot of the Pyrenees.

‘Dear God,’ I murmured.

Instead of water I handed Pep a large glass of brandy and parked him in an armchair in the gallery. When he was calmer, Pep explained that Vidal had sent him to meet Cristina, who was returning that afternoon on a train due to arrive at five o’clock.

‘Imagine how Señorita Cristina must be feeling…’ he mumbled, distressed at the thought of having to be the one to meet her and comfort her on the journey back to the small apartment above the coach house of Villa Helius, the home she had shared with her father since she was a little girl.

‘Pep, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go and meet Señorita Sagnier.’

‘Orders from Don Pedro.’

‘Tell Don Pedro that I’ll do it.’

By dint of alcohol and persuasion I convinced him that he should go home and leave the matter in my hands. I would meet her and take her to Villa Helius in a taxi.

‘I’m very grateful, Señor Martín. You’re a man of letters so you’ll have a better idea of what to say to the poor thing.’

At a quarter to five I made my way towards the recently opened Estación de Francia railway station. That year’s International Exhibition had left the city strewn with wonders, but my favourite was that temple-like vault of glass and steel, even if only because it was so close and I could see it from the study in the tower house. That afternoon the sky was scattered with black clouds galloping in from the sea and clustering over the city. Flashes of lightning echoed on the horizon and a charged warm wind smelling of dust announced a powerful summer storm. When I reached the station I noticed the first few drops, shiny and heavy, like coins falling from heaven. By the time I walked down to the platform where the train was due to arrive the rain was already pounding the station’s vaulted roof. Night seemed to fall suddenly, interrupted only by flashes of light bursting over the city, leaving a trail of noise and fury.

The train came in almost an hour late, a serpent of steam slithering beneath the storm. I stood by the engine waiting for Cristina to appear among the passengers emerging from the carriages. Ten minutes later everybody had descended and there was still no trace of her. I was about to go back home, thinking that perhaps Cristina hadn’t taken that train after all, when I decided to have a last look and walked all the way down to the end of the platform, peering carefully through all the compartment windows. I found her in the carriage before last, sitting with her head against the window, staring into the distance. I climbed into the carriage and walked up to the door of her compartment. When she heard my steps, she turned and looked at me without surprise, smiling faintly. She stood up and hugged me silently.

‘Welcome back,’ I said.

Cristina’s only baggage was a small suitcase. I gave her my hand and we went down to the platform, which by now was deserted. We walked all the way to the main foyer without exchanging a word. When we reached the exit we stopped. It was raining hard and the line of taxis that had been there when I arrived had vanished.

‘I don’t want to return to Villa Helius tonight, David. Not yet.’

‘You can stay at my house if you like, or we can find you a room in a hotel.’

‘I don’t want to be alone.’

‘Let’s go home. If there’s one thing I have it’s too many bedrooms.’

I sighted a porter who had put his head out to look at the storm and was holding an impressive-looking umbrella. I went up to him and offered to buy it for five times its real value. He gave it to me wreathed in an obliging smile.

Protected by that umbrella we ventured out into the deluge and headed towards the tower house, at which we arrived completely drenched ten minutes later, thanks to the gusts of wind and the puddles. The storm had caused a power cut; the streets were buried in a liquid darkness speckled here and there with the light cast by oil lamps or candles from balconies and doors. I had no doubt that the marvellous electrical system in my house must have been one of the first to succumb. We had to fumble our way up the stairs and when we opened the front door of the apartment, a breath of lightning emphasised its gloomiest and most inhospitable aspect.

‘If you’ve changed your mind and you’d rather we looked for a hotel…’

‘No, it’s fine. Don’t worry.’

I left Cristina’s suitcase in the hall and went to the kitchen in search of a box of assorted candles I kept in the larder. I started to light them, one by one, fixing them on plates, and in tumblers and glasses. Cristina watched me from the door.

‘It will only take a minute,’ I assured her. ‘I have a lot of practice.’

I began to distribute the candles around the rooms, along the corridor and in various corners, until the whole house was enveloped in a flickering twilight of pale gold.

‘It looks like a cathedral,’ Cristina said.

I took her to one of the rooms that I didn’t use but kept clean and tidy because of the few times Vidal, too drunk to return to his mansion, had stayed the night.

‘I’ll bring you some clean towels. If you don’t have anything to change into, I can offer you a wide selection of dreadful belle époque clothes, which the former owners left in the wardrobes.’

My clumsy attempt at humour barely drew a smile from her, and she simply nodded. I left her sitting on the bed while I rushed off to fetch the towels. When I returned she was still sitting there, motionless. I left the towels next to her on the bed and brought over a couple of candles that I’d placed by the door, to give her a bit more light.

‘Thanks,’ she murmured.

‘While you change I’ll go and prepare some hot soup for you.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘It will do you good, all the same. If you need anything, let me know.’

I left her alone and went off to my room to remove my sodden shoes. I put water on to boil and sat waiting in the gallery. The rain was still crashing down, angrily machine-gunning the large windows; it poured through the gutters up in the tower and funnelled along the flat roof, sounding like footsteps on the ceiling. Further out, the Ribera quarter was plunged into almost total darkness.

After a while the door of Cristina’s room opened and I heard her approaching. She was wearing a white dressing gown and had thrown an ugly woollen shawl over her shoulders.

‘I’ve borrowed this from one of the wardrobes,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

‘You can keep it if you like.’

She sat in one of the armchairs and glanced round the room, stopping to look at a pile of paper on the table. She looked at me and I nodded.

‘I finished it a few days ago,’ I said.

‘And yours?’

I thought of both manuscripts as mine, but I just nodded again.

‘May I?’ she asked, taking a page and bringing it nearer the candlelight.

‘Of course.’

I watched her read, a thin smile on her lips.

‘Pedro will never believe he’s written this,’ she said.

‘Trust me,’ I replied.

Cristina put the sheet back on the pile and looked at me for a long time.

‘I’ve missed you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to, but I have.’

‘Me too.’

‘Some days, before going to the sanatorium, I’d walk to the station and sit on the platform to wait for the train coming from Barcelona, hoping you might be on it.’

I swallowed hard.

‘I thought you didn’t want to see me,’ I said.

‘That’s what I thought, too. My father often asked after you, you know? He asked me to look after you.’

‘Your father was a good man,’ I said. ‘A good friend.’

Cristina nodded and smiled, but I could see that her eyes were filling with tears.

‘In the end he couldn’t remember anything. There were days when he confused me with my mother and would ask me to forgive him for the years he spent in prison. Then weeks would go by when he hardly seemed to notice I was there. Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn’t go away.’

‘I’m sorry, Cristina.’

‘In the last few days I thought he was better. He was beginning to remember things. I had brought with me one of his albums and I started to show him the photographs again, pointing out who was who. There is one very old picture, taken in Villa Helius, in which you and he are both sitting in the motor car. You’re at the steering wheel and my father is teaching you how to drive. You’re both laughing. Do you want to see it?’

I hesitated, but didn’t dare break that moment.

‘Of course…’

Cristina went to look for the album in her suitcase and returned with a small book bound in leather. She sat next to me and started turning the pages, which were filled with old snapshots, cuttings and postcards. Manuel, like my father, had barely learned to read and write and his memories were mostly made up of images.

‘Look, here you are.’

I looked at the photograph and vividly recalled the summer day when Manuel had let me climb into the first car Vidal ever bought and had taught me the basics of driving. Then we had taken the car out along Calle Panamá and, doing about five kilometres per hour – a dizzying speed to me at the time – had driven as far as Avenida Pearson, returning with me at the wheel.

‘You’re an ace driver!’ Manuel had concluded. ‘If you’re ever stuck with your stories, you could consider a future in racing.’

I smiled, remembering that moment which I thought I had lost. Cristina handed me the album.

‘Keep it. My father would have liked you to have it.’

‘It’s yours, Cristina. I can’t accept it.’

‘I would rather you kept it.’

‘It’s in storage then, until you want to come and collect it.’

I started to turn the pages, revisiting faces I remembered and gazing at others I had never seen. There was the wedding photograph of Manuel Sagnier and his wife Marta, whom Cristina resembled a great deal, studio portraits of Cristina’s uncles and grandparents, a picture of a street in the Raval quarter with a procession going by, another of the San Sebastián bathing area on La Barceloneta beach. Manuel had collected old postcards of Barcelona and newspaper cuttings with photos of a very young Vidal – one of him posing by the doors of the Hotel Florida at the top of Mount Tibidabo, and another where he stood arm in arm with a staggering beauty in the halls of La Rabasada casino.

‘Your father worshipped Don Pedro.’

‘He always said we owed everything to him,’ Cristina answered.

I continued to travel through poor Manuel’s memories until I came to a page with a photograph that didn’t seem to fit in with the rest. It was a picture of a girl of about eight or nine, walking along a small wooden jetty that stretched out into a sheet of luminous sea. She was holding the hand of an adult, a man dressed in a white suit, who was partly cut off by the frame. At the end of the jetty you could make out a small sailing boat and an endless horizon on which the sun was setting. The girl, who was standing with her back to the camera, was Cristina.

‘This is my favourite,’ murmured Cristina.

‘Where was it taken?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t remember that place or that day. I’m not even sure whether that man is my father. It’s as if the moment never existed. I found the picture years ago in my father’s album and I’ve never known what it means. It seems to be trying to say something to me.’

I went on turning the pages while Cristina told me who each person was.

‘Look, this is me when I was fourteen.’

‘I know.’

Cristina looked at me sadly.

‘I didn’t realise, did I?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘You’ll never be able to forgive me.’

I preferred to go on turning the pages than to look into her eyes.

‘There’s nothing to forgive.’

‘Look at me, David.’

I closed the album and did as she asked.

‘It’s a lie,’ she said. ‘I did realise. I realised every day, but I thought I had no right.’

‘Why?’

‘Because our lives don’t belong to us. Not mine, not my father’s, not yours…’

‘Everything belongs to Vidal,’ I said bitterly.

Slowly, she took my hand and brought it to her lips.

‘Not today,’ she murmured.

I knew I was going to lose her as soon as the night was over, and the pain and loneliness that were gnawing at her went away. I knew she was right, not because what she had said was true, but because, deep down, we both believed it and it would always be the same. We hid like two thieves in one of the rooms without daring to light a single candle, without even daring to speak. I undressed her slowly, going over her skin with my lips, conscious that I would never do so again. Cristina gave herself with anger and abandon, and when we were overcome by exhaustion she fell asleep in my arms without feeling the need to say anything. I fought off sleep, enjoying the warmth of her body and thinking that if the following day death should come to take me away, I would go in peace. I caressed Cristina in the dark, listening to the storm outside as it left the city, knowing that I was going to lose her but also knowing that, for a few minutes, we had belonged to one another, and to nobody else.

When the first breath of dawn touched the windows I opened my eyes and found the bed empty. I went out into the corridor and as far as the gallery. Cristina had left the album and had taken Vidal’s novel. I went through the whole house, which already smelled of her absence, and one by one blew out the candles I had lit the night before.

17

Nine weeks later I was standing in front of number 17, Plaza de Cataluña, where the Catalonia bookshop had opened its doors two years earlier. I was staring in amazement at what seemed to be an endless display filled with copies of a novel called The House of Ashes by Pedro Vidal. I smiled to myself. My mentor had even used the title I had suggested to him years before when I had given him the idea for the story. I decided to go in and ask for a copy. I opened it at random and began to reread passages I knew by heart, for I had only finished going over them a couple of months earlier. I didn’t find a single word in the whole book that I hadn’t put there myself, except for the dedication: ‘For Cristina Sagnier, without whom…’

When I handed the book back to the shop assistant he told me not to think twice about buying it.

‘We received it two days ago and I’ve already read it,’ he added. ‘A great novel. Take my advice and buy it now. I know the papers are praising it to the skies and that’s usually a bad sign, but in this case it’s the exception that proves the rule. If you don’t like it, bring it to me and I’ll give you your money back.’

‘Thanks,’ I replied. Knowing what I knew his recommendation was flattering. ‘But I’ve read it too.’

‘May I interest you in something else?’

‘You don’t have a novel called The Steps of Heaven?’

The bookseller thought for a moment.

‘That’s the one by Martín, isn’t it? I heard a rumour he also wrote City…’

I nodded.

‘I’ve asked for it, but the publishers haven’t sent me any copies. Let me have a good look.’

I followed him to the counter, where he consulted one of his colleagues, who shook his head.

‘It was meant to arrive yesterday, but the publisher says he has no copies. I’m sorry. If you like, I’ll reserve one for you when we get them…’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll come back another day. And thank you very much.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what can have happened. As I say, I should have had it…’

When I left the bookshop I went over to a newspaper stand at the top of the Ramblas. There I bought a copy of every newspaper, from La Vanguardia to The Voice of Industry. I sat down in the Canaletas Café and began delving into their pages. Each paper carried a review of the novel I had written for Vidal, full page, with large headlines and a portrait of Don Pedro looking meditative and mysterious, wearing a new suit and puffing on a pipe with studied disdain. I began to read the headlines and then the first and last paragraphs of the reviews.

The first one I found opened with these words: ‘The House of Ashes is a mature, rich work of great quality which takes its place among the best examples of contemporary literature.’ Another paper informed the reader that ‘nobody in Spain writes better than Pedro Vidal, our most respected and noteworthy novelist’, and a third asserted that this was a ‘superlative novel, of masterful craftsmanship and exquisite quality’. A fourth newspaper summed up the great international success of Vidal and his work: ‘Europe bows to the master’ (although the novel had only come out two days earlier in Spain and, were it to be translated, wouldn’t appear in any other country for at least a year). The piece then went into a long-winded ramble about the great international acclaim and huge respect that Vidal’s name aroused among ‘the most famous international experts’, even though, as far as I knew, none of his other books had been translated into any language, except for a novel whose translation into French he himself had financed and which had only sold a hundred and twenty-six copies. Miracles aside, the consensus of the press was that ‘a classic has been born’, and that the novel marked ‘the return of one of the greats, the best pen of our times: Vidal, undisputed master’.

On the opposite page in some of those papers, covering a far more modest space of one or two columns, I also found a few reviews of a novel by someone called David Martín. The most favourable began like this: ‘A first novel, written in a pedestrian style, The Steps of Heaven, by the novice David Martín, shows the author’s lack of skill and talent from the very first page.’ The last review I could bring myself to read, published in The Voice of Industry, opened succinctly with a short introduction in bold letters that stated: ‘David Martín, a completely unknown author, and writer of classified advertisements, surprises us with what is perhaps this year’s worst literary debut.’

I left the newspapers and the coffee I had ordered on the table and made my way down the Ramblas to the offices of Barrido & Escobillas. On the way I passed four or five bookshops, all of which were decorated with countless copies of Vidal’s novel. In none did I see a single copy of mine. My experience in the Catalonia bookshop was repeated in each place.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what can have happened. It was meant to arrive the day before yesterday, but the publisher says he’s run out of stock and doesn’t know when he’ll be reprinting. If you’d care to leave me your name and a telephone number, I can let you know if it arrives… Have you asked in Catalonia? Well, if they don’t have it…’

The two partners received me with grim, unfriendly expressions: Barrido, behind his desk, stroking a fountain pen, and Escobillas, standing behind him, boring through me with his eyes. Lady Venom, who sat on a chair next to me, was licking her lips with anticipation.

‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am, my dear Martín,’ Barrido was explaining. ‘The problem is as follows. The booksellers place their orders based on the reviews that appear in the papers – don’t ask me why. If you go into the warehouse next door you’ll see that we have three thousand copies of your novel just lying there.’

‘With all the expense and the loss which that entails,’ Escobillas completed in a clearly hostile tone.

‘I stopped by the warehouse before coming here and I saw for myself that there were three hundred copies. The manager told me that’s all they printed.’

‘That’s a lie,’ Escobillas proclaimed.

Barrido interrupted him in a conciliatory tone.

‘Please excuse my partner, Martín. You must understand that we’re just as indignant as you, or even more so, about the disgraceful treatment the press has given a book with which all of us at the firm were so in love. But I beg you to understand that, despite our faith in your talent, our hands are tied because of all the confusion created by the malicious press. However, don’t be disheartened. Rome was not built in a day. We’re doing everything in our power to give your work the promotion its estimable literary merit deserves-’

‘With a three-hundred-copy print run.’

Barrido sighed, hurt by my lack of trust.

‘It’s a five-hundred-copy print run,’ Escobillas specified. ‘The other two hundred were collected by Barceló and Sempere in person yesterday. The rest will go out with our next delivery; they couldn’t go out with this one because there were too many new titles. If you bothered to understand our problems and weren’t so selfish you would recognise this.’

I looked at the three of them in disbelief.

‘Don’t tell me you’re not going to do anything.’

Barrido gave me a mournful look.

‘And what would you have us do, my friend? We have bet everything on you. Try to help us a little.’

‘If only you’d written a book like the one your friend Vidal has written,’ said Escobillas.

‘Now that was one hell of a novel,’ Barrido asserted. ‘Even The Voice of Industry says so.’

‘I knew this was going to happen,’ Escobillas went on. ‘You’re so ungrateful.’

Lady Venom, sitting by my side, was looking at me sadly. I thought she was going to take my hand to comfort me so I quickly moved it away. Barrido gave me one of his unctuous smiles.

‘Maybe it’s all for the best, Martín. Maybe it’s a sign from Our Lord, who, in his infinite wisdom, wants to show you the way back to the work that has given so much happiness to the readers of City of the Damned.’

I burst out laughing. Barrido joined in and, at this signal from him, so did Escobillas and Lady Venom. I watched the choir of hyenas and told myself that, under other circumstances, this would have seemed a moment of delicious irony.

‘That’s better. I like to see you handling this with a positive attitude,’ Barrido proclaimed. ‘What do you say? When will we have the next instalment by Ignatius B. Samson?’

The three of them looked at me expectantly. I cleared my throat so I could speak clearly and smiled at them.

‘You can go screw yourselves.’

18

On leaving, I wandered aimlessly for hours round the streets of Barcelona. I was finding it difficult to breathe, as if something were pressing down on my chest. A cold sweat covered my forehead and hands. When evening fell, not knowing where else to hide, I started to make my way back home. As I passed Sempere & Sons, I saw the bookseller filling his shop window with copies of my novel. It was already late and the shop was closed, but the light was still on. I tried to rush past, but Sempere noticed me and smiled with a sadness that I had never seen on his face before. He went over to the door and opened it.

‘Come in for a while, Martín.’

‘Some other day, Señor Sempere.’

‘Do it for me.’

He took me by the arm and dragged me into the bookshop. I followed him to the back room and he offered me a chair. He poured two glasses of something that looked thicker than tar and motioned to me to down it in one, as he did.

‘I’ve been glancing through Vidal’s book,’ he said.

‘This season’s success story,’ I pointed out.

‘Does he know you’ve written it?’

‘What does it matter?’ I said, shrugging my shoulders.

Sempere looked at me the same way he’d looked at that eight-year-old boy who had come to his house one distant day with a bruised face and broken teeth.

‘Are you all right, Martín?’

‘I’m fine.’

Sempere shook his head, muttering to himself, and got up to take something from one of the shelves. It was a copy of my novel. He handed it to me with a pen and smiled.

‘Please sign it for me.’

When I’d finished writing something for him, Sempere took the book from my hands and placed it carefully in the glass case behind the counter where he displayed first editions that were not for sale. It was his private shrine.

‘You don’t have to do that, Señor Sempere,’ I mumbled.

‘I’m doing it because I want to and because the occasion demands it. This book is a piece of your heart, Martín. And it is also a piece of my heart, for the small part I played in it. I’ll place you between Le Père Goriot and L’Éducation Sentimentale.’

‘That’s a sacrilege.’

‘Nonsense. It’s one of the best books I’ve sold in the last ten years, and I’ve sold a lot,’ old Sempere said.

Sempere’s kind words could only scratch the surface of the cold, impenetrable calm that was beginning to invade me. I ambled back to my house, in no hurry.

When I walked into the tower house I poured myself a glass of water. As I drank it in the kitchen, in the dark, I burst out laughing.

The following morning I received two courtesy calls. The first one was from Pep, Vidal’s new chauffeur. He was bringing a message from his boss, summoning me to a lunch at La Maison Dorée – doubtless the celebration he had promised me some time ago. Pep seemed a little stiff and anxious to leave as soon as possible. The air of complicity he’d once had with me had evaporated. He wouldn’t come in, preferring to wait on the landing. Without looking straight at me, he handed me Vidal’s written message, and as soon as I told him I would go to the lunch, he left without saying goodbye.

The second visit, half an hour later, brought my two publishers to my door, accompanied by a forbidding-looking gentleman with piercing eyes who identified himself as a lawyer. The formidable trio arrived displaying a mixture of mourning and belligerence, leaving me in no doubt as to the purpose of the occasion. I invited them into the gallery, where they proceeded to sit down on the sofa, lined up from left to right in descending order of height.

‘May I offer you anything? A small glass of cyanide?’

I was not expecting a smile and I didn’t get one. After a brief preamble from Barrido concerning the terrible losses that the fiasco associated with the failure of The Steps of Heaven was going to cause the publishing house, the lawyer went on to give a brief exposition which, in plain language, said that if I didn’t return to my work in the guise of Ignatius B. Samson and hand in a manuscript for the City of the Damned series within a month and a half, they would proceed to sue me for breach of contract, damages and five or six other legal terms that escaped me because by then I wasn’t paying attention. It was not all bad news. Despite the aggravations caused by my behaviour, Barrido and Escobillas had found a pearl of generosity in their hearts with which to smooth away our differences and establish a new alliance, a friendship, which would benefit both sides.

‘If you want, you can buy all the copies of The Steps of Heaven that haven’t been distributed at a special rate of 75 per cent of the cover price, since there is clearly no demand for the title and it will be impossible for us to include it in our next delivery,’ Escobillas explained.

‘Why don’t you give me back my rights? After all, you didn’t pay a penny for the book and you’re not planning on trying to sell a single copy.’

‘We can’t do that, dear friend,’ Barrido pointed out. ‘Even if no advance materialised in front of you personally, the edition has required a huge outlay and the agreement you signed with us was for twenty years, automatically renewable under the same terms if our firm decides to exercise its rights. You have to understand that we are also entitled to something. The author can’t get everything.’

When he had finished his speech I invited the gentlemen to make their way to the exit, either willingly or with the help of a kick – they could choose. Before I slammed the door in their faces, Escobillas was good enough to cast me one of his evil-eyed looks.

‘We demand a reply within a week, or that will be the end of you,’ he muttered.

‘In a week you and that idiot partner of yours will be dead,’ I replied calmly, without quite knowing why I’d uttered those words.

I spent the rest of the morning staring at the walls, until the bells of Santa María reminded me that it would soon be time for my meeting with Pedro Vidal.

He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist, who was playing with velvet fingers a piece by Granados. When he saw me, he stood up and held out his hand.

‘Congratulations,’ I said

Vidal smiled, waiting for me to sit down before sitting down himself. We let a minute of silence go by, cocooned by the music and the glances of the distinguished people who greeted Vidal from afar or came up to the table to congratulate him on his success, which was the talk of the town.

‘David, you can’t imagine how sorry I am about what has happened,’ he began.

‘Don’t be sorry, enjoy it.’

‘Do you think this means anything to me? The flattery of a few poor devils? My greatest joy would have been to see you succeed.’

‘I’m sorry I’ve let you down once again, Don Pedro.’

Vidal sighed.

‘David, it’s not my fault if they’ve gone for you. It’s your fault. You were crying out for it. You’re quite old enough to know how these things work.’

‘You tell me.’

Vidal clicked his tongue, as if my naivety offended him.

‘What did you expect? You’re not one of them. You never will be. You haven’t wanted to be, and you think they’re going to forgive you. You lock yourself up in that great rambling house and you think you can survive without joining the church choir and putting on the uniform. Well you’re wrong, David. You’ve always been wrong. This isn’t how you play the game. If you want to play alone, pack your bags and go somewhere where you can be in charge of your own destiny, if such a place exists. But if you stay here, you’d better join some parish or other – any one will do. It’s that simple.’

‘Is that what you do, Don Pedro? Join the parish?’

‘I don’t have to, David. I feed them. That’s another thing you’ve never understood.’

‘You’d be surprised at how quickly I’m learning. But don’t worry, the reviews are the least of it. For better or for worse, tomorrow nobody will remember them, neither mine nor yours.’

‘What’s the problem, then?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Is it those two sons-of-bitches? Barrido and the corpse-robber?’

‘Forget it, Don Pedro. As you say, it’s my fault. Nobody else’s.’

The head waiter came over to the table with an enquiring look. I hadn’t laid eyes on the menu and wasn’t going to.

‘The usual, for both of us,’ Vidal told him.

The head waiter left with a bow. Vidal was observing me as if I were a dangerous animal locked in a cage.

‘Cristina was unable to come,’ he said. ‘I brought this, so you could sign it for her.’

He put on the table a copy of The Steps of Heaven wrapped in purple paper with the Sempere & Sons stamp on it, and pushed it towards me. I made no move to pick it up. Vidal had gone pale. After his forceful remarks and his defensive tone, his manner seemed to have changed. Here comes the final thrust, I thought.

‘Tell me once and for all whatever it is you want to say, Don Pedro. I won’t bite.’

Vidal downed his wine in one gulp.

‘There are two things I’ve been wanting to tell you. You’re not going to like them.’

‘I’m beginning to get used to that.’

‘One is to do with your father.’

The bitter smile left my lips.

‘I’ve wanted to tell you for years, but I thought it wouldn’t do you any good. You’re going to think I didn’t tell you out of cowardice, but I swear, I swear on anything you hold sacred, that-’

‘That what?’ I cut in.

Vidal sighed.

‘The night your father died-’

‘The night he was murdered,’ I corrected him icily.

‘It was a mistake. Your father’s death was a mistake.’

I looked at him, confused.

‘Those men were not out to get him. They made a mistake.’

I recalled the look in the three gunmen’s eyes, in the fog, the smell of gunpowder and my father’s dark blood pouring through my hands.

‘The person they wanted to kill was me,’ said Vidal almost inaudibly. ‘An old partner of my father’s discovered that his wife and I…’

I closed my eyes and listened to a morbid laughter rising up inside me. My father had been riddled with bullets because of one of the great Pedro Vidal’s bits of skirt.

‘Please say something,’ Vidal pleaded.

I opened my eyes.

‘What is the second thing you were going to tell me?’

I’d never seen Vidal look so frightened. It suited him.

‘I’ve asked Cristina to marry me.’

A long silence.

‘She said yes.’

Vidal looked down. One of the waiters came over with the starters. He left them on the table, wishing us bon appétit. Vidal did not dare look at me again. The starters were getting cold. After a while I took the copy of The Steps of Heaven and left.

That afternoon, after leaving La Maison Dorée, I found myself making my way down the Ramblas, carrying the copy of The Steps of Heaven. As I drew closer to the corner with Calle del Carmen my hands began to shake. I stopped by the window of the Bagués jewellery shop, pretending to be looking at some gold lockets in the shape of fairies and flowers, dotted with rubies. The baroque and ornate facade of El Indio was just a few metres away; anyone would have thought it was a grand bazaar full of wonders and extraordinary objects, not just a shop selling fabrics and linen. I approached the store slowly and stepped into the entrance hall that led to the main door. I knew she wouldn’t recognise me, that I might not recognise her, but even so I stood there for about five minutes before daring to go in. When I did, my heart was beating hard and my hands were sweating.

The walls were lined with shelves full of large rolls of fabric of all types. Shop assistants, armed with tape measures and special scissors tied to their belts, spread the beautiful textiles on the tables and displayed them as if they were precious jewels to well-bred ladies, who were accompanied by their maids and seamstresses.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

The words came from a heavily built man with a high-pitched voice, dressed in a flannel suit that looked as if it was about to burst at the seams and fill the shop with floating shreds of cloth. He observed me with a condescending air and a smile midway between forced and hostile.

‘No,’ I mumbled.

Then I saw her. My mother was coming down a stepladder holding a handful of remnants. She wore a white blouse and I recognised her instantly. Her figure had grown a little fuller and her face, less well-chiselled than it used to be, had that slightly defeated expression that comes with routine and disappointment. The shop assistant was annoyed and kept talking to me, but I hardly heard his voice. I only saw her drawing closer, then walking past me. She looked at me for a second, and when she saw that I was watching her, she smiled meekly, the way one smiles at a customer or at one’s boss, and then continued with her work. I had such a lump in my throat that I almost wasn’t able to open my mouth to silence the assistant and I hurried off towards the exit, my eyes full of tears. Once I was outside I crossed over the street and went into a café. I sat at a table by the window from which I could see the door of El Indio, and I waited.

Almost an hour and a half had gone by when I saw the shop assistant who had tried to serve me come out and lower the entrance shutter. Soon afterwards the lights started to go out and some of the staff emerged. I got up and went outside. A boy of about ten was sitting by the entrance to the next-door building, looking at me. I beckoned him to come closer, and when he did so, I showed him a coin. He gave me a huge smile – I noticed he was missing a number of teeth.

‘See this packet? I want you to give it to a lady who is about to come out right now. Tell her that a gentleman asked you to give it to her, but don’t tell her it was me. Understood?’

The boy nodded. I gave him the coin and the book.

‘Now we’ll wait.’

We didn’t have to wait long. Three minutes later I saw her coming out. She was heading for the Ramblas.

‘It’s that lady, see?’

My mother stopped for a moment by the portico of the church of Belén and I made a sign to the boy, who ran after her. I watched the scene from a short distance away, but could not hear her words. The boy handed her the packet and she gave it a puzzled look, not sure whether to accept it or not. The boy insisted and finally she took the parcel in her hands and watched the boy run away. Disconcerted, she turned to right and left, searching with her eyes. She weighed up the packet, examining the purple wrapping paper. Finally curiosity got the better of her and she opened it.

I watched her take the book out. She held it with both hands, looking at the cover, then turning it over to examine the back. I could hardly breathe and wanted to go up to her and say something, but couldn’t. I stood there, only a few metres away from my mother, spying on her without her being aware of my presence, until she set off again, clutching the book, walking towards Colón. As she passed the Palace of La Virreina she went over to a waste bin and threw the book inside. I watched as she headed down the Ramblas until she was lost among the crowd, as if she had never been there at all.

19

Sempere was alone in the bookshop, gluing down the spine of a copy of Fortunata and Jacinta that was coming apart. When he looked up, he saw me on the other side of the door. In just a few seconds he realised the state I was in and signalled to me to come in. As soon as I was inside, he offered me a chair.

‘You don’t look well, Martín. You should go and see a doctor. If you’re scared I’ll come with you. Physicians make my flesh crawl too, with their white gowns and those sharp things in their hands, but sometimes you’ve got to go through with it.’

‘It’s just a headache, Señor Sempere. It’s already getting better.’

Sempere poured me a glass of Vichy water.

‘Here. This cures everything, except for stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.’

I smiled weakly at Sempere’s joke, then drank down the water and sighed. I felt a wave of nausea and an intense pressure throbbed behind my left eye. For a moment I thought I was going to collapse and I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath, praying I wouldn’t drop dead right there. Destiny couldn’t have such a perverse sense of humour as to guide me to Sempere’s bookshop so I that could present him with a corpse, after all he’d done for me. I felt a hand holding my head gently. Sempere. I opened my eyes and saw the bookseller and his son, who had just stepped in, watching me as if they were at a wake.

‘Shall I call the doctor?’ Sempere’s son asked.

‘I’m better, thanks. Much better.’

‘Your way of getting better makes one’s hair stand on end. You look grey.’

‘A bit more water?’

Sempere’s son rushed to fill me another glass.

‘Forgive the performance,’ I said. ‘I can assure you I hadn’t rehearsed it.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense!’

‘It might do you good to eat something sweet. Maybe it was a drop in your sugar levels…’ the boy suggested.

‘Run over to the baker’s on the corner and get him something,’ the bookseller agreed.

When we were left alone, Sempere fixed his eyes on mine.

‘I promise I’ll go to the doctor,’ I said.

A few minutes later the bookseller’s son returned with a paper bag full of the most select assortment of buns in the area. He handed it to me and I chose a brioche which, any other time, would have seemed to me as tempting as a chorus girl’s backside.

‘Bite,’ Sempere ordered.

I ate my brioche obediently, and slowly I began to feel better.

‘He seems to be reviving,’ Sempere’s son observed.

‘What the corner-shop buns can’t cure-’

At that moment we heard the doorbell. A customer had come into the bookshop and, at Sempere’s nod, his son left us to serve him. The bookseller stayed by my side, trying to feel my pulse by pressing on my wrist with his index finger.

‘Señor Sempere, do you remember, many years ago, when you said that if one day I needed to save a book, really save it, I should come to see you?’

Sempere glanced at the rejected book I had rescued from the bin, which I was still holding in my hands.

‘Give me five minutes.’

It was beginning to get dark when we walked down the Ramblas among a crowd who had come out for a stroll on a hot, humid afternoon. There was only the hint of a breeze; balcony doors and windows were wide open, with people leaning out of them, watching the human parade under an amber-coloured sky. Sempere walked quickly and didn’t slow down until we sighted an arcade of shadows at the entrance to Calle Arco del Teatro.

Before crossing over he looked at me solemnly and said: ‘Martín, you mustn’t tell anyone what you’re about to see. Not even Vidal. No one.’

I nodded, intrigued by the bookseller’s air of seriousness and secrecy. I followed him through the narrow street, barely a gap between bleak and dilapidated buildings that seemed to bend over like willows of stone, attempting to close the narrow strip of sky between the rooftops. Soon we reached a large wooden door that looked as if it might be guarding the entrance to an old basilica that had spent a century at the bottom of a lake. Sempere went up the steps to the door and took hold of the brass knocker shaped like a smiling demon’s face. He knocked three times then came down the steps again to wait by my side.

‘You can’t tell anyone what you’re about to see… no one. Not even Vidal. No one.’

Sempere nodded severely. We waited for about two minutes until we heard what sounded like a hundred bolts being unlocked simultaneously. With a deep groan, the large door opened halfway and a middle-aged man with thick grey hair, a face like a vulture and penetrating eyes stuck his head round it.

‘We were doing just fine and now here’s Sempere!’ he snapped. ‘What are you bringing me today? Another aficionado who hasn’t got himself a girlfriend because he’d rather live with his mother?’

Sempere paid no attention to this sarcastic greeting.

‘Martín, this is Isaac Monfort, the keeper of this place. His friendliness has no equal. Do everything he says. Isaac, this is David Martín, a good friend, a writer and a trustworthy person.’

The man called Isaac looked me up and down without much enthusiasm and then exchanged a glance with Sempere.

‘A writer is never trustworthy. Let’s see, has Sempere explained the rules to you?’

‘Only that I can never tell anyone what I will see here.’

‘That is the first and most important rule. If you don’t keep it, I personally will wring your neck. Do you get the idea?’

‘One hundred per cent.’

‘Come on, then,’ said Isaac, motioning me to come in.

‘I’ll say goodbye now, Martín. You’ll find a safe place here.’

I realised that Sempere was referring to the book, not to me. He hugged me and then disappeared into the night. I stepped inside and Isaac pulled a lever on the back of the door. A thousand mechanisms, knotted together in a web of rails and pulleys, sealed it up. Isaac took a lamp from the floor and raised it to my face.

‘You don’t look well,’ he pronounced.

‘Indigestion,’ I replied.

‘From what?’

‘Reality.’

‘Join the queue.’

We walked down a long corridor, and on either side, through the shadows, I thought I could make out frescoes and marble staircases. We advanced further into the palatial building and shortly there appeared, in front of us, what looked like the entrance to a large hall.

‘What have you got there?’ Isaac asked.

‘The Steps of Heaven. A novel.’

‘What a tacky title. Don’t tell me you’re the author.’

‘Who, me?’

Isaac sighed, shaking his head and mumbling to himself.

‘And what else have you written?’

‘City of the Damned, volumes one to twenty-seven, among other things.’

Isaac turned round and smiled with satisfaction.

‘Ignatius B. Samson?’

‘May he rest in peace, and at your service.’

At that point, the mysterious keeper stopped and left the lamp resting on what looked like a balustrade rising in front of a large vault. I looked up and was spellbound. There before me stood a colossal labyrinth of bridges, passages and shelves full of hundreds of thousands of books, forming a gigantic library of seemingly impossible perspectives. Tunnels zigzagged through the immense structure, which seemed to rise in a spiral towards a large glass dome, curtains of light and darkness filtering through it. Here and there I could see isolated figures walking along footbridges, up stairs, or carefully examining the contents of the passageways of that cathedral of books and words. I couldn’t believe my eyes and I looked at Isaac Monfort in astonishment. He was smiling like an old fox enjoying his favourite game.

‘Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.’

20

I followed the keeper to the foot of the large nave that housed the labyrinth. The floor we were stepping over was sewn with tombstones, their inscriptions, crosses and faces dissolving into the stone. The keeper stopped and lowered the gas lamp so that the light slid over some of the pieces of the macabre puzzle.

‘The remains of an old necropolis,’ he explained. ‘But don’t let that give you any ideas about dropping dead here.’

We continued towards an area just before the central structure that seemed to form a kind of threshold. In the meantime Isaac was rattling off the rules and duties, fixing his gaze on me from time to time, while I tried to soothe him with docile assent.

‘Article one: the first time somebody comes here he has the right to choose a book, whichever one he likes, from all the books there are in this place. Article two: upon adopting a book you undertake to protect it and do all you can to ensure it is never lost. For life. Any questions so far?’

I looked up towards the immensity of the labyrinth.

‘How does one choose a single book among so many?’

Isaac shrugged his shoulders.

‘Some like to believe it’s the book that chooses the person… destiny, in other words. What you see here is the sum of centuries of books that have been lost and forgotten, books condemned to be destroyed and silenced forever, books that preserve the memory and soul of times and marvels that no one remembers any more. None of us, not even the eldest, knows exactly when it was created or by whom. It’s probably as old as the city itself, and has been growing with it, in its shadow. We know the building was erected using the remains of palaces, churches, prisons and hospitals that may once have stood here. The origin of the main structure goes back to the beginning of the eighteenth century and has not stopped evolving since then. Before that, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books was hidden under the tunnels of the medieval town. Some say that, during the time of the Inquisition, people who were learned and had free minds would hide forbidden books in sarcophagi, or bury them in ossuaries all over the city to protect them, trusting that future generations would dig them up. In the middle of the last century a long tunnel was discovered leading from the bowels of the labyrinth to the basement of an old library that nowadays is sealed off, hidden in the ruins of an old synagogue in the Jewish quarter. When the last of the old city walls came down, there was a landslide and the tunnel was flooded with water from an underground stream that for centuries has run beneath what is now the Ramblas. It’s inaccessible at present, but we imagine that for a long time the tunnel was one of the main entrance routes to this place. Most of the structure you can see was developed during the nineteenth century. Only about a hundred people know about it and I hope Sempere hasn’t made a mistake by including you among them…’

I shook my head vigorously, but Isaac was looking at me with scepticism.

‘Article three: you can bury your own book wherever you like.’

‘What if I get lost?’

‘An additional clause, from my own stable: try not to get lost.’

‘Has anyone ever got lost?’

Isaac snorted.

‘When I started here years ago there was a story doing the rounds about Darío Alberti de Cymerman. I don’t suppose Sempere has told you this, of course…’

‘Cymerman? The historian?’

‘No, the seal tamer. How many Darío Alberti de Cymermans do you know? What happened is that in the winter of 1889 Cymerman went into the labyrinth and disappeared inside it for a whole week. He was found in one of the tunnels, half dead with fright. He had walled himself up behind a few rows of holy texts so he couldn’t be seen.’

‘Seen by whom?’

Isaac looked at me for a long while.

‘By the man in black. Are you sure Sempere hasn’t told you anything about this?’

‘I’m sure he hasn’t.’

Isaac lowered his voice, adopting a conspiratorial tone.

‘Over the years, some members have occasionally seen the man in black in the tunnels of the labyrinth. They all describe him differently. Some even swear they have spoken to him. There was a time when it was rumoured that the man in black was the ghost of an accursed author whom one of the members had betrayed after taking one of his books from here and not keeping the promise to protect it. The book was lost forever and the deceased author wanders eternally along the passages, seeking revenge – well, you know, the sort of Henry James effect people like so much.’

‘You’re not saying you believe the rumours.’

‘Of course not. I have another theory. The Cymerman theory.’

‘Which is…? ’

‘That the man in black is the master of this place, the father of all secret and forbidden knowledge, of wisdom and memory, the bringer of light to storytellers and writers since time immemorial… He is our guardian angel, the angel of lies and of the night.’

‘You’re pulling my leg.’

‘Every labyrinth has its Minotaur,’ Isaac suggested. He smiled mysteriously and pointed towards the entrance. ‘It’s all yours.’

I set off along a footbridge then slowly entered a long corridor of books that formed a rising curve. When I reached the end of the curve the tunnel divided into four passages radiating out from a small circle from which a spiral staircase rose, vanishing upwards into the heights. I climbed the steps until I reached a landing that led into three different tunnels. I chose one of them, the one I thought would lead to the heart of the building, and entered. As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows. I wandered aimlessly for almost half an hour until I reached a sort of closed chamber with a table and chair. The walls were made of books and seemed quite solid except for a small gap that looked as if someone had removed a book from it. I decided that this would be the new home for The Steps of Heaven. I looked at the cover for the last time and reread the first paragraph, imagining the moment when, many years after I was dead and forgotten, someone, if fortune had it, would go down that same route and reach that room to find an unknown book into which I had poured everything I had. I placed it there, feeling that I was the one being left on the shelf. It was then that I felt the presence behind me, and turned to find the man in black, his eyes fixed steadily on mine.

21

At first I didn’t recognise my own eyes in the mirror, one of the many that formed a chain of muted light along the corridors of the labyrinth. What I saw in the reflection was my face and my skin, but the eyes were those of a stranger. Murky, dark and full of malice. I looked away and felt the nausea returning. I sat on the chair by the table and took a deep breath. I imagined that even Doctor Trías might be amused at the thought that the tenant lodged in my brain – the tumorous growth as he liked to call it – had decided to deal me the final blow in that place, thereby granting me the honour of being the first permanent citizen of the Cemetery of Forgotten Novelists, buried in the company of his last and most ill-fated work, the one that had taken him to the grave. Someone would find me there in ten months, or ten years, or perhaps never. A grand finale worthy of City of the Damned.

I think I was saved by my bitter laughter. It cleared my head and reminded me of where I was and what I’d come to do. I was about to stand up again when I saw it. It was a rough-looking volume, dark, with no visible title on the spine. It lay on top of a pile of four other books at the end of the table. I picked it up. The covers were bound in what looked like leather, some sort of tanned hide, darkened as a result of much handling rather than from dye. The words of the title, which seemed to have been branded onto the cover, were blurred, but on the fourth page the same title could be clearly read:

Lux Aeterna

D. M.

I imagined that the initials, which coincided with mine, were those of the author, but there was no other indication in the book to confirm this. I turned a few pages quickly and recognised at least five different languages alternating through the text. Spanish, German, Latin, French and Hebrew. Reading a paragraph at random, it reminded me of a prayer in the traditional liturgy that I couldn’t quite remember. I wondered whether the notebook was perhaps some sort of missal or prayer book. The text was punctuated with numerals and verses, with the first words underlined, as if to indicate episodes or thematic divisions. The more I examined it, the more I realised it reminded me of the Gospels and catechisms of my school days.

I could have left, chosen any other tome from among the hundreds of thousands, and abandoned that place never to return. I almost thought I had done just that, as I walked back through the tunnels and corridors of the labyrinth, until I became aware of the book in my hands, like a parasite stuck to my skin. For a split second the idea crossed my mind that the book had a greater desire to leave the place than I did, that it was somehow guiding my steps. After a few detours, in the course of which I passed the same copy of the fourth volume of LeFanu’s complete works a couple of times, I found myself, without knowing how, by the spiral staircase, and from there I succeeded in locating the way out of the labyrinth. I had imagined Isaac would be waiting for me by the entrance, but there was no sign of him, although I was certain that somebody was observing me from the shadows. The large vault of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books was engulfed in a deep silence.

‘Isaac?’ I called out.

The echo of my voice trailed off into the shadows. I waited in vain for a few seconds and then made my way towards the exit. The blue mist that filtered down from the dome began to fade until the darkness around me was almost absolute. A few steps further on I made out a light flickering at the end of the gallery and realised that the keeper had left his lamp at the foot of the door. I turned to scan the dark gallery one last time, then pulled the handle that kick-started the mechanism of rails and pulleys. One by one, the bolts were released and the door yielded a few centimetres. I pushed it just enough to get through and stepped outside. A few seconds later the door began to close again, sealing itself with a sonorous echo.

22

As I walked away from that place I felt its magic leaving me and the nausea and pain took over once more. Twice I fell flat on my face, first in the Ramblas and the second time when I was trying to cross Vía Layetana, where a boy lifted me up and saved me from being run over by a tram. It was with great difficulty that I managed to reach my front door. The house had been closed all day and the heat – that humid, poisonous heat that seemed to suffocate the town a little more every day – floated on the air like dusty light. I went up to the study in the tower and opened the windows wide. Only the faintest of breezes blew and the sky was bruised by black clouds that moved in slow circles over Barcelona. I left the book on my desk and told myself there would be time enough to examine it in detail. Or perhaps not. Perhaps time was already coming to an end for me. It didn’t seem to matter much any more.

At that point I could barely stand and needed to lie down in the dark. I salvaged one of the bottles of codeine pills from the drawer and swallowed two or three in one gulp. I kept the bottle in my pocket and made my way down the stairs, not quite sure whether I would be able to get to my room in one piece. When I reached the corridor I thought I noticed a flickering along the line of light coming from beneath the main door. I walked slowly to the entrance, leaning on the walls.

‘Who’s there?’ I asked.

There was no reply, no sound at all. I hesitated for a moment, then opened the door and stepped out onto the landing. I leaned over to look down the stairs that descended in a spiral, merging into darkness. There was nobody there. When I turned back to face the door I noticed that the small lamp on the landing was blinking. I went back into the house and turned the key to lock the door, something I often forgot to do. Then I saw it. A cream-coloured envelope with a serrated edge. Someone had slipped it under the door. I knelt down to pick it up. The paper was thick, porous. The envelope was sealed and had my name on it. The emblem on the wax was in the shape of an angel with its wings outspread.

I opened it.

Dear Señor Martín,

I’m going to spend some time in the city and it would give me great pleasure to meet up with you and perhaps take the opportunity to revisit the subject of my proposal. I’d be very grateful if, unless you’re otherwise engaged, you would care to join me for dinner this coming Friday 13th at 10 o’clock, in a small villa I have rented for my stay in Barcelona. The house is on the corner of Calle Olot and Calle San José de la Montaña, next to the entrance to Güell Park. I trust and hope that you will be able to come.

Your friend,

ANDREAS CORELLI

I let the note fall to the floor and dragged myself to the gallery. There I lay on the sofa, sheltering in the half-light. There were seven days to go before that meeting. I smiled to myself. I didn’t think I was going to live seven more days. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. The constant ringing in my ears seemed more deafening than ever and stabs of white light lit up my mind with every beat of my heart.

You won’t even be able to think about writing.

I opened my eyes again and scanned the bluish shadow that veiled the gallery. Next to me, on the table, lay the old photograph album that Cristina had left behind. I hadn’t found the courage to throw it away, or even touch it. I reached for the album and opened it, turning the pages until I found the image I was looking for. I pulled it off the page and examined it. Cristina, as a child, walking hand in hand with a stranger along the jetty that stretched out into the sea. I pressed the photograph against my chest and let exhaustion overcome me. Slowly, the bitterness and the anger of that day, of those years, faded and a warm darkness wrapped itself around me, full of voices and hands that were waiting for me. I had an overwhelming desire to surrender to it, but something held me back and a dagger of light and pain wrenched me from that pleasant sleep that promised to have no end.

Not yet – the voice whispered – not yet.

I sensed the days were passing because there were times when I awoke and thought I could see sunlight coming through the slats in the shutters. Once or twice I was sure I heard someone knocking on the door and voices calling my name, but after a while they stopped. Hours or days later I got up and put my hands on my face and found blood on my lips. I don’t know whether I went outside or whether I dreamed that I did, but without knowing how I had got there I found myself making my way up Paseo del Borne, towards the cathedral of Santa María del Mar. The streets were deserted beneath a mercury moon. I looked up and thought I saw the ghost of a huge black storm spreading its wings over the city. A gust of white light split the skies and a mantle woven with raindrops cascaded down like a shower of glass daggers. A moment before the first drop touched the ground, time came to a standstill and hundreds of thousands of tears of light were suspended in the air like specks of dust. I knew that someone or something was walking behind me and could feel its breath on the nape of my neck, cold and filled with the stench of rotting flesh and fire. I could feel its fingers, long and pointed, hovering over my skin, and at that moment the young girl who only lived in the picture I held against my chest seemed to approach through the curtain of rain. She took me by the hand and pulled me, leading me back to the tower house, away from that icy presence that had crept along behind me. When I recovered consciousness, the seven days had passed.

Day was breaking on Friday, 13 July.

23

Pedro Vidal and Cristina Sagnier were married that afternoon. The ceremony took place at five o’clock in the chapel of the Monastery of Pedralbes and only a small section of the Vidal clan attended; the most select members of the family, including the father of the groom, were ominously absent. Had there been any gossip, people would have said that the youngest son’s idea of marrying the chauffeur’s daughter had fallen on the heads of the dynasty like a jug of cold water. But there was none. Thanks to a discreet pact of silence, the chroniclers of society had better things to do that afternoon, and not a single publication mentioned the ceremony. There was nobody there to relate how a bevy of Vidal’s ex-lovers had clustered together by the church door, crying in silence like a sisterhood of faded widows still clinging to their last hope. Nobody was there to describe how Cristina had held a bunch of white roses in her hand and worn an ivory-coloured dress that matched her skin, making it seem as if the bride were walking naked up to the altar, with no other adornment than the white veil covering her face and an amber-coloured sky that appeared to be retreating into an eddy of clouds above the tall bell tower.

There was nobody there to recall how she stepped out of the car and how, for an instant, she stopped to look up at the square opposite the church door, until her eyes found the dying man whose hands shook and who was muttering words nobody could hear, words he would take with him to the grave.

‘Damn you. Damn you both.’

Two hours later, sitting in the armchair of my study, I opened the case that had come to me years before and contained the only thing I had left of my father. I pulled out the revolver, which was wrapped in a cloth, and opened the chamber. I inserted six bullets and closed the weapon. I placed the barrel against my temple, drew back the hammer and shut my eyes. At that moment I felt a gust of wind whip against the tower and the study windows burst open, hitting the wall with great force. An icy breeze touched my face, bringing with it the lost breath of great expectations.

24

The taxi slowly made its way up to the outskirts of the Gracia district, towards the solitary, sombre grounds of Güell Park. The hill was dotted with large houses that had seen better days, peering through a grove of trees that swayed in the wind like black water. I spied the large door of the estate high up on the hillside. Three years earlier, when Gaudí died, the heirs of Count Güell had sold the deserted grounds – whose sole inhabitant had been its architect – to the town hall for one peseta. Now forgotten and neglected, the garden of columns and towers looked more like a cursed paradise. I told the driver to stop by the park gates and paid my fare.

‘Are you sure you wish to get out here, sir?’ the driver asked, looking uncertain. ‘If you like, I can wait for you for a few minutes…’

‘It won’t be necessary.’

The murmur of the taxi disappeared down the hill and I was left alone with the echo of the wind among the trees. Dead leaves trailed about the entrance to the park and swirled round my feet. I went up to the gates, which were closed with rusty chains, and scanned the grounds on the other side. Moonlight licked the outline of the dragon that presided over the staircase. A dark shape came slowly down the steps, watching me with eyes that shone like pearls under water. It was a black dog. The animal stopped at the foot of the steps and only then did I realise it was not alone. Two more animals were watching me. One of them had crept through the shadow cast by the guard’s house, which stood at one side of the entrance. The other, the largest of the three, had climbed onto the wall and was looking down at me from barely two metres away, steaming breath pouring out between its bared fangs. I drew away very slowly, without taking my eyes off it and without turning round. Step by step I reached the pavement opposite the entrance. Another of the dogs had scrambled up the wall and was following me with its eyes. I quickly surveyed the ground in search of a stick or a stone to use in self-defence if they decided to attack, but all I could see were dry leaves. I knew that if I looked away and started to run, the animals would chase me and I wouldn’t have got more than twenty metres before they caught me and tore me to pieces. The largest dog advanced a few steps along the wall and I was sure it was going to pounce on me. The third one, the only one I had seen at first and which had probably acted as a decoy, was beginning to climb the lower part of the wall to join the other two. I’m done for, I thought.

At that moment, a flash lit up the wolfish faces of the three animals, and they stopped in their tracks. I looked over my shoulder and saw the mound that rose about fifty metres from the entrance to the park. The lights in the house had been turned on, the only lights on the entire hillside. One of the animals gave a muffled groan and disappeared back into the park. The others followed it a few moments later.

Without thinking twice, I began to walk towards the house. Just as Corelli had pointed out in his invitation, the building stood on the corner of Calle Olot and Calle San José de la Montaña. It was a slender, angular, three-storey structure shaped like a tower, its roof crowned with sharp gables, that looked down like a sentinel over the city with the ghostly park at its feet.

The house was at the top of a steep slope, with steps leading up to the front door. The large windows exhaled golden haloes of light. As I climbed the stone steps I thought I noticed the outline of a figure leaning on one of the balustrades on the second floor, as still as a spider waiting in its web. I climbed the last step and stopped to recover my breath. The main door was ajar and a sheet of light stretched out towards my feet. I approached slowly and stopped on the threshold. A smell of dead flowers emanated from within. I knocked gently on the door and it opened slightly. Before me was an entrance hall and a long corridor leading into the house. I heard a dry, repetitive sound, like that of a shutter banging against a window in the wind; it came from somewhere inside the house and reminded me of a heart beating. Advancing a few steps into the hall I saw a staircase on my left that led to the upper floors. I thought I heard light footsteps, a child’s footsteps, climbing somewhere high above.

‘Good evening?’ I called out.

Before the echo of my voice had lost itself down the corridor, the percussive sound that was beating somewhere in the house stopped. Total silence now fell all around me and an icy draught kissed my cheek.

‘Señor Corelli? It’s Martín. David Martín.’

I got no reply, so I ventured forward. The walls were covered with framed photographs of different sizes. From the poses and the clothes worn by the subjects I assumed they were all at least twenty or thirty years old. At the bottom of each frame was a small silver plaque with the name of the person in the photograph and the year it was taken. I studied the faces that were observing me from another time. Children and old people, ladies and gentlemen. They all bore the same shadow of sadness in their eyes, the same silent cry. They stared at the camera with a longing that chilled my blood.

‘Does photography interest you, Martín, my friend?’ said a voice next to me.

Startled, I turned round. Andreas Corelli was gazing at the photographs next to me with a smile tinged with melancholy. I hadn’t seen or heard him approach, and when he smiled at me I felt a shiver down my spine.

‘I thought you wouldn’t come.’

‘So did I.’

‘Then let me offer you a glass of wine and we’ll drink a toast to our errors.’

I followed him to a large room with wide French windows overlooking the city. Corelli pointed to an armchair and then filled two glasses from a decanter on a table. He handed me a glass and sat on the armchair opposite mine.

I tasted the wine. It was excellent. I almost downed it in one and soon felt the warmth sliding down my throat, calming my nerves. Corelli sniffed at his and watched me with a friendly, relaxed smile.

‘You were right,’ I said.

‘I usually am,’ Corelli replied. ‘It’s a habit that rarely gives me any satisfaction. Sometimes I think that few things would give me more pleasure than being sure I had made a mistake.’

‘That’s easy to resolve. Ask me. I’m always wrong.’

‘No, you’re not wrong. I think you see things as clearly as I do and it doesn’t give you any satisfaction either.’

Listening to him it occurred to me that the only thing that could give me some satisfaction at that precise moment was to set fire to the whole world and burn along with it. As if he’d read my thoughts, Corelli smiled and nodded, baring his teeth.

‘I can help you, my friend.’

To my surprise, I found myself avoiding his eyes, concentrating instead on that small brooch with the silver angel on his lapel.

‘Pretty brooch,’ I said, pointing at it.

‘A family heirloom,’ Corelli replied.

I thought we’d exchanged enough pleasantries to last the whole evening.

‘Señor Corelli, what am I doing here?’

Corelli’s eyes shone the same colour as the wine he was gently swilling in his glass.

‘It’s very simple. You’re here because at last you’ve realised that this is the place you should be. You’re here because I made you an offer a year ago. An offer that at the time you were not ready to accept, but which you have not forgotten. And I’m here because I still think that you’re the person I’m looking for, and that is why I preferred to wait twelve months rather than let you go.’

‘An offer you never got round to explaining in detail.’

‘In fact, the only thing I gave you was the details.’

‘One hundred thousand francs in exchange for working for you for a whole year, writing a book.’

‘Exactly. Many people would think that was the essential information. But not you.’

‘You told me that when you described the sort of book you wanted me to write for you, I’d do it even if you didn’t pay me.’

Corelli nodded.

‘You have a good memory.’

‘I have an excellent memory, Señor Corelli, so much so that I don’t recall having seen, read or heard about any book you’ve published.’

‘Do you doubt my solvency?’

I shook my head, trying not to let him notice the longing and greed that gnawed at my insides. The less interest I showed, the more tempted I felt by the publisher’s promises.

‘I’m simply curious about your motives,’ I pointed out.

‘As you should be.’

‘Anyhow, may I remind you that I have an exclusive contract with Barrido & Escobillas for five more years. The other day I received a very revealing visit from them, and from a litigious-looking lawyer. Still, I suppose it doesn’t really matter, because five years is too long, and if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that I have very little time.’

‘Don’t worry about lawyers. Mine are infinitely more litigious-looking than the ones that couple of pustules use, and they’ve never lost a case. Leave all the legal details and litigation to me.’

From the way he smiled when he uttered those words I thought it best never to have a meeting with the legal advisers for Éditions de la Lumière.

‘I believe you. I suppose that leaves us with the question of what the other details of your offer are – the essential ones.’

‘There’s no simple way of saying this, so I’d better get straight to the point.’

‘Please do.’

Corelli leaned forward and locked his eyes on mine.

‘Martín, I want you to create a religion for me.’

At first I thought I hadn’t heard him properly.

‘What did you say?’

Corelli held his gaze on mine, his eyes unfathomable.

‘I said that I want you to create a religion for me.’

I stared at him for a long moment, thunderstruck.

‘You’re pulling my leg.’

Corelli shook his head, sipping his wine with relish.

‘I want you to bring together all your talent and devote yourself body and soul, for one year, to working on the greatest story you have ever created: a religion.’

I couldn’t help bursting out laughing.

‘You’re out of your mind. Is that your proposal? Is that the book you want me to write?’

Corelli nodded calmly.

‘You’ve got the wrong writer: I don’t know anything about religion.’

‘Don’t worry about that. I do. I’m not looking for a theologian. I’m looking for a narrator. Do you know what a religion is, Martín, my friend?’

‘I can barely remember the Lord’s Prayer.’

‘A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.’

‘Amen,’ I replied.

‘As in literature or in any other act of communication, what confers effectiveness on it is the form and not the content,’ Corelli continued.

‘You’re telling me that a doctrine amounts to a tale.’

‘Everything is a tale, Martín. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated. Don’t tell me you’re not tempted by the idea.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Are you not tempted to create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing themselves to be killed, of sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handing over their soul? What greater challenge for your career than to create a story so powerful that it transcends fiction and becomes a revealed truth?’

We stared at each other for a few seconds.

‘I think you know what my answer is,’ I said at last.

Corelli smiled.

‘I do. But I think you’re the one who doesn’t yet know it.’

‘Thank you for your company, Señor Corelli. And for the wine and the speeches. Very stimulating. Be careful who you throw them at. I hope you find your man, and that the pamphlet is a huge success.’

I stood up and turned to leave.

‘Are you expected somewhere, Martín?’

I didn’t reply, but I stopped.

‘Don’t you feel anger, knowing there could be so many things to live for, with good health and good fortune, and no ties?’ said Corelli behind my back. ‘Don’t you feel anger when these things are being snatched from your hands?’

I turned back slowly.

‘What is a year’s work compared to the possibility of having everything you desire come true? What is a year’s work compared to the promise of a long and fulfilling existence?’

Nothing, I said to myself, despite myself. Nothing.

‘Is that your promise?’

‘You name the price. Do you want to set fire to the whole world and burn with it? Let’s do it together. You fix the price. I’m prepared to give you what you most want.’

‘I don’t know what it is that I want most.’

‘I think you do know.’

The publisher smiled and winked at me. He stood up and went over to a chest of drawers that had a gas lamp resting on it. He opened the first drawer and pulled out a parchment envelope. He handed it to me but I didn’t take it, so he left it on the table that stood between us and sat down again, without saying a word. The envelope was open and inside I could just make out what looked like a few wads of one-hundred franc notes. A fortune.

‘You keep all this money in a drawer and leave the door open?’ I asked.

‘You can count it. If you think it’s not enough, name an amount. As I said, I’m not going to argue with you over money.’

I looked at the small fortune for a long moment, and in the end I shook my head. At least I’d seen it. It was real. The offer, and the vanity he had awoken in me in those moments of misery and despair, were real.

‘I cannot accept it,’ I said.

‘Do you think it’s dirty money?’

‘All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it. But that’s not the problem.’

‘So?’

‘I cannot accept it because I cannot accept your proposal. I couldn’t even do so if I wanted to.’

Corelli considered my words carefully.

‘May I ask why?’

‘Because I’m dying, Señor Corelli. Because I only have a few weeks left to live, perhaps only days. Because I have nothing left to offer.’

Corelli looked down and fell into a deep silence. I heard the wind scratching at the windows and sliding over the house.

‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know,’ I added.

‘I sensed it.’

Corelli remained seated, not looking at me.

‘There are plenty of writers who can write this book for you, Señor Corelli. I am grateful for your offer. More than you can imagine. Goodnight.’

I began to walk away.

‘Let’s say I was able to help you get over your illness,’ he said.

I stopped halfway down the corridor and turned round. Corelli was barely a metre away, staring straight at me. I thought he was a bit taller than when I’d first seen him, there in the corridor, and that his eyes were larger and darker. I could see my reflection in his pupils getting smaller as they dilated.

‘Does my appearance worry you, Martín, my friend?’

I swallowed hard.

‘Yes,’ I confessed.

‘Please come back and sit down. Give me the opportunity to explain some more. What have you got to lose?’

‘Nothing, I suppose.’

He put his hand gently on my arm. His fingers were long and pale.

‘You have nothing to fear from me, Martín. I’m your friend.’

His touch was comforting. I allowed him to guide me back to the sitting room and sat down meekly, like a child waiting for an adult to speak. Corelli knelt down by my armchair and fixed his eyes on mine. He took my hand and pressed it tightly.

‘Do you want to live?’

I wanted to reply but couldn’t find the words. I realised that I had a lump in my throat and my eyes were filling with tears. Until then I had not understood how much I longed to keep on breathing, to keep on opening my eyes every morning and be able to go out into the street, to step on stones and look at the sky, and, above all, to keep on remembering.

I nodded.

‘I’m going to help you, Martín, my friend. All I ask of you is that you trust me. Accept my offer. Let me help you. Let me give you what you most desire. That is my promise.’

I nodded again.

‘I accept.’

Corelli smiled and bent over to kiss me on the cheek. His lips were icy cold.

‘You and I, my friend, are going to do great things together. You’ll see,’ he whispered.

He offered me a handkerchief to dry my tears. I did so without feeling the silent shame of weeping before a stranger, something I had not done since my father died.

‘You’re exhausted, Martín. Stay here for the night. There are plenty of bedrooms in this house. I can assure you that tomorrow you’ll feel better, and that you’ll see things more clearly.’

I shrugged my shoulders, though I realised that Corelli was right. I could barely stand up and all I wanted to do was sleep deeply. I couldn’t even bring myself to get up from the armchair, the most comfortable and most comforting in the universal history of all armchairs.

‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather stay here.’

‘Of course. I’m going to let you rest. Very soon you’ll feel better. I give you my word.’

Corelli went over to the chest of drawers and turned off the gas lamp. The room was submerged in a bluish dusk. My eyelids were pressing down heavily and a sense of intoxication filled my head, but I managed to make out Corelli’s silhouette crossing the room and disappearing into the shadows. I closed my eyes and heard the murmur of the wind behind the windowpanes.

25

I dreamed that the house was slowly sinking. At first, little teardrops of dark water began to appear through the cracks in the tiles, in the walls, in the relief on the ceiling, through the holes of the door locks. It was a cold liquid that crept slowly and heavily, like mercury, and gradually formed a layer covering the floor and climbing up the walls. I felt the water going over my feet, rising fast. I stayed in the armchair, watching as the water level rose to my throat and then, in just a few seconds, reached the ceiling. I felt myself floating and could see pale lights rising and falling behind the windows. There were human figures also suspended in that watery darkness. Trapped in the current as they floated by, they stretched their hands out to me, but I could not help them and the water dragged them away inexorably. Corelli’s one hundred thousand francs flowed around me, undulating like paper fish. I crossed the room to a closed door at the other end. A thread of light shone through the lock. I opened the door and saw that it led to a staircase descending to the deepest part of the house. I went down.

At the bottom of the stairs an oval room opened up, and in its centre I could distinguish a group of figures gathered in a circle. When they became aware of my presence they turned round and I saw that they were dressed in white and wore masks and gloves. Strong white lights burned over what seemed to be an operating table. A man whose face had no features or eyes was arranging the objects on a tray of surgical instruments. One of the figures stretched out his hand to me, inviting me to draw closer. I went over to them and felt that they were taking hold of me, grabbing my head and my body and lifting me onto the table. The lights were blinding, but I managed to see that all the figures were identical and had the face of Doctor Trías. I laughed to myself. One of the doctors was holding a syringe and injected it into my neck. I didn’t feel the prick, just a pleasant, muzzy sensation of warmth spreading through my body. Two of the doctors placed my head in some holding contraption and proceeded to adjust the crown of screws that held a padded plate at one end. I felt them tying down my arms and legs with straps. I put up no resistance. When my whole body had been immobilised from head to toe, one of the doctors handed a scalpel to another of his clones, who then leaned over me. I felt someone take my hand and hold it. It was a boy who looked at me tenderly and had the same face I had on the day my father was killed.

I saw the blade of the scalpel coming down in the liquid darkness and felt the metal making a cut across my forehead. There was no pain. I could feel something issuing out of the cut and saw a black cloud bleeding slowly from the wound and spreading into the water. The blood rose towards the lights in spirals, like smoke, twisting into ever-changing shapes. I looked at the boy, who was smiling at me and holding my hand tightly. Then I noticed it. Something was moving inside me. Something that, until just a minute ago, had been gripping my mind like pincers. I felt it being dislodged, like a thorn stuck right into the marrow that was being pulled out with pliers. I panicked and wanted to get up, but I was immobilised. The boy kept his eyes on mine and nodded. I thought I was going to faint, or wake up, and then I saw it. I saw it reflected in the lights of the operating theatre. Two black filaments were emerging from the wound, creeping over my skin. It was a black spider the size of a fist. It ran across my face and before it could jump onto the table, one of the surgeons skewered it with a scalpel. He lifted it up so that I could see it. The spider kicked its legs and bled, silhouetted against the light. A white stain covered its carapace suggesting the shape of wings spread open. An angel. After a while the spider’s legs went limp and its body withered. It was still held aloft, and when the boy reached out to touch it, it crumbled into dust. The doctors undid my ties and loosened the contraption that had gripped my skull. With their help I sat up on the table and put my hand on my forehead. The wound was closing. When I looked around me once more, I realised I was alone.

The lights of the operating theatre went out and the room was dark. I went back to the staircase and ascended the steps that led back to the sitting room. The light of dawn was filtering through the water, trapping a thousand floating particles. I was tired. More than I’d ever been in my whole life. I dragged myself to the armchair and let myself fall into it. My body collapsed, and when I was finally at rest on the chair I could see a trail of tiny bubbles beginning to move around the ceiling. A small air chamber was being formed at the top and I realised that the water level was starting to come down. The water, thick and shiny like jelly, gushed out through the cracks in the windows as if the house were a submarine emerging from the deep. I curled up in the armchair, succumbing to a sense of weightlessness and peace which I hoped would never end. I closed my eyes and listened to the murmur of the water around me. I opened them again and saw drops raining down from on high, slowly, like tears caught in mid-flight. I was tired, very tired, and all that I wanted to do was fall into a deep sleep.

I opened my eyes to the intense brightness of a warm noon. Light fell like dust through the French windows. The first thing I noticed was that the hundred thousand francs were still on the table. I stood up and went over to the window. I drew aside the curtain and an arm of blinding light inundated the room. Barcelona was still there, shimmering like a mirage. I realised that the humming in my ears, which only the sounds of the day used to disguise, had disappeared completely. I heard an intense silence, as pure as crystal water, which I didn’t remember ever having experienced before. Then I heard myself laughing. I brought my hands to my head and touched my skin: I felt no pressure whatsoever. I could see clearly and felt as if my five senses had only just awoken. I could even smell the old wood of the coffered ceiling and columns. I looked for a mirror but there wasn’t one in the sitting room. I went out in search of a bathroom or another room where I might find a mirror and be able to see that I hadn’t woken up in a stranger’s body, that the skin I could feel and the bones were my own. All the rooms in the house were locked. I went through the whole floor without being able to open a single door. When I returned to the sitting room I noticed that where I had dreamed there was a door leading to the basement there was only a painting of an angel crouching on a rock that looked out over an endless lake. I went to the stairs that led to the upper floors, but as soon as I’d gone up one flight I stopped. A heavy, impenetrable darkness seemed to reside beyond.

‘Señor Corelli?’ I called out.

My voice was lost as if it had hit something hard, without leaving an echo or trace. I went back to the sitting room and gazed at the money on the table. One hundred thousand francs. I took the money and felt its weight. The paper begged to be stroked. I put it in my pocket and set off again down the passage that led to the exit. The dozens of faces in the portraits were still staring at me with the intensity of a promise. I preferred not to confront their looks and continued walking towards the door, but just as I was nearing the end of the passage I noticed that among the frames there was an empty one, with no inscription or photograph. I became aware of a sweet scent, a scent of parchment, and realised it was coming from my fingers. It was the perfume of money. I opened the main door and stepped out into the daylight. The door closed heavily behind me. I turned round to look at the house, dark and silent, oblivious to the radiant clarity of the day, the blue skies and brilliant sun. I checked my watch. It was after one o’clock. I had slept more than twelve hours in a row on an old armchair, and yet I had never felt better in all my life. I walked down the hill towards the city with a smile on my face, certain that, for the first time in a long while, perhaps for the first time in my whole life, the world was smiling at me.