I didn’t understand anything anymore.
“What do you mean he asked you if he could? How come? Do you know him?”
“We’ve been speaking almost every day since the first time I called from the hospital and he answered the phone.”
Disconcerted, I wondered why, if he was in hiding, Valdemar would have answered a stranger’s phone. The only reasonable explanation was that he must have thought I was calling him from downstairs.
“He gave me a brief account of his situation and asked me not to get angry with you for letting him stay at my place. I told him he could stay as long as he needed.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you had enough on your plate. I phoned my apartment thinking I’d find you there hard at work. But thanks to Valdemar I discovered that you hadn’t made any progress on the book.”
“He told you that?” I was mortified.
“Yes, but he was trying to make excuses for you. He said you were going through a rough patch, even though you were pretending everything was fine. This man knows a lot more than he lets on.”
“Where is he now?”
“How should I know? Yesterday I told him that I was coming home this morning but that he could stay on. Valdemar’s a good fellow. He’d do anything to avoid being a nuisance.”
Serenitas
After Titus’s revelations, I went home determined to keep a level head. In other words, I’d deal with each new calamity as it happened, without too much worrying beforehand.
An article about Mendelssohn in a magazine I subscribed to made me want to listen to Barenboim’s version of Songs without Words again, after days of feeling I couldn’t bear to hear it.
Lying on my couch, I started reading a short essay on the composer, written by someone named Andrés Sánchez Pascual. I thought it was excellent. This is how he defines Mendelssohn’s music:
The pleasure it gives is not facile, trifling or crude, but is a much subtler form of delight, one that is full of melancholy; this feeling may perhaps be most precisely expressed by the Latin word serenitas.
As the first notes of the second gondolier started in the background, I came upon a curious fact about Songs without Words. In 1842, a relative of Mendelssohn’s wife asked him what the purpose of these short pieces was, and he answered by letter:
So much is spoken about music and so little is said. For my part I do not believe that words suffice for such a task, and if they did I would no longer make any music. . . . The thoughts that are expressed to me by the music I love are not too vague to put into words but, on the contrary, too precise.
The Moon’s Damp Cage
Serenitas fell by the wayside when my doorbell rang, this time from the landing. Judging by the racket, it could only have been Titus on the other side, bearing news.
I invited him in. The old man affectionately patted my back, which was most unusual for him. He was carrying a folder with elastic bands around it.
“Does the music bother you?” I asked, turning down the volume.
“What bothers me is that you’re so modest.”
“Why do you say that?”
I sat down on the couch.
Titus also took a seat and said, “A Short Course in Everyday Magic is magnificent. Congratulations. I’ll send it to the publisher tomorrow. I’ll pay you the entire fee and won’t take no for an answer.”
“But . . . what on earth are you talking about? I don’t recall writing more than fifteen pages.”
“Well, by my count it’s a hundred and twenty-eight.” He opened the folder, which was full of printed pages. “Not only are you modest but you’re a liar too, it would appear.”
“Let me see,” I asked, grabbing the folder to make sure he wasn’t pulling my leg.
Quickly flipping through the pages, I was baffled to see that somehow, inexplicably, the work was not only finished but beautifully written. Each one of the seven chapters—including “Love in Lowercase”—was almost twenty pages long and full of inspirational passages. The anthology concluded with a traditional Celtic poem. The last two lines read:
You can call up the spirits of the night,
And cage in a puddle the moon and its light.
Completely nonplussed, I handed it back to him and said, “Pay Valdemar, if you can find him. This is his work, of course.”
—
I spent the rest of the afternoon telling Titus about how I’d met Valdemar at the bar, his accident in Patagonia, the mysterious people on the platform, his early-morning arrival at my place, and our late-night conversations.
Titus listened, nodding his head but without paying much attention, as if he already knew most of the details. However, when I got to our drinking session and the empty backpack and the dream from which he, Titus, had awakened me, he suddenly became interested.
“So in your dream Valdemar was holding the manuscript in his hand when he was following the cat?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at Mishima, who was happily rolling around on the rug. “Strange, isn’t it?”
Titus burst out laughing. “What’s strange is how thick you are. I’m surprised you can’t understand such a clear message. In your dream, the cat was showing you the hiding place of Valdemar’s manuscript. That’s all that’s left of him and his research now. So it’s our duty to find it and keep it safe.”
“Hiding place!” I repeated. “That’s it! Every time Mishima’s had to have an injection he disappears into a hiding place that I’ve never been able to find.”
“If there’s room for a cat, there’s room for a—” Titus began.
“Manuscript!” I finished. “The problem is I’ve never been able to find out where he goes.”
“Let him show us himself,” Titus suggested. “You only need to phone the vet. I’ll follow him.”
It was such a simple, obvious idea that it was hard to believe it would actually work, but I did what he suggested. I picked up the phone and dialed the number of the clinic. A few seconds later, I heard Meritxell’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Good afternoon. I have a cat named Mishima, and he’s due for vaccination,” I said, emphasizing the words “Mishima” and “vaccination.”
From the corner of my eye, I could see Mishima get up, stretch, and sneak off down the hallway.
“Is this some kind of joke or have you been spending too much time with that neighbor of yours?”
“I’ll explain later,” I said, as quietly as I could. I hung up and went to join Titus’s expedition.
He was standing next to the door of the closet in which I kept the clothes I wasn’t using. He put his index finger to his lips.
“He’s in there,” he mouthed.
We looked at each other as if waiting for instructions. What now? In the end I decided to open the closet door, which was ajar, to reveal the great mystery.
At first we could see only old jackets and trousers and a dusty shoebox on the top shelf. I removed the box, thinking that Mishima could be hiding inside, but it turned out to be empty. To my surprise, however, it had concealed a hole in the wall.
There he was. Mishima’s eyes were as round as saucers. He was astonished that we’d found his hideout. He would have to find another one now.
I tried to grab him, but he sprang down gracefully and dashed along the hallway. The manuscript was there.
I handed it to Titus, and he received it like a precious gift. Pink with emotion, he said, “Since Valdemar has been living in my apartment, let me keep the manuscript. And I might need the telescope to check a few things.”
“All yours.”
“Come up tonight, if you like, so we can study it together. It might give us a clue as to his whereabouts. There are lots of things that you still don’t know about him.”
The Poet’s Rose
As s
oon as Titus had left, I went to lie down on my bed, hoping that a quick nap might help me digest what had happened.
It was six in the evening and my bedroom was already dark. Mishima was miffed because we’d tricked him—although our victory was only temporary—and didn’t join me this time.
I tried to sleep for an hour, floating between waking and sleeping, the kind of limbo where you leave your body behind and your thoughts wander without coming up with anything in particular.
This neutral, meditative state was suddenly interrupted by the sound of the bedroom door slowly opening. A meow in the darkness told me that Mishima was no longer angry and wanted my attention.
I got out of the bed, imagining that he wanted food or water or that the litter box needed cleaning. He was very demanding in that regard. Yet, when I checked, I could see that everything was in perfect order. So why had he gotten me out of bed?
I puttered around in the kitchen, trying to decide whether to make myself some coffee or not. There was a sheet of paper on the floor. It must have dropped out of Titus’s—or, technically speaking, Francis Amalfi’s—folder.
I picked it up and sat on the couch to read it, expecting yet another revelation.
It was from the “Heart in the Hand” section and took the form of a supposedly true story about the young Rainer Maria Rilke’s first stay in Paris.
He used to walk—accompanied by a girl—through a square where a woman went to beg. She always sat in the same place, without looking at the passersby, without asking for their charity, and without ever showing gratitude when someone gave her something. Although his friend often gave her a coin, Rilke never gave her anything.
One day the young woman asked him why, and he said, “It’s her heart that needs a gift, not her hand.”
A few days later, Rilke placed a rose in the woman’s cracked and leathery palm. Then something surprising happened. She looked up and, after effusively covering his hand with kisses, stood up and left the square, waving the rose around. Her spot was unoccupied for a whole week, after which she came back to reclaim it.
“But what has she been living on all these days if she hasn’t been begging in the square?” the girl asked.
“The rose,” Rilke replied.
Closing the Circle
I didn’t bother returning the missing page to Titus. Instead I went downstairs, planning to walk to the city center.
It was one of those decisions that only make sense long after you’ve made them. Somehow I’d accepted that the leitmotif for the day was “Anything can happen,” so I wanted to get to the music shop before it closed.
Titus’s return, Valdemar’s disappearance, and the discovery of his manuscript had unleashed so many doubts that I was determined to sort out at least one thing, and this depended on me and me alone. I’d offended Gabriela and had to apologize. It was the only way to put an end to the whole sorry affair.
This time, I needed no pretext. I’d just walk into the music shop, say I was sorry for my stupid behavior, and wish her luck. If I could leave it at that, order would be restored. Sooner or later, love’s wounds would heal and I’d eventually go back to my quiet, solitary existence. Recent events heralded more troubles ahead, and I was going to need all my strength to deal with them.
—
I got there just in time to see Gabriela lowering the metal blind. I stopped some three yards away from her, careful not to invade her space. Before she saw me, I mustered the whole world’s supply of serenitas and rehearsed the words of the apology I’d prepared in advance.
However, when she turned and glared at me with those almond-shaped eyes, I couldn’t speak. I was trying to come up with a briefer version of my expression of regret, but she beat me to it.
“I’ve been trying to call you since yesterday, but your phone’s busy all the time. Why do you act like this? I was worried about you.”
After my initial shock, I remembered that I’d disconnected my phone and answering machine two days earlier, for the afternoon snack with Meritxell. I had forgotten to plug them in again. Only someone who never gets phone calls would be capable of such an oversight.
“Never mind,” she said when I didn’t answer, “the most important thing is that you’re OK. I was afraid you’d done something crazy.”
“Well, I did,” I confessed as we walked down La Rambla. “I walked right across Barcelona and up to the forest on Mount Tibidabo.”
“What did you do then?”
“I walked back down.”
She laughed. “Well, that’s quite a trek!”
We walked along in silence—as far as this is possible on the most crowded street in the world. What on earth were we doing there? Was there no better place to walk?
As if answering my question, Gabriela took my hand and guided me to the pavement on one side. Now I was the one being led along like a zombie as she gently squeezed my fingers, like a little girl who wants to show her father something she’s just discovered.
We went through a great stone portal leading into an art bookshop, where a poster informed us that there was an exhibition on Frida Kahlo upstairs. It showed her last painting, which she’d completed shortly before her painful death. It was a still life with watermelons. One of them was cut in half, with the following words carved into its pulp: “VIVA LA VIDA.” Long live life.
“Do you want to see the exhibition?” I asked, closing my hand around hers.
“I want to show you something else,” she said, tugging me toward the back of the premises and then off to the right and down a dark, damp passageway, in which we had to stoop in order to move forward.
All at once, with Gabriela at my side, I was under the same staircase where we’d met thirty years earlier.
How had we gotten there? The old mansion had been transformed into an exhibition space, so I hadn’t recognized it at first. Then again, I hadn’t been back there since I was a small boy, so it had seemed bigger in my memory.
Gabriela flashed me a mischievous look, which made me wonder: had she remembered the same episode as I had, but pretended otherwise the whole time? Or had she relived the experience in a dream, in the same way I’d had my revelation about the manuscript?
“Close your eyes,” she murmured from the shadows, bringing her face closer to mine.
I did as I was told and, one second later, felt an almost imperceptible fluttering on my cheek. The circle was closed.
Opening my eyes, I was afraid that I’d be awakening from a dream. Yet Gabriela was still there, smiling with a challenging expression on her face.
I said, “I suppose the story ends here.”
“On the contrary, this is where it begins.” Her lips moved slowly toward mine, like planets condemned by gravity to collide.
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