Alicia held her book against her chest and shook her head. Fermín heard the rattle of the machine guns riddling the rooftops behind them and pushed the girl over. When Alicia landed on the other side of the wall, she turned to stretch a hand up to Fermín, but her friend wasn’t there. He was still holding on to the cornice on the other side of the wall. He was pale, and his eyelids were beginning to droop, as if he could barely remain conscious.
“Run,” he snapped with his last breath. “Run.”
Fermín’s knees gave way, and he fell backward. He heard the rattle of the airplanes flying right above them, and before he closed his eyes, he saw a cluster of bombs falling from the sky.
16
Alicia ran desperately across the roof terrace toward the large glass dome. She never knew where the shell burst, whether it grazed the facade of one of the buildings or exploded in midair. All she could perceive was a wall of compressed air hitting her brutally from behind, a deafening gale that flung her up in the air and propelled her forward. A gust skimmed past her, carrying bits of burning metal. It was then she felt an object the size of a fist stab her sharply in the hip. The impact made her spin in the air and then thrust her against the glass dome. She fell through a curtain of splintered glass into the void, the book slipping from her hands.
For what seemed an eternity Alicia plummeted through the dark. Finally an extended sheet of canvas broke her fall. The material buckled under her weight, leaving her lying faceup on what looked like a wooden platform. Fifteen meters above, she could see the hole her body had left in the dome’s glass. She tried to lean over on her side, but discovered that she couldn’t feel her right leg and could barely move her body from the waist down. She looked around and noticed that the book she thought she’d lost was lying on the edge of the platform.
Using her arms, she dragged herself to the book and touched its spine with her fingertips. A new explosion shook the building, and the vibration hurled the book into the void. Alicia peeped over the edge and saw it plunge, its pages fluttering, into the abyss. The glow from the flames flashing over the clouds spilled a beam of light through the darkness. Alicia blinked a few times in disbelief, doubting her eyes. She had landed on top of a towering spiral that sprawled into an endless labyrinth of corridors, passageways, arches, and galleries, resembling an enormous cathedral. But unlike the cathedrals she knew, this one was not made of stone.
It was made of books.
The shafts of light pouring from the dome revealed a knot of staircases and bridges branching in and out of that structure, each one bordered by thousands and thousands of volumes. At the foot of the chasm she glimpsed a bubble of light, moving slowly. The light paused. A man with white hair was holding a lamp far below her, gazing upward. A deep pain stabbed Alicia’s hip, and she felt her sight clouding over. Soon she closed her eyes and lost all sense of time.
* * *
Alicia woke to find herself being lifted gently into someone’s arms. Through half-open eyes, she saw that she was moving down an endless corridor that split into dozens of galleries opening up in every direction, galleries made with walls and more walls crammed with books. She was being carried by the man with the white hair she had seen at the foot of the labyrinth, and noticed his vulturine features. When they reached the bottom of the structure the keeper of that place took her through the large hall under the vaulted ceiling, to a corner where he settled her on a makeshift bed. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Alicia,” she murmured.
“I’m Isaac.”
With a look of concern, the man examined the wound throbbing in the little girl’s hip. He covered her with a blanket and, holding up her head, brought a glass of fresh water to her lips. Alicia sipped avidly. The keeper’s hands settled her head on a pillow. Isaac smiled at her, but his eyes betrayed deep anguish. Behind him, forming what she thought was a basilica erected out of all the libraries in the world, rose the labyrinth she had seen from the summit.
Isaac sat on a chair next to her and held her hand. “Now you must rest.”
He extinguished the lantern, and a bluish darkness engulfed them, sprinkled with small flashes of fire that trickled down from above. The seemingly impossible geometry of the book-labyrinth faded into the vastness, and Alicia thought she was dreaming all this, that the bomb had exploded in her grandmother’s sitting room, that she and her friend had never escaped from that blazing building.
Isaac watched her with sadness. Through the walls came the sound of the bombs, of the sirens and the fire spreading death through Barcelona. A nearby explosion shook the walls and the floor beneath them, bringing up clouds of dust. In her bed, Alicia shuddered. The keeper lit a candle and left it resting on a low table next to her. The candlelight outlined the prodigious structure rising in the center of the hall, a vision that lit up Alicia’s eyes moments before she lost consciousness.
Isaac sighed.
“Alicia,” he said at last. “Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”
17
Fermín opened his eyes to an immensity of celestial white. A uniformed angel was bandaging his thigh. Beyond, a corridor full of stretchers disappeared into infinity.
“Is this purgatory?” he asked.
The nurse raised her eyes and looked at him askance. She did not appear to be a day older than eighteen, and Fermín thought that for an angel on the divine payroll, she was much better looking than the pictures given out at first communions and christenings suggested. The presence of impure thoughts could only mean one of two things: improvement on the physical front or imminent eternal condemnation.
“It goes without saying that I renounce my villainous unbelief and subscribe word for word to both Testaments, the New and the Old, in whatever order Your Angelical Grace esteems best.”
When she noticed that the patient was regaining consciousness and could speak, the nurse made a sign, and a doctor who looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week walked over to the stretcher. Lifting Fermín’s eyelids with his fingers, the doctor examined his eyes.
“Am I dead?” asked Fermín.
“Don’t exaggerate. You’re a little beat-up, but in general quite alive.”
“So this isn’t purgatory?”
“Wishful thinking. You’re in the Hospital Clínico. In other words, in hell.”
While the doctor was examining his wound, Fermín considered the turn of events and tried to remember how he’d gotten there.
“How are you feeling?” asked the doctor.
“A bit confused, to tell you the truth. I dreamed that Jesus Christ paid me a visit, and we held a long and profound conversation.”
“What about?”
“Soccer, mostly.”
“That’s because of the sedatives we gave you.”
Fermín nodded with relief. “That’s what I thought when the Lord confessed himself a Real Madrid fan.”
The doctor smiled briefly and mumbled instructions to the nurse.
“How long have I been here?”
“About eight hours.”
“Where’s the child?”
“Baby Jesus?”
“No. The girl who was with me.”
The nurse and the doctor exchanged glances.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, “but there was no girl with you. As far as I know, it was a miracle someone found you, on a roof terrace in the Raval quarter, bleeding to death.”
“And they didn’t bring a girl in with me?”
The doctor lowered his eyes. “Alive? No.”
Fermín tried to sit up. The nurse and the doctor held him down on the stretcher.
“I need to get out of here, Doctor. There’s a defenseless child out there who needs my help.”
The doctor gave the nurse a nod, and she quickly took a bottle from the medicine trolley and began preparing an injection. Fermín shook his head, but the doctor held him firmly. “I’m afraid I can’t let you go yet. I’m going to ask you to be a bit patient. We don’t want
things to get worse.”
“Don’t worry, I have more lives than a cat.”
“And less shame than a politician, which is why I’m also going to ask you to stop pinching the nurses’ behinds when they change your bandages. Are we clear?”
Fermín felt the prick of the needle in his right shoulder and the cold spreading through his veins.
“Can you ask again, Doctor, please? Her name is Alicia.”
The doctor loosened his grip and let his prey rest on the stretcher. Fermín’s muscles melted into jelly and his pupils dilated, turning the world into a dissolving watercolor. The faraway voice of the doctor was lost in the echo of his descent. He felt he was falling through cotton-wool clouds, fading into the liquid balm with its promise of a chemical paradise, as the whiteness of the corridor fragmented into a powdery light.
18
Fermín was discharged halfway through the afternoon; the hospital could no longer cope with the numbers of wounded, and whoever wasn’t dying was deemed fit to leave. Armed with a wooden crutch and some new clothes lent to him by a dead man, he managed to climb onto a tram outside the Hospital Clínico and travel back to the streets of the Raval. There he began to walk into cafés, grocers, and any other shops that were still open, asking in a loud voice whether anyone had seen a girl called Alicia. People looked at the wiry, gaunt little man and shook their heads silently, thinking that, like so many others, this poor soul was searching in vain for his dead daughter: one more body among the nine hundred—a hundred of them children—that would be picked up in the streets of Barcelona on that eighteenth day of March in 1938.
When evening fell, Fermín walked all the way down the Ramblas. Trams derailed by the bombs were still lying there, smoldering, with their dead passengers on board. Cafés that just hours earlier had been packed with customers were now ghostly galleries full of bodies. Pavements were awash in blood. None of the people trying to take the wounded away, cover up the dead, or simply flee anywhere or nowhere could remember having seen the girl he was describing.
Even so, Fermín didn’t lose hope, not even when he came across a row of corpses lying on the pavement in front of the opera house, the Gran Teatro del Liceo. None of them looked older than eight or nine.
Fermín knelt down. Next to him, a woman stroked the feet of a boy with a black hole the size of a fist in his chest. “He’s dead,” she said, although Fermín hadn’t asked. “They’re all dead.”
All night long, while the city removed the rubble and the ruins of dozens of buildings went on burning, Fermín walked from door to door through the whole of the Raval quarter, asking for Alicia.
Finally, at dawn, he couldn’t take another step. He collapsed on the stairs outside the Church of Belén, and after a while a local policeman in a bloodstained uniform, his face smudged with cinders, sat down next to him. When the policeman asked him why he was crying, Fermín threw his arms around him. He wanted to die, he told him. Fate had placed the life of a little girl in his care, and he’d betrayed her and hadn’t known how to protect her. If either God or the devil had even a hint of decency left in them, he went on, this fucking world would come to an end tomorrow or the next day, because it didn’t deserve to go on existing.
The policeman, who had been tirelessly pulling out bodies from the rubble for hours, including those of his wife and six-year-old son, listened to him calmly.
“My friend,” he said at last. “Don’t lose hope. If there’s anything I’ve learned from this lousy world, it’s that destiny is always just around the corner. It might look like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor, its three most usual personifications. And if you ever decide to go and find it—remember, destiny doesn’t make house calls—you’ll see that it will grant you a second chance.”
Masked Ball
Madrid
1959
His Excellency
Don Mauricio Valls y Echevarría
and
Doña Elena Sarmiento de Fontalva
cordially invite you to the
Masked Ball
that will take place in the
Palacete Villa Mercedes
of Somosaguas, Madrid
on November 24, 1959
from 7:00 p.m.
R.S.V.P. to the Protocol Service
of the Ministry of National Education
before November 1.
1
The room existed in perpetual darkness. For years the drapes had been drawn, sewn together to prevent any hint of brightness from filtering through. The only source of light grazing the shadows was a copper wall lamp. Its dull ocher-colored halo revealed the outline of a bed crowned by a canopy from which hung a diaphanous veil, behind which Mauricio Valls could perceive his wife Elena’s static figure. It looks like a hearse, Mauricio Valls thought as he peered at her silhouette.
She lay there motionless in the bed that had been her prison for the last decade, once it had become impossible to sit her in the wheelchair. As the years went by, the disease that was wasting her bones away had twisted Doña Elena’s skeleton, reducing it to an unrecognizable tangle of limbs in constant agony. A mahogany crucifix stared down at her from above the headboard, yet heaven, in its infinite cruelty, refused to grant her the blessing of death.
It’s my fault, Valls thought. He does it to punish me.
He could hear Elena’s tortured breathing through the echoes of the orchestra’s strains and the voices of the guests—over a thousand of them—who were downstairs, in the garden. The nurse on night shift rose from the chair next to the bed and walked quietly over to Valls. He couldn’t remember her name. The nurses watching over his wife never lasted more than two or three months in their job, however high their salary. He didn’t blame them.
“Is she asleep?” he asked.
The nurse shook her head. “No, Minister, but the doctor has already given her the evening injection. She’s been restless all afternoon. She’s better now.”
“Leave us.”
The nurse nodded and left the room, closing the door behind her. Valls moved closer. He drew back the gauze curtain and sat on the edge of the bed. Closing his eyes for a moment, he listened to Elena’s rasping breath while he absorbed the bitter stench emanating from her body. He heard the sound of her nails scratching the sheet. When he turned, with a false smile on his lips and the serene expression of calm and endearment frozen on his face, Valls discovered that his wife was looking at him with blazing eyes. The illness for which the most expensive doctors in Europe had been unable to provide a cure, or even a name, had deformed her hands and turned them into knots of rough skin that reminded him of the claws of a reptile. Valls took what had once been his wife’s right hand and confronted her glare, which flashed with anger and pain. Perhaps with hatred, Valls hoped. The very thought that the poor creature could still hold the slightest bit of affection for him or for the world seemed too cruel.
“Good night, my love.”
For almost two years now, Elena had all but lost the use of her vocal cords, and to form a word required a huge effort. Even so, she responded to his greeting with a guttural moan that seemed to stem from the very depths of the deformed body one could just about visualize under the sheets.
“I hear you’ve had a bad day,” he went on. “The medication will soon take effect, and you’ll be able to sleep.”
Valls didn’t wipe off his smile, nor did he let go of the hand that aroused both revulsion and fear in him. The scene would take place as it did every day. He would speak to her in a low voice for a few minutes while he held her hand, and she would observe him with those blazing eyes until the morphine calmed the pain and the fury, whereupon Valls could leave that room at the end of the first-floor corridor, and not return until the following day.
“Everybody is here. Mercedes wore her new long dress, and I’m told she danced with the son of the British ambassador. They’re all asking after you and send you their love.”
While he reeled off his ritual of ban
alities, his eyes rested on the small tray lying on the metal table next to her bed, holding medical instruments and syringes. The table was covered with a piece of red velvet, and in the dim light the morphine phials shone like precious stones. His voice became suspended, his empty words lost in the air. Elena’s eyes had followed his and were now fixed on him imploringly, her face covered in tears. Valls gazed at his wife and sighed. He leaned over to kiss her forehead.
“I love you,” he whispered.
When she heard those words, Elena turned her head and closed her eyes. Valls stroked her cheek and stood up. He drew the veil and walked across the room, buttoning up his dinner jacket and cleaning his lips with a handkerchief, which he dropped onto the floor before leaving.
2
A few days earlier, Mauricio Valls had asked his daughter, Mercedes, to come up to his office at the top of the tower, so that he could find out what she wanted for a birthday present. The days of beautiful porcelain dolls and storybooks had passed. Mercedes, whose only remaining childlike traits were her laughter and the devotion she felt toward her father, declared that her greatest and only wish was to be able to attend the masked ball that was going to take place in the mansion that bore her name.
“I’ll have to talk to your mother,” Valls lied.
Mercedes hugged and kissed him, sealing the unspoken promise she knew she’d secured. Before speaking to her father, she had already chosen the dress she was going to wear: a dazzling wine-colored gown made in a Parisian haute-couture workshop for her mother, which Doña Elena herself had not worn even once. The dress, like hundreds of other fine garments and jewels from the stolen life her mother had never lived, had been confined for fifteen years to one of the wardrobes of the luxurious and solitary dressing room, next to the unused marital bedroom on the second floor. For years, when everyone thought she was asleep in her bedroom, Mercedes would sneak into her mother’s room and borrow the key hidden in the fourth drawer of a chest of drawers next to the door. The only night nurse who had dared mention her presence was fired unceremoniously and without compensation when Mercedes accused her of stealing a bracelet from her mother’s dressing table—a bracelet she herself had buried in the garden behind the fountain with the angels. The others never dared open their mouths, pretending not to notice her in the permanent half-light that shrouded the room.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 6
