The Labyrinth of the Spirits

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

  2

  The next time Victoria opened her eyes, she was blinded by the sunlight behind the curtains. She could smell coffee. She stood up and found a silk dressing gown that matched her pajamas. There was also a pair of slippers at the foot of the bed. She heard a voice behind the door that seemed to lead to another room in the suite. Moving closer, she stopped to listen. The soft tinkling of a teaspoon in a china cup. Victoria opened the door.

  A short corridor led to an oval room. On a table in the middle of the room, breakfast was set for two: a pitcher of orange juice, a basketful of bread rolls and pastries, a selection of jams, cream, butter, scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, sautéed mushrooms, tea, coffee, milk, and brown and white sugar lumps. The smell it all gave out was wonderful, and despite herself, Victoria’s mouth began to water.

  A middle-aged man, of middling height, middling baldness, and middling middlingness, was sitting at the table. When he saw her come in, he stood up courteously, smiled affably, and offered her the chair opposite him. He wore a black three-piece suit and had the pallid complexion of those who live behind closed doors. If she’d passed him in the street, she would barely have noticed him, or would have taken him for a midrange civil servant, or perhaps a provincial notary visiting the capital to go to the Prado Museum and the theater.

  Only when one stopped to observe him closely did one notice his pale eyes, limpid and piercing, enlarged behind glasses whose oversize tortoiseshell frames lent him a vaguely effeminate air. His gaze seemed shrouded in perpetual calculation as he watched her, almost without blinking.

  “Good morning, Ariadna,” he said. “Please sit down.”

  Victoria looked around her. She seized a candlestick she found on a shelf and brandished it menacingly.

  Completely unperturbed, the man lifted the lid off one of the trays and sniffed. “It smells marvelous. You must be hungry.”

  He made no move to approach Victoria, but she kept the candlestick raised.

  “I don’t think you’re going to need that, Ariadna,” he said calmly.

  “My name isn’t Ariadna. My name is Victoria. Victoria Sanchís.”

  “Please sit down. You’re safe here and you have nothing to fear.”

  Victoria’s eyes were lost in that hypnotic gaze. A whiff from the breakfast reached her again. She realized that the fierce pain she felt in her guts was simply hunger. She lowered the candlestick and left it on the shelf, then slowly made her way to the table. Without taking her eyes off the man, she sat down.

  He waited for her to be seated before pouring a cup of coffee for her. “Let me know how much sugar you want. I like it very sweet, although the doctor tells me it’s not good for me.”

  She watched him prepare the coffee. “Why did you call me Ariadna?”

  “Because that’s your real name. Ariadna Mataix. Isn’t that right? Still, I can call you Victoria if you prefer. I’m Leandro.”

  Leandro stood up briefly and held out his hand. Victoria didn’t shake it. He sat down again graciously. “Scrambled eggs? I’ve had some, and they’re not poisoned—I hope.”

  Victoria wished the man would stop smiling that way, making her feel guilty for not repaying his perfect kindness.

  “It’s a joke. Of course there’s nothing poisoned. Eggs with bacon?”

  Victoria surprised herself by accepting. Leandro smiled with satisfaction and served her, sprinkling a little salt and pepper over the small pile of steaming eggs. Her host had the easygoing manner of an expert chef.

  “If you’d rather have anything else, we can ask for it. The room service here is excellent.”

  “This is fine, thanks.”

  She almost bit her tongue for saying “thanks.” Thanks for what? To whom?

  “The croissants are delicious. Try them. The best in town.”

  “Where am I?”

  “We’re in the Gran Hotel Palace.”

  Victoria frowned. “In Madrid?”

  Leandro nodded and offered her the basket with the pastries. She hesitated.

  “They’re freshly made. Take some, or I’ll end up eating them all, and I’m on a diet.”

  Victoria stretched her hand out to take a croissant, and as she did so, noticed the needle marks on her forearm.

  “We had to sedate you. I’m sorry. After what happened in El Pinar . . .”

  Victoria jerked back her arm. “How did I get here? Who are you?”

  “I’m your friend, Ariadna. Don’t be afraid. You’re safe here. That man, Hendaya, won’t be able to hurt you ever again. Nobody will be able to hurt you again. You have my word.”

  “Where’s Ignacio, my husband? What have they done to him?”

  Leandro looked at her tenderly and smiled weakly. “Go on, first eat a bit and recover your strength. Later I’ll let you know what happened. I’ll answer all your questions. I promise. Trust me and be calm.”

  Leandro had a gentle voice, and he constructed sentences with poise. He chose words the way a perfume maker chooses fragrances for his formulas. Despite herself, Victoria discovered that she was beginning to relax; the fear that had seized her was slowly disappearing. The food, hot and delicious, the warm air issuing from the radiators, and the serene and fatherly presence of Leandro were making her want to let go. “How I wish all this were true.”

  “Was I right, or wasn’t I? About the croissants, I mean.”

  Victoria nodded timidly.

  Leandro wiped his lips with his napkin, folded it slowly, and pressed a service-bell ringer on the table. A door opened instantly, and a waiter appeared. He removed the breakfast service without saying a word or looking at Victoria once. Alone with Victoria again, Leandro adopted a sorrowful expression, crossed his hands on his lap, and lowered his eyes. “I’m afraid I have bad news, Ariadna. Your husband, Ignacio, has passed away. I’m terribly sorry. We arrived too late.”

  Ariadna felt her eyes filling with tears. They were tears of anger, because she had known that Ignacio was dead without having to be told by anyone. She pressed her lips together and looked at Leandro, who seemed to be considering her state of mind.

  “Tell me the truth,” she managed to utter.

  Leandro nodded repeatedly. “This isn’t going to be easy, but please listen to me. Afterward you can ask me whatever you like. But first I want you to see something.”

  Leandro got up and walked over to pick up a folded newspaper lying on a small tea table in a corner of the room. He returned to the table and handed it to Victoria. “Open it.”

  She took the paper without understanding. She opened it and looked at the front page.

  DEATH OF MINISTER MAURICIO VALLS IN TRAFFIC ACCIDENT

  Victoria let out a stifled scream. The newspaper fell from her hands, and she began to sob and moan uncontrollably. With utmost tact, Leandro approached her and gently put his arms around her. Victoria allowed herself to be hugged and took refuge in that stranger, trembling like a child. Leandro let her lean her head on his shoulder, stroking her hair while she shed the tears and the pain she had accumulated all her life.

  3

  “We’d been investigating Valls for a long time. We opened the case after a report from the compliance commission of the Banco de España detected some financial irregularities in the transactions of the National Consortium for Financial Restructuring—a consortium that had been presided over by Miguel Ángel Ubach, your father . . . or, I should say, the man who passed himself off as your father. For some time we’d been suspecting that the consortium was just a smokescreen, rubber-stamping everything that had been expropriated, or simply stolen, during and after the war, to be shared among a chosen few. Like all wars, ours ruined the country and further enriched a few who were already too rich before it started. That’s why wars are fought. In this case, the consortium was also used to repay favors, pay for betrayals and services, and buy silence and complicity. It was a means to attain promotion for many—among them, Mauricio Valls. We know what Valls did, Ariadna. What he did to you and your
family. But that is not enough. We need your help to get to the bottom of this.”

  “What for? Valls is dead.”

  “To see that justice is done. Valls is dead, yes, but many hundreds of people whose lives he destroyed are still alive and deserve justice.”

  Victoria glanced at him suspiciously. “Is that what you’re looking for? Justice?”

  “We’re looking for the truth.”

  “And who are you, exactly?”

  “We’re a group of citizens who have sworn to serve the country because we want to make Spain a fairer place, more honest and more open.”

  Victoria laughed.

  Leandro looked at her, his expression serious. “I don’t expect you to believe me. Not yet. But I’m going to prove to you that we’re the ones who are trying to change things from inside the regime, because there’s no other way of changing them. To regenerate this country and give it back to the people. We’re the ones risking our lives so that what happened to you and your sister, what happened to your parents, never happens again; to make sure that those who committed such crimes pay for them and the truth becomes known. Because without truth there is no justice, and without justice there is no peace. We’re for change and progress. We’re the ones here to end a state that serves only those few individuals who have hidden behind institutions to shield their privileges, at the expense of workers and disadvantaged people. And not because we’re heroes, but because someone has to do it. There’s no one else. That is why we need your help. If we join forces, it will be possible.”

  They gazed at one another throughout a long silence.

  “What if I don’t want to help you?”

  Leandro shrugged. “Nobody can force you to do this. If you decide that you don’t want to join us, that you don’t care whether others who have suffered the same fate don’t get justice, I’m not going to force you. It’s in your hands. Valls is dead. The easiest thing for a person in your situation would be to leave all this behind and begin a new life. Who knows, perhaps I would do the same in your place. But I think you’re not that kind of person. I think that deep down you don’t care about revenge, but about justice and truth. As much as we do, or more so. I think you want those who are to blame to pay for their crimes. And I’m sure you want their victims to get their lives back and to be assured that those who lost theirs for their sake didn’t do so in vain. But it’s in your hands. I’m not going to stop you. There’s the door. You can leave this place whenever you wish. The only reason we’ve brought you here is that here you’re safe. Here we can protect you while we try to get to the bottom of this matter. It depends on you.”

  Victoria turned her head to look at the door.

  Leandro poured himself another cup of coffee, dissolved five lumps in it, and sipped it calmly. “When you ask, a car will pick you up and take you wherever you want to go. You’ll never see me again or get news from us. You only have to ask.”

  Victoria felt a knot in her stomach.

  “You don’t have to decide now. I know what you’ve been through, and I know you’re confused. I know you don’t trust me, or anyone. It’s perfectly understandable. Nor would I, in your place. But you’ve got nothing to lose by giving us an opportunity. One more day. Or a few hours. At any moment, without having to give your reasons to anyone, you can leave. But I hope you don’t—I beg you not to. Give us this opportunity to help others.”

  Victoria looked down and saw that her hands were shaking.

  Leandro smiled with infinite gentleness. “Please . . .”

  At some point, through her tears, she consented.

  4

  For an hour and a half Leandro reconstructed what they had been able to uncover.

  “I’ve been trying to piece together the facts for some time. What I’m going to do is summarize what we know, or think we know. You’ll see that there are some gaps, and that we’re probably wrong on some points. Or on many. That’s where you come in. If you like, I’ll tell you what I think happened, and you correct me whenever I’m wrong. All right?”

  Leandro had a soothing voice that invited one to surrender. Victoria wanted to close her eyes, be cocooned for a time in the warm embrace of that voice, framed by the velvety outline of words that acquired sense, no matter what their meaning was.

  “All right,” she agreed. “I’ll try.”

  The man smiled with such gratitude and warmth that he made her feel safe and protected against whatever lay in wait beyond the walls of that place. Little by little, unhurriedly, he told her the story she knew only too well. The account began when she was just a small girl and her father, Víctor Mataix, met a man called Miguel Ángel Ubach, a powerful banker whose wife—a regular reader of Mataix’s books—had persuaded him to hire Mataix to ghostwrite his autobiography in exchange for a substantial sum of money.

  Victoria’s father, who was going through financial difficulties, accepted the assignment. After the war, the banker and his wife paid the Mataix family an unexpected visit in their home next to Carretera de las Aguas in Vallvidrera. Señora Ubach was a beauty queen straight out of a magazine, and quite a bit younger than her husband. She didn’t want to ruin her perfect figure by bringing a child into the world, but she liked children, or the idea of having them and letting her servants bring them up, almost as much as she liked pet cats and a well-mixed vodka martini. The Ubachs spent the day with the Mataix family. By then her parents had given her a sister, Sonia, who was still a baby. When they left, Señora Ubach kissed the girls good-bye and declared that they were adorable. A few days later a group of armed men returned to the Mataixes’ house in Vallvidrera. They arrested her father and took him to the prison in Montjuïc Castle, and they took Victoria away with her sister, leaving their mother behind, so badly wounded they presumed she was dead.

  “Am I correct up to now?” asked Leandro.

  Victoria nodded, drying her angry tears.

  That very night those men separated them, and she never saw Sonia again. They told her that if she didn’t want her little sister to be killed, she must forget her parents, because they were a pair of criminals. And from then on, they said, her name would no longer be Ariadna Mataix but Victoria Ubach. They explained to her that her new parents were Miguel Ángel Ubach and his wife Federica, and that she was very lucky. She would live with them in the most beautiful house in all of Barcelona, a mansion called El Pinar. She would have servants at her disposal, and whatever she wished for would be hers. Ariadna was ten.

  “From then on the story becomes confused,” warned Leandro.

  They discovered, he explained, that Víctor Mataix had been shot in Montjuïc Castle, like so many others, on the orders of Mauricio Valls, the prison governor, although the official report said he had committed suicide. Leandro believed that Valls had sold Ariadna to the Ubachs in exchange for favors that would help him rise in the regime, together with a bundle of shares in a bank that had been recently set up. These shares had been expropriated from estates of hundreds of people who were imprisoned and in many cases executed shortly after the end of the war.

  “Do you know what happened to your mother?”

  Victoria nodded, pressing her lips together.

  Leandro told her how, as far as they knew, the day after her husband and daughters had been kidnapped, her mother, Susana, managed to gather her strength and made the mistake of going to the police to report what had happened. She was immediately arrested and interned in a psychiatric hospital in Horta, where she was kept in solitary confinement and underwent electric shock treatments for five years, until they decided to abandon her in some deserted area on the outskirts of Barcelona, once they realized she couldn’t even remember her name.

  “Or at least that’s what they believed.”

  Leandro explained that Susana had survived on the streets of Barcelona by begging, sleeping rough, and eating food she stole from rubbish bins, hoping that one day she would be able to recover her daughters. That hope is what kept her alive. Years lat
er, Susana found a newspaper among the rubble in an alleyway of the Raval quarter, with a photograph of Mauricio Valls and his family. By then he was a very important man who had left his days as prison governor behind him. In the photograph Valls posed with a little girl, Mercedes.

  “Mercedes was none other than your little sister, Sonia. Your mother recognized her because Sonia had been born with a mark she could never forget.”

  “A mark in the shape of a star on the base of her neck,” Victoria heard herself saying.

  Leandro smiled as he nodded. “Valls’s wife suffered from a chronic illness that prevented her from having children. Valls decided to keep your sister and bring her up as his own child. He called her Mercedes, after his late mother. Stealing what she could, Susana managed to put together enough money to take a train to Madrid. Once she was there, she spent months spying on the playgrounds of all the schools in Madrid, hoping to locate your sister. By then she had built herself a new identity. She lived in a squalid room in the Chueca area and at night worked as a seamstress in a workshop. During the day she searched the Madrid schools. And when she had almost given up hope, she found her. She saw her from a distance, and knew it was her daughter. She began to go there every morning. She would approach the playground railings and try to catch the girl’s attention. She managed to talk to her a couple of times. She didn’t want to frighten her. When she realized that Mercedes . . . that Sonia no longer remembered her, your mother was on the point of taking her own life. But she didn’t give up. She kept going there every morning, hoping to see her, even if it was just for a few seconds, or to speak to her if the child came over to the railings. One day she decided that she should tell her the truth. She was caught by Valls’s bodyguards as she stood by the railings, talking to your sister. They blew her brains out with a single shot in front of the girl. Would you like me to stop for a bit?”

  Victoria shook her head.

  Leandro continued to narrate what he knew about how Victoria had grown up in the golden prison of El Pinar. In time, Miguel Ángel Ubach was summoned by the Generalissimo to head a group of bankers and dignitaries who had financed his army, and put in charge of designing a new economic structure for the State. Ubach left Barcelona and moved with his family to a large house in Madrid, which Victoria always hated and from which she escaped, disappearing for a few months, until she was found in strange circumstances on a beach in San Feliu de Guíxols, a small town about a hundred kilometers from Barcelona.