Valls, the man who had stolen his mother from him, had got away.
* * *
Daniel had learned to hate that face, so eager to be photographed in vainglorious poses. He’d come to the conclusion that you never really know who you are until you learn to hate. And when you really hate, when you abandon yourself to that anger that burns you inside, that slowly consumes what little good you thought you had in your baggage, you do it secretly. Daniel smiled bitterly. Nobody thought him capable of keeping a secret. He’d never been able to, even as a child, when keeping secrets is an art and a way of staving off the world and its emptiness. Not even Fermín or Bea suspected that he kept that folder hidden there, containing the scrapbook in which he so often took refuge, feeding the darkness that had grown inside him since discovering that Mauricio Valls, the great white hope of the regime, had poisoned his mother. It was all conjecture, they told him. Nobody could know the truth of what had happened. Daniel had left the suspicions behind him and lived in a world of certainties.
And the worst of them all, the most difficult to contemplate, was that justice would never be served.
The day he’d dreamed of, poisoning his soul, the day he would find Mauricio Valls, make him look into his eyes and see in them the hatred he had fed—that day would never come. Nor would he pick up the gun he’d bought from a black marketeer who sometimes did business in Can Tunis, which he kept wrapped in rags at the bottom of the box. It was an old gun, dating from the war, but the ammunition was new and the guy had taught him how to use it.
“First you get him in the legs, below the knees. And you wait. You watch him try to pull himself along. Then shoot him in his guts. And you wait. You let him writhe. Then you shoot on the right side of his chest. And you wait. You wait for his lungs to fill with blood, until he chokes in his own shit. Only then, when you think he’s already dead, do you empty the last three bullets into his head. One in the back of the neck, one in his temple, and one under his chin. Then you throw the gun into the Besós River, near the beach, and let the current take it away.”
Perhaps the current would also take with it, forever, the anger and the pain now rotting inside him.
“Daniel?”
He looked up and saw Bea. He hadn’t heard her come in.
“Daniel, are you feeling all right?”
He nodded.
“You look pale. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. A bit tired, from not having slept. That’s all.” Daniel gave her his sweet smile, the one he’d been dragging around since he was a schoolboy, the smile he was known for in the neighborhood. Good old Daniel Sempere, the son-in-law all good mothers would want for their daughters. The man who hid no shadows in his heart.
“I’ve bought you some oranges. Don’t let Fermín see them, or he’ll eat them all in one go, like last time.”
“Thanks.”
“Daniel, what’s the matter? Aren’t you going to tell me? Is it because of what’s happened with Alicia? Because of that policeman?”
“Nothing’s the matter. I’m a bit worried. It’s normal. But we’ve gotten out of worse fixes. We’ll get out of this one.”
Daniel had never known how to lie to Bea. She looked into his eyes. For months now, what she saw in them had scared her. She drew closer to him and hugged him. Daniel let her put her arms around him, but he didn’t say anything, as if he wasn’t there.
Bea walked away slowly. She put the shopping bag on the table and lowered her eyes. “I’m going to pick up Julián.”
“See you soon.”
9
Four days went by before Alicia could get out of bed without help. Time seemed to have stopped in midair since she’d arrived in that place. She spent most of the day swaying between wakefulness and sleep, without leaving the room where she’d been installed. The room had a brazier, which Isaac fed every few hours, and the gloom was barely broken by the light of a candle or an oil lamp. The medication Dr. Soldevila had left to ease the pain plunged her into a heavy drowsiness from which she occasionally emerged to find Fermín or Daniel watching over her. Money might not buy you happiness, but chemicals can sometimes perform miracles.
When she did recover a vague sense of who and where she was, she would try to utter a few words. Most of her questions were answered before she asked them. No, nobody was going to find her there. No, the dreaded infection had not happened, and Dr. Soldevila thought Alicia was making good progress, although she was still weak. Yes, Fernandito was safe and sound. Señor Sempere had offered him a part-time job making deliveries and picking up sets of books bought from private owners. He was always asking after her, but, according to Fermín, not quite as much since he’d bumped into Sofía in the bookshop. He had managed to beat what seemed impossible: his own infatuation track record.
Alicia was happy for him. If he was going to suffer, let it be for someone worthwhile.
“He does fall in love easily, poor thing,” said Fermín. “He’ll have a dreadful time during his stay on this planet.”
“Those who aren’t able to fall in love suffer all the more,” Alicia let drop.
“I think the medication is affecting your cerebellum, Alicia. If you start picking up a guitar and singing Sunday-school songs, I’ll have to ask the medicine man to reduce your dosage to that of baby aspirin.”
“Don’t take away the only good thing I’ve got.”
“What a fiend you can be, Mother of God.”
The virtues of vice were underestimated. Alicia missed her glasses of white wine, her imported cigarettes, and her space for solitude. The medication kept her sufficiently dazed to allow the days to go by in the warm company of those good people who had conspired to save her life and seemed more anxious about her survival than she herself was. Sometimes, when she was submerged in that chemical balm, she told herself that the best thing would be to touch bottom and remain there in a never-ending stupor. But sooner or later she would wake up again and remember that only people who have settled all their debts deserve to die.
More than once she had woken up in the dim room to find Fermín sitting in a chair opposite her, looking thoughtful.
“What time is it, Fermín?”
“Your time: the witching hour.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I’ve never been one for naps. What I go for is insomnia elevated to an art form. I’ll catch up on sleep when I die.” Fermín gazed at her with a mixture of tenderness and suspicion that exasperated her.
“Haven’t you forgiven me yet, Fermín?”
“Remind me what it is I must forgive you for. I’m vaguely confused.”
Alicia sighed. “That I let you believe I’d died that night during the war. That I let you live with the guilt of thinking that you’d failed me and my parents. That when I returned to Barcelona, and you recognized me in the train station, I pretended not to know you and allowed you to think you were going mad or seeing ghosts.”
“Ah, that.” Fermín gave her a caustic smile, but his eyes shone with tears in the candlelight.
“Are you going to forgive me, then?”
“I’ll take it into consideration.”
“I need you to forgive me. I don’t want to die carrying this burden.”
They gazed mutely at one another.
“You’re a lousy actress.”
“I’m a great actress. The trouble is that with all the junk the doctor is prescribing, I keep forgetting my lines.”
“I don’t feel at all sorry for you, you know.”
“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, Fermín. Not you, nor anyone else.”
“You’d rather they were afraid of you.”
Alicia smiled, baring her teeth.
“Well, I’m not scared of you either,” he declared.
“That’s because you don’t know me well enough.”
“I liked you better before, when you played the part of a poor dying damsel.”
“So, do you forgive me?�
�
“What does it matter to you?”
“I don’t like to think that it’s because of me that you go around being the guardian angel of people—of Daniel and his family.”
“I’m the bibliographic adviser to the Sempere & Sons bookshop. The angelic attributes are your invention.”
“Are you sure you don’t think that if you save someone decent, you’ll save the world, or at least the possibility that something good might be left in it?”
“Who said you’re someone decent?”
“I was talking about the Semperes.”
“Don’t you do the same thing, deep down, my dear Alicia?”
“I don’t think there is anything decent to save in the world, Fermín.”
“Even you don’t believe that. The trouble is that you’re afraid of finding out that there is.”
“Or the opposite, in your case.”
Fermín let out a grunt and dug his hand in his raincoat pocket in search of sweets. “Let’s not get all corny. You stick to your nihilism, and I’ll stick to my Sugus sweets.”
“Two unmistakable values.”
“And no two ways about it.”
“Go on, give me a good-night kiss, Fermín.”
“You and your kisses!”
“On the cheek.”
Fermín hesitated, but in the end he leaned over and brushed her forehead with his lips. “Go to sleep, for Christ’s sake, you demon woman.”
Alicia closed her eyes and smiled. “I love you very much, Fermín.”
When she heard him crying quietly, she stretched out her hand until she found his. And so, holding each other, they fell asleep in the warmth of a dying candle.
10
The keeper of that place, Isaac Montfort, brought Alicia a tray twice or three times a day with a glass of milk, a few slices of toast with butter and jam, and some fruit or a pastry from the Escribá Patisserie, the sort he bought every Sunday—for he too had his weaknesses beyond literature and a hermit’s life, especially if they involved significant amounts of pine nuts and custard cream. After much pleading, Isaac began to bring her old newspapers, even though Dr. Soldevila wasn’t too happy about it. That is how she was able to read everything the press had published about the death of Mauricio Valls and feel her blood boil again.
This is what has saved you, Alicia, she thought.
Good old Isaac was a small, fierce-looking man, but he had a tender nature and had developed a soft spot for Alicia he was barely able to hide. He said she reminded him of his late daughter. Nuria was her name. He always carried two pictures of her in his pocket. One was of a rather mysterious-looking woman, who smiled sadly; the other showed a happy little girl hugging a man Alicia recognized as Isaac, a few decades younger.
“She left me before knowing how much I loved her,” he said.
Sometimes, when he brought in the tray with her food and Alicia struggled to swallow two or three mouthfuls, Isaac would be overcome by a wave of memories and start telling her about his daughter Nuria, and about his regrets. Alicia listened to him. She suspected that the old man hadn’t shared that sorrow with anyone, but fate had chosen to send him a stranger who resembled the person he had most loved, so that now, when it was too late, when he was no longer of any use to anyone, he could find some comfort by trying to save Alicia and give her an affection that didn’t belong to her. Sometimes, when he talked about his daughter, the old man would start to cry, haunted by that memory. Then he would leave Alicia and not return for hours. The most sincere pain is experienced alone. Alicia felt secretly relieved when Isaac took his infinite sadness to a corner to drown in it. The only pain she hadn’t learned to tolerate was to see old people cry.
* * *
They all took turns watching over Alicia and keeping her company. Daniel liked reading to her from books he borrowed from the labyrinth, especially books by someone called Julián Carax, for whom he felt a special fondness. Carax’s pen made Alicia think of music and chocolate cakes. The times she spent with Daniel every day, listening to him read from Carax’s pages, allowed her to lose herself in a forest of words and images that she was always sad to leave. Her favorite was a short novel called Nobody, whose last paragraph she ended up learning by heart, and would whisper to herself when she was trying to get to sleep:
In war he made a fortune, and in love he lost everything. He was destined not to be happy, never to taste the fruit which that late spring had brought to his heart. He knew then that he would live the rest of his days in solitude’s perpetual autumn, with no other company or memory than longing and remorse, and that when someone asked who had built that house and who had lived in it before it became a haunted ruin, people who had known it and were familiar with its accursed history would look down and say, in a very faint voice and hoping the wind would blow away their words: nobody.
She soon discovered that she couldn’t talk about Julián Carax to anybody, least of all to Isaac. The Semperes had shared some sort of history with Carax, and Alicia thought it best not to rummage around in the family’s shadows. Isaac, in particular, couldn’t bear to hear Carax’s name without turning purple with anger. As Daniel explained to her, Isaac’s daughter Nuria had been in love with Carax. The old man believed that all his poor daughter’s misfortunes, which had led to her tragic death, were due to Carax, a strange character who, she learned, had once tried to burn all the existing copies of his own books. Had the keeper not been sworn in to his post, Carax would have been able to count on his enthusiastic help.
“It’s best not to mention Carax to Isaac,” said Daniel. “Come to think of it, better not mention him to anyone.”
The only person among them all who saw Alicia as she was, and who didn’t have any imaginary ideas or qualms, was Daniel’s wife. Bea bathed her, dressed her, combed her hair, and gave her the medication, her eyes conveying that constraint presiding over their relationship, which they had both implicitly established. Bea would take care of Alicia; she would help her to heal and recover so that, as soon as possible, she could get out of their lives and disappear forever, before she could hurt them.
Bea, the woman Alicia would have liked to be and who, with every day spent in her company, she realized she never would. Bea, who spoke little and asked even less, but who understood her better than anyone. Alicia had never been one for hugs and gestures, but more than once had felt the urge to embrace her. Luckily she always restrained herself at the last second. A quick glance at Bea was enough for Alicia to know that this was not a parish church performance of Little Women, and that they both had a task to accomplish.
“I think you’ll soon be rid of me,” Alicia would say.
Bea never took the bait. She never complained. She never reproached her. She changed her bandages with the utmost care. She applied an ointment, something Dr. Soldevila had gotten his trusted chemist to prepare for him, on the old wound. It eased the pain without poisoning her blood. When she did so, she showed neither pity nor compassion. She was the only person, excepting Leandro, in whose eyes Alicia hadn’t glimpsed horror or apprehension when they saw her naked and realized the extent of the wounds that had destroyed part of her body during the war.
The only point where they could come together in peace and without shadows on the horizon was little Julián. Their longest and most peaceful chats usually took place when Bea bathed Alicia with a bar of soap and jugs of warm water heated up by Isaac on a camping stove he had in the room he used as office, kitchen, and bedroom. Bea adored the child with a devotion Alicia knew she could never even begin to understand.
“The other day he assured us that when he grows up,” Bea said, “he wants to marry you.”
“I suppose that as a good mother you’ve warned him that there are wicked girls in the world who are not at all suitable for him.”
“Of which you must be the queen.”
“That’s what all my potential mothers-in-law have always said. And rightly so.”
“On such matters being
right is the least of it. I live surrounded by men, and for a long time I’ve known that most of them are immune to logic. The only thing they learn about, and not all of them do, is the law of gravity. Until they fall flat on their faces, they don’t wake up.”
“That maxim sounds like one of Fermín’s.”
“Everything is catching, and I’ve spent years listening to his pearls of wisdom.”
“What else does Julián say?”
“His latest idea is that he wants to be a novelist.”
“Precocious.”
“You’ve no idea.”
“Are you going to have any more?”
“Children? I don’t know. I’d like Julián not to grow up alone. It would be nice if he had a little sister . . .”
“Another woman in the family.”
“Fermín says that would dilute the excess of testosterone that dulls the mind of the clan. Except for his, which he alleges can’t even be dissolved with turpentine.”
“And what does Daniel say?”
There was a long silence.
Bea shrugged. “Daniel says less every day.”
* * *
As the weeks went by, Alicia could feel her strength coming back. Dr. Soldevila examined her twice a day. Soldevila was not a man of many words, and the few he used, he dedicated to the concerns of others. Sometimes Alicia caught him looking at her out of the corner of his eye, as if he were wondering who this creature was and wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
“You have scars from a lot of old wounds. Some are serious. You should start thinking about changing your habits.”
“Don’t worry about me, Doctor. I have more lives than a cat.”
“I’m not a vet, but the theory is that cats only have nine lives, and I can see you’re almost running on empty.”
“One more will suffice.”
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 63
