“Who goes there?” came the voice again.
Clutching the stone firmly, Daniel held his breath. A figure loomed, holding a candle in one hand and a shining object in the other. All of a sudden it stopped, as if sensing Daniel’s presence. Daniel studied its shadow. A gun trembled in its hand. The figure took a few steps forward, and in a flash Daniel saw the hand holding the weapon cross in front of the doorway where he was hiding.
His fear turned to anger, and before he realized what he was doing, he threw himself on the figure, hitting the hand with the stone as hard as he could. He heard bones cracking, and a howl of pain. The weapon fell to the floor. Daniel hurled himself on the bearer of the gun, unleashing all the fury he’d been holding inside as he beat the figure’s face and torso with his bare fists. The figure tried to cover its face and shouted like a terrified animal.
The fallen candle, still burning, had created a pool of wax that now ignited. In its amber light, Daniel saw the panic-stricken face of a fragile-looking man. He stopped, disconcerted. The man, breathing with difficulty, his face covered in blood, looked at him without understanding. Daniel grabbed his gun and pressed the barrel against one of the eyes of the man, who let out a groan.
“Don’t kill me, please . . .”
“Where’s Valls?”
The man still didn’t seem to understand.
“Where’s Valls?” Daniel repeated. He could hear the steely tone in his voice, and a hatred he didn’t recognize.
“Who is Valls?” stammered the man.
Daniel made as if to hit his face with the gun. The man closed his eyes, trembling, and Daniel suddenly realized he was beating up an elderly person. He retreated and sat down with his back to the wall. Taking a deep breath, he tried to recover his self-control. The old man had curled into a ball and was whimpering.
“Who are you?” Daniel sighed at last. “I’m not going to kill you. I only want to know who you are, and where Valls is.”
“The guard,” the old man groaned. “I’m the guard.”
“What are you doing here?”
“They said they’d come back. They told me to feed him and wait for them.”
“Feed who?”
The old man shrugged.
“Valls?”
“I don’t know his name. They left this gun with me and ordered me to kill him and throw him into the well if they didn’t come back in three days’ time. But I’m not a murderer . . .”
“How long ago was this?”
“I don’t know. Days ago.”
“Who told you he would come back?”
“A police captain. He didn’t give me his name. He gave me money. It’s yours if you want it.”
Daniel shook his head. “Where’s that man? Valls.”
“Downstairs . . .” The old man pointed to the metal door at the far end of the kitchen.
“Give me the keys.”
“Have you come to kill him, then?”
“The keys.”
The old man looked in his pockets and handed him a bunch of keys.
“Are you with them? With the police? I’ve done everything I was told to do, but I couldn’t kill him . . .”
“What’s your name?”
“Manuel. Manuel Requejo.”
“Go home, Manuel.”
“I have no home. . . . I live in a shed, back there, in the woods.”
“Leave this place.”
The old man nodded. He got on his feet with some difficulty, holding on to the table to steady himself.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Daniel said. “I thought you were someone else.”
Avoiding his eyes, the man dragged himself toward the exit.
“You’re going to do him a favor,” he said.
5
Behind the metal door was a room in which a few shelves held cans of food. There was an opening on the wall at the far end, and beyond it Daniel thought he could make out a tunnel hollowed out in the stone, descending steeply. As soon as he stuck his head into the opening he was hit by an intense odor rising from underground, an animal stink of excrement, blood, and fear. Covering his face with his hand, he listened through the shadows. A flashlight was hanging on the wall. He switched it on, sending the beam of light into the tunnel. Steps carved out of the rock disappeared into a well of darkness.
He went down slowly. The walls oozed damp, and the ground was slippery. He reckoned he must have descended some ten meters by the time he saw the end of the stairs. There the tunnel widened and spread into a recess the size of a room. The stench was so powerful that it clouded the senses. As he swept through the darkness with the flashlight, he saw the bars separating the two halves of the chamber hollowed in the rock. Daniel shone the beam around the cell without understanding. It was empty. Until he heard the murmur of laborious breathing and noticed a corner with shadows that unfolded into a skeletal silhouette, he didn’t realize he’d been mistaken. There was something trapped in there, creeping toward the light, something he had trouble identifying as a man.
Eyes that were burned by the dark, eyes that seemed not to see, veiled by a layer of white. Those eyes were searching him. The silhouette, a tangle of rags covering a bag of bones that was swathed with dried blood, filth, and urine, grabbed one of the bars and tried to stand up. He only had one hand. Where the other one should have been, there was only a festering, burned stump. The creature remained close to the bars, as if he wanted to smell Daniel. Suddenly the creature smiled, and Daniel realized he’d seen the gun he was holding.
Daniel tested various keys in the bunch until he found one that fit into the lock. He opened the cell. The creature inside looked at him expectantly. Daniel recognized in him a pale reflection of the man he’d learned to hate. Nothing remained of his regal face, of his arrogant demeanor and his haughty presence. Someone, or something, had ripped out everything that could be taken from a human being until all that remained was a longing for darkness and oblivion. Daniel raised the gun and aimed it at his face. Valls laughed joyfully.
“You killed my mother.”
Valls nodded repeatedly and hugged Daniel’s knees. He then groped for the gun with his only hand and pulled it up to his forehead. “Please, please,” he beseeched through his tears.
Daniel cocked the hammer. Valls closed his eyes and pressed his face hard against the barrel.
“Look at me, you son of a bitch.”
Valls opened his eyes.
“Tell me why.”
Valls smiled without understanding. He’d lost a few teeth, and his gums bled. Daniel turned his face away and felt nausea rising to his throat. He closed his eyes and evoked the face of his son Julián, asleep in his bedroom. Then he pulled the gun away, opened the cylinder, letting the bullets fall to the waterlogged floor, and shoved Valls aside.
Valls stared at him, first in confusion, then in a panic, and started picking up the bullets, one at a time, holding them out to Daniel with a trembling hand. Daniel threw the gun to the far end of the cell and grabbed Valls by the neck. A ray of hope lit up Valls’s eyes. Daniel held him tight and hauled him out of the cell and up the stairs. When he reached the kitchen area, he kicked open the door and went outside, without ever letting go of Valls, who staggered behind him. He didn’t look at him or speak to him. He just pulled him down the garden path until they reached the metal gate. There he looked for the key in the bunch the guard had given him and opened it.
Valls had begun to moan, terrified. Daniel shoved him out into the road. The man fell on the ground, and Daniel grabbed his arm again, pulling him back to his feet. Valls took a few steps and stopped. Daniel kicked him, forcing him to continue. He pushed him until they reached the small square where the first blue tram awaited. Dawn was breaking, the sky unfurling into a reddish cobweb that spread over Barcelona and set the distant sea ablaze. Valls went down on his knees and looked up at Daniel imploringly.
“You’re free,” said Daniel. “Go!”
Don Mauricio Valls, a shining
light of his day, limped away down the avenue.
Daniel stayed there until his silhouette merged into the grayness of that early hour. He sought refuge in the waiting tram, which was empty. Sitting down on one of the benches at the back, he pressed his face against the window and closed his eyes. After a while he dozed off.
When the conductor woke him, a clear sun was already sweeping away the clouds, and Barcelona had a clean smell.
“Where are you going, boss?” asked the conductor.
“Home,” said Daniel. “I’m going home.”
After a while the tram began its descent. Daniel set his gaze on the horizon extending at the foot of the wide avenue, feeling that there was no resentment left in his soul, and that for the first time in many years he had woken up with the memory that would stay with him for the rest of his days: the face of his mother, a woman who would always be younger than he was now.
“Isabella,” he whispered. “I wish I’d been able to know you.”
6
They say they saw him arrive at the entrance of the metro station, and that he went down the stairs in search of the tunnels, as if he wanted to crawl back to hell. They say that when passersby saw his rags and noticed the stench he gave off, they moved to one side and pretended not to see him. They say he got into one of the trains and looked for shelter in a corner of the car. Nobody approached him, nobody looked at him, and nobody wanted to admit, later, that they’d seen him.
They say the invisible man wept and moaned in the car, begging for someone to have pity and kill him, but no one would even exchange a glance with such a wreck. They say he wandered all day through the underworld, changing trains, waiting on the platform for another train to take him through the mesh of tunnels hidden beneath the labyrinth of Barcelona, and from that train to the next train, and the next, leading nowhere.
They say that at the end of that afternoon, one of those accursed trains came to a halt at the line’s terminus station, and when the beggar refused to get out and showed no signs of hearing the orders being shouted at him by the conductor and the stationmaster, they called the police. As soon as the police officers arrived, they stepped into the carriage and approached the tramp, who didn’t respond to their orders either. Only then did one of the policemen get close to him, covering his nose and mouth with his hand. He poked him gently with the barrel of his gun. They say that the body then collapsed, lifeless, on the floor, and the rags covering him opened up to reveal a corpse that seemed to have already begun to decompose.
His only piece of identification was a photograph he held in his hand, showing an unknown young woman. One of the officers took the photograph of Alicia Gris, and for a few years he kept it inside his locker at the police station, convinced that it was none other than Death, who had left her visiting card in the hands of that poor devil before sending him to his eternal damnation.
The funeral services collected the body and transported it to the morgue, where all destitute people ended up, together with unidentified bodies and the abandoned souls the city left behind every night. At dawn, two workers put him into a canvas bag bearing the stench of hundreds of other bodies that had made their last journey inside it, and lifted it into the back of a truck. They drove up the old road bordering Montjuïc Castle, which was outlined against a sea of fire and a thousand silhouettes of angels and spirits in the city of the dead, figures that seemed to have gathered there to spit their last insult at him as he made his way to the common grave where in another life he, the beggar, the invisible man, had sent so many whose names he barely remembered.
When they reached the grave, an endless well of bodies covered with lime, the two men opened the bag and let Don Mauricio Valls slide down the hillside of cadavers until he reached the bottom. They say he fell faceup, his eyes open, and that the last thing the men saw before leaving that forsaken place was a black bird perching on his body and gouging them out with its beak, while all the bells of Barcelona tolled in the distance.
Barcelona
April 23, 1960
1
Came the day.
Shortly before dawn, Fermín woke up with his hormones raging. Heeding the call, he descended on an unsuspecting Bernarda and showered her with one of his morning love specials that would leave her exhausted for a week and the bedroom furniture askew, while rousing vigorous protests from the neighbors on the other side of the wall.
“Blame it on the full moon,” Fermín apologized to the lady next door, greeting her through the laundry room window overlooking the inner courtyard. “I don’t know what comes over me. I seem to be transformed.”
“Yes, but instead of transforming into a wolf, you turn into a pig. See if you can’t control yourself—there are children living here who haven’t yet taken their first communion.”
As was usually the case with Fermín in the aftermath of one of his arduous early performances, he felt the appetite of a tiger. He made himself a four-egg omelette with bits of chopped ham and cheese, which he polished off with a half-kilo French loaf and a small bottle of champagne to boot. Satisfied, he crowned it all with a small glass of orujo and proceeded to put on the prescribed attire for confronting a day that showed all the signs of possible complications.
“Will you tell me why you’ve dressed yourself like a diver?” asked Bernarda from the kitchen doorway.
“Out of precaution. In fact it’s an old raincoat lined with copies of one of the regime’s newspapers. Not even holy water gets through this material. Something to do with the ink they use. They say a big one’s coming.”
“Today, Sant Jordi’s day?”
“The ways of the Lord may be unknowable, but they’re often a pain in the butt,” Fermín chipped in.
“Fermín, no blaspheming in this house.”
“I’m sorry, my love. I’ll take the pill for my agnosticism right away, and it will pass.”
Fermín wasn’t lying. For some time now, a day of countless biblical disasters had been forecast to fall upon Barcelona, city of books and roses, on the day of its most beautiful celebration. The panel of experts had agreed in full: the National Meteorology Service, Radio Barcelona, La Vanguardia, and the Civil Guard. The last drop before the proverbial deluge had been added by the well-known fortune teller Madame Carmanyola. The fortune teller was famous for two things. One was her condition as a morbidly obese nymph, which hid the fact that she was really a full-bodied man from Cornellá called Cucufate Brotolí, reborn into a hirsute womanliness—after a long career as a notary—to discover that what she really liked, deep down, was to dress as a tart and shake her rear end to the sensual hand-clapping of flamenco. The other was her infallible gift for weather forecasts. Quality and technical issues aside, the fact of the matter was that they were all in agreement. This Sant Jordi’s day was set to rain cats and dogs.
“Well, in that case perhaps you’d better not bring the stall out onto the street,” Bernarda advised.
“No way. Don Miguel de Cervantes and his colleague Don Guillermo de Shakespeare didn’t die in vain on the same date—strictly speaking—the twenty-third of April. Surely on this day of all days, we booksellers should be up for the challenge. Today we’ll be putting books and readers together, even if the ghost of General Espartero bombs us from Montjuïc Castle.”
“Will you at least bring me a rose?”
“I’ll bring you a cartload of the fullest and most scented ones, my little sugar.”
“And remember to give one to Señora Bea. Danielito is a bit of a disaster, and I’m sure he’ll forget at the last minute.”
“I’ve been changing the boy’s proverbial diapers for too many years now to forget strategic details of such importance.”
“Promise me you won’t get wet.”
“The wetter I get, the more fecund and fertile I’ll become.”
“Oh, dear God, we’ll be going straight to hell.”
“All the more reason to make the most of it while we can, my love.”
Afte
r assaulting his adored Bernarda with an array of kisses, pinches, and cuddles, Fermín stepped out into the street, convinced that at the eleventh hour a miracle would occur, and the sun would appear, as bright as in a Sorolla painting.
On his way he stole the caretaker’s newspaper—it served her right for being a gossip and a Fascist sympathizer—and confirmed the latest predictions. They were forecasting thunder, lightning, hailstones the size of crystalized chestnuts, and gale-force winds likely to sweep millions of books and roses into the sea, forming an isle like Sancho Panza’s Barataria, stretching as far as the eye could see.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Fermín, donating the paper to a poor soul who was sleeping it off, wedged in a chair next to the Canaletas kiosk.
Fermín wasn’t the only one to have that feeling. Barcelonians are peculiar creatures, never wasting an opportunity to contradict acknowledged truths such as weather maps or Aristotelian logic. That morning, which dawned with a sky the color of the trumpets of death, all the booksellers had gotten up early, ready to bring their bookstands out into the street and if necessary face tornadoes and typhoons.
When he saw the display of camaraderie along the Ramblas, Fermín felt that the optimists would surely triumph that day. “That’s what I like to see. Show them what we’re made of. Let it pour down, but they won’t make us budge.”
The florists, armed with an ocean of red roses, had shown no less courage. At 9:00 on the dot, the streets in central Barcelona were all decked out for the great day of books, hoping that the troubling prophecies would not scare away sweethearts, readers, and all the absentminded folk who’d congregated punctually every April 23 since 1930 to celebrate what was, in Fermín’s view, the most glorious holiday in the known universe.
At 9:24, as was not to be expected, the miracle occurred.
2
A Saharan sun drilled through Daniel’s bedroom curtains and shutters and slapped him in the face. He opened his eyes and witnessed the marvel in disbelief. Next to him lay Bea’s naked back, which he proceeded to lick from her neck all the way down, until she woke up giggling and turned around with a start. Daniel embraced her and kissed her lips slowly, as if he wanted to drink her. Then he moved the sheet aside and took pleasure in gazing at her, caressing her belly with his fingertips until she caught his hand between her thighs and licked his lips with enjoyment.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 75
