My friend Oscar is one of those princes who would be well advised to stay away from fairy tales and the princesses who inhabit them. He doesn’t know he’s really Prince Charming who must kiss Sleeping Beauty in order to wake her from her eternal sleep, but that’s because Oscar doesn’t know that fairy tales are lies, although not all lies are fairy tales. Princes aren’t charming, and sleeping beauties, however beautiful, never wake from their sleep. He’s the best friend I’ve ever had and if I ever come across Merlin, I’ll thank him for having placed him in my path.
I kept the sheet of paper and went down to join Germán. He had put on a special bow tie and seemed more cheerful than ever. He smiled at me and I smiled back. That day, during the taxi ride, the sun was shining. Barcelona was decked out in her best clothes, enchanting both tourists and clouds – for even the clouds paused to stare at her beauty. None of this managed to erase the anxiety those lines had thrust into my mind. It was the first day of May 1980.
CHAPTER 28
THAT MORNING WE FOUND MARINA’S BED EMPTY, without sheets. There was no trace of the wooden cathedral or of her belongings. When I turned my head Germán was already rushing out in search of Dr Rojas. I ran after him. We found the doctor in his office, looking as if he hadn’t slept.
‘She’s taken a turn for the worse,’ he said succinctly.
He went on to explain that the night before, only a couple of hours after we’d left, Marina had suffered respiratory failure and her heart had stopped beating for thirty-four seconds. They’d managed to resuscitate her and she was now in the intensive care unit, unconscious. Her condition was stable and Rojas expected she would be able to leave the unit within the next twenty-four hours, although he didn’t want to give us any false hopes. I noticed that Marina’s things, her book, the wooden cathedral and the dressing gown she’d never worn, were on a shelf in the doctor’s office.
‘May I see my daughter?’ asked Germán.
Rojas himself led us to the intensive care unit. Marina was trapped in a bubble of tubes and steel machines, more monstrous and more real than any of Mijail Kolvenik’s inventions. She lay there like a piece of flesh at the mercy of some metal magic. And then I saw the real face of the demon that had tormented Kolvenik and understood his madness.
I remember that Germán burst into tears and an uncontrollable force pulled me out of there. I ran and ran, out of breath, until I came to noisy streets full of anonymous faces unaware of my pain. Around me was a world that was unconcerned with Marina’s fate. A whole universe in which her life was only a drop of water among the waves. I could think of only one place to go.
The old building in the Ramblas was still standing in its pool of darkness. Dr Shelley didn’t recognise me when he opened the door. The apartment was full of rubbish and smelled mouldy. The doctor looked at me with wild bulging eyes. I led him to his study and made him sit down near the window. María’s absence filled the air. It burned us. All the doctor’s haughtiness and bad temper had vanished. There was nothing left but an old man, alone and desperate.
‘He took her with him,’ he said. ‘He took her with him . . .’
I waited respectfully for him to calm down. At last he looked up and recognised me. He asked me what I wanted and I told him. He observed me unhurriedly.
‘There is no other bottle of Mijail’s serum. They were all destroyed. I can’t give you what I don’t have. But if I had it, I’d be doing you a bad turn. And you’d be making a mistake if you used it on your friend. The same mistake Mijail made . . .’
His words took a while to sink in. We only have ears for what we want to hear, and I didn’t want to hear that. Shelley held my gaze without blinking. I suspected that he had recognised my despair and the memories it brought back were frightening. I was surprised at myself when I realised that, had it depended on me, at that very moment I would have taken the same route as Kolvenik. Never again would I judge him.
‘The territory of humans is life,’ said the doctor. ‘Death does not belong to us.’
I felt immensely tired. I wanted to surrender – but to what? I turned to leave. Before I left Shelley called me back.
‘You were there, weren’t you?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘María died peacefully, Doctor.’
I saw tears in his eyes. He stretched a hand out to me and I shook it.
‘Thank you.’
I never saw him again.
At the end of the week Marina recovered consciousness and came out of intensive care. She was moved to a room on the second floor, facing west. She was alone in the room. She no longer wrote in her book and could barely lean over to look at her cathedral – almost finished now – on the windowsill. Rojas asked for permission to carry out one last series of tests. Germán agreed. He still had hope. When Rojas gave us the results in his office, his voice cracked. After months of struggling, he went to pieces when faced with the evidence, while Germán held him up and patted his shoulders.
‘There’s nothing more I can do . . . There’s nothing . . . Forgive me,’ cried Damián Rojas.
Two days later we took Marina back to the house in Sarriá. The doctors could not help her any further. We said goodbye to Doña Carmen, Rojas and Lulú, who wouldn’t stop crying. Little Valeria asked me where we were taking my girlfriend, the famous writer. Would she not tell her any more stories?
‘Home. We’re taking her home.’
I left the boarding school on a Monday without letting the school know or telling anyone where I was going. It didn’t occur to me that they’d miss me. Nor did I care. My place was next to Marina. We set her up in her bedroom. Her cathedral, now finished, kept her company by the window. It was the best building I have ever made. Germán and I took turns to be by her side around the clock. Rojas had told us she wouldn’t suffer. She would fade away slowly, like a flame flickering in the wind.
Marina never looked more beautiful to me than she did during those last days in the old house in Sarriá. Her hair had grown back, shinier than before, with silvery highlights. Even her eyes were more luminous. I hardly left her room. I wanted to savour every hour and every minute I had left by her side. We’d spend hours hugging each other without saying a word, without moving. One night, it was Thursday, Marina kissed my lips and whispered in my ear that she loved me and that, whatever happened, she would always love me.
She died the following morning, quietly, just as Rojas had predicted. At daybreak, with the first light of dawn, Marina pressed my hand hard, smiled at her father, and the flame in her eyes went out for ever.
We made the last journey with Marina in the old Tucker. Germán drove in silence to the beach, just as we’d done months earlier. It was a radiant day. I wanted to believe that the sea she loved so much had dressed up specially to receive her. We parked the car among the trees and went down to the shore to scatter her ashes.
When we returned to the car, Germán, now a broken man, admitted that he felt incapable of driving back. We abandoned the Tucker among the pine trees. Some fishermen who were driving by were kind enough to take us as far as the railway station. By the time we arrived back in Barcelona, at the Estación de Francia, seven days had passed since my disappearance. To me it felt like seven years.
I hugged Germán goodbye on the station platform. I still don’t know where he went or what became of him. We both knew we wouldn’t be able to look into each other’s eyes again without seeing Marina in them. I watched as he walked away, a speck vanishing into the canvas of time. Shortly afterwards a plainclothes policeman recognised me and asked me whether my name was Oscar Drai.
EPILOGUE
THE BARCELONA OF MY YOUTH NO LONGER EXISTS. Its streets and its light are gone for ever and only live on in people’s memories. Fifteen years later I returned to the city and revisited the scenes I thought I’d banished from my mind. I discovered that the Sarriá mansion had been demolished. The surrounding streets now form part of a motorway, along which, they say, progress travels. Th
e old cemetery is still there, I suppose, lost in the mist. I sat on the bench in the square that I’d shared so often with Marina. In the distance I glimpsed the outline of my old school, but I didn’t dare walk up to it. Something told me that if I did, my youth would evaporate for ever. Time doesn’t make us wiser, only more cowardly.
For years I’ve been fleeing without knowing what from. I thought that if I ran further than the horizon, the shadows of the past would move out of my way. I thought that if I put in enough distance, the voices in my mind could be silenced for ever. I returned at last to the secret beach facing the Mediterranean. Beyond it stood the chapel of Sant Elm, always keeping watch from afar. I found the old Tucker belonging to my friend Germán. Oddly enough it’s still there, in its final resting place among the pine trees.
I walked down to the shore and sat on the sand where years ago I had scattered Marina’s ashes. The sky had the same luminosity as on that day and I felt her presence sharply. I realised that I could no longer flee, that I no longer wished to do so. I had come back home.
During her last days I promised Marina that, if she couldn’t do it, I would finish this story. The book I gave her has been by my side all these years. Her words will be my words. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to do her justice. Sometimes I doubt my memory and wonder whether I will only be able to remember what never really happened.
Marina, you took all the answers away with you.
About the Author
Carlos Ruiz Zafón is the author of seven novels including the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game and The Prisoner of Heaven. He is one of the world’s most read and best loved writers. His work has been translated into more than forty languages and published around the world, garnering numerous international prizes and reaching millions of readers. He divides his time between Barcelona and Los Angeles.
Also By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Shadow of the Wind
The Angel’s Game
The Prisoner of Heaven
The Prince of Mist
The Midnight Palace
The Watcher in the Shadows
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Copyright
A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This ebook first published in 2013 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
© Carlos Ruiz Zafón 1999
© Dragonworks, S. L., 2004
English translation © Lucia Graves 2013
First published in Spain as Marina
The rights of Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Lucia Graves, to be identified as the author and translator of this work respectively, have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 297 85744 0
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
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An Hachette UK Company
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Marina Page 21
