The Angel's Game (10 page)

“The reason I wanted to talk to you is that I’m very worried about him.”

“Why are you worried?”

“You know that some years ago I started work as his secretary. The truth is that Pedro is a very generous man and we’ve ended up being good friends. He has behaved very well toward my father, and toward me. That’s why it hurts me to see him like this.”

“Like what?”

“It’s that wretched book, the novel he wants to write.”

“He’s been at it for years.”

“He’s been destroying it for years. I correct and type all his pages. Over the years I’ve been working as his secretary he’s destroyed at least two thousand pages. He says he has no talent. He says he’s a fraud. He’s constantly at the bottle. Sometimes I find him upstairs in his study, drunk, crying like a child.”

I swallowed hard.

“He says he envies you, he wants to be like you, he says people lie and praise him because they want something from him—money, help—but he knows that his book is worthless. He keeps up appearances with everyone else, his smart suits and all that, but I see him every day and I know he’s losing hope. Sometimes I’m afraid he’ll do something stupid. It’s been going on for some time now. I haven’t said anything because I didn’t know who to speak to. If he knew I’d come to see you he’d be furious. He always says: Don’t bother David with my worries. He’s got his whole life ahead of him and I’m nothing now. He’s always saying things like that. Forgive me for telling you all this, but I didn’t know who to turn to.”

I felt an intense cold invading me: the knowledge that while the man to whom I owed my life had plunged into despair, I had been locked in my own world and hadn’t paused for one second to notice.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have come …”

“No,” I said. “You’ve done the right thing.”

Cristina looked at me with a hint of a smile and for the first time I felt that I was not a stranger to her.

“What can we do?” she asked.

“We’re going to help him,” I said.

“What if he doesn’t let us?”

“Then we’ll do it without his noticing.”

I
will never know whether I did it to help Vidal, as I kept telling myself, or simply as an excuse to spend more time with Cristina. We met almost every afternoon in my tower house. Cristina would bring the pages Vidal had written in longhand the day before, always full of deletions, with whole paragraphs crossed out, notes all over the page, and a thousand and one attempts to save what was beyond repair. We would go up to the study and sit on the floor. Cristina would read the pages out loud and then we would discuss them at length. My mentor was attempting to write an epic saga covering three generations of a Barcelona family that was not very different from his own. The action began a few years before the Industrial Revolution with the arrival in the city of two orphaned brothers and developed into a sort of biblical parable in the Cain and Abel mode. One of the brothers ended up becoming the richest and most powerful magnate of his time, while the other devoted himself to the Church and helping the needy, only to end his days tragically during an episode that was quite evidently borrowed from the misfortunes of the priest and poet Jacint Verdaguer. Throughout their lives the two brothers were at loggerheads, and an endless list of characters filed past in torrid melodramas, scandals, murders, tragedies, and other requirements of the genre, all set against the background of the birth of modern Barcelona and its world of industry and finance. The narrator was a grandchild of one of the two brothers, who reconstructed the story as he
watched the city burn from a palatial mansion in Pedralbes, during the riots of the Tragic Week of 1909.

The first thing that surprised me was that the story was one that I had suggested to him some years earlier, as a means of getting him started on his most significant work, the novel he always said he would write one day. The second thing was that, not for any lack of opportunity, he had never told me he’d decided to use the idea or that he’d already spent years on it. The third thing was that the novel, as it stood, was a complete and utter flop: not one of the elements of the book worked, starting with the characters and the structure, continuing with the atmosphere and the plot, and ending with a language and a style that suggested the efforts of a pretentious amateur with too much time on his hands.

“What do you think of it?” Cristina asked. “Can it be saved?”

I preferred not to tell her that Vidal had borrowed the premise from me, not wishing her to be more worried than she already was, so I smiled and nodded.

“It needs some work, that’s all.”

As the day grew dark, Cristina would sit at the typewriter and between us we rewrote Vidal’s book, letter by letter, line by line, scene by scene.

The storyline put together by Vidal was so vague and insipid that I decided to recover the one I had invented when I originally suggested it to him. Slowly we brought the characters back to life, rebuilding them from head to toe. Not a single scene, moment, line, or word survived the process and yet, as we advanced, I had the impression that we were doing justice to the novel that Vidal carried in his heart and had decided to write without knowing how.

Cristina told me that sometimes, weeks after he remembered writing a scene, Vidal would reread it in its final typewritten version and be surprised at his craftsmanship and the fullness of a talent in which he had ceased to believe. She feared he might discover what we were doing and told me we should be more faithful to his original work.

“Never underestimate a writer’s vanity, especially that of a mediocre writer,” I would reply.

“I don’t like to hear you talking like that about Pedro.” “I’m sorry. Neither do I.”

“Perhaps you should slow down a bit. You don’t look well. I’m not worried about Pedro anymore—I’m concerned about you.” “Something good had to come of all this.”

…

In time I grew accustomed to savoring the moments I shared with her. It wasn’t long before my own work suffered the consequences. I found the time to work on
City of the Damned
where there was none, sleeping barely three hours a day and pushing myself to the limit to meet the deadlines in my contract. Both Barrido and Escobillas made it a rule not to read any book—neither the ones they published nor the ones published by the competition—but Lady Venom did read them and soon began to suspect that something strange was happening to me.

“This isn’t you,” she would say every now and then.

“Of course it’s not me, dear Herminia. It’s Ignatius B. Samson.”

I was aware of the risks I was taking, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I woke up every day covered in sweat and with my heart beating so hard I felt as if it were going to crack my ribs. I would have paid that price and much more to retain the slow, secret contact that unwittingly turned us into accomplices. I knew perfectly well that Cristina could read this in my eyes every time she came, and I knew perfectly well that she would never respond to my advances. There was no future, there were no great expectations, in that race to nowhere, and we both knew it.

Sometimes, when we grew tired of attempting to refloat the leaking ship, we would abandon Vidal’s manuscript and try to talk about something other than the intimacy that, from being so hidden, was beginning to weigh on our consciences. Now and then I would muster enough courage to take her hand. She let me, but I knew it made her feel uncomfortable. She felt that it was not right, that our debt of gratitude to Vidal united and separated us at the same time. One night, shortly before she left, I held her face in my hands and tried to kiss her. She remained motionless and when I saw myself in the mirror of her eyes I
didn’t dare speak. She stood up and left without saying a word. After that, I didn’t see her for two weeks and when she returned she made me promise nothing like that would ever happen again.

“David, I want you to understand that when we finish working on Pedro’s book we won’t be seeing each other as we do now.”

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

My advances were not the only thing Cristina didn’t approve of. I began to suspect that Vidal had been right when he said she disliked the books I was writing for Barrido & Escobillas, even if she kept quiet about it. It wasn’t hard to imagine her thinking that my efforts were strictly mercenary and soulless, that I was selling my integrity for a pittance and lining the pockets of a couple of sewer rats because I didn’t have the courage to write from my heart, under my own name and with my own feelings. What hurt me most was that, deep down, she was probably right. I fantasized about backing out of my contract and writing a book just for her, a book with which I could earn her respect. If the only thing I knew how to do wasn’t good enough for Cristina, perhaps I should return to the gray, miserable days of the newspaper. I could always live off Vidal’s charity and favors.

…

I had gone out for a walk after a long night’s work, unable to sleep. Wandering about aimlessly, my feet led me uphill until I reached the building site of the Sagrada Familia. When I was small, my father had sometimes taken me there to gaze up at the babel of sculptures and porticoes that never seemed to take flight, as if the building were cursed. I liked going back to visit the place and discovering that it had not changed, that although the city was endlessly growing around it, the Sagrada Familia remained forever in a state of ruin.

Dawn was breaking when I arrived: the towers of the Nativity façade stood in silhouette against a blue sky, scythed by red light. An eastern wind carried the dust from the unpaved streets and the acrid smell from the factories shoring up the edges of the Sant Martí quarter. I
was crossing Calle Mallorca when I saw the lights of a tram approaching through the early morning mist. I heard the clatter of the metal wheels on the rails and the sound of the bell the driver was ringing to warn people of the tram’s advance. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. I stood there, glued to the ground between the rails, watching the lights of the tram leaping toward me. I heard the driver’s shouts and saw the plume of sparks that shot out from the wheels as he slammed on the brakes. Even then, with death only a few meters away, I couldn’t move a muscle. The smell of electricity invaded the white light that blazed in my eyes, and then the tram’s headlights went out. I fell over like a puppet, conscious for only a few more seconds, time enough to see the tram’s smoking wheel stop just centimeters from my face. Then all was darkness.

I
opened my eyes. Thick columns of stone rose in the shadows toward a naked vault. Needles of dusty light fell diagonally, revealing endless rows of ramshackle beds. Small drops of water fell from the heights like black tears, exploding with an echo as they touched the ground. The darkness smelled of mildew and damp.

“Welcome to Purgatory.”

I sat up and turned to find a man dressed in rags who was reading a newspaper by the light of a lantern. He brandished a smile that showed half of his teeth were missing. The front page of the newspaper he was holding announced that General Primo de Rivera was taking over all the powers of the state and installing a gentlemanly dictatorship to save the country from imminent disaster. That newspaper was at least five years old.

“Where am I?”

The man peered over his paper and looked at me curiously.

“At the Ritz. Can’t you smell it?”

“How did I get here?”

“Half dead. They brought you in this morning on a stretcher and you’ve been sleeping it off ever since.”

I felt my jacket and realized that all the money I’d had on me had vanished.

“What a mess the world is in,” cried the man, reading the news in
his paper. “It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.”

“How do I get out of here?”

“If you’re in such a hurry … There are two ways, the permanent and the temporary. The permanent way is via the roof: one good leap and you can rid yourself of all this rubbish forever. The temporary way is somewhere over there, at the end, where that idiot is holding his fist in the air with his trousers falling off him, making the revolutionary salute to everyone who passes. But if you go out that way you’ll come back sooner or later.”

The first man was watching me with amusement and the kind of lucidity that shines occasionally only in madmen.

“Are you the one who stole my money?”

“Your suspicion offends me. When they brought you here you were already as clean as a whistle, and I only accept bonds that can be cashed at a bank.”

I left the lunatic sitting on his bed with his out-of-date newspaper and his up-to-date speeches. My head was still spinning and I was barely able to walk more than four steps in a straight line, but I managed to reach a door that led to a staircase on one of the sides of the huge vault. A faint light seemed to filter down from the top of the stairwell. I went up four or five floors until I felt a gust of fresh air that was coming through a large doorway at the top. I walked outside and at last understood where I was.

Spread out before me was a lake, suspended above the treetops of Ciudadela Park. The sun was beginning to set over Barcelona and the weed-covered water rippled like spilled wine. The water reservoir building looked like a crude castle or a prison. It had been built to supply water to the pavilions of the 1888 Universal Exhibition, but in time its vast, cathedral-like interior had become a shelter for the destitute and the dying who had no other refuge from the night or the cold. The huge water basin on the flat rooftop was now a murky stretch of water that slowly bled away through the cracks in the building.

Then I noticed a figure posted on one of the corners of the roof. As if the mere touch of my gaze had alerted him, he turned round sharply and looked at me. I still felt a bit dazed and my vision was blurred, but I thought the figure seemed to be getting closer. He was approaching too fast, as if his feet weren’t touching the ground when he walked, and he moved in sudden, agile bursts, too quick for the eye to catch. I could barely see his face against the light, but I was able to tell that he was a gentleman with black, shining eyes that seemed too big for his face. The closer he got to me the more his shape seemed to lengthen and the taller he seemed to grow. I felt a shiver as he advanced, and I took a few steps back without realizing that I was moving toward the water’s edge. I felt my feet treading air and began to fall backwards into the pond when the stranger suddenly caught me by the arm. He pulled me up gently and led me back to solid ground. I sat on one of the benches that surrounded the water basin, then looked up and saw him clearly for the first time. His eyes were normal size, his height similar to mine, and his walk and gestures were like those of any other gentleman. He had a kind and reassuring expression.