The Angel's Game (17 page)

6

Perhaps there was too much caffeine coursing through my veins, or maybe it was just my conscience trying to return, like electricity after a power cut, but I spent the rest of the morning turning over in my mind an idea that was far from comforting. It was hard to imagine that there was no connection between the fire in which Barrido and Escobillas had perished, Corelli’s proposal - I hadn’t heard a single word from him, which made me suspicious - and the strange manuscript I had rescued from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which I suspected had been written within the four walls of my study.

The thought of returning to Corelli’s house uninvited, to ask him about the fact that our conversation and the fire should have occurred practically at the same time, was not appealing. My instinct told me that when the publisher decided he wanted to see me again he would do so
motu propio
and I was in no great hurry to pursue our inevitable meeting. The investigation into the fire was already in the hands of Inspector Víctor Grandes and his two bulldogs, Marcos and Castelo, on whose list of favourite people I came highly recommended. The further away I kept from them, the better. This left only the connection between the manuscript and the tower house. After years of telling myself it was no coincidence that I had ended up living here, the idea was beginning to take on a different significance.

I decided to start my own investigation in the place to which I had confined most of the belongings left behind by the previous inhabitants. I found the key to the room at the far end of the corridor in the kitchen drawer, where it had spent many years. I hadn’t been in that room since the men from the electrical company had wired up the house. When I put the key into the lock, I felt a draught of cold air from the keyhole brushing across my fingers, and I realised that Isabella was right; the room did give off a strange smell, reminiscent of dead flowers and freshly turned earth.

I opened the door and covered my mouth and nose. The stench was intense. I groped around the wall for the light switch, but the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling didn’t respond. The light from the corridor revealed the outline of the boxes, books and trunks I had banished to that room years before. I looked at everything with disgust. The wall at the end was completely covered by a large oak wardrobe. I knelt down by a box full of old photographs, spectacles, watches and other personal items. I began to rummage without really knowing what I was looking for, but after a while I abandoned the undertaking with a sigh. If I was hoping to discover anything I needed a plan. I was about to leave the room when I heard the wardrobe door slowly opening behind my back. A puff of icy, damp air touched the nape of my neck. I turned round slowly. The wardrobe door was half open and I could see the old dresses and suits that hung inside it, eaten away by time, fluttering like seaweed under water. The current of fetid cold air was coming from within. I stood up and walked towards the wardrobe. I opened the doors wide and pulled aside the clothes hanging on the rail. The wood at the back was rotten and had begun to disintegrate. Behind it I noticed what looked like a wall of plaster with a hole in it, a few centimetres wide. I leaned in to see what was on the other side of the wall, but it was almost pitch dark. The faint glow from the corridor cast only a vaporous thread of light through the hole into the space beyond, and all I could perceive was a murky gloom. I put my eye closer, trying to make out some shape, but at that moment a black spider appeared at the mouth of the hole. I recoiled quickly and the spider ran into the wardrobe, disappearing among the shadows. I closed the wardrobe door, left the room, turned the key in the lock and put it safely in the top of a chest of drawers in the corridor. The stench that had been trapped in the room had spread down the passage like poison. I cursed the moment I had decided to open that door and went outside to the street, hoping to forget, if only for a few hours, the darkness that throbbed at the heart of the tower house.

Bad ideas always come in twos. To celebrate the fact that I’d discovered some sort of camera obscura hidden in my home, I went to Sempere & Sons with the idea of taking the bookseller to lunch at La Maison Dorée. Sempere the elder was reading a beautiful edition of Potocki’s
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
and wouldn’t even hear of it.

‘I don’t need to pay to see snobs and halfwits congratulating one another, Martín.’

‘Don’t be grumpy. I’m buying.’

Sempere declined. His son, who had witnessed the conversation from the entrance to the back room, looked at me, hesitating.

‘What if I take your son with me? Will you stop talking to me?’

‘It’s up to you how you waste your time and money. I’m staying here to read: life’s too short.’

Sempere’s son was the very model of discretion. Even though we’d known one another since we were children, I couldn’t remember having had more than three or four short conversations with him. I didn’t know of any vices or weaknesses he might have, but I had it on good authority that among the girls in the quarter he was considered to be quite a catch, the official golden bachelor. More than one would drop by the bookshop with any old excuse and stand sighing by the shop window. But Sempere’s son, even if he did notice, never tried to cash in on these promises of devotion and parted lips. Anyone else would have made a brilliant career in seduction with only a tenth of the capital. Anyone but Sempere’s son who, one sometimes felt, deserved to be called a saint.

‘At this rate, he’s going to end up on the shelf,’ Sempere complained from time to time.

‘Have you tried throwing a bit of chilli pepper into his soup to stimulate the blood flow in key areas?’ I would ask.

‘You can laugh, you rascal. I’m close to seventy and I don’t have a single grandson.’

We were received by the same head waiter I remembered from my last visit, but without the servile smile or welcoming gesture. When I told him we hadn’t made a reservation he nodded disdainfully, clicking his fingers to summon a young waiter, who guided us unceremoniously to what I imagined was the worst table in the room, next to the kitchen door and buried in a dark, noisy corner. During the following twenty-five minutes nobody came near our table, not even to offer us the menu or pour us a glass of water. The staff walked past, banging the door and utterly ignoring our presence and our attempts to attract their attention.

‘Don’t you think we should leave?’ Sempere’s son said at last. ‘I’d be happy with a sandwich in any old place . . .’

He’d hardly finished speaking when I saw them arrive. Vidal and his wife were advancing towards their table escorted by the head waiter and two other waiters who were falling over themselves to offer their congratulations. The Vidals sat down and a couple of minutes later the royal audience began: one after the other, all the diners in the room went over to congratulate Vidal. He received these obeisances with divine grace and sent each one away shortly afterwards. Sempere’s son, who had become aware of the situation, was observing me.

‘Martín, are you all right? Why don’t we leave?’

I nodded slowly. We got up and headed for the exit, skirting the edges of the dining room on the opposite side from the Vidals’ table. Before we left the restaurant we passed by the head waiter, who didn’t even bother to look at us, and as we reached the main door I saw, in the mirror above the doorframe, that Vidal was leaning over and kissing Cristina on the lips. Once outside, Sempere’s son looked at me, mortified.

‘I’m sorry, Martín.’

‘Don’t worry. Bad choice. That’s all. If you don’t mind, I’d prefer it if you didn’t tell your father about all this . . .’

‘Not a word,’ he assured me.

‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t mention it. What do you say if I treat you to something more plebeian? There’s an eatery in Calle del Carmen that’s a knockout.’

I’d lost my appetite, but I gladly accepted.

‘Sounds like a plan.’

The place was near the library and served good homemade meals at inexpensive prices for the people of the area. I barely touched my food, which smelled infinitely better than anything I’d smelled at La Maison Dorée in all the years it had been open, but by the time dessert came round I had already drunk, on my own, a bottle and a half of red wine and my head was spinning.

‘Tell me something, Sempere. What have you got against improving the human race? How is it that a young, healthy citizen, blessed by the Lord Almighty with as fine a figure as yours, has not yet taken advantage of the best offers on the market?’

The bookseller’s son laughed.

‘What makes you think that I haven’t?’

I touched my nose with my index finger and winked at him. Sempere’s son nodded.

‘You will probably take me for a prude, but I like to think that I’m waiting.’

‘Waiting for what? For your equipment to get rusty?’

‘You sound just like my father.’

‘Wise men think and speak alike.’

‘There must be something else, surely?’ he asked.

‘Something else?’

Sempere nodded.

‘What do I know?’ I said.

‘I think you do know.’

‘Fat lot of good it’s doing me.’

I was about to pour myself another glass when Sempere stopped me.

‘Moderation,’ he murmured.

‘See what a prude you are?’

‘We all are what we are.’

‘That can be cured. What do you say if you and I go out on the town?’

Sempere looked sorry for me.

‘Martín, I think the best thing you can do is go home and rest. Tomorrow is another day.’

‘You won’t tell your father I got plastered, will you?’

On my way home I stopped in at least seven bars to sample their most potent stock until, for one reason or another, I was thrown out; each time I walked on down the street in search of my next port of call. I had never been a big drinker and by the end of the afternoon I was so drunk I couldn’t even remember where I lived. I recall that a couple of waiters from the Hostal Ambos Mundos in Plaza Real took me by the arms and dumped me on a bench opposite the fountain, where I fell into a deep, thick stupor.

I dreamed that I was at Vidal’s funeral. A blood-filled sky glowered over the maze of crosses and angels surrounding the large mausoleum of the Vidal family in Montjuïc Cemetery. A silent cortège peopled with black veils encircled the amphitheatre of darkened marble that formed the portico of the tomb. Each figure carried a long white candle. The light from a hundred flames sculpted the contours of a great marble angel on a pedestal overcome with grief and loss. At the angel’s feet lay the open grave of my mentor and, inside it, a glass sarcophagus. Vidal’s body, dressed in white, lay under the glass, his eyes wide open. Black tears ran down his cheeks. The silhouette of his widow, Cristina, emerged from the cortège; she fell on her knees next to the body, drowning in grief. One by one, the members of the procession walked past the deceased and dropped black roses on his glass coffin, until it was almost completely covered and all one could see was his face. Two faceless gravediggers lowered the coffin into the grave, the base of which was flooded with a thick, dark liquid. The sarcophagus floated on the sheet of blood, which slowly filtered through the cracks in the glass cover, until little by little, it filled the coffin, covering Vidal’s dead body. Before his face was completely submerged, my mentor moved his eyes and looked at me. A flock of black birds took to the air and I started to run, losing my way among the paths of the endless city of the dead. Only the sound of distant crying enabled me to find the exit and to avoid the laments and pleadings of the dark, shadowy figures who waylaid me, begging me to take them with me, to rescue them from their eternal darkness.

Two policemen woke me, tapping my leg with their truncheons. Night had fallen and it took me a while to work out whether these were normal policemen on the beat, or agents of the Fates on a special mission.

‘Now, sir, go and sleep it off at home, understood?’

‘Yes, colonel!’

‘Hurry up or you’ll spend the night in jail; let’s see if you find that funny.’

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I got up as best I could and set off towards my house, hoping to get there before my feet led me off into some other seedy dive. The journey, which would normally have taken me ten or fifteen minutes, almost tripled in time. Finally, by some miraculous twist, I arrived at my front door only to find Isabella sitting there, like a curse, this time inside the main entrance of the building, in the courtyard.

‘You’re drunk,’ said Isabella.

‘I must be, because in mid delirium tremens I thought I discovered you sleeping in my doorway at midnight.’

‘I had nowhere else to go. My father and I quarrelled and he’s thrown me out.’

I closed my eyes and sighed. My brain, dulled by alcohol and bitterness, was unable to give any shape to the torrent of denials and curses piling up behind my lips.

‘You can’t stay here, Isabella.’

‘Please, just for tonight. Tomorrow I’ll look for a
pensión
. I beg you, Señor Martín.’

‘Don’t give me that doe-eyed look,’ I threatened.

‘Besides, it’s your fault that I’ve been thrown out,’ she added.

‘My fault. I like that! I don’t know whether you have any talent for writing, but you certainly have plenty of imagination! For what ill-fated reason, pray tell me, is it my fault that your dear father has chucked you out?’

‘When you’re drunk you have an odd way of speaking.’

‘I’m not drunk. I’ve never been drunk in my life. Now answer my question.’

‘I told my father you’d taken me on as your assistant and that from now on I was going to devote my life to literature and couldn’t work in the shop.’

‘What?’

‘Can we go in? I’m cold and my bum’s turned to stone from sitting on the steps.’

My head was going round in circles and I felt nauseous. I looked up at the faint glimmer that seeped through the skylight at the top of the stairs.

‘Is this a punishment from above to make me repent my rakish ways?’