The Angel's Game (22 page)

Isabella looked down.

“I don’t know if I have any talent. I only know that I like to write. Or, rather, that I need to write.”

“Liar.”

She looked up and gazed at me harshly.

“OK. I am talented. And I don’t care two hoots if you think that I’m not.”

I smiled.

“That’s better. I couldn’t agree with you more.”

She seemed confused.

“In that I have talent or in that you think that I don’t?”

“What do you think?”

“Then do you believe I have potential?”

“I think you are talented and passionate, Isabella. More than you think and less than you expect. But there are a lot of people with talent and passion, and many of them never get anywhere. This is only the first step toward achieving anything in life. Natural talent is like an athlete’s strength. You can be born with more or less ability, but nobody can become an athlete just because he or she was born tall, or strong, or fast. What makes the athlete, or the artist, is the work, the vocation, and the technique. The intelligence you are born with is just ammunition. To achieve something with it you need to transform your mind into a high-precision weapon.”

“Why the military metaphor?”

“Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist’s life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one’s limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.”

Isabella considered my words.

“Do you hurl that speech at everyone, or have you just made it up?”

“The speech isn’t mine. It was ‘hurled’ at me, as you put it, by someone whom I asked the same questions that you’re asking me today. It was many years ago, but not a day goes by when I don’t realize how right he was.”

“So, can I be your assistant?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Isabella nodded, satisfied. On the table, close to where she was sitting, lay the photograph album Cristina had left behind. She opened it at random, starting from the back, and was soon staring at a picture of Señora de Vidal, taken by the gates of Villa Helius two or three years before she was married. Isabella closed the album and let her eyes wander around the gallery until they came to rest on me. I was observing her impatiently. She gave me a nervous smile, as if I’d caught her poking around where she had no business.

“Your girlfriend is very beautiful,” she said.

The look I gave her removed the smile in an instant.

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

A long silence ensued.

“I suppose the fifth rule is that I’m not to meddle in anything that doesn’t concern me, right?”

I didn’t reply. Isabella nodded to herself and stood up.

“Then I’d better leave you in peace and not bother you anymore today. If you like, I can come back tomorrow and we’ll start then.”

She gathered her pages and I nodded.

Isabella left discreetly and disappeared down the corridor. I heard her steps as she walked away and then the sound of the door closing. Her absence made me aware, for the first time, of the silence that bewitched that house.

P
erhaps 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 had 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 favorite people I came highly recommended. The farther 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 the room since the men from the electric company had wired the house. When I put the key in the lock, I felt a draft of cold air from the keyhole brush across my fingers, and I realized 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. 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 toward 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 centimeters 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 intention 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 each other 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 quite a catch, the official golden bachelor. More than one would drop by the bookshop with some excuse and stand sighing by the shop window. But Sempere’s son, even if he noticed, never tried to cash in on those 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 chili 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 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. Over the next 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 toward 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 Vidal’s table. Before we left the restaurant we passed 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 excellent eatery in Calle del Carmen.”

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 ever smelled at La Mai-son Dorée, 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 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 of black-veiled figures encircled the amphitheater of darkened marble that formed the portico. Each carried a long white candle. The light from a hundred flames sculpted the contours of a great, grieving marble angel on a pedestal. At the angel’s feet was 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 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.