The Angel's Game (26 page)

“Do I have your word that you’ll look after her for me until she comes to her senses?”

I grunted. “You have my word.”

I returned home laden with superb delicacies that Don Odón and his wife insisted on foisting on me. I promised them I’d take care of Isabella for a few days, until she agreed to reason things out and understood that her place was with her family. The shopkeepers wanted to pay me for her keep, but I refused. My plan was that before the week was up Isabella would be back sleeping in her own home, even if I had to keep up the pretense that she was my assistant. Taller towers had toppled.

When I got home I found her sitting at the kitchen table. She had washed all the dishes from the night before, made coffee, and dressed and styled her hair so that she resembled a saint in a religious picture. Isabella, who was no fool, knew perfectly well where I’d been and looked at me like an abandoned dog, smiling meekly. I left the bags with the delicacies from Don Odón by the sink.

“Didn’t my father shoot you with his gun?”

“He’d run out of bullets and decided to throw all these pots of jam and Manchego cheese at me instead.”

Isabella pressed her lips together, trying to look serious.

“So the name Isabella comes from your grandmother?”

“La mamma,”
she confirmed. “In the local area they called her Vesuvia.”

“You don’t say.”

“They say I’m a bit like her. When it comes to persistence.”

There was no need for a judge to pronounce on that, I thought.

“Your parents are good folk, Isabella. They don’t misunderstand you any more than you misunderstand them.”

The girl didn’t say anything. She poured me a cup of coffee and waited for the verdict. I had two options: throw her out and give the two shopkeepers a fit or be bold and patient for two or three more days. I imagined that forty-eight hours of my most cynical and cutting performance would be enough to break the iron determination of the young girl and send her, on her knees, back to her mother, begging for forgiveness and full board.

“You can stay here for the time being—”

“Thank you!”

“Not so fast. You can stay here under the following conditions: one, that you go spend some time in the shop every day, to say hello to your parents and tell them you’re well, and two, that you obey me and follow the rules of this house.”

It sounded patriarchal but excessively fainthearted. I maintained my austere expression and decided to make my tone more severe.

“What are the rules of this house?” Isabella inquired.

“Basically, whatever I damn well please.”

“Sounds fair.”

“It’s a deal, then.”

Isabella came round the table and hugged me gratefully. I felt the warmth and the firm shape of her seventeen-year-old body against mine. I pushed her away delicately, keeping my distance.

“The first rule is that this is not
Little Women
and we don’t hug each other or burst into tears at the slightest thing.”

“Whatever you say.”

“That will be the motto on which we’ll build our coexistence: Whatever I say.”

Isabella laughed and rushed off into the corridor.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“To tidy up your study. You don’t mean to leave it like that, do you?”

I
had to find a place where I could think, where I could escape from my new assistant’s domestic pride and her obsession with cleanliness. So I went to the library in Calle del Carmen, set in a nave of Gothic arches that had once housed a medieval hospice. I spent the rest of the day surrounded by volumes that smelled like a papal tomb, reading about mythology and the history of religions until my eyes were about to fall out onto the table and roll away along the library floor. After hours of reading without a break, I worked out that I had barely scratched a millionth of what I could find beneath the arches of that sanctuary of books, let alone everything else that had been written on the subject. I decided to return the following day and the day after that: I would spend at least a week filling the cauldron of my thoughts with pages and pages about gods, miracles and prophecies, saints and apparitions, revelations and mysteries—anything rather than think about Cristina, Don Pedro, and their life as a married couple.

…

As I had an obliging assistant at my disposal, I instructed her to find copies of catechisms and schoolbooks currently used for religious instruction and to write me a summary of each one. Isabella did not dispute my orders, but she frowned when I gave them.

“I want to know, in numbing detail, how children are taught the
whole business, from Noah’s Ark to the Feeding of the Five Thousand,” I explained.

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way I am. I have a wide range of interests.”

“Are you doing research for a new version of ‘Away in a Manger’?”

“No. I’m planning a novel about the adventures of a second lieutenant nun. Just do as I say and don’t question me or I’ll send you back to your parents’ shop to sell quince jelly galore.”

“You’re a despot.”

“I’m glad to see we’re getting to know each other.”

“Does this have anything to do with the book you’re writing for that publisher, Corelli?”

“It might.”

“Well, I get the feeling it’s not a book that will have much commercial appeal.”

“And what would you know?”

“More than you think. And there’s no need to get so worked up, either. I’m only trying to help you. Or have you decided to stop being a professional writer and change into an elegant amateur?”

“For the moment I’m too busy being a nanny.”

“I wouldn’t bring up the question of who is the nanny here, because I’d win that debate hands down.”

“So what debate does Your Excellency fancy?”

“Commercial art versus stupid moral idiocies.”

“Dear Isabella, my little Vesuvia, in commercial art—and all art that is worthy of the name is commercial sooner or later—stupidity is almost always in the eye of the beholder.”

“Are you calling me stupid?”

“I’m calling you to order. Do as I say. And shush.”

I pointed to the door and Isabella rolled her eyes, mumbling some insult or other that I didn’t quite hear as she walked off down the passageway.

…

While Isabella went around schools and bookshops in search of textbooks and catechisms to summarize for me, I went back to the library in Calle del Carmen to further my theological education, an endeavor I undertook fueled by strong doses of coffee and stoicism. The first seven days of that strange creative process enlightened me only with more doubts. One of the few truths I discovered was that, although the vast majority of authors who felt a calling to write about the divine, the human, and the sacred must have been exceedingly learned and pious, as writers they were dreadful. For the long-suffering reader forced to skim their pages it was a real struggle not to fall into a coma induced by boredom with each new paragraph.

After surviving thousands of pages, I was beginning to get the impression that the hundreds of religious beliefs cataloged throughout the history of the printed letter were extraordinarily similar. I attributed this first impression to my ignorance or to a lack of adequate information, but I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that I’d been going through the story lines of dozens of crime novels in which the murderer turned out to be either one person or another but the mechanics of the plot were, in essence, always the same. Myths and legends, either about divinities or about the origins and history of peoples and races, began to look like the images of a jigsaw puzzle, slightly different from one another but always constructed with the same pieces, though not in identical configurations.

After two days I had already become friends with Eulalia, the head librarian, who picked out texts and volumes from the ocean of paper in her care and from time to time came to see me at my table in the corner to ask whether I needed anything else. She must have been around my age and had wit to spare, generally expressed as sharp, somewhat poisonous jibes.

“You’re reading a lot of hagiography, sir. Have you decided to become an altar boy now, at the threshold of maturity?”

“It’s only research.”

“Ah, that’s what they all say.”

The librarian’s clever jokes provided an invaluable balm that enabled
me to survive those texts that seemed to be carved in stone and to press on with my pilgrimage. Whenever Eulalia had a free moment she would come over to my table and help me classify all that bilge—pages abounding with stories of fathers and sons, of pure, saintly mothers, betrayals and conversions, prophets and martyrs, envoys from heaven, babies born to save the universe, evil creatures horrifying to look at and usually taking the form of animals, ethereal beings with racially acceptable features who acted as agents of good, and heroes subjected to terrible tests to prove their destiny. Earthly existence was always perceived as a temporary rite of passage that urged one to a docile acceptance of one’s lot and the rules of the tribe, because the reward was always in the hereafter, a paradise brimming with all the things one had lacked in corporeal life.

On Thursday at midday, Eulalia came over to my table during one of her breaks and asked me whether, besides reading missals, I ate every now and then. So I asked her to lunch at nearby Casa Leopoldo, which had just opened to the public. While we enjoyed a delicious oxtail stew, she told me she’d been in the job for over two years and had spent two more years working on a novel that was proving difficult to finish. It was set in the library on Calle del Carmen and the plot was based on a series of mysterious crimes that took place there.

“I’d like to write something similar to those novels by Ignatius B. Samson,” she said. “Ever heard of them?”

“Vaguely,” I replied.

Eulalia couldn’t quite find a way forward with her writing so I suggested she give it all a slightly sinister tone and focus the story on a secret book possessed by a tormented spirit, with subplots full of the seemingly supernatural.

“That’s what Ignatius B. Samson would do, in your place,” I suggested.

“And what are you doing reading all about angels and devils? Don’t tell me you’re a repentant ex-seminarist.”

“I’m trying to find out what the origins of different religions and myths have in common,” I explained.

“What have you discovered so far?”

“Almost nothing. I don’t want to bore you with my lament.”

“You won’t bore me. Go on.”

“Well, what I’ve found most interesting so far is that, generally speaking, beliefs arise from an event or character that may or may not be authentic and rapidly evolve into social movements that are conditioned and shaped by the political, economic, and societal circumstances of the group that accepts them. Are you still awake?”

Eulalia nodded.

“A large part of the mythology that develops around each of these doctrines, from its liturgy to its rules and taboos, comes from the bureaucracy generated as they develop and not from the supposed supernatural act that originated them. Most of the simple, well-intentioned anecdotes are a mixture of common sense and folklore, and all the belligerent force they eventually develop comes from a subsequent interpretation of those principles, or even their distortion, at the hands of bureaucrats. The administrative and hierarchic aspects seem to be crucial in the evolution of belief systems. The truth is first revealed to all men but very quickly individuals appear claiming sole authority and a duty to interpret, administer, and, if need be, alter this truth in the name of the common good. To this end they establish a powerful and potentially repressive organization. This phenomenon, which biology shows us is common to any social group, soon transforms the doctrine into a means of achieving control and political power. Divisions, wars, and breakups become inevitable. Sooner or later, the word becomes flesh and the flesh bleeds.”

I thought I was beginning to sound like Corelli and I sighed. Eulalia gave a hesitant smile.

“Is that what you’re looking for? Blood?”

“It’s the caning that leads to learning, not the other way round.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

“I have a feeling you went to a convent school.”

“The Sisters of the Holy Infant Jesus. The black nuns. Eight years.”

“Is it true what they say, that girls from convent schools are the ones who harbor the darkest and most unmentionable desires?”

“I bet you’d love to find out.”

“You can put all the chips on ‘yes.’”

“What else have you learned in your crash course in theology?”

“Not much else. My initial conclusions have left an unpleasant aftertaste—it’s so banal and inconsequential. All this seemed more or less evident already without the need to swallow whole encyclopedias and treatises on where to tickle angels—perhaps because I’m unable to understand beyond my own prejudices or because there is nothing else to understand and the crux of the matter lies in simply believing or not believing, without stopping to wonder why. How’s my rhetoric? Are you still impressed?”

“It’s giving me goose pimples. A shame I didn’t meet you when I was a schoolgirl with dark desires.”

“You’re cruel, Eulalia.”

The librarian laughed heartily, looking me in the eye.

“Tell me, Ignatius B., who has broken your heart and left you so angry?”

“I see books aren’t the only things you read.”

We sat awhile longer at the table, watching the waiters coming and going across the dining room of Casa Leopoldo.

“Do you know the best thing about broken hearts?” the librarian asked.

I shook my head.

“They can only really break once. The rest is just scratches.”

“Put that in your book.”

I pointed to her engagement ring.

“I don’t know who the idiot is, but I hope he knows he’s the luckiest man in the world.”

Eulalia smiled a little sadly. We returned to the library and to our places: she went to her desk and I to my corner. I said good-bye to her the following day, when I decided that I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, read another
line about revelations and eternal truths. On my way to the library I had bought her a white rose at one of the stalls on the Ramblas and I left it on her empty desk. I found her in one of the passages, sorting out some books.