“One of yours?” His voice came out husky, diminished.
Federmann nodded.
“It looks expensive,” Vic said.
“It isn’t cheap. But this is just a social visit, remember?”
All the same, he began to tell Vic about the piece. The wood was Russian birch, he said, imported from Siberia. The fact that it had been cut at night, by the light of a full moon, gave it an unusual responsiveness, a special pliancy. It explained the pallor too, perhaps. As a rule, Vic had no patience with this kind of superstitious nonsense, but the carpenter’s voice had become hypnotic, and it was as if the skeptical side of Vic’s nature had been bypassed or overridden. Before he knew it, he had reached out and placed a hand on the top of the chest of drawers. It felt smooth. Cool. It reminded him of something. Something he hadn’t touched in a long time—or something he had only imagined touching. He looked up. Federmann was watching him with an expression he couldn’t decipher.
Bending down, Vic examined the piece of furniture more closely. It had a slightly asymmetrical quality, its edges appearing to undulate. Knots showed in its stumpy legs. Though Vic hadn’t spoken, Federmann seemed to read his mind. He had respected the wood’s inherent character, he said. He had followed the grain. There were four drawers—two small ones at the top and two large ones underneath. The metal handles were the color of verdigris, and they had a rustic look. When Vic slid one of the large drawers open, it rumbled like distant thunder. The inside smelled of forests. Moss.
Siberia, Vic thought.
He paid for the chest of drawers by credit card and arranged to have it delivered. The transaction took no more than a few minutes. Once Federmann had entered Vic’s details in his ledger, he turned away and consulted the calendar on the wall behind him. Vic surreptitiously scanned the previous entries. There was no sign of a Bill Stone.
When the delivery men set down the chest of drawers in the hallway three days later, Vic’s wife Joanna gave him an odd look.
“This isn’t like you,” she said.
“To buy furniture?”
She shook her head. “To get it right.”
He was about to take offense, but then he caught himself. If the truth be told, he was also surprised at himself—and he went on being surprised. He would find himself in cafés and bars, repeating Federmann’s lines about Siberia, the full moon, and the wood’s rare flexibility, not just to Joanna, but to friends as well, and no one took the piss or even questioned what he was saying. They reacted just as he’d reacted. They were riveted.
Vic turned to me, sweat gleaming on his forehead. “But you know what, Jordi? I couldn’t help feeling there was something fishy going on.”
“Fishy?”
“What he was doing,” Vic went on, “it felt like a challenge. A threat.”
I stared at him. “I don’t understand.”
Vic’s face was sickly pale all of a sudden. “You’re not the only one.”
“Where is it now? I didn’t notice it on the way in.”
“It’s right behind you.”
Startled, I swung round. The chest of drawers stood at the back of the terrace, near the barbecue. I looked at Vic, as if for guidance or permission, but he gave me nothing. I crossed the terrace. As I approached, I felt a magnetic pull, not just the urge to reach out and touch the chest of drawers, but something palpable or physical, a kind of tug. It didn’t come from me. It came from outside. From the thing itself. I didn’t touch it, though. I stepped back instead.
“Why is it outdoors?” I said. “What if it rains?”
But Vic didn’t seem to be listening. “The full moon. Siberia—” He let out a disdainful, almost bitter laugh. “I mean, it’s crazy, right?”
I saw that he needed something from me—corroboration, or reassurance. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. I’m not being much use.”
He stared off into the hills again, and for a few seconds I sensed his thoughts, as dark and tangled as the woodlands of the Collserola.
“What does your wife think?” I asked.
He shrugged. “She likes it.”
I looked around. “Where is she, anyway?”
“Sleeping.”
A voice called from the living room. More people had arrived. He said we’d better go in.
“What I told you,” he added. “Keep it to yourself.”
Vic’s guests had settled round the glass-topped coffee table, rolling spliffs and chopping white powder into lines. Vic made caipirinhas in a big jug. He told me he had learned the recipe from a friend in the restaurant business in Castelldefels. Within half an hour the apartment was packed. Vic put on the latest Amy Winehouse record—he owned a large collection of vinyl—and people started dancing.
We didn’t get the chance to talk again.
* * *
—
ON FRIDAY NIGHT a storm rolled in, violent and yet incomplete, with sheet lightning and bursts of thunder, but no real rain. I stood at my living-room window, staring down into Avinguda de la República Argentina. The 22 bus roared past. Bleary greenish-yellow windows, hardly anyone inside. It was March, and people would have left for the mountains. There was still some snow up there.
Earlier that day, Montse had called. She was publishing the French novella I was working on. Married to Jaume, one of my literature professors at university, she was a glamorous, chain-smoking woman in her late forties. She wanted to know how the translation was going, and I told her progress was slow. I was having trouble capturing the tone of voice. It was so brilliantly airless and corrosive.
“Take your time, love,” Montse said. “It’s got to be good.”
Corrosive. Was that the word? Though Jeanne narrated the story, she remained underwritten and uninhabited throughout. At first, I admired her bravado—her unconventional approach to what was essentially a conventional predicament—but as the book evolved, her behavior became disproportionate, and I began to wonder what kind of monster I was listening to. When did being in the right turn into being in the wrong? At what point did the victim become the perpetrator? To what extent was Jeanne actually enjoying the bewilderment and terror of her rival, Sophie? And where, in the end, did the reader’s sympathies lie? These were the questions the novella raised. But the title—Giving—which was obvious and flat, offered no easy answers. Perhaps what the book was really about was not infidelity and revenge but the way in which we’re altered by pressures we’re not accustomed to. There was even the implication that Jeanne had been waiting for a situation like this to arise. Part of her had been lying dormant—hoping…
A vicious flash of silver. For a split second, the people on the pavement below had shadows, even though it was after eleven o’clock at night. I walked over to my desk and shut down my computer. Once, during a storm, there had been a power surge, and I had lost an entire week’s work. I found myself thinking of Mireia. She lived on her own, and storms frightened her. As I called her mobile, the thunder came, long-drawn-out and ponderous, like a bowling ball sent rolling down its lane. The moment before the skittles scatter.
“God, did you hear that?” Her voice was trembling.
To distract her, I began to tell her about the carpenter’s workshop at the foot of Montjuïc, and the chest of drawers made from wood that had been cut by the light of a full moon.
“You’re making this up,” she said.
“I’m not. It’s true.” But I tried to sound as if I was lying. I wanted to take some credit for the story. Anything to impress her—even now, after all these years.
“So what happened?”
“A man came across the workshop by chance. He just walked in and looked around, all very casual. When he saw the chest of drawers, though, he fell in love with it. Instantly. It reminded him of something—he couldn’t think what—but he knew one thing: he had to have it.”
Mi
reia laughed softly. “I’m a bit like that.”
“I know.”
A crack of thunder, then a nasty tearing sound, as if bits of canvas were being ripped to pieces in the sky.
Mireia gasped.
I asked if she was all right.
“Keep talking,” she said.
I remembered the night we went for a walk in the Collserola. It was Mireia’s idea. After dinner, we drove up Muntaner and through the tunnels, leaving the carretera at Valldoreix. We parked on a suburban road and set off along the dirt track that leads to Can Borell, a restaurant deep in the woods. It was July, and the moon was almost full. The track was dusty, pale as flour. I could see Mireia’s face quite clearly.
Once we had passed the huge two-hundred-year-old pine tree known as El Pi d’en Xandri, the track narrowed. Only a few hundred meters farther on, Mireia suggested we take a smaller path, one she seemed to choose at random. I was worried about wild boar—I had heard of people being attacked—and also about getting lost, but I decided to say nothing. Still, there was a ribbon of fear in me as I plunged after her, into the bushes. The path wound upwards, over rocks and roots. We were following a dried-up watercourse. If we came in winter, we would be walking in a stream. After a quarter of an hour we reached the summit of a low hill. The undergrowth was taller than we were. There was no view. It was here, just to one side of the path, that we found a small clearing with a floor of pine needles, a kind of chamber in the forest. Now we were standing still, I realized we were both breathing hard from the climb.
“It’s like a little room,” Mireia said in a hushed voice.
We would never be more hidden, I thought, or more alone.
She kneeled down.
“The ground’s still warm,” she said. “Feel.”
She was looking up at me, lips parted. The sight of her drew all the air out of me. I felt my heart was beating in a vacuum.
“Jordi?” she murmured.
I kneeled.
For once I managed not to tell her what she meant to me. That always ruined everything. Instead I talked about the beauty of the night, the wildness of where we were. The sense that we could be the only people in the world. A soft sound came out of her. Half sigh, half groan. As if I’d hurt her. We took off our clothes and made love on the pine needles, her body monochrome but edged in silver as it rose above me, and I whispered to myself, Remember this, remember everything. There will come a time when you won’t believe it happened.
“Jordi?”
Ah yes. The storm, the story…
“The man bought the chest of drawers,” I said, resuming, “and had it delivered to his apartment. A few hours later, when he woke up in the middle of the night, he saw the chest of drawers standing across the room, next to the door. It was giving off a strange kind of muted light, like an aura, and it was then that he realized what it reminded him of—”
Mireia interrupted. “What? What did it remind him of?”
“It reminded him of a girl he used to know—how her skin looked in the dark when they made love…”
I could hear Mireia on the other end, holding her breath. She was only millimeters away from me, it seemed. I wondered if she understood the reference. I doubted it somehow. It was possible she no longer remembered the night that I could not forget.
Still, I went on.
“He walked over and touched the wood, and it was as soft as her skin, and he knew then that he would have paid anything for that chest of drawers. Because the girl it reminded him of was a girl who had been killed in a car crash several years before. She’d been on holiday in France, and she was driving back to Barcelona to be with him. She missed him so much that she was driving fast—too fast—and that was when she lost control—”
I stopped, partly out of shock—until that moment I hadn’t realized that the girl might be dead—and partly because I wasn’t sure where I could take the story next.
“Is that the end?” Mireia asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe she shouldn’t have died. Maybe something else should have happened—something less dramatic, but just as tragic.”
“I think the storm’s moved on.”
“Yes.”
“You know what, Jordi? You should write.”
“I haven’t got anything to say. That’s why I do translations.”
She sighed. I had disappointed her.
“It’s late,” I said. “I should get some sleep.”
“Thank you so much for calling.”
Something hot surged through me, like a car accelerating from a standing start. “Mireia—”
But she’d already gone.
* * *
—
I BECAME A REGULAR at the café on Plaça Kennedy where Vic had taken me on the day we first met. Most mornings, I would order café con leche and a croissant, then I would go back to my apartment and start work. Though Vic and I kept different hours, I knew I would run into him sooner or later.
During the first week of May I walked in to find him sitting by the window in a pink bowling shirt, reading a copy of Mundo Deportivo. The paper was open on a photo of Ronaldinho, his face tipped skywards, the two middle fingers of each hand tucked into the palm. Though football didn’t interest me much, I knew this was how the Brazilian celebrated when he scored a goal. Vic looked up. He hadn’t shaved, and his eyes were bloodshot.
“Can I join you?” I asked.
“Be my guest.” He didn’t seem especially glad to see me, and I wondered if I’d done something to offend him.
I ordered my usual café con leche.
He asked if I’d seen the game on Sunday. I shook my head. He told me it had been a shambles.
“Shambles,” I said. “Such a great word.” I gestured at the picture of Ronaldinho. “Is it true he’s leaving?”
Vic shrugged. “That’s what they say.”
“Are you all right, Vic? You look tired.”
“I just got back from London. I have to show up now and then—keep the bastards on their toes.” He pushed the paper away and lit a cigarette. “Do you believe in the supernatural?”
“You mean, like ghosts?” I was smiling.
“I’m serious.” He turned his cigarette in the ashtray until the tip was sharp and red. “Have you had any experiences you couldn’t explain?”
“Like what?”
“Noises in the night—stuff moving about—”
I assumed a pensive look, but I wasn’t actually thinking about anything at all. In that moment, I felt like I was in a movie. Vic often had that effect on me.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “What are you getting at?”
He rolled his shoulders inside his shirt, then crushed out his cigarette and shook his wrist, adjusting the position of his gold chain bracelet. “Are you free tomorrow night?”
I said I was.
He asked if I knew a bar called the Mirador. It was at the top of Avinguda Tibidabo. I thought I’d seen a bar up there, but I’d never been to it.
“Meet me there at eleven,” he said.
Seconds later, he had me staring at him open-mouthed as he told me a story that involved, among other things, two male strippers from Venezuela performing in a derelict ballroom in Les Corts.
* * *
—
I ARRIVED EARLY the following night. Taking a seat at the bar, I ordered a beer and looked around. I could see why Vic might frequent the Mirador. With its seventies wood paneling, its red banquettes, and its small square dance floor, it had a seedy Saturday Night Fever feel to it, and the front wall was a single plate-glass window that overlooked the whole of Barcelona. Vic liked a view. I wondered where Mireia was. I wondered who she was with. The jealousy was dull, like a headache only partially suppressed by painkillers. Far below, the lights of the city winked and glittered, as if they were in on th
e secret.
I was already on my second beer when Vic showed up. He was dressed in a mustard-yellow jacket with a black polo neck and his usual pressed black trousers. He ordered a rum-and-Coke. When the drink arrived, he stared down into the glass, stabbing at the ice cubes with a plastic cocktail stick. The signet ring he was wearing gave off a sullen gleam.
“You asked me why I kept the chest of drawers outside,” he said.
I nodded. “I was curious.”
“It started about a month ago.”
He had got home late, he went on, and he had gone straight to bed. At four a.m., he was woken by a scraping noise that seemed to be coming from inside the apartment. At first he thought it was Joanna—chronic back pain often disturbed her during the night—but she was fast asleep beside him. He lay motionless, just listening. There were no more noises. In the morning he found a note from Joanna on the breakfast bar. Could you be a bit quieter when you come in? Some of us have to get up in the morning. He had no idea what she was on about.
A week later, she accused him of having moved the chest of drawers into the living room. He could at least have moved it back again afterwards, she said, instead of leaving her to do it, with her slipped disc.
He was indignant. “I didn’t move it. Why would I do that?”
“Maybe you don’t remember moving it.”
“It wasn’t me.”
She turned away, as if to protect herself. “You were probably out of it—as usual.”
They’d had a fierce argument—it didn’t take much these days—but the mystery remained unsolved.
Vic brushed the tip of his nose with the back of his hand, then glanced around. The Mirador had filled up while he’d been talking. Farther along the bar was a middle-aged man in a blazer. With his dyed blond mullet and his perma-tan he looked like an aging tennis star. The girl with him was wearing six-inch heels and lots of gold.
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