“Do you see that young lady sitting by the church door? Tell her to order whatever she likes. It’s on me.”
The waiter nodded and went up to her. When she saw him approaching she buried her head in her notebook, assuming an expression of total concentration that made me smile. The waiter stopped in front of her and cleared his throat. She looked up from her notebook and stared at him. He explained his mission and pointed in my direction. The girl looked at me in alarm. I waved at her. She went crimson. She stood up and came over to my table, with short steps, her eyes lowered.
“Isabella?” I asked.
The girl looked up and sighed, annoyed at herself.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Supernatural intuition,” I replied.
She held out her hand and I shook it without much enthusiasm.
“May I sit down?” she asked.
She sat down without waiting for a reply. In the next half a minute the girl changed positions about six times until she returned to the original one. I observed her with a calculated lack of interest.
“You don’t remember me, do you, Señor Martín?”
“Should I?”
“For years I delivered your weekly order from Can Gispert.”
The image of the girl who for so long had brought my food from the grocer’s came into my mind, then dissolved into the more adult and slightly more angular features of this Isabella, a woman of soft shapes and steely eyes.
“The little girl I used to tip,” I said, although there was little or nothing left of the girl in her.
Isabella nodded.
“I always wondered what you did with all those coins.”
“I bought books at Sempere & Sons.”
“If only I’d known …”
“I’ll go if I’m bothering you.”
“You’re not bothering me. Would you like something to drink?”
The girl shook her head.
“Señor Sempere tells me you’re talented.”
Isabella smiled at me skeptically.
“Normally, the more talent one has, the more one doubts it,” I said. “And vice versa.”
“Then I must be quite something,” Isabella replied.
“Welcome to the club. Tell me, what can I do for you?”
Isabella took a deep breath.
“Señor Sempere told me that perhaps you could read some of my work and give me your opinion and some advice.”
I fixed my eyes on hers for a few seconds before replying. She held my gaze without blinking.
“Is that all?”
“No.”
“I could see it coming. What is chapter 2?”
Isabella hesitated for only a second.
“If you like what you read and you think I have potential, I’d like you to allow me to become your assistant.”
“What makes you think I need an assistant?”
“I can tidy up your papers, type them, correct errors and mistakes—”
“Errors and mistakes?”
“I didn’t mean to imply that you make mistakes …”
“Then what did you mean to imply?”
“Nothing. But four eyes are better than two. And besides, I can take care of your correspondence, run errands, help with research. What’s more, I know how to cook and I can—”
“Are you asking for a position as assistant or cook?”
“I’m asking you to give me a chance.”
Isabella looked down. I couldn’t help but smile. Despite myself, I really liked this curious creature.
“This is what we’ll do. Bring me the best twenty pages you’ve written, the ones you think will show me what you are capable of. Don’t bring any more because I won’t read them. I’ll have a good look at them and then, depending on what I think, we’ll talk.”
Her face lit up and for a moment the veil of tension and toughness disappeared.
“You won’t regret it,” she said.
She stood up and looked at me nervously.
“Is it all right if I bring the pages round to your house?”
“Leave them in my letter box. Is that all?”
She nodded vigorously and backed away with those short, nervous steps. When she was about to turn and start running, I called her.
“Isabella?”
Her meek eyes clouded with sudden anxiety.
“Why me?” I asked. “And don’t tell me it’s because I’m your favorite author or any of that other flattery Sempere advised you to use to soften me up, because if you do this will be the first and last conversation we ever have.”
Isabella hesitated for a moment. Then she replied with disarming bluntness.
“Because you’re the only writer I know.”
She gave me an embarrassed smile and went off with her notebook, her unsteady walk, and her frankness. I watched her turn the corner of Calle Mirallers and vanish behind the cathedral.
5
When I returned home an hour later, I found her sitting on my doorstep clutching what I imagined must be her story. As soon as she saw me she stood up and forced a smile.
“I told you to leave it in my letter box,” I said.
Isabella nodded and shrugged her shoulders.
“As a token of my gratitude I’ve brought you some coffee from my parents’ shop. It’s Colombian and really good. The coffee didn’t fit through your letter box so I thought I’d better wait for you.”
An excuse like that could have been invented only by a budding novelist. I sighed and opened the door.
“In.”
I went up the stairs, Isabella following like a lapdog a few steps behind.
“Do you always take that long to have your breakfast? Not that it’s any of my business, of course, but I’ve been waiting here for three-quarters of an hour, so I was beginning to worry. I said to myself, I hope he hasn’t choked on something. It would be just my luck. The one time I meet a writer in the flesh and then he goes and swallows an olive the wrong way and bang goes my literary career,” she rattled on.
I stopped halfway up the steps and looked at her with the most hostile expression I could muster.
“Isabella, for things to work out between us we’re going to have to set down a few rules. The first is that I ask the questions and you just answer them. When there are no questions from me, you don’t give me answers or spontaneous speeches. The second rule is that I can take as long as I damn well please to have breakfast, an afternoon snack, or to daydream, and that does not constitute a matter for debate.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you. I understand that slow digestion of food is an aid to inspiration.”
“The third rule is that sarcasm is not allowed before noon. Understood?”
“Yes, Señor Martín.”
“The fourth is that you must not call me Señor Martín, not even at my funeral. I might seem like a fossil to you, but I like to think that I’m still young. In fact, I am young.”
“What should I call you?”
“By my name, David.”
The girl nodded. I opened the door of the apartment and showed her in. Isabella hesitated for a moment, then slipped in, giving a little jump.
“I think you still look quite young for your age, David.”
I stared at her in astonishment.
“How old do you think I am?”
Isabella looked me up and down, assessing.
“About thirty? But a young-looking thirty?”
“Just shut up and go and make some coffee with that concoction you’ve brought.”
“Where is the kitchen?”
“Look for it.”
We shared a delicious Colombian coffee sitting in the gallery. Isabella held her cup and watched me furtively as I read the twenty pages she had brought with her. Every time I turned a page and looked up I was confronted by her expectant gaze.
“If you’re going to sit there looking at me like an owl, this will take a long time.”
“What do you want m
e to do?”
“Didn’t you want to be my assistant? Then assist. Look for something that needs tidying and tidy it, for example.”
Isabella looked around.
“Everything is untidy.”
“This is your chance then.”
Isabella agreed and went off, with military determination, to confront the chaos that reigned in my home. I continued reading. The story she had brought me had almost no narrative thread. With a sharp sensitivity and an articulate turn of phrase, it described the feelings and longings of a girl confined to a cold room in an attic of the Ribera quarter from which she gazed at the city with its people coming and going along dark, narrow streets. The images and the sad music of her prose spoke of a loneliness that bordered on despair. The girl in the story spent hours trapped in her world; sometimes she would sit facing a mirror and slit her arms and thighs with a piece of broken glass, leaving scars like the ones just visible under Isabella’s sleeves. I had almost finished my reading when I noticed that she was looking at me from the gallery door.
“What?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but what’s in the room at the end of the corridor?”
“Nothing.”
“It smells odd.”
“Damp.”
“I can clean it if you like …”
“No. That room is never used. And besides, you’re not my maid. You don’t need to clean anything.”
“I’m only trying to help.”
“You can help by getting me another cup of coffee.”
“Why? Did the story make you drowsy?”
“What’s the time, Isabella?”
“It must be about ten o’clock.”
“And what does that mean?”
“No sarcasm before noon,” Isabella replied.
I smiled triumphantly and handed her my empty cup. She took it and headed off toward the kitchen.
When she returned with the steaming coffee, I had just read the last page. Isabella sat down opposite me. I slowly sipped the delicious brew. The girl wrung her hands and gritted her teeth, glancing now and then at the pages of her story that I had left face down on the table. She held out for a couple of minutes without saying a word.
“And?” she said at last.
“Superb.”
She beamed.
“My story?”
“The coffee.”
She gave me a wounded look and went to gather up her pages.
“Leave them where they are.”
“Why? It’s obvious that you didn’t like them and you think I’m nothing but a poor idiot.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say anything, which is worse.”
“Isabella, if you really want to devote yourself to writing, or at least to writing something others will read, you’re going to have to get used to sometimes being ignored, insulted, and despised and to almost always being considered with indifference. It’s an occupational hazard.”
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.
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 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.
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