The Antiquarian

by Julián Sánchez

  Their eyes met. Manolo kept quiet, and waited for Bety to speak.

  “What about Diego de Siurana? What happened to him?”

  “After his arrest in Barcelona and his first round of torture, Diego was taken to Toledo, where he was tortured again. They tortured him by strappado, which dislocated his bones. They used the toca, where they forced water down him, damaging his organs. Then they used fire to burn his limbs. Only the presence of a physician prevented the excesses from causing his death. They wanted him to speak by any means necessary. He received a heinous, inhumane punishment. But he didn’t say a word. Throughout it all he claimed not to know what they were talking about.

  “Diego’s torture was no less barbaric than that of other Inquisition victims, but it did differ from the rest in its duration. He was tortured once every two weeks over a span of about ten years. What usually happened was that after three or four sessions, the heretic was sentenced to burn at the stake, jailed for life, or penanced following participation in an auto-da-fé. Diego was the only victim whose torment was so prolonged, at least to my knowledge, and I’ve read about many, many sentences, so many that not even I can remember them all.”

  “Ten years of torture,” Bety murmured.

  “Ten years. It’s unbelievable that he could have survived as long as he did. In the end, his mutilated body gave up. He may have been stubborn, but he had probably lost his mind long before he died. Even the application of the torture violated the procedure, because torturing a person more than once wasn’t allowed, although they tended to resort to the legal term of ‘suspending’ the torture only to start over again a few days later. The accused could go back into the torture chamber only if new evidence appeared. And obviously, that wasn’t the case for Diego. Once he was dead, the tribunal found him guilty of heresy and his remains were burned during the great auto-da-fé held in Toledo in early July 1627. And the irregularities present in the actions of the Inquisition throughout the process appeared again: his name wasn’t on the public list of participants in the auto-da-fé, and is mentioned only in the sentence.”

  Manolo’s hands, which throughout his story had rested quietly on the table beside Bety’s notes, suddenly sprang back to life. They moved with a unique grace difficult to imagine in their owner, and finally ended up open, with palms upward. With that simple gesture, he seemed to confirm the truths revealed.

  “I see.”

  “You see?”

  “It’s not that difficult. They wanted to leave no trace of him behind.”

  “A good, albeit incomplete, assessment,” he said with his peculiar brand of candidness. “The Inquisition worked in a perfectly regulated way. No one broke the rules. One of the most important was the publication of the list of names before each auto-da-fé. The objective was to make the sins of the participants known to the spectators present, to remind them not only of what they mustn’t do, but that the sins purged by those wearing sanbenitos had been committed by their neighbors, friends, brothers, and sisters, and that it could most definitely happen to any of them.”

  “Not only did they want to keep any trace of him from being preserved, they wanted to make even the memory of his existence disappear.”

  “Exactly.” Manolo then took on a confidential air. “The birth certificates of Siurana are supposed to be in Prades, the town with the parish it belongs to. Well, I visited the archives and his name isn’t there, anywhere. It wasn’t crossed out; it simply wasn’t there. And another thing, the archbishopric’s archive in Barcelona should have his name in many documents by virtue of his office, and none of them do, despite it being one of the best historic archives on the church in our country. Diego de Siurana ceased to exist, as if he had never been born, until a curious researcher sifting through the dirty laundry of the past found him in the present.”

  “You raised a man from the dead.”

  “That’s right!” corroborated Manolo, taken by a certain excitement. “That unmatched power that research has over scholars, whatever their specialty, has to do with discovering its secrets. It doesn’t matter what secrets. The important thing is to find them, confront the mystery dangling from them.” Manolo nodded. “I found one without realizing it. I conveyed it to the person who could get the most out of it, Shackermann, and when that secret was about to play out on its own, when the final revelation appeared so near, it disappeared, it vanished before my eyes, it laughed like a flighty courtesan at my abilities, saying, ‘That’s your lot! So close, yet so far!’”

  Bety could scarcely believe what Manolo was telling her. It was well beyond anything she or Enrique had imagined, on their own or together. In exchange for it, there wasn’t much she could tell the man, who appeared to have offered in good faith all of his knowledge on the manuscript and its mysteries. Certain it was impossible for her information to match up to Manolo’s, Bety began her story.

  “Now it’s my turn. My story will be much shorter than yours. I have relatives in Barcelona who are book collectors. One of them recently acquired an entire library from an old masia, a family estate. The manuscript was mixed in with other documents. These relatives called on me to help translate the text. I was only too happy to oblige; it’s not every day you get an opportunity like that. The translation was tedious, complex at times, above all because of the master’s strange handwriting, but I got through it without too much difficulty. There was only one part I couldn’t quite translate: the side notes. As you’ve seen, they’re there in part of the text. I deduced that someone worked with the manuscript years after it was written, and wrote their impressions down in those side notes. But there’s one thing I don’t understand. If the Inquisition meant to make everything about Diego de Siurana disappear, how is it that the Casadevall manuscript, with all its side notes that prove Diego’s work, wasn’t found and destroyed as well? How could the inquisitors have missed it and allowed it to reach our hands? It makes no sense!”

  “One idea does occur to me. Remember at first when I asked you where you’d found it?”

  “Yes. And I told you it was in the old Bergués mansion, in Vic.”

  “Right. And you don’t remember that surname coming up in our conversation?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, yes. When we were talking about the life of Casadevall, you mentioned the names of the magister principalis, and one of them was Bergués!”

  “The name of the architect was Bargués, with an a, but it’s possible that with the passage of time one of the letters got changed into an e, making it into Bergués. Which would make sense: for generations, as was common in those times, the members of that family were builders and architects. It’s more than plausible that Diego de Siurana could have been connected to any of them, working as he did in the archbishopric. I find it a possibility that is beautiful in its rationality. I can’t tell you how it got passed off to Bargués, but it seems obvious that it was. Friendship? Maybe he knew the secret? He tried to carry on with Diego’s investigation and had to back off for fear of the Inquisition? Who knows.”

  “Now I understand why you reacted the way you did when I told you it was the Bergués family from Vic.”

  “Everything has fit from the very beginning.” Manolo watched her in silence, a blank expression on his face. But Bety felt uneasy, as if he might know that, without lying, she wasn’t telling the whole truth. “And now that you’ve translated the Latin text, you need an expert to help you with the Old Catalan used by Diego de Siurana, as it was clearly him,” Manolo asserted. “Don’t worry. Quim brought you to the best.”

  Bety nodded, faking serenity. There was no doubt in her mind: Manolo was the best.

  And that was exactly what she was afraid of.

  11

  “So this is where it all began.”

  Enrique was studying the slender arches that sustained the vaults of the cathedral. In the zenith of the vault, the distant crests that sealed the work seemed to float in space, put there by the hand of an unknown giant. Carlos follo
wed his gaze over the surface of the light-hued stone, which had been restored in the early 1970s to recover its original color after six hundred years of progressive blackening.

  “So it is.”

  “And it was a mere five hundred years ago.”

  “That’s right,” Enrique said.

  The cathedral was curiously free from the usual throngs of visitors that tend to turn it into anything but a place of worship. Though it was just five in the afternoon, only a few—mostly elderly worshippers, veteran and inveterate believers—were praying in front of the chapels that lined the aisles or were seated in the pews before the high altar. Neither the stampedes of Japanese tourists on a quest for the perfect photo, surely distracted by the Gaudí craze rampant in their country, nor domestic visitors, incapable of keeping the silence the place deserved, disturbed the conversation between Enrique and Carlos. The peculiar peacefulness of the moment, and the building’s excellent acoustics—perhaps the best of any Gothic structure for organ concerts—forced them to speak in very low tones, as befitted the prevailing silence. Using the pews to sit and discuss the developments of a murky case from the past was perfectly legitimate, just as disrupting proper order and propriety—as a sign on the wall near the entrance indicated—was not. “It must be three or four years since I’ve been here,” Carlos commented. “Funny about things like this; I had forgotten how beautiful it is.”

  “Me too,” Enrique admitted, letting himself smile. “But the truth is, this whole thing is over my head. I don’t know where I am, what I’m doing, and, if you really want to know, what my part in it is. At first it all seemed simple: I was going to trap a killer, avenge Artur’s death, and find some mysterious treasure from the past. But now, a stranger has snitched on the murderer, I’ve had my revenge but it’s been no good to me, and the treasure is elusive and out of reach, assuming it even exists. And the most incredible thing: my entire past has suddenly been turned upside down.”

  Carlos chuckled softly, restraining himself out of consideration for the ambience.

  “My God, Enrique. If you put a mystery reader in your place, I bet they’d be as confused as you. Look, things in life aren’t linear. They’re an association of a thousand different events. Seeing those associations is a very complex business. So much so that only a few manage to get there. And that’s what detectives and police do. The good ones have … we have—modesty aside—an innate knack for it. They’re—how shall I put it?—able to see a whole network of things, for lack of a better way to explain it.”

  “Give me an example,” Enrique asked.

  “Imagine a net, hung out in front of you. Something happens on the upper left-hand corner of the net, and it moves horizontally across it. Every time it reaches the other side, it moves down a row and goes back in the other direction, until it reaches the bottom right-hand corner, which is where the end is. Add to that the vertical strands of the net, which are the concurrent events. When I investigate a case I try to spread the information out, like a net, to get a grip on the connections between the events. That way, you can get to the other side of the net without needing to have all the information, which is the usual way to work, following a lead, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Great explanation.”

  “Yeah, well, too bad that a job well done doesn’t guarantee success, like this time. The investigation also ruled Samuel out as a suspect. He had a good alibi, like I told you over lunch. So your three suspects went up in smoke. And, without giving me time to tell you about it, you show up at my office, pull me away from my obligations—which I’m actually grateful for because I’m feeling pretty lazy and by this point in my career, my team is working for me so I can live off them—and take me to lunch in Plaça Reial to tell me they’ve caught Artur’s killer. And not only that, you lay down some wild story that dates back five hundred years about a hidden treasure, and, to my surprise, now it turns out Artur was a black market art dealer.”

  “Give me a break. My writer’s psyche might have had something to do with creating a work of fiction complex enough to fool not only Bety but even a pro like you, but the pieces fit perfectly. That much you have to admit. What was it you said? ‘There’s no such thing as coincidence,’ or something like that.”

  “Yeah, I said that,” Carlos agreed. “I said it because it’s true. But whether or not it was a believable story, the truth is you hid information from me. It was clear as day from the very moment we talked on my boat, and I told you so. It didn’t bother me, but I’d appreciate it if you told me why you did it.”

  Enrique moved his hands and head in an attempt to express his mystification at his own motives.

  “Oh, please! If a pimply twenty-year-old claimed not to know why he did things, it would seem reasonable. But you! All grown-up, and my friend, to boot!”

  “It’s true, I don’t know what to say. I don’t mean to justify it, but maybe it was the excitement of hunting a treasure, like when my real dad read me Treasure Island, and then we would play pirates in our apartment, stashing something somewhere and getting my mother to hunt for it. The only thing missing was the ghost of Flint appearing to me in dreams, and a parrot singing ‘yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.’ Christ, Carlos. I’m sorry, really. I didn’t mean to mislead you.”

  “If you’d been any other client, I would’ve cut you off cold. But you always were somewhat inconsistent and twisted. Don’t laugh! Always trying to be the center of the world’s attention, never realizing that the world could do just fine without you.”

  “I deserve that,” Enrique acknowledged.

  “Yes, you do. But you’re my friend,” Carlos nodded, “so this time, I’ll let it go.”

  They were silent. The strength of their old bond warmed them, muting their voices. They sat with the intense feeling of brotherhood, so rarely felt in full. To speak would have only ruined the moment.

  A little old woman lit a votive candle before the statue of Saint Pancras. The blend of incense and burning wax floated in the air, and anyone there, in their state of mind, would have thought they were living in a dream world.

  “How are you coping with this whole Artur ordeal?” Carlos asked with a soft, cautious smile.

  It was like pouring salt into a wound. Enrique leaned his head against the metal railing that separated the choir enclosure from the sanctuary before he spoke.

  “Badly,” he said, and leaned his head forward until he held it in his hands.

  The question was painful. Enrique’s mood plummeted, and he made no attempt to hide it. Carlos thought he knew the effect his question would have even before he asked it. But even though he thought it necessary to ask, he never imagined an impact so deep. Enrique hadn’t spoken about Artur since he outlined his activities over lunch, which showed how much it was affecting him. Carlos didn’t want to leave him with that pain inside. When shared, the intensity of pain is lessened. It was no consolation, but it was the first step toward acceptance.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Carlos suggested. Enrique got up alongside his friend. They left the cathedral through the cloister doorway. The spring sun still managed to illuminate with filtered beams a part of that courtyard originally meant for the priests’ meditation, now a rapid thoroughfare for many, and a place of contemplation for few. They walked over the floor, clad with the tombs that belonged to the highest officials of the bygone guilds of Barcelona, toward Bisbe Irurita Street. There, Enrique said good-bye to his friend.

  “I’d rather not talk about it. I really appreciate it, Carlos, but I want to walk alone awhile.”

  Carlos didn’t mention it again. He had given Enrique the chance to express his feelings, to ease his pain, like the good friend that he was. Enrique choosing not to was his business; it was beyond Carlos’s reach.

  “All right.” He extended his hand. “I’ll head back to the office. When are you leaving?

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Soon.”

  “Call me before you do. It’s tramontana se
ason so there’s a strong north wind. We could go out sailing any morning.”

  “Yeah, maybe I will. Thanks for everything, my friend.” He waved as he made his way down Baixada de Santa Eulàlia.

  Enrique walked slowly down the slope where, more than one thousand five hundred years before, the adolescent virgin who became the Patron Saint of Barcelona was martyred—put into a barrel with a nail-studded interior, and rolled down from the hill the Romans called Mons Taber. He too felt martyred, though his cross was not physical, but spiritual. When Fornells had finished telling him about the developments in the case and walked out of London Bar, Enrique felt agitated, as if the weight of Artur’s deceit fell on his shoulders all of a sudden, crushing him, smothering him. He wandered slowly around the wharf, trying to sort out his ideas, until he realized that Carlos’s security detail was no longer necessary. In fact, the investigation itself had lost its purpose, its very reason for existence. He had gone to his friend’s office hours earlier to tell him about the surprising developments in the case and to seek a consolation he was sure his pride wouldn’t let him ask for.

  He walked toward La Palla Street. He was right in the hub of Barcelona’s antiques district, and he soon saw what had been Artur’s shop in the distance. A few minutes later, he rested his forehead on the cool glass of a shop window, where under a sign that read “S. HOROWITZ, ANTIQUARIAN,” the shop run by his father’s best friend was located. It looked contemporary, completely different from Artur’s. They had used the low bearing arches of the building, some four hundred years old, to create a tasteful contrast with the light color of the walls. The lighting, warm and bright, aided in highlighting the quality of the objects on display, most of a religious nature. Samuel ran a specialized business where quality came before quantity. Inside, situated between two arches, a slender figure was perusing several documents arranged on a seventeenth-century baroque desk. Her long black hair hung loose over bare shoulders. She was wearing a light sleeveless burgundy dress, which brought out her clear eyes. Enrique stood and watched her for several minutes. Mariola handled the documents with what seemed to him like infinite grace. Her style and elegance came through even in insignificant everyday tasks.