The Dream of the City
Page 45
Thanks to Guillermo, in large part, Dimas had managed to know Laura, to truly know her.
In those faraway days, his only ambition had been to climb the ladder, make money, even if it meant betraying himself. Now, from the distance, everything seemed to have a reason, and those hard times he had been through were like necessary steps to go through, and their hard edges had been filed down by time. Yes, in the end, life had treated him well.
Not even the memory of Ferran could cloud that vision. That night in March of 1915, Dimas’s path and Laura’s had joined together forever. Definitively. And Ferran’s had taken a turn, spontaneous, surprising, one that he himself had chosen. He had let himself be blinded by money, by the stupid bourgeois tradition of making your own name, which he must have inherited from his father. Francesc, despite his goodness, reminded his oldest son frequently, without words, maybe without malice, by his mere presence, that to inherit a business wasn’t enough, that the next generation had to do something more. … And the influence of a sinister person like Bragado did all the rest. For that reason, Ferran, after writing his confession, decided to vanish, to disappear. After his commercial flirtations with the Germans, he ended up enlisting with the French. He had the firm conviction he was joining the losing side. About that he was wrong, too, though he never found out. Or perhaps he did. The last they heard of him was that he had disappeared in an incursion with his company behind enemy lines, close to Nancy. At that time, as they would later learn, he was shot twice, spent a month recovering after inhaling mustard gas, and had three ribs broken after a fall into a trench fleeing from enemy fire. If he wanted to do penance for his errors, he had done so amply. His death was added to more than ten million losses across the face of the continent. In his heart, Dimas hoped Ferran had been able to forgive himself before the end came.
“You don’t ever put that contraption down?” Dimas said to Guillermo softly.
“Every person should pick the jewelry that’s right for them, don’t you think, brother?” Guillermo said, smiling ear to ear.
Outside, the ambience was less oppressively mournful. Without the pressure of the sacred space or the imposing presence of the coffin, the people talked; discreetly, but they talked. They seemed to have freed themselves from a heavy burden. When he went out, Guillermo greeted the man who had been his father for most of his life. He had no doubt about his love and influence and just how much he owed him. Leaving him was the hardest thing about his decision to go to New York.
But he knew he wasn’t leaving him alone. Unlike with most people, Juan Navarro, after years of hard luck, had triumphed with the patience of a warrior who knows how to wait for his moment.
Carmela, his wife—she always had been—grabbed the lapels of his jacket and smoothed them out. She gave him a long look and said, “You’re a disaster, Juan.”
He smiled back at her and grabbed the hand that a little girl held out to him. Beside her, a somewhat older boy waited patiently. He looked at his dusty shoes. Then he leaned down to wipe them off. When the three of them were all holding hands at last, they stood there looking back at Guillermo. They seemed to be posing for a family photo that would be repeated a thousand times.
On their collars they wore brooches that everyone recognized. Modeled on the one Francesc Jufresa had once made, Laura had simplified the figure and created a hollow profile that followed the characteristic curved lines of the Sagrada Familia precisely. Guillermo made a square with his fingers and acted as if he was photographing the children. They were six and eight and were the spitting image of Laura.
Inés appeared and stood by Guillermo. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the thick midday air. She was wearing a hat with an elegant mesh veil that matched her dress and shoes.
“Guillermo, Guillermo … How you’ve changed. I always say it, right, Mother? How this boy has changed.”
“You’ve changed a bit yourself,” Guillermo said.
“Money works miracles, kid. Give up on art and all that nonsense. Money’s what makes the world go round,” Inés said roundly.
Guillermo laughed aloud.
“I take it business with Dimas is good.”
“You are correct. You have to know how to adapt to circumstances.” She winked at him roguishly.
And the three of them, Carmela, Inés, and Guillermo, stood there looking at Juan playing with his grandchildren; it was the same lot as before, but now surrounded by an iron barrier and the new apartment blocks of the Ensanche.
Guillermo raised his camera, though he no longer had film for it, and looked through the viewfinder. Far away, under the mountain, a cloud of dust was rising up in the open spaces the Ensanche had yet to fill in. He lowered the camera and was able to glimpse a figure leaning against a walnut tree. It was his dear friend Tomàs, coming down with his flock from Guinardó, happy with his routine despite the passage of the years.
Then he thought, after getting a kind of comprehensive image of the people he had lived with, with whom he had shared so many things, that they formed a strange family. Each one of them had a story to tell and chance or destiny—maybe even angels or ancestral spirits of the type Juan used to talk about when he was little—had brought them together in that instant he could memorialize, if there was a camera capable of doing so. Each one of them contributed their own character as well as a common past, and together they were like that anomalous city, with its parts that were visible to the eye and its parts that were buried below the surface and would never come to light. All that was what he wanted to encompass with his photos: to be a kind of iceberg that showed only a part, but then also the submerged, the deep and invisible, different for each one of them, the way life was, the way reality was.
Like his family, the family that for him was and would always be sagrada.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To my editor, Míriam Vall, for her advice, ideas, and patience. To the editor Ana D’Atri, for her constant commitment to the project. To Mauro Cavaller, for his opinions and his important participation in the novel. To Laia Vinaixa (head of Arxiu i Domcumentació dl Temple expiatori de la Sagrada Familia) for her unerring recommendations. To Montse Torres, for her unconditional labor in the preliminary documentation. To David Serarols, for his authoritative information on the business world. To Carme and Rita Vilà, for their generous and accessible vision of the intrigues behind great family enterprises, where there is no doubt that truth is stranger than fiction. To the entire team at Planeta, without whom this book would never have made it into readers’ hands.
And of course, to my family, always there, always helpful, always warm.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Andrés Vidal
Translation copyright © 2015 by Adrian West
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