“I’ll take them to the Red Cross. There are lots of creeps around here, and I wouldn’t like to find that smart aleck Valenzuela sniffing around where he has no business.”
Alicia went over to the little man and embraced him. “Thanks for everything, Maura,” she whispered in his ear. “I’m going to miss you.”
Maura dropped the mop handle and put his trembling arms around her. “Forget all about us as soon as you get home,” he said in a broken voice.
She was going to kiss him good-bye, but Maura, knight of the doleful countenance and old school, held out his hand. Alicia shook it.
“Someone called Vargas might call and ask for me.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get him off your back. Go on, off you go.”
She got into a taxi that was waiting by the hotel entrance and asked the driver to take her to Atocha. A leaden blanket covered the city, and frost shrouded the car windows. The taxi driver looked as if he’d spent the night, or the entire week, at the wheel, barely clinging to the world with the cigarette butt hanging from his lips. He watched her through the rearview mirror. “Are you going or returning?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” replied Alicia.
When she arrived at the station, she saw that Leandro had gotten there ahead of her. He was waiting at a table in one of the cafés next to the ticket offices, reading a newspaper and playing with his coffee spoon. Two of his heavies were posted against columns, a few meters away. When he saw her, Leandro folded the newspaper and smiled paternally.
“Getting up early won’t make the sun rise any sooner,” said Alicia.
“Reciting proverbs doesn’t suit you, Alicia. Sit down. Have you had breakfast?”
She shook her head and sat down at the table. The last thing she wanted was to annoy Leandro just when she was about to put six hundred kilometers between them.
“There are some common habits among normal people, like eating breakfast or having friends. They would do you good, Alicia.”
“Do you have many friends, Leandro?”
Alicia noticed the steely glimmer in her boss’s eyes, a hint of warning, and she looked down. She dutifully accepted the cup of coffee and the pastry served by the waiter at Leandro’s request and took a few sips under his watchful eye.
He pulled an envelope out of his coat and handed it to her. “I’ve reserved a first-class compartment just for you. I hope you don’t mind. There’s also some money there. Today I’ll put the rest into the Hispano account. If you need any more, let me know.”
“Thank you.”
Alicia nibbled the pastry. It was dry and rough, and she found it hard to swallow. Leandro didn’t take his eyes off her. She sneaked a look at the clock hanging high up on the wall.
“You still have ten minutes,” said her mentor. “Relax.”
Groups of passengers were beginning to walk past on their way to the platform. Alicia curled her hands around the cup just for something to do with them. The silence between them was painful.
“Thanks for coming to say good-bye,” she ventured.
“Is that what we’re doing? Saying good-bye?”
Alicia shook her head. They continued sitting there, mutely, for a couple of minutes. At last, when Alicia was beginning to think the cup would shatter into a thousand pieces under the pressure of her grip, Leandro stood up, buttoned up his coat, and calmly tied his scarf. He put on his leather gloves and, smiling benevolently, leaned over to kiss Alicia on the cheek. His lips were cold, and his breath smelled of mint. Alicia sat there, motionless, barely daring to breathe.
“I want you to call me every day. Without fail. Starting tonight, as soon as you arrive, so I know that all is well.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Alicia?”
“Every day, without fail,” she recited.
“No need for the singsong.”
“Sorry.”
“How are you managing the pain?”
“Well. Better. Much better.”
Leandro pulled a pill bottle out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. “I know you don’t like to take anything, but you’ll be grateful for this. It’s not as strong as the injectable sort. One pill, no more. Don’t take it on an empty stomach, and especially not with alcohol.”
Alicia accepted the bottle and put it into her handbag. She wasn’t going to start an argument now. “Thanks.”
Leandro nodded and made his way toward the exit, escorted by his men.
The train was waiting beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling. On the platform, a very young-looking porter asked to see her ticket. He led her to the first-class carriage, which was standing empty at the head of the train. Noticing that she was limping slightly, he helped her up the steps and accompanied her to her compartment, where he lifted the suitcase into the luggage rack and raised the window curtain. The glass was misted up, and he wiped it with his jacket sleeve. A troupe of passengers glided along the platform, which shone like a mirror in the humid early-morning air. Alicia offered the porter a tip: he bowed before leaving and closed the compartment door.
She collapsed into her seat and looked absently at the station lights. Soon the train began to crawl, and Alicia abandoned herself to the gentle swaying of the carriage while she imagined the sun rising over Madrid, anchored in mist. And then she saw him. Vargas was racing down the platform, trying in vain to catch the train. He very nearly touched the carriage with his fingers, and even met Alicia’s impenetrable eyes as she observed him impassively through the window. At last Vargas gave up, his hands on his knees and a bitter, breathless laugh on his lips.
As the city receded into the distance, the train entered a plain with no visible horizon, stretching endlessly. Behind that wall of darkness, Alicia felt, Barcelona had already scented her trail in the wind. She imagined the city opening like a black rose and for a moment was filled with the calm of inevitability that comforts the accursed—or perhaps, she told herself, it was just tiredness. Little did it matter now. She closed her eyes and surrendered to sleep while the train, clearing the shadows, slowly hastened toward the labyrinth of the spirits.
City of Mirrors
Barcelona
December 1959
1
Cold. A cold that bites the skin, cuts the flesh, and slices through the bones. A damp cold that clamps one’s muscles and burns one’s insides. Cold. For that first moment of consciousness it’s the only thing he can think of.
It is almost pitch-dark. Only a thin sliver of light filters through from above, a breath of deathly light that clings to the shadows and hints at the limits of the space in which he is confined. His pupils dilate, and he’s able to make out an area the size of a small room. The walls are made of bare stone. Moisture oozes from them and glistens in the gloom, as if dark tears were sliding down them. The floor is made of rock and sodden with something that doesn’t look like water. There is a powerful stench in the air. He notices a row of thick, rusty bars, and beyond them some steps leading up in the dark.
He’s in a cell.
Valls tries to stand up, but his legs won’t support him. After barely a step his knees buckle, and he falls to one side, hitting his face against the floor, cursing. He tries to recover his breath. He remains there for a few minutes, dejected, his face glued to the slimy film that covers the floor, giving off a metallic, slightly sweet smell. His mouth is dry, as if he’d swallowed earth, and his lips are chapped. He tries to touch them with his right hand, but realizes he can’t feel his hand, as if there was nothing there below the elbow.
He manages to prop himself up with his left arm. Raising his right hand in front of his face, he looks at it against the light, a yellowish gleam that tints the air. The hand is shaking. He can see it shake, but he can’t feel it. He tries to open and close his fist, but his muscles don’t respond. Only then does he notice that he is missing his index and middle fingers. In their place are two dark stains: shreds of skin and flesh dangle from them. Valls wants to scream, but
his voice is broken and he only manages to produce an empty cry. He lets himself slump backward and closes his eyes. He starts breathing through his mouth to avoid the strong smell that poisons the air. As he does so, he is reminded of something from his childhood: a faraway summer in the country house his parents had outside Segovia, and an old dog that went down to the cellar to die. Valls remembers the nauseating smell that took hold of the house, how it was similar to the smell that now burns his throat. But this is much worse; this hardly allows him to think. After a while, minutes or perhaps hours, he is overcome by exhaustion and falls into a troubled drowsiness, somewhere between sleeplessness and sleep.
He dreams he is traveling in a train where he is the only passenger. The locomotive is galloping furiously over clouds of black steam toward a maze of factories shaped like cathedrals, pointed towers and a mass of bridges and roofs conjured up into a tangle of incomprehensible angles beneath a bloodstained sky. Shortly before entering a tunnel that seems to have no end, Valls looks out of the window and sees that the entrance is guarded by two large statues of angels with open wings, sharp teeth visible between their lips. A battered sign hanging from the lintel reads:
Barcelona
The train hurtles into the tunnel with a hellish roar. When it emerges at the other end, the silhouette of Montjuïc rises before him, with the castle outlined on the hilltop, enveloped in an aura of crimson light. Valls feels his guts tighten. A ticket inspector, bent over like an old, storm-battered tree, is approaching along the corridor and stops in front of Valls’s compartment. He wears a badge on his uniform that reads salgado.
“Your stop, Governor . . .”
The train climbs up the winding road he remembers so well and enters the prison premises. It stops in a dark corridor, and he alights. The train sets off again and disappears into darkness. Valls turns around and realizes that he’s become trapped in one of the prison cells. A dark figure is watching him from the other side of the bars. When Valls tries to explain to him that there’s been a mistake, that he’s on the wrong side, that he’s the prison governor, his voice won’t reach his lips.
The pain comes later, pulling him out of his dream like an electric current.
* * *
The smell of carrion, the darkness, and the cold are still there, but now he barely notices them. The only thing he can think of is the pain. A pain as he’s never known before. As he’s never been able to imagine. His right hand is burning. It feels as if he’s plunged it into a bonfire and can’t pull it out. He grabs his right arm with his left hand. Even in the shadows he can see that the two dark stains where his fingers should be are suppurating, oozing what looks like a thick and bloody liquid. He screams in silence.
The pain helps him remember.
The images of what has happened begin to form in his mind. He revisits the moment when Barcelona emerges in the distance, silhouetted against the early-evening sky. Through the windshield, he watches the town rise like the great backdrop for a funfair performance and remembers how much he hates that place. His loyal bodyguard, Vicente, drives silently, concentrating on the traffic. If he’s scared, he doesn’t show it. They drive along avenues and streets where he sees people wrapped up, hurrying through a curtain of snow that drifts in the air like glass mist. They head straight up a boulevard to the higher part of town, and soon they’re on a road that zigzags up toward the ridge of Vallvidrera. Valls recognizes that strange citadel of facades suspended from heaven. The city’s lower zones are left behind, a carpet of darkness below, melting into the sea. The funicular climbs the hillside like a serpent of golden light, outlining the grand modernist villas that shore up the mountain. There, sunk among the trees, he glimpses the outline of the old rambling house. Valls swallows hard. Vicente glances at him, and Valls gives him a nod. It will all be over very soon. Valls pulls back the hammer of the revolver in his hand. It is already dark when they reach the entrance to the villa. The gates are open. The car drives into the weed-infested garden, around the fountain—dry and covered in ivy. Vicente stops the car opposite the stairs that lead to the front door. He turns off the engine and pulls out his revolver. Vicente never uses a gun, only a revolver. A revolver, he says, never gets jammed.
“What time is it?” Valls asks in a tiny voice.
Vicente doesn’t have time to reply. It all happens very fast. The bodyguard has just pulled the key out of the ignition when Valls notices a figure on the other side of the car window. He hasn’t seen it approach. Without a word, Vicente pushes Valls aside and shoots. The window shatters a few centimeters from Valls’s head. He feels a shower of glass shards lashing at his face. The roar of the shot deafens him, a piercing whistle stabbing his ears. Before the cloud of gunpowder floating inside the car has time to settle, the door on the driver’s side suddenly opens. Vicente turns, revolver in hand, but with no time to fire another shot because something has slit his throat. He clutches his neck with both hands. Dark blood runs through his fingers. For a brief moment their eyes meet, Vicente’s haunted by disbelief. A second later the bodyguard slumps over the steering wheel and sets off the horn. Valls tries to hold him, but Vicente leans to one side, and half his body is left hanging out of the car. Valls holds the revolver in both hands and points toward the blackness beyond the driver’s open door. Then he senses someone’s breath behind him, and when he turns to shoot, all he notices is a sharp, ice-cold blow on his hand. He feels the metal on the bone, and nausea clouds his vision. The revolver falls on his lap, and he sees blood flowing along his arm. The figure looms, holding the bloodstained knife in one hand, the blade dripping. Then the figure tries to open the car door, but the door is stuck. Two hands grab Valls by the neck and tug at him angrily. Valls feels himself being pulled out of the car through the gap in the window and being dragged up the gravel path to the broken marble steps. He hears soft footsteps approaching. The moon lights up what in his delirium he takes for an angel and then for an apparition of death. Valls faces those eyes and realizes his mistake.
“What are you laughing at, you son of a bitch?” the voice asks.
Valls smiles. “You look so much like her,” he murmurs.
Valls closes his eyes and waits for the coup de grâce. It doesn’t come. He feels his angel spitting on his face. The angel’s footsteps move away. God, or the devil, takes pity on him, and at some point he loses consciousness.
He can’t remember whether all that happened hours, days, or weeks ago. Time has ceased to exist in this cell. All is cold now, and pain and darkness. He feels a sudden spasm of rage. Dragging himself to the bars, he bangs on the cold metal until his skin smarts. He is still holding on to them when a band of light opens above, revealing a staircase that leads down to the cell. Valls hears footsteps and looks up hopefully. He stretches his hand beyond the bars, imploringly. His jailer gazes at him from the shadows, motionless. Something covers his face, reminding Valls of the frozen expression on a mannequin in one of Gran Vía’s shop windows.
“Martín? Is that you?” asks Valls.
He gets no reply. The jailer just stares at him without saying a word. Al last Valls nods, as if wishing to imply that he understands the rules of the game.
“Water, please,” he groans.
For a long time the jailer remains impassive. Then, when Valls thinks he’s imagined it all and the man’s presence is only an image from the delirium caused by pain and by the infection that is eating him alive, the jailer walks down a few steps.
Valls smiles submissively. “Water,” he begs.
The spurt of urine splashes his face, burning the cuts that cover it. Valls howls and jerks back. He drags himself backward until he hits the wall, and there he cringes and curls up into a ball. The jailer disappears up the stairs, and the light goes out again behind the echo of a heavy door closing.
This is when he realizes he’s not alone in the cell. Vicente, his loyal bodyguard, is sitting in the corner, leaning against the wall. He doesn’t move. Only the shape of his legs is visib
le. And the hands. The palms and fingers are swollen and have a purple hue.
“Vicente?”
Valls drags himself over there but stops when he notices how close the stench is. He takes shelter in the opposite corner and doubles himself up, hugging his knees and burying his face between his legs to get away from the smell. He tries to conjure up the image of his daughter, Mercedes. He imagines her playing in the garden, in her dollhouse, traveling in her private train. He imagines her as a child, with those eyes of hers fixed on his, those all-forgiving eyes that shed light where there had always been darkness.
After a while he surrenders to the cold, the pain and exhaustion, and feels he’s again losing consciousness. Perhaps it is death, he thinks, hopeful.
2
Fermín Romero de Torres woke with a start, his heart throbbing like a machine gun. He felt as if the world was sitting on his chest. The hands of the alarm clock confirmed his worst suspicions. It wasn’t even midnight. He’d only half slept for an hour before his insomnia had charged at him again like a runaway tram. Next to him, Bernarda snored like a little calf, blissfully asleep in the arms of Morpheus.
Fermín, I think you’re going to be a father.
Pregnancy had made her more enticing than ever, her blossoming beauty and her entire self a feast of curves into which he would gladly have dug his teeth at that very moment. He was considering finishing off the job with his characteristic “midnight express service,” but he didn’t dare wake her and break that heavenly peace radiating from her face. He knew that if he did, there would be two alternative outcomes: either the H-bomb of hormones that oozed from her pores would explode, and Bernarda would transform into a wild tigress who would slice him up, or else the spark of lust would turn out to be a damp squib, rendering his saintly wife a prey to fears, including the thought that any attempt at docking anywhere near her nether regions might put the baby at risk. Fermín didn’t blame her. Bernarda had lost the first child they’d conceived just before their marriage. Such was the sadness that had come over her that Fermín feared he was going to lose her forever. In time, just as the doctor had promised them, Bernarda was once again in the family way, and had returned to life. But now she lived with the constant panic that she might lose the baby, and sometimes she even seemed to be afraid to breathe.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 19