“But David Martín didn’t have a family.”
“He had people he loved.”
“Did he tell you how he managed to escape from the castle?”
“Valls had ordered two of his men to take him to an old house next to Güell Park and murder him. They used to kill a lot of people there, and they buried them in the garden.”
“And what happened?”
“David said there was someone else there, in the house, who helped him escape.”
“An accomplice?”
“He called him the boss.”
“The boss?”
“He had a foreign name. Italian. I remember because it was the same as that of a famous composer my parents liked a lot.”
“Can you remember the name?”
“Corelli. He was called Andreas Corelli.”
“That name doesn’t appear in any of my reports.”
“Because he didn’t exist.”
“I don’t understand.”
“David wasn’t well. He imagined things. People.”
“Do you mean to say that David Martín had imagined that Andreas Corelli person?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know. David had lost his mind, or what little mind he had left, in prison. He was very ill, and he didn’t realize.”
“You always call him David.”
“We were friends.”
“Lovers?”
“Friends.”
“What did he say to you on that day?”
“That he’d spent three years trying to get access to Mauricio Valls.”
“To take revenge on him?”
“Valls had murdered someone he loved very much.”
“Isabella.”
“Yes. Isabella.”
“Did he tell you how he thought Valls had murdered her?”
“He’d poisoned her.”
“And why did he come to look for you?”
“To keep the promise he’d made to my father.”
“Is that all?”
“And because he thought that if I could provide him with access to my parents’ house, sooner or later Mauricio Valls would turn up there, and he’d be able to kill him. Valls often visited Ubach. They had some businesses together. Financial interests. Otherwise it was impossible to get to Valls, because he always had his bodyguards with him or was protected somehow.”
“But that never happened.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I told him that if he tried to do it, they’d kill him.”
“He must have imagined that already. There must have been something else.”
“Something else?”
“Something else you said to him to make him change his plans.”
“I need my medicine. Please.”
“Tell me what you told David Martín that made him change his mind, so that he abandoned the plan that had brought him to Madrid to take his revenge on Valls and instead decided to help you escape.”
“Please . . .”
“Just a tiny bit more, Ariadna. Afterward we’ll give you your medication, and you’ll be able to rest.”
“I told him the truth. That I was pregnant.”
“I don’t understand. Pregnant? Who by?”
“By Ubach.”
“Your father?”
“He wasn’t my father.”
“Miguel Ángel Ubach, the banker. The man who had adopted you.”
“The man who had bought me.”
“What happened?”
“At night he would often come to my bedroom, drunk. He told me his wife didn’t love him, he said she had lovers, that they no longer shared anything. He would start crying. Then he’d rape me. When he got tired of it, he said it was my fault, he said I tempted him, he said I was a whore, like my mother. He beat me and assured me that if I said anything about this to anyone, he’d have my sister killed. He knew where she was, he said, and a call from him would be enough to have her buried alive.”
“And what did David Martín say when he heard that?”
“He stole a car and got me out of there. I need the medicine, please . . .”
“Of course. Right now. Thank you, Ariadna. Thanks for your frankness.”
12
“What day is it today?”
“Tuesday.”
“It was also Tuesday yesterday.”
“That was a different Tuesday. Tell me about your escape with David Martín.”
“David had a car. He’d stolen it, and he kept it hidden in a garage in the Carabanchel district. That day he told me that the following Saturday he’d drive it around to one of the gates of the park at noon. When Doña Manuela fell asleep, I had to start running and meet him in the entrance opposite Puerta de Alcalá.”
“And did you?”
“We got into the car and hid in the garage until it was dark.”
“The police accused your tutor of having been an accomplice in your kidnapping. They interrogated her for forty-eight hours, and then she was found in a ditch on the road to Burgos. They’d broken her legs and arms, and then shot her in the back of the neck.”
“Don’t expect me to feel sorry for her.”
“Did she know that Ubach abused you?”
“She was the only person I ever told.”
“And what did she say?”
“To keep quiet. She said important men had their needs, and that in time I’d realize that Ubach loved me very much.”
“What happened that night?”
“David and I left the garage with the car and spent the whole night on the road.”
“Where were you going?”
“We traveled for about two days. We would wait until it was dark, and then we’d take byroads or country lanes. David made me lie down in the back seat, covered with blankets so no one could see me when we stopped at gas stations. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, and the moment I woke up I could hear him talking, as if there was someone with him, sitting in the passenger seat.”
“That Corelli individual?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t that scare you?”
“It made me feel sorry.”
“Where did he take you?”
“To a place in the Pyrenees where he’d hidden for a few days after returning to Spain at the end of the war. Bolvir, that was the name. It was very close to a small town called Puigcerdá, almost on the border with France. There was a large abandoned house there that had been a hospital during the war. I think it was called La Torre del Remei. We spent a few weeks in that place.”
“Did he tell you why he was taking you there?”
“He said it was a safe place. There was an old friend of David’s there, someone he’d met when he crossed the frontier, a local writer named Alfons Brosel. He brought us food and clothes. Without him we would have starved or died of cold.”
“Martín must have chosen that place for some other reason.”
“The village brought back memories. David never told me what had happened there, but I know it had a special meaning for him. David lived in the past. When the worst of the winter came, Alfons advised us to leave and gave us a bit of money with which to continue the journey. The people in the town had started to gossip. David knew of an enclave on the coast where another old friend of his—a rich man called Pedro Vidal—had a house he thought would make a good hiding place, at least until the summer. David knew the house well. I think he’d stayed there before.”
“Was that the village where you were found a few months later? San Feliu de Guíxols?”
“The house was about two kilometers outside the village, in a place called S’Agaró, next to the bay of San Pol.”
“I know it.”
“The house was among the rocks, in a place called Camino de Ronda. Nobody lived there in the winter. It was a sort of housing development, with big summer mansions belonging to wealthy families from Barcelona and Gerona.”
/> “Is that where you spent the winter?”
“Yes. Until spring.”
“When they found you, you were alone. Martín wasn’t with you. What happened to him?”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“If you like, we can have a break. I can ask the doctor to give you something.”
“I want to leave this place.”
“We’ve talked about this before, Ariadna. You’re safe here. Protected.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Leandro. You know that. Your friend.”
“I don’t have friends.”
“You’re nervous. I think we’d better leave it for today. Have a rest. I’ll tell the doctor to come.”
* * *
It was always Tuesday in the suite of the Gran Hotel Palace.
“You’re looking very well this morning, Ariadna.”
“I have a bad headache.”
“It’s the weather. The pressure’s very low today. It happens to me too. Take this, and it will pass.”
“What is it?”
“Just aspirin. Nothing else. By the way, we’ve been checking what you told me about the house in S’Agaró. You were right, it was owned by Don Pedro Vidal, a member of one of the wealthiest families in Barcelona. From what we’ve been able to find out, he was a sort of mentor to David Martín. The police report specifies that David Martín murdered him in his Pedralbes residence in 1930, because Vidal had married the woman he loved, someone called Cristina.”
“That’s a lie. Vidal committed suicide.”
“Is that what David Martín told you? It seems that deep down he was a very vindictive man. Valls, Vidal . . . People do crazy things because of jealousy.”
“The person David loved was Isabella.”
“You’ve already told me that. But it doesn’t quite fit in with the information we have. What linked him to Isabella?”
“She’d been his apprentice.”
“I didn’t know novelists had apprentices.”
“Isabella was very stubborn.”
“Is that what Martín told you?”
“David talked about her a lot. It’s what kept him alive.”
“But Isabella had been dead for almost ten years.”
“Sometimes he forgot. That’s why he’d gone back there.”
“To the house in S’Agaró?”
“David had been there before. With her.”
“Do you know when that was?”
“Just before the start of the war. Before he had to flee to France.”
“Is that why he came back to Spain, even though he knew they were looking for him? Because of Isabella?”
“I think so.”
“Tell me about your time there. What did you do?”
“David was already very ill. By the time we got to the house, he could barely tell the difference between reality and what he thought he saw and heard. The house brought back a whole lot of memories. I believe that deep down he went back there to die.”
“So David Martín is dead?”
“What do you think?”
“Tell me the truth. What did you do during those months?”
“Look after him.”
“I thought he was the one who was meant to look after you.”
“David could no longer take care of anyone, much less himself.”
“Ariadna, did you kill David Martín?”
13
“We hadn’t been there a month when David got worse. I’d gone out to get some food. A few peasants came along every morning with a cartful of groceries and set themselves up by the old bathhouse and the restaurant they called La Taberna del Mar. At first it was David who went there, or to the village, to find provisions, but there came a point when he couldn’t leave the house. He suffered from terrible headaches, fever, nausea . . . Almost every night he paced around the house, delirious and talking to himself. He believed Corelli would come and get him.”
“Did you ever see this Corelli?”
“Corelli didn’t exist. I told you. He was someone who lived only in David’s imagination.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The Vidals had built a small wooden jetty that stretched out into the sea from the little cove below the house. David would often go there and sit at the far end, gazing at the sea. That’s where he held his imaginary conversations with Corelli. Sometimes I would walk over to the pier and sit down next to him. David wouldn’t notice that I was there. I heard him talk to Corelli, just as he had done in the car when we fled from Madrid. Then he would wake up from his trance and smile at me. One day it began to rain, and when I took his hand to take him back home, he hugged me, crying, and called me Isabella. From then on he no longer recognized me, and he spent the last two months of his existence convinced that he was living with Isabella.”
“It must have been very hard for you.”
“No. The months I spent taking care of him were the happiest, and the saddest, of my life.”
“How did David Martín die, Ariadna?”
“One night I asked him who Corelli was and why he was so afraid of him. He told me Corelli was a black soul—those were his words. David had agreed to write a book commissioned by Corelli, but he had betrayed him by destroying the book before Corelli could get his hands on it.”
“What sort of a book?”
“I’m not quite sure. Some sort of religious text or something like that. David called it Lux Aeterna.”
“So David thought Corelli wanted to take his revenge on him.”
“Yes.”
“How, Ariadna?”
“What does it matter? It has nothing to do with Valls or with anything.”
“Everything is connected, Ariadna. Please, help me.”
“David was convinced that the baby I carried in my womb was someone he had known and lost.”
“Did he say who?”
“He called her Cristina. He hardly ever spoke of her. But when he mentioned her, his voice seemed to shrink with remorse and guilt.”
“Cristina was the wife of Pedro Vidal. The police also accused Martín of her death. They assured us that he’d drowned her in a lake in Puigcerdá, very near the old house in the Pyrenees where he took you to.”
“Lies.”
“Perhaps. But you’re telling me that when he spoke about her, he showed signs of guilt . . .”
“David was a good man.”
“But you yourself said that he’d completely lost his mind, that he imagined things and people who were not there, that he thought you were his old apprentice, Isabella, who had died ten years earlier. . . . Weren’t you afraid for yourself? For your baby?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me it didn’t cross your mind to leave that house and run away.”
“No.”
“All right. What happened next?”
14
“It was at the end of March, I think. David’s health had improved over the last few days. He’d found an old wooden boat in a shed at the bottom of the cliff, and almost every morning, early, he would row out to sea in it. I was already seven months pregnant and spent my time reading. The house had a library, and there were copies of almost all the works by David Martin’s favorite author, someone I’d never heard of, called Julián Carax. In the afternoon we’d light the fire in the sitting room, and I would read aloud to him. We read them all. We spent those two last weeks reading the latest novel by Julián Carax, The Shadow of the Wind.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Almost nobody knows it. They think they do, but they don’t really. One night we finished reading the book in the early hours. I went to bed, and two hours later I felt the first contractions.”
“You had two months to go . . .”
“I started to feel a terrible pain, as if I’d been stabbed in the womb. I panicked. I shouted David’s name. When he pulled back the sheet to pick me up in his arms and take me to the doctor, they were soaked in blood . . .�
��
“I’m sorry.”
“Everyone is sorry.”
“Did you get to the doctor?”
“No.”
“And the baby?”
“It was a girl. She was stillborn.”
“I’m very sorry, Ariadna. Perhaps we’d better stop for a while and call the doctor to give you something.”
“No. I don’t want to stop now.”
“All right. What happened next?”
“David . . .”
“Relax, take your time.”
“David took the corpse in his arms and started to whine like a wounded animal. The little girl’s skin was bluish. She looked like a broken doll. I wanted to get up and hug them both, but I was very weak. At dawn, when it was beginning to get light, David took the baby, looked at me for the last time, and asked to be forgiven. Then he left the house. I dragged myself over to the window. I saw him go down the steps in the rocks to the jetty. The wooden boat was moored at the very end. He got into it with the girl’s body wrapped in a few rags and started to row out to sea, looking toward me the whole time. I raised a hand, hoping he’d see me, hoping he’d come back. He went on rowing until he stopped about a hundred meters from the coast. The sun was peering over the sea by now, making it look like a lake of fire. I saw David’s figure stand up and take something from the bottom of the boat. He proceeded to hit the keel, again and again. It only took a couple of minutes to sink. David stayed there, motionless, with the baby in his arms, staring at me until the sea swallowed them both forever.”
“What did you do then?”
“I’d lost a lot of blood and was very weak. I spent a couple of days with a fever, thinking that everything had been a nightmare and that any moment now David would come back in through the door. After that, when I was able to get up and walk, I started going down to the beach every day. To wait.”
“To wait?”
“For them to return. You must think I was as mad as David.”
“No. I don’t think that at all.”
“The peasants who came every day with their cart had seen me there. They came over to ask me whether I was all right and gave me something to eat. They said I didn’t look well and offered to take me to the hospital in San Feliu. It must have been them who alerted the Civil Guard. One of their patrols found me asleep on the beach and took me to the hospital. I was suffering from hypothermia, pneumonia, and an internal hemorrhage that would have killed me within twelve hours if I hadn’t been taken to the hospital. I didn’t tell them who I was, but it didn’t take them long to find out. There were search warrants with my picture in all the police stations and Civil Guard barracks. I was admitted to a hospital and spent two weeks there.”
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 65