It happened the morning he arrived at the bookshop to report for duty as delivery-boy-at-large. As fate would have it, at that precise moment a creature of disturbing charms and a slippery accent was running about the shop. From the conversation the Semperes were having, Fernandito gathered that her name was Sofía, and after a few inquiries he discovered that the girl in question was none other than the niece of Sempere the bookseller and a cousin of Daniel. It appeared that Daniel’s mother, Isabella, was of Italian descent, and Sofía, who hailed from the city of Naples, was spending some time with the Semperes while she studied at Barcelona University and perfected her Spanish. All these minutiae, of course, were but a mere technicality.
Eighty-five percent of Fernandito’s cerebral matter, not to mention other lesser parts, became devoted to the contemplation and adoration of Sofía. The girl must have been about nineteen, give or take a year. Nature, with her infinite cruelty toward timid young men of a marriageable age, had opted to endow her with such fulsome and suggestive shapeliness, and such a pert little walk, that the mere sight of it all drove Fernandito into a paroxysm of near cardiac arrest. Her eyes, the shape of those lips, and the white teeth and pink tongue he glimpsed when she smiled dazzled the poor boy. He could spend hours imagining his fingers caressing that Renaissance mouth and moving down that pale throat on their way to the valley of paradise, emphasized by those tight woolen sweaters the signorina wore, which proved beyond a doubt that Italians had always been the true masters of architecture.
Fernandito half closed his eyes and ignored the noise of the radio in the dining room of his family home and the shouts of neighbors, conjuring up instead the image of Sofía languidly reposing on a bed of roses, or any other vegetable equipped with petals, offering herself to him in the full blossom of youth so that he, with firm hands expert in all kinds of fasteners, zips, and other mysteries of the eternal feminine, could strip her bit by bit by means of kisses, or maybe bites, and end up burying his face in that incomparable oasis of perfection that heaven had so kindly placed right below the belly button of all women. Fernandito remained in his daydream, convinced that if the Lord above struck him dead at that very moment with a destructive bolt for such lewd thoughts, it would have been worth it.
But instead of a purifying shaft of lightning, the phone rang. Footsteps, heavy as a digging machine, traipsed up the corridor, and the door of the cabin opened suddenly to reveal the large silhouette of Fernandito’s father, sporting a vest and loose trousers and holding a chorizo sandwich in one hand. “Get up, you useless twit,” he announced. “It’s for you.”
Torn away from the clutches of paradise, Fernandito dragged himself to the end of the corridor. There, in a hidden corner, stood the telephone beneath a plastic figure of Christ his mother had bought in the monastery of Montserrat. The figure’s eyes lit up when you pressed the switch, lending it a supernatural glow that had given Fernandito years of nightmares. As soon as he picked up the receiver, his brother Fulgencio poked his head around to spy on him and make faces, his one great talent.
“Fernandito?” asked a voice on the line.
“Speaking.”
“It’s Alicia.”
His heart missed a beat.
“Can you speak?” she asked.
Fernandito threw a rope-soled shoe at Fulgencio, who ran off to hide in his room. “Yes. Are you all right? Where are you?”
“Listen carefully, Fernandito. I need to be away for a while.”
“That doesn’t sound at all good.”
“I need you to do me a favor. It’s important.”
“Anything you ask.”
“Do you still have the papers that were in the box I asked you to take from my apartment?”
“Yes. They’re in a safe place.”
“I want you to look for a handwritten notebook that has ‘Isabella’ written on the cover.”
“I know the one. I haven’t opened it, eh? I don’t want you to think . . .”
“I know you haven’t. What I want you to do is give it to Daniel Sempere. Only to him. Have you understood?”
“Yes . . .”
“Tell him that I told you to give it to him. That it belongs to him and nobody else.”
“Yes, Señorita Alicia. Where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Are you in danger?”
“Don’t worry about me, Fernandito.”
“Of course I worry . . .”
“Thanks for everything.”
“This sounds like a good-bye.”
“You and I know that only corny people say good-bye.”
“And you could never be corny. Even if you tried.”
“You’re a good friend, Fernandito. And a good man. Sofía is a very lucky woman.”
Fernandito turned to steaming crimson. “How do you know?”
“I’m happy to see that at last you’ve found someone who deserves you.”
“Nobody will ever be like you, Señorita Alicia.”
“Will you do what I asked?”
“Of course.”
“I love you, Fernandito. Keep the keys to the flat. You’ll need a place to take your girl to. It’s your home now. Be happy. And forget me.”
Before he could say another word, Alicia had hung up. Fernandito swallowed hard and, drying his tears, put down the receiver.
24
Alicia walked out of the telephone booth. The taxi was waiting for her a few meters farther on. The driver had pulled down the window and was enjoying a cigarette, his thoughts miles away. When he saw her approach, he prepared to throw the cigarette butt away. “Shall we go?”
“Just one minute. Finish your cigarette.”
“The gates close in ten minutes . . .”
“In ten minutes we’ll be out of here,” said Alicia.
She headed up the hill toward the forest of mausoleums, crosses, angels, and gargoyles covering the mountainside. The sunset had dragged a shroud of red clouds over Montjuïc Cemetery. A curtain of sleet swayed in the breeze, spreading a veil of crystal specks before her. Alicia walked up a path and climbed a few stone steps leading to a balcony populated by tombs and sculptures of ghostly figures. There, standing out against the light of the Mediterranean, stood a gravestone that was slightly tilted.
ISABELLA SEMPERE
1917–1939
Alicia knelt by the grave and placed her hand on the headstone. She remembered the face in the photographs she had seen in Señor Sempere’s apartment, and in the picture Brians had kept of his old client—in all likelihood, also his unmentionable love. She recalled the words she’d read in the notebook and knew that, even though she hadn’t met her, she had never felt as close to anyone as she did to that woman whose remains lay beneath her feet.
“Perhaps it would be best if Daniel never knew the truth and never found Valls or the revenge he longs for,” she said. “But I can’t decide for him. Forgive me.”
Alicia unbuttoned the coat she’d borrowed from the keeper, put her hand in the inside pocket, and pulled out the carved figure he’d given her. She examined the little angel with open wings he’d bought for his daughter in a Christmas market stand so many years ago, inside which she’d hidden messages and secrets for her father. She opened the hollow space and looked at the note she’d written on a scrap of paper on her way to the cemetery.
Mauricio Valls
El Pinar
Calle Manuel Arnús
Barcelona
She rolled up the note and slipped it into the hollow, then put the lid back on and placed the angel figure at the foot of the headstone, between the vases of dry flowers.
“Let fate decide,” she murmured.
When she got back to the taxi, the driver was waiting for her, leaning against the car. He opened the door for Alicia and returned to the wheel. Through the rearview mirror he saw her open her bag and pull out a bottle of white pills. She put a handful of them in her mouth and chewed, lost in thought. The driver handed her a wate
r bottle lying on the passenger seat. Alicia drank. At last she looked up.
“Where to?” asked the taxi driver.
She showed him a wad of notes.
“There’s at least four hundred duros there,” he ventured.
“Six hundred,” she specified. “They’re yours if we reach Madrid before dawn.”
25
Fernandito stopped on the other side of the street and looked at Daniel through the bookshop window. It had started to snow when he left the house, and by now the streets were almost deserted. He observed Daniel for a few minutes, waiting to make sure he was alone in the bookshop. When Daniel walked over to the door to hang the closed sign, Fernandito emerged from the shadows and stood in front of him, a frozen smile on his face.
Daniel looked at him in surprise and opened the door. “Fernandito, if you’re looking for Sofía, she’s spending the night at her friend Sita’s in Sarriá, to study for some exam or—”
“No. I was looking for you.”
“Me?”
The boy nodded.
“Come in.”
“Are you alone?”
Daniel gave him a puzzled look. Fernandito stepped into the bookshop and waited for Daniel to close the door.
“Yes, what is it?”
“I have something for you on behalf of Señorita Alicia.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“No.”
“What is it?”
Fernandito dithered for a moment, and then pulled out what looked like a school notebook from inside his jacket. He handed it to Daniel, who accepted it with a smile at the apparent innocence accompanying that air of mystery. As soon as he read the word on the cover of the notebook, his smile vanished.
“Well . . . ,” said Fernandito. “I’ll leave you. Good night, Don Daniel.”
Daniel nodded without taking his eyes off the notebook. Once Fernandito had left the bookshop, he turned off the lights and sought refuge in the back room. He sat down at the old desk that had already belonged to his grandfather, turned on the reading lamp, and closed his eyes for a few seconds. He felt his pulse accelerating, and his hands shook.
The cathedral bells rang out in the distance as he opened the notebook and began to read.
Isabella’s Notebook
1939
My name is Isabella Gispert, and I was born in Barcelona in 1917. I’m twenty-two years old and I know I will never reach my twenty-third birthday. I write these words knowing for certain that I only have a few days left to live, and that I will soon have to leave behind those to whom I am most indebted in this world: my son Daniel and my husband Juan Sempere, the kindest man I have ever known. I will die without having merited all the trust, love, and devotion he has given me. I’m writing for myself, taking with me secrets that don’t belong to me and knowing that nobody will ever read these pages. I’m writing to reminisce and to cling to life. My only wish is to be able to remember and understand who I was and why I did what I did while I am still able to do so, and before the consciousness that I already feel weakening abandons me forever. I’m writing even if it hurts, because loss and pain are the only things that keep me alive, and I’m afraid of dying. I’m writing to tell these pages what I can’t tell those I love, for fear of hurting them and putting their lives in danger. I’m writing because as long as I’m able to remember, I will be with them one more minute . . .
1
The image of my body wasting away in the mirror of this bedroom makes it hard for me to believe it, but once, a long time ago, I was a child. My family had a grocery behind the church of Santa María del Mar. We lived in a house at the back of the shop. There we had a patio from which we could see the top of the basilica. I liked to imagine it was an enchanted castle that went out for a stroll every night through the streets of Barcelona and returned at dawn to sleep in the sunlight. My father’s family, the Gisperts, came from a long line of Barcelona traders, and my mother’s, the Ferratinis, from a family of Neapolitan sailors and fishermen. I inherited the character of my maternal grandmother, a woman with a rather volcanic temperament who was nicknamed La Vesubia. We were three sisters, but my father used to say he had two daughters and one mule. I loved my father very much, despite the fact that I made him very unhappy. He was a good man who managed groceries better than he managed his daughters. Our father confessor used to say that we all come into this world with a purpose, and mine was to contradict.
My two older sisters were more docile. It was clear to them that their objective was to make a good marriage and better themselves in the world according to the rules of social etiquette. Much to my poor parents’ disappointment, I declared myself a rebel when I was eight and announced that I would never get married, that I would never wear an apron, not even in front of a firing squad, and that I would be a writer or a submariner (Jules Verne had me confused on that point for a while). My father blamed the Brontë sisters, whom I always talked about devotedly. He thought they were a bunch of libertarian nuns entrenched in the old city walls who had lost their minds during the riots of 1909 and now smoked opiates and danced cheek-to-cheek among themselves after midnight. “This would never have happened if we’d sent her to the Teresian mothers,” he complained. I must admit that I never knew how to be the daughter my parents would have wished me to be, or the young girl the world I was born into expected. Or perhaps I should say I didn’t want to. I always went against everyone’s wishes: against my parents’ wishes, my teachers’ wishes, and, when they all grew tired of battling with me, my own.
I didn’t like playing with the other girls: my specialty was decapitating dolls with a catapult. I preferred to play with boys, who were easily bossed around, although sooner or later they discovered that I always beat them, so I had to start managing on my own. I think that’s when I began to have that feeling of always being distant and separate from the rest. In that respect I was like my mother, who used to say that deep down we were always alone, especially those of us born female. My mother was a melancholy woman with whom I never got along, perhaps because she was the only one in the family who understood me a little. She died when I was still a child. My father got married again, to a widow from Valladolid who never liked me and who, when we were alone, called me “little tart.”
After my mother died, I realized how much I missed her. Perhaps that’s why I started going to the university library, for which she’d managed to get me a reader’s card before she died, without telling my father, who thought all I needed to study was the catechism, and all I needed to read were the lives of saints. My stepmother hated books. Their very presence offended her; she hid them inside cupboards so they wouldn’t ruin the decor of the house.
The library is where my life changed. I didn’t even open the catechism by chance, and the only saint I enjoyed reading about was Saint Teresa, for I was utterly intrigued by those mysterious ecstasies, which I associated with shameful practices that I don’t even dare tell these pages. In the library I read everything I was allowed to read, and especially what some people told me I shouldn’t read. Doña Lorena, a wise librarian who used to be around in the afternoons, always prepared a pile of books she described as “books all young ladies should read and nobody wants them to read.” Doña Lorena said that the level of barbarism in a society is measured by the distance it tries to create between women and books. “Nothing frightens a loutish person more than a woman who knows how to read, write, and think, and moreover shows her knees.” During the war she was sent to the women’s prison, and they say she hanged herself in her cell.
I knew from the start that I wanted to live among books, and I began to dream that one day my own stories would end up in one of those tomes I so worshiped. Books taught me to think, to feel, and to live a thousand lives. I’m not ashamed to admit that, just as Doña Lorena predicted, the day came when I also started liking boys. Too much. I can tell these pages and laugh about how my legs trembled when I saw some of the young men who unloaded boxes in the Borne m
arket and looked at me with hungry smiles, their torsos covered in sweat, their skin tanned and, I was sure, tasting of salt. “Oh, what I’d give you, gorgeous,” one of them told me, before my father locked me up in the house for a week, a week I devoted to fantasizing about what that daring young man wanted to give me, while feeling a bit like Saint Teresa.
To tell you the truth, the boys of my age didn’t interest me much. Besides, they were somewhat afraid of me. I’d beaten them at everything except in competitions to see who could pee farthest in the wind. Like all girls of my age, whether they admit it or not, I preferred older boys, especially the ones who fit into the category defined by all mothers as “the unsuitable ones.” I didn’t know how to doll myself up or look my best, at least at first, but soon I learned to tell when boys liked me. Most of them turned out to be the complete opposite of books: they were simple and could be read instantly. I suppose I never was what is known as a good girl. I’m not going to lie to myself. Who wants to be a good girl voluntarily? Not me. I would corner the boys I liked in a doorway and instruct them to kiss me. Since a lot of them were paralyzed with fear or didn’t even know how to begin, I would kiss them. My exploits reached the parish priest’s ears, and he deemed it necessary to perform an immediate act of exorcism, for these were clear signs of demonic possession. My stepmother had a nervous breakdown caused by the shame I’d put her through. It lasted a month. After that episode she declared that I would end up at least as a cabaret artist, or go straight to the “gutter,” her favorite expression. “And then nobody will want you, you little tart.” My father, who was at his wit’s end as to what to do with me, began making arrangements to send me to a strict religious boarding school, but my reputation preceded me, and as soon as they realized who I was, they refused to admit me for fear I might contaminate the other boarders. I write all this without embarrassment because I think that if I committed a sin at all during my teenage years, it was simply that of being too innocent. I broke a heart or two, but never with malice, and then I still believed that nobody would ever break mine.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 69