My stepmother, who had declared a special devotion for Our Lady of Lourdes, never lost hope. She prayed to her constantly, begging that one day I would settle down, or that a tram would run me over and I’d be out of the way once and for all. My salvation, suggested the parish priest, had to come about by channeling my troubled instincts in the Roman Catholic way. An urgent plan was put together for me to become engaged, whether I liked it or not, to Vicentet, whose parents owned the patisserie at the entrance to Calle Flassaders, and who, according to my parents, was a good match. Vicentet had a soul as soft as powdered sugar; he was as tender and supple as the sponge cakes his mother made. I could have eaten him up in half a morning, and the poor guy knew it, but our respective families thought that our union would be a way of killing two birds with one stone—setting up the “boy,” and putting that little tart Isabella back on the straight and narrow.
Vicentet, blessed art thou among confectioners, adored me. For him, poor soul, nothing in the whole wide world could be more beautiful or purer than Isabella. When I walked past, he would gaze at me like a sacrificial lamb, dreaming of our wedding banquet at the Siete Puertas and our honeymoon trip on a pleasure boat to the breakwater point in the port. I, of course, made him as unhappy as I could. Unfortunately for all the Vicentets of the world, and they’re not few in number, the heart of a girl is like a fireworks stand under the summer sun. Poor Vicentet, how he suffered because of me. I was told that in the end he married a second cousin from Ripoll who was about to become a novice and would have married the statue of the unknown soldier if that would have saved her from the convent. Together they still bring babies and sponge cakes into the world. He had a lucky escape.
* * *
As foreseeable, I stuck to my guns and ended up doing what my father had always feared—even more than the possibility that Grandmother La Vesubia might come and live with them. Now that books had poisoned my feverish brain, his most dreaded nightmare was that I should fall in love with the worst sort of creature in the universe, the most treacherous, cruel, and malevolent to have ever set foot on earth, whose main purpose in life, aside from satisfying his infinite vanity, was to cast unhappiness on those poor souls who commit the serious mistake of loving him: a writer. And for that matter, not even a poet, a variety my father thought of as more or less a harmless daydreamer, who could be persuaded to find an honest job in a grocery store and leave his verses for Sunday afternoons after church. No, it would be the worst variety of that species: a novelist. Those were beyond repair, not welcome even in hell.
The only living writer in my world was a somewhat eccentric individual, to put it kindly, who had settled in the neighborhood. After some inquiries I discovered that he lived in a large old house on Calle Flassaders, near the pastry shop belonging to Vicentet’s family. According to rumors from old gossipmongers, land registrars, and a very bigmouthed night watchman called Soponcio who knew all the tittle-tattle in our streets, the house was haunted and its occupant was a bit soft in the head. His name was David Martín.
I’d never seen him because, supposedly, he only came out at night and hung out in places not suitable for young ladies and respectable people. I didn’t consider myself either one or the other, so I forged a plan to make our destinies collide, like two trains hurtling out of control. David Martín, the only living novelist in a radius of five streets from my home, didn’t know yet, but very soon his life was going to change. For the better. Heaven or hell would send him just what he needed to straighten out his dissolute existence: an apprentice, the great Isabella.
2
The story of how I became David Martín’s official apprentice is long and detailed. Knowing him, it wouldn’t surprise me if David himself had left his own account of it somewhere, an account in which my character won’t be exactly that of the heroine. The fact is that, despite his iron resistance, I managed to sneak into his house, his strange life, and his consciousness, which in itself was a haunted house. Perhaps it was destiny, perhaps it was the fact that, deep down, David Martín was a tormented spirit who, without knowing it, needed me much more than I needed him. “Lost souls who find one another at midnight,” I wrote at the time as part of my training, in an attempt at a melodramatic poem that my new mentor declared highly dangerous for diabetics. He was like that.
I’ve often thought that David Martín was my first real friend in this life, after Doña Lorena, that is. He was almost twice my age, and sometimes it seemed to me that he’d lived a hundred lives before meeting me, but even when he avoided my company or we quarreled about something trivial, I felt so close to him that despite myself I understood that, as he sometimes joked, we were “two devils in a pod.” Like many good-natured people, David liked to hide in a shell of gruff cynicism, but despite the numerous jibes he threw at me (no more than the ones I threw at him, to be fair) and however hard he pretended not to, he always showed me great patience and generosity.
David Martín taught me many things: how to create a sentence, how to think about language and all its devices as an orchestra in search of a musical score, how to analyze a text and understand how it is constructed and why . . . He taught me to read and write again, but this time I knew what I was doing, why, and what for. And above all how. He never tired of telling me that in literature there is only one real theme: not what is narrated, but how it is narrated. The rest, he said, was decoration. He also told me that writing was a profession one had to learn, but was impossible to teach: “Whoever doesn’t understand that principle may as well devote their life to something else, for there are lots of things to be done in this world.” He was of the opinion that I had less of a future as a writer than Spain had of being a reasonable country, but he was a born pessimist, or what he called an “informed realist,” so, true to myself, I contradicted him.
* * *
With David I learned to accept myself just as I was, to think for myself, and even to love myself a little. During the time I spent living in his ghost-ridden house we became friends, good friends. David Martín was a solitary man, who burned his bridges with the world without realizing it, or perhaps he did it deliberately because he thought that nothing good would ever come across them. His was a broken soul, an item that had been damaged since childhood and which he was never able to mend. I began by pretending to hate him, then tried to hide the fact that I admired him, and finally I made an effort not to show that I felt sorry for him, because it infuriated him. The more David tried to push me away, and he never stopped trying, the closer I felt to him. Then I stopped contradicting him in everything and only wanted to protect him. The irony of our friendship is that I came into his life as an apprentice and a nuisance, but deep down it was as if he’d always been waiting for me. To save him, perhaps, from himself or from all that stuff he had trapped inside him, which was eating him alive.
You only truly fall in love when you don’t realize it’s happening. I fell in love with that broken, profoundly unhappy man long before I began to suspect that I even liked him. He, who always read me like an open book, feared for me. It was his idea that I should work in the Sempere & Sons bookshop, where he’d been a customer all his life. It was his idea to convince Juan, who would end up being my husband and who at the time was “the young Sempere,” to court me. In those days Juan was as shy as David could be brazen. In a way they were like day and night; in David’s heart it was always night.
By then I’d begun to realize that I would never be a writer, or even a submariner, and that the Brontë sisters would have to wait for another, more like-minded candidate to succeed them. I had also started to realize that David Martín was ill. A chasm opened up inside him, and after an entire existence spent fighting to maintain his sanity, when I came into his life David had already lost the battle with himself and was losing his mind, like sand slipping through his fingers. If I’d heeded common sense, I would have run away, but by then I’d already started to enjoy contradicting myself.
* * *
In
time, a lot of things were said about David Martín, and terrible crimes were attributed to him. I am convinced—and I think I knew him better than anyone else—that the only crimes he committed were against himself. That is why I helped him escape from Barcelona, after the police had accused him of murdering his protector, Pedro Vidal, and Vidal’s wife Cristina—with whom he thought he was in love, in that stupid and fatal way some men imagine they love a woman they can’t tell apart from an apparition. And that’s why I prayed he would never return to this city, that he would find peace in some faraway place, that I would be able to forget him, or eventually persuade myself that I had. God only listens when one prays for what one doesn’t need.
I spent the next four years trying to forget David Martín, and thinking I had almost managed to do so. Having abandoned my dreams of writing, I’d made my other dream, that of living among books and words, a reality. I worked in the Sempere & Sons bookshop, where, after the death of Grandfather Sempere, Juan had become Señor Sempere. Our engagement was one of those prewar affairs—a modest courtship, cheeks caressed, strolls on Sunday afternoons, and stolen kisses under marquees during the street fiestas in Gracia, when no family members were spying on us. There were no trembling legs, but that wasn’t necessary either. One can’t live one’s whole life as if one were always fourteen.
Juan didn’t take long to propose to me. My father accepted his proposal in three minutes flat, full of gratitude to Saint Rita, patron saint of impossible causes, as he glimpsed the improbable sight of his daughter dressed in white bowing before a priest and doing as she was told. Barcelona, city of miracles. When I said yes to Juan, I did it with the conviction that he was the best man I would ever meet, that I didn’t deserve him, and that I’d learned to love him not only with my heart but also with my mind. My “yes” wasn’t that of a young girl. How wise I felt. My mother would have been proud of me. All those books had served some purpose. I accepted his hand knowing that what I most desired in the world was to make him happy and raise a family with him. And for a while I actually believed that that was how it would be. I was still so innocent.
3
People live inside their hopes, but the landlord of fate is the devil. The wedding was going to take place in the church of Santa Ana, in the little square just behind the bookshop. The invitations had been sent, the wedding banquet organized, the flowers bought, and the car that was supposed to drive the bride to the church door booked. Every day I told myself I was thrilled, that at last I was going to be happy. I remember one Friday in March, exactly one month before the ceremony, when I was left alone in the bookshop because Juan had had to go to Tiana to deliver an order to an important customer. I heard the tinkle of the doorbell, and when I looked up, I saw him. He’d barely changed.
David Martín was one of those men who don’t grow old, or who only do so inside themselves. Anyone would have joked that he must have made a pact with the devil. Anyone but me, who knew that in the hallucinations of his soul he was convinced that it was so, although his private devil was an imaginary character who lived in the back room of his mind under the name of Andreas Corelli, a Parisian publisher and such a sinister individual he seemed to have emerged from David’s own pen. In his mind, David was convinced that Corelli had hired him to write an accursed book, the founding text of a new faith of fanaticism, anger, and destruction that would set fire to the world forevermore. David carried the burden of that raving fantasy and many others, and believed unquestioningly that his literary demon was hunting him down because he, true to character, hadn’t thought of anything better to do than betray him, break their agreement, and destroy the present-day Malleus Maleficarum at the very last moment, perhaps because the shining kindness of his unbearable apprentice had made him see the light as well as the error of his ways. And that’s where I came in, the great Isabella, an unbeliever who didn’t even believe in lottery tickets, who thought that the perfume of my youthful charms and a time spent without breathing the stuffy air of Barcelona (where, moreover, the police were looking for him) would be enough to cure his madness. As soon as I looked into his eyes, I knew that four years wandering around God knows where hadn’t cured him one iota. The moment he smiled at me and told me he’d missed me, my soul was shattered. I began to cry, and cursed my luck. When he touched my cheek, I knew I was still in love with my very own Dorian Gray, my preferred lunatic, and the only man I had always yearned to have his way with me.
* * *
I can’t remember what words we exchanged. That moment is still a blur in my memory. I think that everything I’d built up in my imagination during the years of his absence collapsed on me in five seconds, and when I managed to crawl out from under the rubble, all I could do was write a hasty note to Juan that I left by the cash register:
I must leave. Forgive me, my love,
Isabella
I knew the police were still looking for David; a month didn’t go by without some member of the force coming by the bookshop to ask whether we’d had any news of the fugitive. I left the bookshop holding on to David’s arm and dragged him to the Estación del Norte. He seemed delighted to have returned to Barcelona and looked at everything with the nostalgia of a dying man and the innocence of a child. I was terrified, and all I could think of was where to hide him. I asked him whether he knew of any place where nobody could find him, and nobody would think of looking.
“The Great Assembly Room in the city hall building,” he said.
“I’m serious, David.”
I was always a woman of bright ideas, and that day I had one of my craziest. David had once told me that his old mentor and friend, Don Pedro Vidal, had a house in a remote corner of the Costa Brava called S’Agaró. At the time the house had served him as a gentleman’s pad, that familiar institution of the Catalan bourgeoisie, a place where well-do-to male members of good society took young ladies, prostitutes, and other candidates for hidden love encounters through which to vent their energetic temperaments without soiling the immaculate marriage bond.
Vidal, who kept various addresses for that purpose in the comfort of Barcelona, had always offered David his hideout by the sea whenever he wished, because he and his cousins only used it during the summer, and even then only for a couple of weeks. The key was always hidden behind a stone on a ledge next to the entrance. With the money I’d taken from the cash register in the bookshop, I bought two tickets to Gerona and from there another two to San Feliu de Guíxols. S’Agaró was just two kilometers farther on, in the bay of San Pol. David didn’t put up any resistance. In the train, he leaned on my shoulder and fell asleep.
“I haven’t slept for years,” he said.
We arrived in San Feliu in the evening, with nothing but the clothes we were wearing. I decided not to take one of the horse carts waiting outside the station, instead making the journey to the villa on foot under cover of darkness. The key was still there. The house had been closed for years. I opened all the windows wide and left them like that until dawn appeared over the sea at the foot of the cliff. David had slept like a baby all night, and when the sun touched his face, he opened his eyes, sat up, and drew close to me. He held me tight, and when I asked him why he’d come back, he said he’d realized that he loved me.
“You have no right to love me,” I said.
After three years of idleness, La Vesubia, who had always been inside me, reappeared. I started to shout at him, venting all the anger, all the sadness, all the longing he had left in me. I assured him that knowing him was the worst thing that had ever happened in my life, that I hated him, that I didn’t want to see him ever again, that I wanted him to stay in that house and rot there forever. David nodded and looked down. I suppose that’s when I kissed him, because I was always the one who had to kiss first, and in a split second I shattered the rest of my life. The priest of my childhood days had been wrong. I hadn’t come to this world to contradict everyone, but to make mistakes. And that morning, in his arms, I made the greatest mistake I could
ever have made.
4
One doesn’t become aware of the emptiness in which one has allowed time to go by until one truly lives. Sometimes life—not the days that have burned away—is just an instant, a day, a week, or a month. One knows one is alive because it hurts, because suddenly everything matters, and because when that brief moment is over, the rest of one’s existence becomes a memory to which one tries in vain to return while there is some breath left in one’s body. For me that moment was contained in the weeks I lived in that large house overlooking the sea with David. I should say with David and the shadows that he carried inside him and that lived with us, but then I didn’t care. I would have gone with him to hell if he’d asked me to. And I suppose that, in my own way, that’s what I ended up doing.
At the foot of the cliff there was a shed with a couple of rowing boats, and a wooden jetty that stretched out into the sea. Almost every morning, at dawn, David would sit at the end of the jetty to watch the sunrise. Sometimes I would join him, and we’d swim in the cove shaped by the cliff. It was March, and the water was still cold, but after a while we’d run home and sit by the fireplace. Then we would take long walks along the path bordering the cliffs, which led to a deserted beach the locals called Sa Conca. In the small wood behind the beach there was a gypsy camp where David bought provisions. Back home, he would cook and we’d have dinner in the evening while we listened to some of the old records Vidal had left in the house. Many evenings, right after sunset, a strong north wind would start up, blowing among the trees and banging the shutters. We had to close the windows and light candles all over the house. Then I would spread a couple of blankets in front of the fireplace and take David’s hand, because although he was twice my age and had lived more than I could even begin to imagine, he was always shy with me, and I was the one who had to guide his hands so he could undress me slowly, the way I liked him to do. I suppose I should be ashamed to write these words and conjure up these memories, but I have no modesty or shame left to offer the world. The memory of those nights, of his hands and lips exploring my skin, of the happiness and pleasure I lived between those four walls, all that, together with the birth of Daniel and the years I’ve had him by my side and seen him grow, are the most beautiful things I will take with me.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 70