Now I know that the real purpose of my life, the one not even I could have foreseen, was to conceive my son Daniel during the weeks I spent with David. And I know the world would judge me and condemn me to its heart’s content for having loved that man, for having conceived a son in sin and in hiding, and for lying. The punishment, be it fair or unfair, did not wait. In this life nobody is happy for free, not even for an instant.
* * *
One morning, while David was walking down to the jetty, I got dressed and went down to the bathhouse and the restaurant called La Taberna del Mar, at the foot of the bay of San Pol. From there I called Juan. It was now two and a half weeks since I’d disappeared.
“Where are you? Are you all right? Are you safe?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to come back?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything, Juan.”
“I love you very much, Isabella. I’ll always love you. Whether or not you come back.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me whether I love you?”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me if you don’t feel like it. I’ll wait for you. Always.”
Those words sank into me like a dagger, and when I got back home, I was still crying. David, who was waiting for me by the door of the house, hugged me.
“I can’t go on being here with you, David.”
“I know.”
Two days later, one of the gypsies from the beach came over to warn us that the Civil Guard was asking about a man and a young girl who had been seen in the area. The guards had a photograph of David, and said he was wanted for murder. That was the last night we spent together. The following morning, when I woke up under the fireplace blankets, David had gone. He’d left a note in which he told me to go back to Barcelona, marry Juan Sempere, and be happy for the two of us. The night before, I’d confessed that Juan had asked me to marry him and that I’d accepted. Even now, I don’t know why I told him that—whether I wanted to push him away from me or wanted him to beg me to elope with him in his descent to hell. He decided for me. When I’d told him he had no right to love me, he’d believed me.
I knew there was no sense in waiting for him. That he wasn’t going to return that afternoon or the next day. I cleaned the house, covered the furniture with sheets again, and closed all the windows. I left the key behind the stone in the wall and made my way to the train station.
I knew I was carrying his child in my womb as soon as I stepped into the train in San Feliu. Juan, whom I’d called from the station before leaving, came to meet me. He hugged me and didn’t ask me where I’d been. I didn’t even dare look him in the eye.
“I don’t deserve your love,” I confessed.
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
I was cowardly and afraid. For me. For the child I knew I carried inside me. A week later, I married Juan Sempere in the church of Santa Ana, as had been arranged. We spent the wedding night in the Fonda España. The following morning, when I woke up, I heard Juan crying in the bathroom. How beautiful life would be if we were able to love those who deserve it.
Daniel Sempere Gispert, my son, was born nine months later.
5
I never quite understood why David Martín decided to return to Barcelona during the last days of the war, in January of this year, 1939. The morning he left the house in S’Agaró and disappeared, I thought I would never see him again. When Daniel was born, I left behind the young girl I’d once been and the memory of the time we’d spent together. I’ve lived these years looking no further than caring for Daniel, being the mother I should be for him, and protecting him from a world I have learned to see through David’s eyes. A world of darkness, of resentment and envy, of meanness and hatred. A world in which everything is false and everyone lies. A world that shouldn’t deserve to survive, but a world into which my son has come and from which I need to protect him. I never wanted David to know of Daniel’s existence. The day my son was born, I swore to myself that he would never know who his father had been, because Daniel’s true father, the man who devoted his life to him and brought him up by my side, Juan Sempere, was the best father he could ever have had. I did this because I was convinced that if one day Daniel discovered, or suspected, the truth, he would never forgive me. And even so, I would do it again.
David Martín should never have returned to Barcelona. Deep down I believe that if he did, it was because he somehow suspected the truth. Perhaps that was the real punishment reserved for him by the devil he carried in his soul. The moment he crossed the frontier, we were both doomed.
He was arrested a few months ago after crossing the Pyrenees, then taken to Barcelona, where the cases pending against him were reopened. They also charged him with subversion, treason against the state, and God knows what other absurdities. He was locked up in La Modelo, together with thousands of other prisoners. These days people are murdered and imprisoned in vast numbers in all big cities in Spain, and even more so in Barcelona. It’s open season for revenge, for annihilating the opponent, our great national calling. As was to be expected, the brand-new crusaders of the regime crept out from under the stones and ran to take up positions in the new order of things, ready to climb up the ranks of the new society. Many of them have crossed the lines and changed sides once or even a number of times for convenience and self-interest. No person who has lived through a war with their eyes open can ever again believe we’re better than any wild animal.
One might think that things could get no worse, but there’s no bar low enough for meanness when it holds the reins. An individual appeared on the horizon, someone who seemed to have come to the world to embody the spirit of the times and the place. I imagine there are plenty like him among the scum that always rises to the surface when everything else founders. His name is Mauricio Valls, and, like all great men in small times, he is a nobody.
6
I suppose one day all the newspapers in the country will publish great eulogies of Don Mauricio Valls and sing his praises to the four winds. Our land abounds with characters of his ilk, men who never lack a retinue of flatterers crawling around to pick up the crumbs that fall from their table, once they’ve reached the top. For the time being, before that moment comes, and it will, Mauricio Valls is still just one of many, an outstanding candidate. During these last few months I’ve learned a great deal about him. I know he began as one more bookworm in café gatherings—a mediocre man with no talent or trade who, as usually happens, made up for his failings with an enormous vanity and insatiable hunger for recognition. Estimating that his merits would never earn him a penny or the position he coveted and felt entitled to, he decided to carve out a career for himself, cultivating a clique of like-minded chums with whom to exchange privileges, excluding those he envied.
* * *
Yes, I’m writing in anger and resentment, and I’m ashamed of it, because I no longer know, nor do I care, whether my words are fair or not, whether I’m judging the innocent or whether the fury and the pain that burn me to the core are also blinding me. During these past months I’ve learned to hate, and it terrifies me to think that I’ll die with this bitterness in my heart.
The first time I heard his name was shortly after I found out that David had been captured and imprisoned. At the time Mauricio Valls was a young pup of the new regime, a loyal follower who had made himself a name by marrying the daughter of a tycoon in the business and financial setup that had supported the Fascist Nacionales. Valls had started his days as an aspiring man of letters, but his greatest triumph was to seduce a poor soul and lead her down the aisle: a young woman born with a cruel illness that since adolescence had wasted away her bones and confined her to a wheelchair. A rich and unmarriageable heiress, a golden opportunity.
Valls must have imagined that his move was going to catapult him to the top of the national Parnassus, to some important position in the Academy or some prestigious post in the court of Spanish arts and culture. He hadn’t fact
ored in that there were plenty of others who, like him, had begun to appear like late-blossoming flowers out of nowhere when it was clear which side would win the war, all queuing up for the great day.
When the time came for sharing the rewards and booty, Valls received his with a lesson on the rules of the game. The regime didn’t need poets but jailers and inquisitors. And so, without expecting it, he received an appointment that he considered degrading and well below his intellectual gifts: governor of the prison of Montjuïc Castle. Of course, someone like Valls never wastes an opportunity. He knew how to profit from this reversal of fortune by getting into the regime’s good books, preparing for his future promotion, and while he was at it, incarcerating or exterminating all adversaries, real or imaginary, on his long list, or disposing of them as he pleased. How David Martín ended up on that list is something I will never be able to understand, although he wasn’t the only one. For some reason Valls’s fixation with Martín has been twisted and obsessive.
As soon as Valls found out that David Martín had been sent to La Modelo, he requested his transfer to Montjuïc Castle and didn’t rest until he saw him behind the bars of one of his cells. My husband Juan knew a young lawyer, a customer at the bookshop, called Fernando Brians. I went to see him to find out what I could do to help David. Our savings were practically nonexistent, and Brians, a good man who has become a great friend in these difficult months, agreed to work for free. Brians had contacts in Montjuïc, especially one of the jailers, Bebo, and was able to discover that Valls had some sort of a plan regarding David. Valls knew David’s work, and although he never tired of describing him as “the world’s worst writer,” he was trying to persuade David to write, or rewrite, a sheaf of pages bearing Valls’s name, with which Valls believed he could establish his own reputation as an author, backed up by his new position in the regime. I can just imagine David’s reply.
Brians tried everything, but the charges brought against David were too serious. The only thing left to do was to beg for Valls’s clemency, that the treatment David received in the castle not be what we all imagined. Ignoring Brians’s advice, I went to see Valls. Now I know that I made a mistake, a very serious mistake. By going there, if only because Valls saw me as one more possession belonging to the object of his hatred, David Martín, I made myself the focal point of his greed.
Like so many of his sort, Valls was quickly learning how to take advantage of the anxieties of his prisoners’ relatives. Brians kept warning me. Juan, who suspected that my relationship with David and my devotion for him went beyond a noble friendship, was concerned about my visits to Valls in the castle. “Think of your son,” he would say. And he was right, but I was selfish. I couldn’t just abandon David in that place if there was something I could do. It was no longer a question of dignity. Nobody survives a civil war with even a scrap of dignity to boast about. My error was not realizing that Valls didn’t want merely to possess or humiliate me but to destroy me. He’d finally understood that this was the only real way he had to hurt David and bend him to his will.
All my determination, all the naïveté with which I tried to persuade Valls, was turned against us. It made no difference how much I praised him, how much I pretended to respect and fear him, how much I humiliated myself by begging for his compassion toward his prisoner. Everything I did was just fuel for the fire inside Valls. I now know that in my attempt to help David, I ended up condemning him.
When I realized all this, it was already too late. Bored with his work, with himself, and with the slow arrival of his days of glory, Valls filled his time with fantasies. One of them was that he’d fallen in love with me. I thought that if I could convince him that his fantasy had a future, perhaps Valls would show some magnanimity. But he also got tired of me. In despair, I threatened to unmask him, to make public who he really was and how far his cruelty went. Valls laughed at me and at my ingenuousness, but he wanted to punish me. To wound David and deal him his fatal blow.
Barely a week and a half ago, Valls asked me to meet him at the Café de la Ópera, in the Ramblas. I went to the meeting without saying a word to anyone, not even my husband. I was sure that this was my last chance. I was mistaken. That very night I knew something had gone wrong. In the early hours I woke up feeling nauseous. In the mirror I saw that my eyes looked yellow, and some stains had appeared around my neck and on my chest. At daybreak I began to throw up blood. Then the pain began. A cold pain, like a knife carving you up inside, making its way through your body. I grew feverish, unable to keep down liquids or solids. My hair fell out in clumps. The muscles of my entire body tensed up like cables, making me scream with pain. Blood came out of my skin, my eyes, my mouth.
The doctors and hospitals haven’t been able to help me. Juan thinks I’ve caught an illness, and there is still hope. He can’t bear the thought that I’m going to abandon him and my son Daniel, whom I have failed as a mother by allowing my desire, my yearning to save the man I thought was the love of my life, to supplant my duty.
I know Mauricio Valls poisoned me that night in the Café de la Ópera. I know he did it to hurt David. I know I only have a few days left to live. Everything has happened very fast. My only comfort is laudanum, which numbs the pain inside me, and this notebook in which to confess my sins and my faults. Brians, who visits me every day, knows that I’m writing to stay alive, to contain this fire that is devouring me. I’ve asked him to destroy these pages when I die, and not to read them. Nobody must know what I have explained here. Nobody must know the truth, because I’ve learned that in this world truth only hurts, and God loves and helps those who lie.
I have nobody left to pray to. Everything I once believed in has deserted me. Sometimes I don’t remember who I am, and rereading this notebook is the only thing that lets me understand what is happening. I will write until the end. To remember. To try to survive. I’d like to hug my son Daniel and make him understand that whatever happens, I will never abandon him. That I’ll be with him. That I love him. Dear God, forgive me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t want to die. Dear God, let me live one more day so I can hold Daniel in my arms and tell him how much I love him . . .
* * *
That night, like so many others, Fermín had gone out in the small hours to stroll through the deserted streets of Barcelona, which were sown with frost. Remigio, the neighborhood nightwatchman, knew him, and when he saw him walk by always inquired about his insomnia. He’d learned that word from a phone-in radio program for lonely women that he listened to avidly because he identified with almost all the sorrows expressed in it, including one referred to as menopause, which intrigued him no end and which he thought could be cured by vigorously scraping one’s privates with a pumice stone.
“Why call it insomnia, when what they mean is conscience?”
“You’re a philosopher, Fermín. If I had a woman like yours waiting for me, all nice and warm between the sheets, there’s no chance I’d be the only sleepless guy in town. And wrap yourself up. The winter might have come late, but it’s come with a vengeance.”
An hour of wrestling with the biting breeze that was sweeping the streets with sleet convinced Fermín that he should make his way to the bookshop. He had some work to catch up on, and he’d learned to enjoy those moments alone in the shop before the sun came out or Daniel came down to open up. He headed along the corridor of blue light stretching along Calle Santa Ana and glimpsed a distant pale glow tinting the glass of the shop window. Fermín slowed down as he drew closer, listening to the echo of his footsteps, and stopped a few meters away, sheltering from the wind in a doorway. Too early even for Daniel, he thought. Maybe what he’d said about conscience was going to turn out to be contagious.
He was debating between going back home to wake Bernarda up with a strenuous demonstration of Iberian virility, or going into the bookshop to interrupt Daniel doing whatever he was doing (above all to make sure this didn’t include firearms or any sharp objects), when he caught sight of his fri
end walking through the shop entrance and stepping into the street. Fermín sank back into the doorway until he felt the door knocker sticking into his lower back and discovered that Daniel was locking the door and setting off toward Puerta del Ángel. He was in his shirtsleeves and was carrying something under his arm, a book or a notebook. Fermín sighed. That didn’t look good. Bernarda would have to wait to find out a thing or two.
For almost half an hour Fermín followed Daniel through the knot of streets leading down to the port. He didn’t need to move too skillfully or surreptitiously; Daniel seemed so lost in thought, he wouldn’t have noticed a group of tap-dancing ballerinas if they’d been following him. Trembling with cold and cursing himself for having lined his coat with pages from a sports paper—porous and unreliable for such occasions—instead of using the extra-thick pages from the Sunday edition of La Vanguardia, Fermín was tempted to call out to his friend. But he thought better of it. Daniel was advancing as if in a trance, unaware of the sleety mist clinging to his body.
Finally Paseo de Colon opened up before them and, beyond it, the tableau of sheds, masts, and sea mist guarding the docks of the port. Daniel crossed the avenue and walked around a couple of stationary trams that waited for dawn to break. He entered the narrow alleyways between the cavernous sheds, colossal warehouses storing mountains of cargo. At the breakwater of the port, a group of fishermen getting their nets and tackle ready to go out to sea had lit a fire in an empty diesel drum to keep warm. As Daniel approached, they moved to one side, seeing something in his expression that did not encourage conversation. Fermín hurried on. As he drew closer, he could see Daniel throwing the notebook he’d been carrying under his arm into the flames.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 71