The Angel's Game (4 page)

4

You don’t know what thirst is until you drink for the first time. Three days after my visit to El Ensueño, the memory of Chloé’s skin still burned my very thoughts. Without a word to anyone - especially not to Vidal - I decided to gather up what little savings I had and go back there, hoping it would be enough to buy even just one moment in her arms. It was past midnight when I reached the stairs with the red walls that led up to El Ensueño. The light was out in the stairway and I climbed cautiously, leaving behind the noisy citadel of cabarets, bars, music halls and random establishments which the years of the Great War had strewn along Calle Nou de la Rambla. Only the flickering light from the main door below outlined each stair as I ascended. When I reached the landing I stopped and groped about for the door knocker. My fingers touched the heavy metal ring and, when I lifted it, the door gave way slightly and I realised that it was open. I pushed it gently. A deathly silence caressed my face and a bluish darkness stretched before me. Disconcerted, I advanced a few steps. The echo of the street lights fluttered in the air, revealing fleeting visions of bare walls and broken wooden flooring. I came to the room that I remembered, decorated with velvet and lavish furniture. It was empty. The blanket of dust covering the floor shone like sand in the glimmer from the illuminated signs in the street. I walked on, leaving a trail of footsteps in the dust. No sign of the gramophone, of the armchairs or the pictures. The ceiling had burst open, revealing blackened beams. The paint hung from the walls in strips. I walked over to the corridor that led to the room where I had met Chloé, crossing through a tunnel of darkness until I reached the double door, which was no longer white. There was no handle on it, only a hole in the wood, as if the mechanism had been yanked out. I pushed open the door and went in.

Chloé’s bedroom was a shadowy cell. The walls were charred and most of the ceiling had collapsed. I could see a canvas of black clouds crossing the sky and the moon projected a silver halo over the metal skeleton of what had once been a bed. It was then that I heard the floor creak behind me and turned round quickly, aware that I was not alone in that place. The dark, defined figure of a man was outlined against the entrance to the corridor. I couldn’t distinguish his face, but I was sure he was watching me. He stood there for a few seconds, still as a spider, time enough for me to react and take a step towards him. In an instant the figure withdrew into the shadows, and by the time I reached the sitting room there was nobody there. A breath of light from a sign on the other side of the street flooded the room for a second, revealing a small pile of rubble heaped against the wall. I went over and knelt down by the remnants that had been devoured by fire. Something protruded from the pile. Fingers. I brushed away the ashes that covered them and slowly the shape of a hand emerged. I grasped it, and when I tried to pull it out I realised that it had been severed at the wrist. I recognised it instantly and saw that the girl’s hand, which I had thought was wooden, was in fact made of porcelain. I let it fall back on the pile of debris and left.

I wondered whether I had imagined that stranger, because there were no other footprints in the dust. I went downstairs and stood outside the building, inspecting the first-floor windows from the pavement, utterly confused. People passed by laughing, unaware of my presence. I tried to spot the outline of the stranger among the crowd. I knew he was there, maybe a few metres away, watching me. After a while I crossed the street and went into a narrow café, packed with people. I managed to elbow out a space at the bar and signalled to the waiter.

‘What would you like?’

My mouth was as dry as sandpaper.

‘A beer,’ I said, improvising.

While the waiter poured me my drink, I leaned forward.

‘Excuse me, do you know whether the place opposite, El Ensueño, has closed down?’

The waiter put the glass on the bar and looked at me as if I were stupid.

‘It closed fifteen years ago,’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. After the fire it never reopened. Anything else?’

I shook my head.

‘That will be four céntimos.’

I paid for my drink and left without touching the glass.

The following day I arrived at the newspaper offices before my usual time and went straight to the archives in the basement. With the help of Matías, the person in charge, and going on what the waiter had told me, I began to check through the front pages of
The Voice of Industry
from fifteen years back. It took me about forty minutes to find the story, just a short item. The fire had started in the early hours of Corpus Christi Day, 1903. Six people had died, trapped in the flames: a client, four of the girls on the payroll and a small child who worked there. The police and firemen believed that the cause of the tragedy was a faulty oil lamp, although the council of a nearby church alluded to divine retribution and the intervention of the Holy Spirit.

When I returned to the
pensión
I lay on my bed and tried in vain to fall asleep. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out the business card from my strange benefactor - the card I was holding when I awoke in Chloé’s bed - and in the dark I reread the words written on the back. ‘
Great expectations
’.

5

In my world, expectations - great or small - rarely came true. Until a few months previously, the only thing I longed for when I went to bed every night was to be able to muster enough courage to speak to Cristina, the daughter of my mentor’s chauffeur, and for the hours that separated me from dawn to pass so that I could return to the newspaper offices. Now, even that refuge had begun to slip away from me. Perhaps, if one of my literary efforts were a resounding failure, I might be able to recover my colleagues’ affection, I told myself. Perhaps if I wrote something so mediocre and despicable that no reader could get beyond the first paragraph, my youthful sins would be forgiven. Perhaps that was not too high a price to pay to feel at home again. Perhaps.

I had arrived at
The Voice of Industry
many years before, with my father, a tormented, penniless man who, on his return from the war in the Philippines, had found a city that preferred not to recognise him and a wife who had already forgotten him. Two years later she decided to abandon him altogether, leaving him with a broken heart and a son he had never wanted. He did not know what to do with a child. My father, who could barely read or write his own name, had no fixed job. All he had learned during the war was how to kill other men before they killed him - in the name of great and empty-sounding causes that seemed more absurd and repellent the closer he came to the fighting.

When he returned from the war, my father - who looked twenty years older than the man who had left - searched for work in various factories in the Pueblo Nuevo and Sant Martí districts. The jobs only lasted a few days, and sooner or later I would see him arrive home, his eyes blazing with resentment. As time went by, for want of anything better, he accepted a post as nightwatchman at
The Voice of Industry
. The pay was modest, but the months passed by and for the first time since he came back from the war it seemed he was not getting into trouble. But the peace was short-lived. Soon some of his old comrades in arms, living corpses who had come home maimed in body and soul only to discover that those who had sent them off to die in the name of God and the Fatherland were now spitting in their faces, got him involved in shady affairs that were too much for him and which he never really understood.

My father would often disappear for a couple of days, and when he returned his hands and clothes smelled of gunpowder, and his pockets of money. Then he would retreat to his room and, although he thought I didn’t notice, he would inject himself with whatever he had been able to get. At first he never closed his door, but one day he caught me spying on him and slapped me so hard that he split my lip. He then hugged me until there was no strength left in his arms and lay down, stretched out on the floor with the hypodermic needle still stuck in his skin. I pulled out the needle and covered him with a blanket. After that, he began to lock himself in.

We lived in a small attic suspended over the building site of the new auditorium, the Palau de la Música. It was a cold, narrow place in which wind and humidity seemed to mock the walls. I used to sit on the tiny balcony with my legs dangling out, watching people pass by and gazing at the battlement of weird sculptures and columns that was growing on the other side of the street. Sometimes I felt I could almost touch the building with my fingertips, at others - most of them - it seemed as far away as the moon. I was a weak and sickly child, prone to fevers and infections that dragged me to the edge of the grave, although, at the last minute, death always repented and went off in search of larger prey. When I fell ill, my father would end up losing his patience and after the second sleepless night would leave me in the care of one of the neighbours and then disappear. As time went by I began to suspect that he hoped to find me dead on his return, and so free himself of the burden of a child with brittle health who was no use for anything.

More than once I too hoped that would happen, but my father always came back and found me alive and kicking, and a bit taller. Mother Nature didn’t hold back: she punished me with her extensive range of germs and miseries, but never found a way of successfully finishing the job. Against all prognoses, I survived those first years on the tightrope of a childhood before penicillin. In those days death was not yet anonymous and one could see and smell it everywhere, devouring souls that had not even had time enough to sin.

Even at that time, my only friends were made of paper and ink. At school I had learned to read and write long before the other children. Where my school friends saw notches of ink on incomprehensible pages, I saw light, streets, and people. Words and the mystery of their hidden science fascinated me, and I saw in them a key with which I could unlock a boundless world, a safe haven from that home, those streets and those troubled days in which even I could sense that only a limited fortune awaited me. My father didn’t like to see books in the house. There was something about them - apart from the letters he could not decipher - that offended him. He used to tell me that as soon as I was ten he would send me off to work and that I’d better get rid of all my scatterbrained ideas because otherwise I’d end up being a loser, a nobody. I used to hide my books under the mattress and would wait for him to go out or fall asleep so that I could read. Once he caught me reading at night and flew into a rage. He tore the book from my hands and flung it out of the window.

‘If I catch you wasting electricity again, reading all this nonsense, you’ll be sorry.’

My father was not a miser and, despite the hardships we suffered, whenever he could he gave me a few coins so that I could buy myself some treats like the other children. He was convinced that I spent them on liquorice sticks, sunflower seeds or sweets, but I would keep them in a coffee tin under the bed and, when I’d collected four or five reales, I’d secretly rush out to buy myself a book.

My favourite place in the whole city was the Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. It smelled of old paper and dust and it was my sanctuary, my refuge. The bookseller would let me sit on a chair in a corner and read any book I liked to my heart’s content. He hardly ever allowed me to pay for the books he placed in my hands but, when he wasn’t looking, I’d leave the coins I’d managed to collect on the counter before I left. It was only small change - if I’d had to buy a book with that pittance, I would probably only have been able to afford a booklet of cigarette papers. When it was time for me to leave, I would do so dragging my feet, a weight on my soul. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed there forever.

One Christmas Sempere gave me the best gift I have ever received. It was an old volume, read and experienced to the full.

‘
Great Expectations
, by Charles Dickens . . .’ I read on the cover.

I was aware that Sempere knew a few authors who frequented his establishment and, judging by the care with which he handled the volume, I thought that perhaps this Mr Dickens was one of them.

‘A friend of yours?’

‘A lifelong friend. And from now on, he’s your friend too.’

That afternoon I took my new friend home, hidden under my clothes so that my father wouldn’t see it. It was a rainy winter, with days as grey as lead, and I read
Great Expectations
about nine times, partly because I had no other book at hand, partly because I did not think there could be a better one in the whole world and I was beginning to suspect that Mr Dickens had written it just for me. Soon I was convinced that I didn’t want to do anything else in life but learn to do what Mr Dickens had done.

One day I was suddenly awoken at dawn by my father shaking me. He had come back from work early. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled of spirits. I looked at him in terror as he touched the naked bulb that hung from the ceiling.

‘It’s warm.’

He fixed his eyes on mine and threw the bulb angrily against the wall. It burst into a thousand pieces that fell on my face, but I didn’t dare brush them away.

‘Where it is?’ asked my father, his voice cold and calm.

I shook my head, trembling.

‘Where is that fucking book?’

I shook my head once more. In the half-light I hardly saw the blow coming. My sight blurred and I felt myself falling out of bed, with blood in my mouth and a sharp pain like white fire burning behind my lips. When I tilted my head I saw what I imagined to be pieces of a couple of broken teeth on the floor. My father’s hand grabbed me by the neck and lifted me up.

‘Where it is?’

‘Please, father—’

He threw me face-first against the wall with all his might, and the bang on my head made me lose my balance and crash down like a bag of bones. I crawled into a corner and stayed there, curled up in a ball, watching as my father opened my wardrobe, pulled out the few clothes I possessed and threw them on the floor. He looked in drawers and trunks without finding the book until, exhausted, he came back for me. I closed my eyes and pressed myself up against the wall, waiting for another blow that never came. I opened my eyes again and saw my father sitting on the bed, crying with shame and hardly able to breathe. When he saw me looking at him, he rushed off down the stairs. His footsteps echoed as he walked off into the silence of dawn and only when I was sure he was a good distance away did I drag myself as far as the bed and pull my book out of its hiding place under the mattress. I got dressed and went out, clutching the book under my arm.

A sheet of sea mist was descending over Calle Santa Ana as I reached the door of the bookshop. The bookseller and his son lived on the first floor of the same building. I knew that six o’clock in the morning was not a good time to call on anyone, but my only thought at that moment was to save the book, for I was sure that if my father found it when he returned home he would destroy it with all the anger that boiled inside him. I rang the bell and waited. I had to ring two or three times before I heard the balcony door open and saw old Sempere, in his dressing gown and slippers, looking at me in astonishment. Half a minute later he came down to open the front door and when he saw my face all trace of anger disappeared. He knelt down in front of me and held me by my arms.

‘God Almighty! Are you all right? Who did this to you?’

‘Nobody. I fell.’

I held out the book.

‘I came to return it, because I don’t want anything to happen to it . . .’

Sempere looked at me but didn’t say a word - he simply took me in his arms and carried me up to the apartment. His son, a twelve-year-old boy who was so shy I didn’t remember ever having heard his voice, had woken up at the sound of his father going out, and was waiting on the landing. When he saw the blood on my face he looked at his father with fear in his eyes.

‘Call Doctor Campos.’

The boy nodded and ran to the telephone. I heard him speak, realising that he was not dumb after all. Between the two of them they settled me into an armchair in the dining room and cleaned the blood off my wounds while we waited for the doctor to arrive.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me who did this to you?’

I didn’t utter a sound. Sempere didn’t know where I lived and I was not going to give him any ideas.

‘Was it your father?’

I looked away.

‘No. I fell.’

Doctor Campos, who lived four or five doors away, arrived five minutes later. He examined me from head to toe, feeling my bruises and dressing my cuts as delicately as possible. You could see his eyes burning with indignation, but he made no comment.

‘There’s nothing broken, but the bruises will last a while and they’ll hurt for a few days. Those two teeth will have to come out. They’re no good any more and there’s a risk of infection.’

When the doctor had left, Sempere made me a cup of warm cocoa and smiled as he watched me drink it.

‘All this just to save
Great Expectations
, eh?’

I shrugged my shoulders. Father and son looked at one another with a conspiratorial smile.

‘Next time you want to save a book, save it properly; don’t risk your life. Just let me know and I’ll take you to a secret place where books never die and nobody can destroy them.’

I looked at both of them, intrigued.

‘What place is that?’

Sempere gave me a wink and smiled at me in that mysterious manner that seemed to be borrowed from an Alexandre Dumas romance, and which, people said, was a family trait.

‘Everything in due course, my friend. Everything in due course.’

My father spent that whole week with his eyes glued to the floor, consumed with remorse. He bought a new light bulb and even told me that I could turn it on, but not for long, because electricity was very expensive. I preferred not to play with fire. On the Saturday he tried to buy me a book and went to a bookshop on Calle de la Palla, opposite the old Roman walls - the first and last bookshop he ever entered - but as he couldn’t read the titles on the spines of the hundreds of tomes that were on show, he came out empty-handed. Then he gave me some money, more than usual, and told me to buy whatever I wanted with it. It seemed the perfect moment to bring up something that I’d wanted to say to him for a long time but had never found the opportunity.

‘Doña Mariana, the teacher, has asked me whether you could go by the school one day and talk to her,’ I said, trying to sound casual.

‘Talk about what? What have you done?’

‘Nothing, father. Doña Mariana wanted to talk to you about my future education. She says I have possibilities and thinks she could help me win a scholarship for a place at the Escolapios . . .’

‘Who does that woman think she is, filling your head with nonsense and telling you she’s going to get you into a school for rich kids? Have you any idea what that pack is like? Do you know how they’re going to look at you and treat you when they find out where you come from?’

I looked down.

‘Doña Mariana only wants to help, father. That’s all. Please don’t get angry. I’ll tell her it’s not possible, end of story.’

My father looked at me angrily, but controlled himself and took a few deep breaths with his eyes shut before speaking again.