16
A few days after I had put the finishing touches to both novels, Vidal’s and my own, Pep turned up at my house unannounced. He was wearing the uniform inherited from Manuel that made him look like a boy dressed up as a field marshal. At first I thought he was bringing me some message from Vidal, or perhaps from Cristina, but his sombre expression spoke of an anxiety that made me rule out that possibility as soon as our eyes met.
‘Bad news, Se?or Martín.’
‘What has happened?’
‘It’s Se?or Manuel.’
While he was explaining what had happened his voice faltered, and when I asked him whether he wanted a glass of water he almost burst into tears. Manuel Sagnier had died three days earlier at the sanatorium in Puigcerdà after prolonged suffering. At his daughter’s request he had been buried the day before in a small cemetery at the foot of the Pyrenees.
‘Dear God,’ I murmured.
Instead of water I handed Pep a large glass of brandy and parked him in an armchair in the gallery. When he was calmer, Pep explained that Vidal had sent him to meet Cristina, who was returning that afternoon on a train due to arrive at five o’clock.
‘Imagine how Se?orita Cristina must be feeling . . .’ he mumbled, distressed at the thought of having to be the one to meet her and comfort her on the journey back to the small apartment above the coach house of Villa Helius, the home she had shared with her father since she was a little girl.
‘Pep, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go and meet Se?orita Sagnier.’
‘Orders from Don Pedro.’
‘Tell Don Pedro that I’ll do it.’
By dint of alcohol and persuasion I convinced him that he should go home and leave the matter in my hands. I would meet her and take her to Villa Helius in a taxi.
‘I’m very grateful, Se?or Martín. You’re a man of letters so you’ll have a better idea of what to say to the poor thing.’
At a quarter to five I made my way towards the recently opened Estación de Francia railway station. That year’s International Exhibition had left the city strewn with wonders, but my favourite was that temple-like vault of glass and steel, even if only because it was so close and I could see it from the study in the tower house. That afternoon the sky was scattered with black clouds galloping in from the sea and clustering over the city. Flashes of lightning echoed on the horizon and a charged warm wind smelling of dust announced a powerful summer storm. When I reached the station I noticed the first few drops, shiny and heavy, like coins falling from heaven. By the time I walked down to the platform where the train was due to arrive the rain was already pounding the station’s vaulted roof. Night seemed to fall suddenly, interrupted only by flashes of light bursting over the city, leaving a trail of noise and fury.
The train came in almost an hour late, a serpent of steam slithering beneath the storm. I stood by the engine waiting for Cristina to appear among the passengers emerging from the carriages. Ten minutes later everybody had descended and there was still no trace of her. I was about to go back home, thinking that perhaps Cristina hadn’t taken that train after all, when I decided to have a last look and walked all the way down to the end of the platform, peering carefully through all the compartment windows. I found her in the carriage before last, sitting with her head against the window, staring into the distance. I climbed into the carriage and walked up to the door of her compartment. When she heard my steps, she turned and looked at me without surprise, smiling faintly. She stood up and hugged me silently.
‘Welcome back,’ I said.
Cristina’s only baggage was a small suitcase. I gave her my hand and we went down to the platform, which by now was deserted. We walked all the way to the main foyer without exchanging a word. When we reached the exit we stopped. It was raining hard and the line of taxis that had been there when I arrived had vanished.
‘I don’t want to return to Villa Helius tonight, David. Not yet.’
‘You can stay at my house if you like, or we can find you a room in a hotel.’
‘I don’t want to be alone.’
‘Let’s go home. If there’s one thing I have it’s too many bedrooms.’
I sighted a porter who had put his head out to look at the storm and was holding an impressive-looking umbrella. I went up to him and offered to buy it for five times its real value. He gave it to me wreathed in an obliging smile.
Protected by that umbrella we ventured out into the deluge and headed towards the tower house, at which we arrived completely drenched ten minutes later, thanks to the gusts of wind and the puddles. The storm had caused a power cut; the streets were buried in a liquid darkness speckled here and there with the light cast by oil lamps or candles from balconies and doors. I had no doubt that the marvellous electrical system in my house must have been one of the first to succumb. We had to fumble our way up the stairs and when we opened the front door of the apartment, a breath of lightning emphasised its gloomiest and most inhospitable aspect.
‘If you’ve changed your mind and you’d rather we looked for a hotel . . .’
‘No, it’s fine. Don’t worry.’
I left Cristina’s suitcase in the hall and went to the kitchen in search of a box of assorted candles I kept in the larder. I started to light them, one by one, fixing them on plates, and in tumblers and glasses. Cristina watched me from the door.
‘It will only take a minute,’ I assured her. ‘I have a lot of practice.’
I began to distribute the candles around the rooms, along the corridor and in various corners, until the whole house was enveloped in a flickering twilight of pale gold.
‘It looks like a cathedral,’ Cristina said.
I took her to one of the rooms that I didn’t use but kept clean and tidy because of the few times Vidal, too drunk to return to his mansion, had stayed the night.
‘I’ll bring you some clean towels. If you don’t have anything to change into, I can offer you a wide selection of dreadful belle époque clothes, which the former owners left in the wardrobes.’
My clumsy attempt at humour barely drew a smile from her, and she simply nodded. I left her sitting on the bed while I rushed off to fetch the towels. When I returned she was still sitting there, motionless. I left the towels next to her on the bed and brought over a couple of candles that I’d placed by the door, to give her a bit more light.
‘Thanks,’ she murmured.
‘While you change I’ll go and prepare some hot soup for you.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘It will do you good, all the same. If you need anything, let me know.’
I left her alone and went off to my room to remove my sodden shoes. I put water on to boil and sat waiting in the gallery. The rain was still crashing down, angrily machine-gunning the large windows; it poured through the gutters up in the tower and funnelled along the flat roof, sounding like footsteps on the ceiling. Further out, the Ribera quarter was plunged into almost total darkness.
After a while the door of Cristina’s room opened and I heard her approaching. She was wearing a white dressing gown and had thrown an ugly woollen shawl over her shoulders.
‘I’ve borrowed this from one of the wardrobes,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
‘You can keep it if you like.’
She sat in one of the armchairs and glanced round the room, stopping to look at a pile of paper on the table. She looked at me and I nodded.
‘I finished it a few days ago,’ I said.
‘And yours?’
I thought of both manuscripts as mine, but I just nodded again.
‘May I?’ she asked, taking a page and bringing it nearer the candlelight.
‘Of course.’
I watched her read, a thin smile on her lips.
‘Pedro will never believe he’s written this,’ she said.
‘Trust me,’ I replied.
Cristina put the sheet back on the pile and looked at me for a long time.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to, but I have.’
‘Me too.’
‘Some days, before going to the sanatorium, I’d walk to the station and sit on the platform to wait for the train coming from Barcelona, hoping you might be on it.’
I swallowed hard.
‘I thought you didn’t want to see me,’ I said.
‘That’s what I thought, too. My father often asked after you, you know? He asked me to look after you.’
‘Your father was a good man,’ I said. ‘A good friend.’
Cristina nodded and smiled, but I could see that her eyes were filling with tears.
‘In the end he couldn’t remember anything. There were days when he confused me with my mother and would ask me to forgive him for the years he spent in prison. Then weeks would go by when he hardly seemed to notice I was there. Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn’t go away.’
‘I’m sorry, Cristina.’
‘In the last few days I thought he was better. He was beginning to remember things. I had brought with me one of his albums and I started to show him the photographs again, pointing out who was who. There is one very old picture, taken in Villa Helius, in which you and he are both sitting in the motor car. You’re at the steering wheel and my father is teaching you how to drive. You’re both laughing. Do you want to see it?’
I hesitated, but didn’t dare break that moment.
‘Of course . . .’
Cristina went to look for the album in her suitcase and returned with a small book bound in leather. She sat next to me and started turning the pages, which were filled with old snapshots, cuttings and postcards. Manuel, like my father, had barely learned to read and write and his memories were mostly made up of images.
‘Look, here you are.’
I looked at the photograph and vividly recalled the summer day when Manuel had let me climb into the first car Vidal ever bought and had taught me the basics of driving. Then we had taken the car out along Calle Panamá and, doing about five kilometres per hour - a dizzying speed to me at the time - had driven as far as Avenida Pearson, returning with me at the wheel.
‘You’re an ace driver!’ Manuel had concluded. ‘If you’re ever stuck with your stories, you could consider a future in racing.’
I smiled, remembering that moment which I thought I had lost. Cristina handed me the album.
‘Keep it. My father would have liked you to have it.’
‘It’s yours, Cristina. I can’t accept it.’
‘I would rather you kept it.’
‘It’s in storage then, until you want to come and collect it.’
I started to turn the pages, revisiting faces I remembered and gazing at others I had never seen. There was the wedding photograph of Manuel Sagnier and his wife Marta, whom Cristina resembled a great deal, studio portraits of Cristina’s uncles and grandparents, a picture of a street in the Raval quarter with a procession going by, another of the San Sebastián bathing area on La Barceloneta beach. Manuel had collected old postcards of Barcelona and newspaper cuttings with photos of a very young Vidal - one of him posing by the doors of the Hotel Florida at the top of Mount Tibidabo, and another where he stood arm in arm with a staggering beauty in the halls of La Rabasada casino.
‘Your father worshipped Don Pedro.’
‘He always said we owed everything to him,’ Cristina answered.
I continued to travel through poor Manuel’s memories until I came to a page with a photograph that didn’t seem to fit in with the rest. It was a picture of a girl of about eight or nine, walking along a small wooden jetty that stretched out into a sheet of luminous sea. She was holding the hand of an adult, a man dressed in a white suit, who was partly cut off by the frame. At the end of the jetty you could make out a small sailing boat and an endless horizon on which the sun was setting. The girl, who was standing with her back to the camera, was Cristina.
‘This is my favourite,’ murmured Cristina.
‘Where was it taken?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember that place or that day. I’m not even sure whether that man is my father. It’s as if the moment never existed. I found the picture years ago in my father’s album and I’ve never known what it means. It seems to be trying to say something to me.’
I went on turning the pages while Cristina told me who each person was.
‘Look, this is me when I was fourteen.’
‘I know.’
Cristina looked at me sadly.
‘I didn’t realise, did I?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘You’ll never be able to forgive me.’
I preferred to go on turning the pages than to look into her eyes.
‘There’s nothing to forgive.’
‘Look at me, David.’
I closed the album and did as she asked.
‘It’s a lie,’ she said. ‘I did realise. I realised every day, but I thought I had no right.’
‘Why?’
‘Because our lives don’t belong to us. Not mine, not my father’s, not yours . . .’
‘Everything belongs to Vidal,’ I said bitterly.
Slowly, she took my hand and brought it to her lips.
‘Not today,’ she murmured.
I knew I was going to lose her as soon as the night was over, and the pain and loneliness that were gnawing at her went away. I knew she was right, not because what she had said was true, but because, deep down, we both believed it and it would always be the same. We hid like two thieves in one of the rooms without daring to light a single candle, without even daring to speak. I undressed her slowly, going over her skin with my lips, conscious that I would never do so again. Cristina gave herself with anger and abandon, and when we were overcome by exhaustion she fell asleep in my arms without feeling the need to say anything. I fought off sleep, enjoying the warmth of her body and thinking that if the following day death should come to take me away, I would go in peace. I caressed Cristina in the dark, listening to the storm outside as it left the city, knowing that I was going to lose her but also knowing that, for a few minutes, we had belonged to one another, and to nobody else.
When the first breath of dawn touched the windows I opened my eyes and found the bed empty. I went out into the corridor and as far as the gallery. Cristina had left the album and had taken Vidal’s novel. I went through the whole house, which already smelled of her absence, and one by one blew out the candles I had lit the night before.