3
I didn’t leave the house for several days, sleeping at odd times and barely eating. At night I would sit in the gallery by the open fire and listen to the silence, hoping to hear footsteps outside the door, thinking that Cristina would return, that as soon as she heard about the death of Se?or Sempere she’d come back to me, if only out of compassion, which by now would have been enough for me. When almost a week had gone by since the death of the bookseller and I realised that Cristina was not going to return, I began to visit the study again. I rescued the boss’s manuscript from the trunk and started to reread it, savouring every phrase, every paragraph. Reading it produced in me both nausea and a dark satisfaction. When I thought of the hundred thousand francs that at first had seemed so much, I smiled and reflected that I’d sold myself to that son-of-a-bitch too cheaply. Vanity papered over my bitterness, and pain closed the door of my conscience. In an act of pure arrogance, I reread my predecessor Diego Marlasca’s Lux Aeterna, and then threw it into the fire. Where he had failed, I would triumph. Where he had lost his way, I would find the path out of the labyrinth.
I went back to work on the seventh day. I waited until midnight and sat down at my desk. A clean sheet in the old Underwood typewriter and the city black behind the windowpanes. The words and images sprang forth from my hands as if they’d been waiting angrily in the prison of my soul. The pages flowed from me without thought or measure, with nothing more than the desire to bewitch, or poison, hearts and minds. I stopped thinking about the boss, about his reward or his demands. For the first time in my life I was writing for myself and nobody else. I was writing to set the world on fire and be consumed along with it. I worked every night until I collapsed from exhaustion. I banged the typewriter keys until my fingers bled and fever clouded my vision.
One morning in January, when I’d lost all notion of time, I heard someone knocking on the door. I was lying on my bed, my eyes lost in the old photograph of Cristina as a small child, walking hand in hand with a stranger along a jetty that reached out into a sea of light. That image seemed to be the only good thing I had left, the key to all mysteries. I ignored the knocking for a few minutes, until I heard her voice and knew she was not going to give up.
‘Open the door, damn you! I know you’re there and I’m not leaving until you open it or I knock it down.’
When she saw me Isabella stepped back and looked horrified.
‘It’s only me, Isabella.’
She pushed me aside and made straight for the gallery, where she flung open the windows. Then she went to the bathroom and started filling the tub. She took my arm and dragged me there, then made me sit on the edge of the bath and examined my eyes, lifting my eyelids with her fingertips and muttering to herself. Without saying a word she began to remove my shirt.
‘Isabella, I’m not in the mood.’
‘What are all these cuts? But . . . what have you done to yourself?’
‘They’re just scratches.’
‘I want a doctor to see you.’
‘No.
‘Don’t you dare say no to me,’ she replied harshly. ‘You’re getting into this bathtub right now; you’re going to wash yourself with soap and water and you’re going to have a shave. You have two options: either you do it, or I will. And don’t imagine for one second that I won’t.’
I smiled.
‘I know.’
‘Do as I say. In the meantime I’m going to find a doctor.’
I was about to reply, but she raised her hand to silence me.
‘Don’t say another word. If you think you’re the only person for whom life is painful, you’re wrong. And if you don’t mind letting yourself die like a dog, at least have the decency to remember that there are those of us who do care - although, to tell the truth, I don’t see why.’
‘Isabella . . .’
‘Into the water. And please remove your trousers and underpants.’
‘I know how to take a bath.’
‘I’d never have guessed.’
While Isabella went off in search of a doctor, I submitted to her orders and subjected myself to a baptism of cold water and soap. I hadn’t shaved since the funeral and when I looked in the mirror I was greeted by the face of a wolf. My eyes were bloodshot and my skin had an unhealthy pallor. I put on clean clothes and went to wait in the gallery. Isabella returned twenty minutes later with a physician I thought I’d seen in the area once or twice.
‘This is the patient. Pay no attention whatsoever to anything he says to you. He’s a liar,’ Isabella announced.
The doctor glanced at me, calibrating the extent of my hostility.
‘It’s over to you, doctor,’ I said. ‘Just imagine I’m not here.’
We went to my bedroom and he began the subtle rituals that form the basis of medical science: he took my blood pressure, listened to my chest, examined my pupils and my mouth, and asked me questions of a mysterious nature. When he inspected the razor cuts Irene Sabino had made on my chest, he raised an eyebrow.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a long story, doctor.’
‘Did you do it to yourself?’
I shook my head.
‘I’m going to give you an ointment for the cuts, but I’m afraid you’ll be left with some scars.’
‘I think that was the idea.’
He continued with his examination and I submitted to everything obediently, my eye on Isabella, who was watching anxiously from the doorway. I understood then how much I had missed her and how much I appreciated her company.
‘What a fright you gave me,’ she mumbled with disapproval.
The doctor frowned when he saw the raw wounds on the tips of my fingers. He proceeded to bandage them one by one.
‘When did you last eat?’
I didn’t reply. The doctor exchanged glances with Isabella.
‘There is no cause for alarm, but I’d like to see him in my surgery tomorrow at the latest.’
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, doctor,’ I said.
‘He’ll be there,’ Isabella assured him.
‘In the meantime I recommend that he begins by eating something warm, first broth and then solids. A lot of water but no coffee or other stimulants, and above all he must get lots of rest. Let him go out for a little fresh air and sunshine, but he mustn’t overexert himself. He is showing the classic symptoms of exhaustion and dehydration and the beginnings of anaemia.’
Isabella sighed.
‘It’s nothing,’ I remarked.
The doctor looked at me, unconvinced, and stood up.
‘Tomorrow afternoon in my surgery, at four o’clock. I don’t have the correct instruments or environment for a proper examination here.’
He closed his bag and politely said goodbye. Isabella accompanied him to the door and I heard them murmuring on the landing for a few minutes. I got dressed again and waited, like a good patient, sitting on the bed. I heard the front door close and the doctor’s steps as he descended the stairs. I knew that Isabella was in the entrance hall, pausing before coming into the bedroom. When at last she did, I greeted her with a smile.
‘I’m going to prepare something for you to eat.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I couldn’t care less. You’re going to eat and then we’re going to go out so that you get some fresh air. End of story.’
Isabella prepared a broth for me, to which I added morsels of bread. I then forced myself to swallow it with a cheerful face, although to me it tasted like grit. Eventually I cleaned my bowl and showed it to Isabella, who had been standing on guard duty while I ate. Next she took me to the bedroom, searched for a coat in the wardrobe, equipped me with gloves and a scarf, and pushed me towards the front door. When we stepped outside a cold wind was blowing, but the sky shone with an evening sun that turned the streets the colour of amber. She put her arm in mine and we set off.
‘As if we were engaged,’ I said.
‘Very funny.’
We walked to Ciudadela Park and into the gardens surrounding the Shade House. When we reached the pond by the large fountain we sat down on a bench.
‘Thank you,’ I murmured.
Isabella didn’t reply.
‘I haven’t asked you how you are,’ I volunteered.
‘That’s nothing new.’
‘So how are you?’
Isabella paused.
‘My parents are delighted that I’ve returned. They say you’ve been a good influence. If only they knew . . . The truth is, we do get on better than before. Not that I see that much of them. I spend most of my time in the bookshop.’
‘How’s Sempere? How is he taking his father’s death?’
‘Not very well.’
‘And how are you taking him?’
‘He’s a good man,’ she said.
Isabella fell silent and lowered her eyes.
‘He proposed to me,’ she said after a while. ‘A couple of days ago, in Els Quatre Gats.’
I contemplated her profile, serene and robbed of that youthful innocence I had wanted to see in her and which had probably never been there.
‘And?’ I finally asked.
‘I’ve told him I’ll think about it.’
‘And will you?’
Isabella’s gaze was lost in the fountain.
‘He told me he wanted to have a family, children . . . He said we’d live in the apartment above the bookshop, that somehow we’d make a go of it, despite Se?or Sempere’s debts.’
‘Well, you’re still young . . .’
She tilted her head and looked me in the eye.
‘Do you love him?’ I asked.
She gave a smile that seemed endlessly sad.
‘How do I know? I think so, although not as much as he thinks he loves me.’
‘Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love,’ I said.
‘Don’t you worry about me.’
‘All I ask is that you give yourself some time.’
We looked at each other, bound by an infinite complicity that needed no words, and I hugged her.
‘Friends?’
‘Till death us do part.’