8
Years later, when I read an account about British explorers penetrating the dark passages of a thousand-year-old Egyptian burial place - mazes and curses included - I would recall that first visit to the tower house in Calle Flassaders. The secretary came equipped with an oil lamp because the building had never had electricity installed. The auditor turned up with a set of fifteen keys with which to liberate the countless padlocks that fastened the chains. When the front door was opened, the house exhaled a putrid smell, like a damp tomb. The auditor started to cough, and the manager, who was making an effort not to look too sceptical or disapproving, covered his mouth with a handkerchief.
‘You first,’ he offered.
The entrance resembled one of those interior courtyards in the old palaces of the area, paved with large flagstones and with a stone staircase that led to the front door of the living quarters. Daylight filtered in through a glass skylight, completely covered in pigeon and seagull excrement, that was set on high.
‘There aren’t any rats,’ I announced once I was inside the building.
‘A sign of good taste and common sense,’ said the property manager behind me.
We proceeded up the stairs until we reached the landing on the main floor, where the auditor spent ten minutes trying to find the right key for the lock. The mechanism yielded with an unwelcoming groan and the heavy door opened, revealing an endless corridor strewn with cobwebs that undulated in the gloom.
‘Holy Mother of God,’ mumbled the manager.
No one else dared take the first step, so once more I had to lead the expedition. The secretary held the lamp up high, looking at everything with a baleful air.
The manager and the auditor exchanged a knowing look. When they noticed that I was observing them, the auditor smiled calmly.
‘A good bit of dusting and some patching up and the place will look like a palace,’ he said.
‘Bluebeard’s palace,’ the manager added.
‘Let’s be positive,’ the auditor corrected him. ‘The house has been empty for some time: there’s bound to be some minor damage.’
I was barely paying attention to them. I had dreamed about that place so often as I walked past its front door that now I hardly noticed the dark, gloomy aura that possessed it. I walked up the main corridor, exploring rooms of all shapes and sizes in which old furniture lay abandoned under a thick layer of dust and shadow. One table was still covered with a frayed tablecloth on which sat a dinner service and a tray of petrified fruit and flowers. The glasses and cutlery were still there, as if the inhabitants of the house had fled in the middle of dinner.
The wardrobes were crammed with threadbare faded clothes and shoes. There were whole drawers filled with photographs, spectacles, fountain pens and watches. Dust-covered portraits observed us from every surface. The beds were made and covered with a white veil that shone in the half-light. A gramophone rested on a mahogany table. It had a record on it and the needle had slid to the end. I blew on the film of dust that covered it and the title of the recording came into view: W. A. Mozart’s Lacrimosa.
‘The symphony orchestra performing in your own home,’ said the auditor. ‘What more could one ask for? You’ll live like a lord here.’
The manager shot him a murderous look, clearly in disagreement. We went through the apartment until we reached the gallery at the back, where a coffee service lay on a table and an open book on an armchair was still waiting for someone to turn over the page.
‘It looks like whoever lived here left suddenly, with no time to take anything with them,’ I said.
The auditor cleared his throat.
‘Perhaps the gentleman would like to see the study?’
The study was at the top of a tall tower, a peculiar structure at the heart of which was a spiral staircase that led off the main corridor, while its outside walls bore the traces of as many generations as the city could remember. There it stood, like a watchtower suspended over the roofs of the Ribera quarter, crowned by a narrow dome of metal and tinted glass that served as a lantern, and topped by a weathervane in the shape of a dragon. We climbed the stairs, and when we reached the room at the top, the auditor quickly opened the windows to let in air and light. It was a rectangular room with high ceilings and dark wooden flooring. Its four large arched windows looked out on all four sides, giving me a view of the cathedral of Santa María del Mar to the south, the large Borne market to the north, the railway station to the east and to the west the endless maze of streets and avenues tumbling over one another towards Mount Tibidabo.
‘What do you say? Marvellous!’ proposed the auditor enthusiastically.
The property manager examined everything with a certain reserve and displeasure. His secretary held the lamp up high, even though it was no longer needed. I went over to one of the windows and leaned out, spellbound.
The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that when I opened those windows - my new windows - each evening its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets in my ear, that I could catch on paper and narrate to whoever cared to listen. Vidal had his exuberant and stately ivory tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees and fairytale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the Rose of Fire.
What finally decided the matter was the desk that dominated the centre of the study. On it, like a great sculpture of metal and light, stood an impressive Underwood typewriter for which, alone, I would have paid the price of the rent. I sat in the plush armchair facing the desk, stroked the typewriter keys, and smiled.
‘I’ll take it,’ I said.
The auditor sighed with relief and the manager rolled his eyes and crossed himself. That same afternoon I signed a ten-year rental agreement. While workmen were busy wiring the house for electricity, I devoted my time to cleaning, tidying and straightening the place up with the help of three servants whom Vidal sent trouping down without first asking me whether or not I wanted any help. I soon discovered that the modus operandi of that commando of electrical experts consisted in first drilling holes right, left and centre and then asking. Three days after their deployment, the house did not have a single light bulb that worked, but one would have thought that the place had been infested by a plague of woodworm that devoured plaster and the noblest of minerals.
‘Are you sure there isn’t a better way of fixing this?’ I would ask the head of the battalion, who resolved everything with blows of the hammer.
Otilio, as the talented man was called, would show me the building plans supplied by the property manager when I was handed the keys, and argue that the problem lay with the house, which was badly built.
‘Look at this,’ he would say. ‘I mean, when something is badly made, it’s badly made, and there are no two ways about it. Here, for example. Here it says that you have a water tank on the terrace. Well, no, sir, you have a water tank in the back yard.’
‘What does it matter? The water tank has nothing to do with you, Otilio. Concentrate on the electrics. Light. Not taps, not water pipes. Light. I need light.’
‘But everything is connected. What do you think about the gallery?’
‘I think it has no light.’
‘According to the plans this should be a supporting wall. Well, my mate Remigio here tapped it ever so slightly and half the wall came crashing down. And you should see the bedrooms. According to this plan, the size of the room at the end of the corridor should be almost forty square metres. Not in a million years! I’d be surprised if it measured twenty. There’s a wall where there shouldn’t be a wall. And as for the waste pipes, well, best not talk about them. Not one of them is where it’s supposed to be.’
‘Are you sure you know how to read the plans?’
‘Listen, I’m a professional. Mark my words: this house is a jigsaw puzzle. Everybody’s grandmother has poked their nose into this place.’
‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to make do with what there is. Perform a few miracles or do whatever you want, but by Friday I want to see all the walls plastered and painted, and the lights working.’
‘Don’t rush me; this is precision work. One has to act strategically. ’
‘So what is your plan?’
‘For a start we’re off to have our breakfast.’
‘You only got here half an hour ago!’
‘Se?or Martín, we’re not going to get anywhere with that attitude.’
The ordeal of building work and botched jobs went on a week longer than expected, but even with the presence of Otilio and his squadron of geniuses making holes where they shouldn’t and enjoying two-and-a-half-hour breakfasts, the thrill of being able to live in that old rambling house, which I had dreamed about for so long, would have kept me going for years with candles and oil lamps if need be. I was lucky in that the Ribera quarter was a spiritual home for all kinds of craftsmen: just a stone’s throw from my new home I found someone who could put in new locks that didn’t look as if they’d been stolen from La Bastille, as well as twentieth-century wall lights and taps. The idea of having a telephone line installed did not appeal to me and, judging by what I’d heard on Vidal’s wireless, these ‘new mass communication media’, as the press called them, were not aimed at people such as myself. I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence. All I took from the pensión was a change of clothes and the case containing my father’s gun, his only memento. I distributed the remainder of my clothes and personal belongings among the pensión residents. Had I also been able to leave behind my memories, even my skin, I would have done so.
The same day as the first instalment of City of the Damned was published, I spent my first official and electrified night in the tower house. The novel was an imaginary intrigue I had woven round the story of the fire in El Ensue?o in 1903, about a ghostly creature who had bewitched the streets of the Raval quarter ever since. Before the ink had dried on that first edition I had already started work on the second novel of the series. By my reckoning, based on thirty uninterrupted days’ work a month, Ignatius B. Samson had to produce an average of 6.66 pages a day to comply with the terms of the agreement, which was crazy but had the advantage of not giving me much time to think about it.
I hardly noticed that, as the days went by, I was beginning to consume more coffee and cigarettes than oxygen. As I gradually poisoned my brain, I had the feeling that it was turning into a steam engine that never cooled down. But Ignatius B. Samson was young and resilient. He worked all night and collapsed from exhaustion at dawn, possessed by strange dreams in which the letters on the page trapped in the typewriter would come unstuck and, like spiders made of ink, would crawl up his hands and face, working their way through his skin and nesting in his veins until his heart was covered in black and his pupils were clouded in pools of darkness. I would barely leave the old rambling house for weeks on end, and would forget what day of the week it was, or what month of the year. I paid no attention to the recurring headaches that would sometimes plague me, arriving all of a sudden as if a metal awl were boring a hole through my skull, burning my eyes with a flash of white light. I had grown accustomed to living with a constant ringing in my ears that only the murmur of wind or rain could mask. Sometimes, when a cold sweat covered my face and I felt my hands shaking on the Underwood keyboard, I told myself that the following day I would go to the doctor. But on that day there was always another scene, and another story to tell.
To celebrate the first year of Ignatius B. Samson’s life, I decided to take the day off and reacquaint myself with the sun, the breeze and the streets of a city I had stopped walking through and now only imagined. I shaved, tidied myself up and donned the best and most presentable of my suits. I left the windows open in the study and in the gallery to air the house and let the thick fog that had become its scent be scattered to the four winds. When I went out into the street, I found a large envelope at the bottom of the letter box. Inside was a sheet of parchment, sealed with the angel motif and written on in that exquisite writing. It said:
Dear David,
I wanted to be the first to congratulate you on this new stage of your career. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the first instalments of City of the Damned. I hope you will like this small gift.
I would like to reiterate my admiration for you, and my hope that one day our paths may cross. Trusting that this will come about, please accept the most affectionate greetings from your friend and reader,
Andreas Corelli
The gift was the same copy of Great Expectations that Se?or Sempere had given me when I was a child, the same copy I had returned to him before my father could find it and the same copy that, years later, when I had wanted to recover it at any price, had disappeared only hours before in the hands of a stranger. I stared at the bundle of paper which to me, in a not so distant past, had seemed to contain all the magic and light of the world. The cover still bore my bloodstained fingerprints.
‘Thank you,’ I whispered.