15
The staircase was in darkness when I left the Valera family mansion. I groped my way towards the entrance and, as I opened the door, the street lamps cast a rectangle of blue light back across the hall, at the end of which I spotted the stern eyes of the porter. I hurried away towards Calle Trafalgar, where the tram set out on its journey down to the gates of Pueblo Nuevo Cemetery - the same tram I had taken so many times with my father when I accompanied him on his night shifts at The Voice of Industry.
The tram was almost empty and I sat at the front. As we approached Pueblo Nuevo we entered a network of shadowy streets covered in large puddles. There were hardly any street lamps and the tram’s headlights revealed the contours of the buildings like a torch shining through a tunnel. At last I sighted the gates of the cemetery, its crosses and sculptures set against an endless horizon of factories and chimneys injecting red and black into the vault of the sky. A group of emaciated dogs prowled around the foot of the two large angels guarding the graveyard. For a moment they stood still, staring into the lights of the tram, their eyes lit up like the eyes of jackals, before they scattered into the shadows.
I jumped from the tram while it was still moving and set off, skirting the walls of the cemetery. The tram sailed away like a ship in the fog and I quickened my pace. I could hear and smell the dogs following behind me in the dark. When I reached the back of the cemetery I stopped on the corner of the alley and blindly threw a stone at them. I heard a sharp yelp and then the sound of paws galloping away into the night. The alley was just a narrow walkway trapped between the wall and the row of stonemasons’ workshops, all jumbled together. The notice SANABRE & SONS swung in the dusty light of a street lamp that stood about thirty metres further on. I went to the door, just a grille secured with chains and a rusty lock, and blew it open with one shot.
The echo of the shot was swallowed by the wind as it gusted up the passageway, carrying salt from the breaking waves of the sea only a hundred metres away. I opened the grille and walked into the Sanabre & Sons workshop, drawing back the dark curtain that masked the interior so that the light from the street lamp could penetrate. Beyond was a deep, narrow nave, populated by marble figures seemingly frozen in the shadows, their faces only half-sculpted. I took a few steps past madonnas cradling infants in their arms, white women holding marble roses and looking heavenward, and blocks of stone on which I could just make out the beginnings of an expression. The scent of dust from the stone filled the air. There was nobody there except for these nameless effigies. I was about to retrace my steps when I saw it. The hand peeped out from behind a tableau of figures covered with a cloth at the back of the workshop. As I walked towards it, the shape gradually revealed itself to me. Finally I stood in front of it and gazed up at that great angel of light, the same angel the boss had worn on his lapel and I had found at the bottom of the trunk in the study. The figure must have been two and a half metres high, and when I looked at its face I recognised the features, especially the smile. At its feet was a gravestone, with an inscription:
DAVID MARTíN
1900-1930
I smiled. One thing I had to admit about my good friend Diego Marlasca was that he had a sense of humour and a taste for the unexpected. It shouldn’t have surprised me, I told myself, that in his eagerness he’d got ahead of himself and prepared such a heartfelt send-off. I knelt down by the gravestone and stroked my name. Behind me I heard light footsteps. I turned and saw a familiar face. The boy wore the same black suit he had worn when he followed me weeks ago in Paseo del Borne.
‘The lady will see you now,’ he said.
I nodded and stood up. The boy offered me his hand, and I took it.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said, as he led me towards the exit.
‘I’m not,’ I whispered.
The boy took me to the end of the alleyway. From there I could make out the line of the beach, hidden behind a row of run-down warehouses and the remains of a cargo train abandoned on a weed-covered siding. Its coaches were eaten away by rust, and all that was left of the engine was a skeleton of boilers and metal struts waiting for the scrapyard.
Up above, the moon peeped through the gaps in a bank of leaden clouds. Out at sea, the blurred shapes of distant freighters appeared between the waves, and on the sands of Bogatell beach lay the skeletons of old fishing boats and coastal vessels, spewed up by storms. On the other side, like a mantle of rubbish stretching out from the great, dark fortress of industry, stood the shacks of the Somorrostro encampment. Waves broke only a few metres from the first row of huts made of cane and wood. Plumes of white smoke slithered among the roofs of the miserable hamlet growing between the city and the sea like an endless human dumping ground. The stench of burned rubbish floated in the air. We stepped into the streets of that forgotten city, passages that opened up between structures held together with stolen bricks, mud and driftwood. The boy led me on, unaware of the distrustful stares of the locals. Unemployed day labourers, Gypsies ousted from similar camps on the slopes of Montju?c or opposite the communal graves of the Can Tunis Cemetery, homeless old men, women and children. They all observed me with suspicion. As we walked by, women of indeterminate age stood by fires outside their shacks, heating up water or food in tin canisters. We stopped in front of a whitish structure, at the door of which we saw a girl with the face of an old woman, limping on a leg withered by polio. She was dragging a bucket with something grey and slimy moving about inside it. Eels. The boy pointed to the door.
‘It’s here,’ he said.
I took a last look at the sky. The moon was hiding behind the clouds again and a veil of darkness advanced towards us from the sea.
I went in.