The Angel's Game (16 page)

“We were doing just fine and now here’s Sempere!” he snapped. “What are you bringing me today? Another aficionado who hasn’t got himself a girlfriend because he’d rather live with his mother?”

Sempere paid no attention to this sarcastic greeting.

“Martín, this is Isaac Monfort, the keeper of this place. His friendliness has no equal. Do everything he says. Isaac, this is David Martín, a good friend, a writer, and a trustworthy person.”

The man called Isaac looked me up and down without much enthusiasm and then exchanged a glance with Sempere.

“A writer is never trustworthy. Let’s see, has Sempere explained the rules to you?”

“Only that I can never tell anyone what I will see here.”

“That is the first and most important rule. If you don’t observe it, I personally will wring your neck. Do you get the idea?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Come on, then,” said Isaac, motioning me to come in.

“I’ll say good-bye now, Martín. You’ll find a safe place here.”

I realized that Sempere was referring to the book, not to me. He hugged me and disappeared into the night. I stepped inside and Isaac pulled a lever on the back of the door. A thousand mechanisms, knotted together in a web of rails and pulleys, sealed it up. Isaac took a lamp from the floor and raised it to my face.

“You don’t look well,” he pronounced.

“Indigestion,” I replied.

“From what?”

“Reality.”

“Join the queue.”

We walked down a long corridor and on either side, through the shadows, I thought I could make out frescoes and marble staircases. We advanced farther into the palatial building and shortly there appeared in front of us what looked like the entrance to a large hall.

“What have you got there?” Isaac asked.

“The Steps of Heaven.
A novel.”

“What a preposterous title. Don’t tell me you’re the author.”

“Who, me?”

Isaac sighed, shaking his head and mumbling to himself.

“And what else have you written?”

“City of the Damned
, volumes one to twenty-seven, among other things.”

Isaac turned round and smiled with satisfaction.

“Ignatius B. Samson?”

“May he rest in peace, and at your service.”

At that point, the mysterious keeper stopped and left the lamp
resting on what looked like a balustrade rising in front of a large vault. I looked up and was spellbound. There before me stood a colossal labyrinth of bridges, passages, and shelves full of hundreds of thousands of books, forming a gigantic library of seemingly impossible perspectives. Tunnels zigzagged through the immense structure, which seemed to rise in a spiral toward a large glass dome, curtains of light and darkness filtering through it. Here and there I could see isolated figures walking along footbridges and up stairs or carefully examining the contents of the passageways of that cathedral of books and words. I couldn’t believe my eyes and I looked at Isaac Monfort in astonishment. He was smiling like an old fox enjoying his favorite game.

“Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”

I
followed the keeper to the foot of the large nave that housed the labyrinth. The floor we were stepping over was sown with tombstones, their inscriptions, crosses, and faces dissolving into the stone. The keeper stopped and lowered the gas lamp so that the light slid over some of the pieces of the macabre puzzle.

“The remains of an old necropolis,” he explained. “But don’t let that give you any ideas about dropping dead here.”

We continued toward an area just before the central structure that seemed to form a kind of threshold. In the meantime Isaac was rattling off the rules and duties, fixing his gaze on me from time to time, while I tried to soothe him with docile assent.

“Article one: the first time somebody comes here he has the right to choose a book, whichever one he likes, from all the books there are in this place. Article two: upon adopting a book you undertake to protect it and do all you can to ensure it is never lost. For life. Any questions so far?”

I looked up toward the immensity of the labyrinth.

“How does one choose a single book among so many?”

Isaac shrugged.

“Some like to believe it’s the book that chooses the person. Destiny, in other words. What you see here is the sum of centuries of books that have been lost and forgotten, books condemned to be destroyed and silenced
forever, books that preserve the memory and soul of times and marvels that no one remembers anymore. None of us, not even the oldest, knows exactly when it was created or by whom. It’s probably as old as the city itself and has been growing with it, in its shadow. We know the building was erected using the ruins of palaces, churches, prisons, and hospitals that may once have stood here. The origin of the main structure goes back to the beginning of the eighteenth century and has not stopped evolving since then. Before that, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books was hidden under the tunnels of the medieval town. Some say that during the Inquisition people who were learned and had free minds would hide forbidden books in sarcophagi or bury them in ossuaries all over the city to protect them, trusting that future generations would dig them up. In the middle of the last century a long tunnel was discovered leading from the bowels of the labyrinth to the basement of an old library that nowadays is sealed off, hidden in the ruins of an old synagogue in the Jewish quarter. When the last of the old city walls came down, there was a landslide and the tunnel was flooded with water from an underground stream that for centuries has run beneath what is now the Ramblas. It’s inaccessible at present, but we imagine that for a long time the tunnel was one of the main entrance routes to this place. Most of the structure you can see was developed during the nineteenth century. Only about a hundred people know about it and I hope Sempere hasn’t made a mistake by including you among them …”

I shook my head vigorously, but Isaac was looking at me with skepticism.

“Article three: you can bury your own book wherever you like.”

“What if I get lost?”

“An additional clause, from my own stable: try not to get lost.”

“Has anyone ever got lost?”

Isaac snorted.

“When I started here years ago there was a story doing the rounds about Darío Alberti de Cymerman. I don’t suppose Sempere has told you this, of course.”

“Cymerman? The historian?”

“No, the seal tamer. How many Darío Alberti de Cymermans do you know? What happened is that in the winter of 1889 Cymerman went into the labyrinth and disappeared for a whole week. He was found in one of the tunnels, half dead with fright. He had walled himself up behind a few rows of holy texts so he couldn’t be seen.”

“Seen by whom?”

Isaac looked at me for a long while.

“By the man in black. Are you sure Sempere hasn’t told you anything about this?”

“I’m sure he hasn’t.”

Isaac lowered his voice, adopting a conspiratorial tone.

“Over the years, some members have occasionally seen the man in black in the tunnels of the labyrinth. They all describe him differently. Some even swear they have spoken to him. There was a time when it was rumored that the man in black was the ghost of a cursed author whom one of the members had betrayed after taking one of his books from here and not keeping the promise to protect it. The book was lost forever and the deceased author wanders eternally along the passages, seeking revenge—well, you know, the sort of Henry James touch people like so much.”

“You’re not saying you believe the rumors.”

“Of course not. I have another theory. The Cymerman theory.”

“Which is … ?”

“That the man in black is the master of this place, the father of all secret and forbidden knowledge, of wisdom and memory, the bringer of light to storytellers and writers since time immemorial. He is our guardian angel, the angel of lies and of the night.”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“Every labyrinth has its Minotaur,” Isaac suggested. He smiled mysteriously and pointed toward the entrance to the stacks.

“It’s all yours.”

I set off along a footbridge then slowly entered a long corridor of books that formed a rising curve. When I reached the end of the curve the tunnel divided into four passages radiating out from a small circle
from which a spiral staircase rose, vanishing upwards into the heights. I climbed the steps until I reached a landing that led into three different tunnels. I chose one of them, the one I thought would lead to the heart of the building, and entered. As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows. I wandered aimlessly for almost half an hour until I reached a sort of closed chamber with a table and chair. The walls were made of books and seemed quite solid except for a small gap that looked as if someone had removed a book from it. I decided that this would be the new home for
The Steps of Heaven.
I looked at the cover for the last time and reread the first paragraph, imagining the moment when, many years after I was dead and forgotten, someone, if fortune would have it, would go down that same route and reach that room to find an unknown book into which I had poured everything I had. I placed it there, feeling that I was the one being left on the shelf. It was then that I felt the presence behind me and turned to find the man in black, his eyes fixed steadily on mine.

A
t first I didn’t recognize my own eyes in the mirror, one of the many that formed a chain of muted light along the corridors of the labyrinth. What I saw in the reflection was my face and my skin, but the eyes were those of a stranger. Murky, dark, and full of malice. I looked away and felt the nausea returning. I sat on the chair by the table, imagining that even Dr. Trías might be amused at the thought that the tenant lodged in my brain—the tumorous growth, as he liked to call it—had decided to deal me the final blow in that place, thereby granting me the honor of being the first permanent citizen of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books buried in the company of his last and most ill-fated work, the one that had taken him to the grave. Someone would find me there in ten months, or ten years, or perhaps never. A grand finale worthy
of City of the Damned.

I think I was saved by my bitter laughter. It cleared my head and reminded me of where I was and what I’d come to do. I was about to stand up again when I saw it. It was a rough-looking volume, dark, with no visible title on the spine. It lay on top of a pile of four other books at the end of the table. I picked it up. The covers were bound in what looked like leather, some sort of tanned hide darkened as a result of much handling rather than by dye. The title, which seemed to have been branded onto the cover, was blurred, but on the fourth page it could be clearly read:

I imagined that the initials, the same as mine, were those of the author, but there was no other indication in the book to confirm this. I turned a few pages quickly and recognized at least five different languages alternating through the text—Spanish, German, Latin, French, and Hebrew. Reading a paragraph at random, I was reminded of a prayer in the traditional liturgy that I couldn’t quite remember. I wondered whether the notebook was perhaps some sort of missal or prayer book. The text was punctuated with numerals and verses, with the first words underlined, as if to indicate episodes or thematic divisions. The more I examined it, the more I realized it reminded me of the Gospels and catechisms of my school days.

I could have left, chosen any other tome from among the hundreds of thousands, and abandoned that place, never to return. I almost thought I had done just that, as I walked back through the tunnels and corridors of the labyrinth, until I became aware of the book in my hands, like a parasite stuck to my skin. For a split second the idea crossed my mind that the book had a greater desire to leave the place than I did, that it was somehow guiding my steps. After a few detours, in the course of which I passed the same copy of the fourth volume of LeFanu’s complete works a couple of times, I found myself, without knowing how, by the spiral staircase, and from there I succeeded in locating the way out of the labyrinth. I had imagined Isaac would be waiting for me by the entrance, but there was no sign of him, although I was certain that somebody was observing me from the shadows. The large vault of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books was engulfed in silence.

“Isaac?” I called out.

My voice trailed off into the shadows. I waited in vain for a few seconds and then made my way toward the exit. The blue mist that filtered down from the dome began to fade until the darkness around me was almost absolute. A few steps farther on I made out a light flickering at the end of the gallery and realized that the keeper had left his lamp at the
foot of the door. I turned to scan the dark gallery one last time, then pulled the handle that kick-started the mechanism of rails and pulleys. One by one, the bolts were released and the door yielded a few centimeters. I pushed it just enough to get through and stepped outside. A few seconds later the door began to close again, sealing itself with a sonorous echo.

A
s I walked away from that place I felt its magic leaving me and the nausea and pain took over once more. Twice I fell flat on my face, first in the Ramblas and the second time when I was trying to cross Vía Layetana, where a boy lifted me up and saved me from being run over by a tram. It was with great difficulty that I managed to reach my front door. The house had been closed all day and the heat—that humid, poisonous heat that seemed to suffocate the town a little more every day—floated on the air like dusty light. I went up to the study in the tower and opened the windows wide. Only the faintest of breezes blew and the sky was bruised by black clouds that moved in slow circles over Barcelona. I left the book on my desk and told myself there would be time enough to examine it in detail. Or perhaps not. Perhaps time was already coming to an end for me. It didn’t seem to matter much anymore.