The Angel's Game (8 page)

“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 the 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 trooping 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 center and then asking. Three days after their deployment, the house did not have a single lightbulb 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 this 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 backyard.”

“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 meters. 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 got here only half an hour ago!”

“Señor 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 that the Ribera quarter was a spiritual home for all kinds of craftsmen: near my new home I found someone who could put in new locks that didn’t look as if they’d been stolen from the 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 “intercommunicating systems,” 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 pension was a change of clothes and the case containing my father’s gun, his only memento. I distributed the rest of my clothes and personal belongings among the pension residents. Had I also been able to leave behind my memories, even my skin, I would have done so.

…

The day the first installment
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 Ensueño 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 then there was always another scene, and another story to tell.

To celebrate the first year of Ignatius B. Samson’s life, though, 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 dressed in my best suit. 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:

The gift was the copy of
Great Expectations
that Señor 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 that 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.

S
eñor Sempere put on his reading spectacles to examine the book closely. He placed it on a cloth he had spread out on his desk in the back room and pulled down the reading lamp so that its beam focused on the volume. His examination lasted a few minutes, during which I maintained a reverential silence. I watched him turn the pages, smell them, stroke the paper and the spine, weigh the book with one hand and then the other, and finally close the cover and examine with a magnifying glass the bloodstained fingerprints left by me many years earlier.

“Incredible,” he mused, removing his spectacles. “It’s the same book. How did you say you recovered it?”

“I really couldn’t tell you, Señor Sempere. Do you know anything about a French publisher called Andreas Corelli?”

“For a start he sounds more Italian than French, although the name Andreas could be Greek …”

“The publishing house is in Paris. Éditions de la Lumière.”

Sempere looked doubtful.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t ring a bell. I’ll ask Barceló. He knows everything. Let’s see what he says.”

Gustavo Barceló was one of the senior members of the secondhand booksellers’ guild in Barcelona and his vast expertise was as legendary as his somewhat abrasive and pedantic manner. There was a saying in the trade: when in doubt, ask Barceló. At that very moment Sempere’s son
put his head round the door and signaled to his father. Although he was two or three years older than me he was so shy that he could make himself invisible.

“Father, someone’s come to collect an order that I think you took.”

The bookseller nodded and handed me a thick, worn volume.

“This is the latest catalog of European publishers. Why don’t you have a look at it and see if you can find anything while I attend to the customer?” he suggested.

I was left alone in the back room, searching in vain for Éditions de la Lumière, while Sempere returned to the counter. As I leafed through the volume, I could hear him talking to a woman whose voice sounded familiar. I heard them mention Pedro Vidal. Intrigued, I peeked through the door to find out more.

Cristina Sagnier, the chauffeur’s daughter and my mentor’s secretary, was going through a pile of books that Sempere was noting down in his ledger. When she saw me she smiled politely, but I was sure she did not recognize me. Sempere looked up and, noticing the silly expression on my face, took a quick X-ray of the situation.

“You do know each other, don’t you?” he said.

Cristina raised her eyebrows in surprise and looked at me again, unable to place me.

“David Martín. A friend of Don Pedro’s,” I said.

“Oh, of course,” she replied. “Good morning.”

“How is your father?” I asked.

“Fine, fine. He’s waiting for me on the corner with the car.”

Sempere, who never missed a trick, quickly interjected.

“Señorita Sagnier has come to collect some books Vidal ordered. As they are so heavy, perhaps you could help her take them to the car.”

“Please don’t worry—” protested Cristina.

“But of course,” I blurted out, ready to lift the pile of books that turned out to weigh as much as the luxury edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, appendices included.

I felt something go crunch in my back and Cristina gave me an embarrassed look.

“Are you all right?”

“Don’t worry, miss. My friend Martín here might be a man of letters, but he’s as strong as a bull,” said Sempere. “Isn’t that right, Martín?”

Cristina was looking at me unconvinced. I offered her my “strong man” smile.

“Pure muscle,” I said. “I’m just warming up.”

Sempere’s son was about to offer to carry half the books, but his father, in a display of great diplomacy, stopped him. Cristina held the door open for me and I set off to cover the fifteen or twenty meters that separated me from the Hispano-Suiza parked on the corner of Puerta del Ángel. I only just managed to get there, my arms almost on fire. Manuel, the chauffeur, helped me unload the books and greeted me warmly.

“What a coincidence, meeting you here, Señor Martín.”

“Small world.”

Cristina gave me a grateful smile and got into the car.

“I’m sorry about the books.”

“It was nothing. A bit of exercise lifts the spirit,” I volunteered, ignoring the tangle of knots I could feel in my back. “My regards to Don Pedro.”

I watched them drive off toward Plaza de Cataluña and when I turned I noticed Sempere at the door of the bookshop, looking at me with a catlike smile and gesturing to me to wipe the drool off my chin. I went over to him and couldn’t help laughing at myself.

“I know your secret now, Martín. I thought you had a steadier nerve in these matters.”

“Everything gets a bit rusty.”

“I should know! Can I keep the book for a few days?”

I nodded.

“Take good care of it.”

A
few months later I saw her again, in the company of Pedro Vidal, at the table that was always reserved for him at La Maison Dorée. Vidal invited me to join them, but a quick look from her was enough to tell me that I should refuse the offer.

“How is the novel going, Don Pedro?”

“Swimmingly.”

“I’m pleased to hear it.
Bon appétit.”

My meetings with Cristina were always by chance. Sometimes I would bump into her in the Sempere & Sons bookshop, where she often went to collect books for Vidal. If the opportunity arose, Sempere would leave me alone with her, but soon Cristina grew wise to the trick and would send one of the young boys from Villa Helius to pick up the orders.

“I know it’s none of my business,” Sempere would say. “But perhaps you should stop thinking about her.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Señor Sempere.”

“Come on, Martín, we’ve known each other for a long time …”

The months seemed to slip by in a blur. I lived at night, writing from evening to dawn and sleeping all day. Barrido and Escobillas couldn’t stop congratulating themselves on the success of
City of the Damned
and when they saw me on the verge of collapse they assured me that after a couple more novels they would grant me a sabbatical so that
I could rest or devote my time to writing a personal work that they would publish with much fanfare and with my real name printed in large letters on the cover. It was always just a couple of novels away. The sharp pains, the headaches, and the dizzy spells became more frequent and intense, but I attributed them to exhaustion and treated them with more injections of caffeine, cigarettes, and some tablets tasting of gunpowder that contained codeine and God knows what else, supplied on the quiet by a chemist in Calle Argenteria. Don Basilio, with whom I had lunch on alternate Thursdays in an outdoor café in La Barceloneta, urged me to go to the doctor. I always said yes, I had an appointment that very week.