The Antiquarian (56 page)

“Mariola, Mariola, it's me, Enrique.”

“Enrique,” she whispered with a voice so weak he thought he was imagining it. “Enrique, I didn't trick you, I swear.” A bloody froth suddenly erupted from her mouth, making her cough. “Enrique, can you hear me?”

“Yes my love, I'm here.”

“I love you, Enrique. You must believe me …”

“I believe you,” he answered.

“You could be saying it out of pity.”

“Do you know for a fact it's untrue?”

“No.”

“Then give me the benefit of the doubt,” he whispered in her ear, just for her.

Mariola's breathing grew weaker, lighter, less detectable. Enrique held her in his arms, her body broken by the brutal fall, her limbs lifeless. He wasn't cognizant of the moment she stopped breathing. Someone's hands tried to separate him from her, but he resisted with all his waning might, clutching the remains that were Mariola. When, after
a time so eternal it ceased to exist, he felt his forces fail and fell completely into gloom, those same hands lifted him onto a gurney and took him to the hospital.

Hours later, Bety and Enrique, his arm in a sling, appeared before Rodríguez and Fornells in a room of the Hospital Clínic. Fornells informed them that Carlos had undergone successful surgery and was in serious but stable condition; he would make it. Enrique's silence spurred Bety to tell the part of the story that was of interest to the policemen, who gave her their undivided attention. They took several pages of notes, though they didn't doubt Bety's word; hundreds of witnesses had seen Enrique trying to hold onto Mariola, putting his own life at risk in the process. Once they had the facts, the policemen departed and left them alone.

Six months later, Enrique was busying himself with several lines on the deck of the
Hispaniola
when he saw Bety approaching down the brand-new pontoon, recently installed by the San Sebastián Port Authority.
She's so beautiful
, he thought, watching her walk toward him.

“Hi!” she said, leaping onto the deck.

“Hi,” Enrique greeted her. “You look beautiful.”

A courteous smile was all the response he got.

“How'd you know I was down here?” he asked.

“I imagined you would be since I've been calling all morning and yesterday afternoon and there was no way to reach you on the phone. I had some errands to do around here so I thought I'd come down.”

“I'm going over all the gear,” he explained unnecessarily. “I'm planning a long trip and I want to have everything ready.”

Bety sat across from Enrique in the cockpit, facing him as he coiled a couple of lines. “Where are you planning on going?”

“For now, Galicia. From there, wherever the wind blows me. I might point my bow southward and head for the Mediterranean or, if the wind is really blowing, I'll try to make my first Atlantic crossing. Carlos proposed we sail to Greece together, but we'll see about that.”

“How is he?”

“Better than ever. He has a nice scar on his chest. I was in Barcelona a few months ago to finish up some corrections on the final draft and we had dinner together. He feels
a little out of it, but he hopes to get back into shape with a couple weeks' sailing. He's the only one who has a souvenir from this whole adventure—a lead one.”

“Your publisher sent me this.” She took a thick book from her purse and handed it to him.

“
The Secret of the Antiquarian
. So, Juan decided on that title in the end,” Enrique mused. “Well, I don't blame him. It really does sound better than the others we were considering.”

Enrique perceived what else had brought her there, but he resisted Bety's unspoken desires. If what she wanted was to talk, she'd have to take the initiative.

“It's a great book, one of the best you've written. It draws you right in from the beginning.”

“I don't deserve any credit for writing it,” he confessed. “It was all in my head; it didn't take me more than four months to finish. The printing proofs took another month. Everything else was pure publishing routine.”

“It's on its fourth edition in just two weeks. It's the best seller of the season—no,” she corrected herself, “of the year. It'll be a blockbuster.”

“It's an absurd way to join the club of the majors. If the readers didn't know that it's partly based on a true story it would've sold a lot less. Only my most loyal readers would've bought it then.”

“I liked the dedication. It's the first one you've ever done.”

“‘To Artur,'” Enrique recited. “It was about time. He deserved it. A tribute that came too late to the man who made me what I am.”

Bety put the book back in her purse. She looked at Enrique. He continued, absorbed in his task.

“Feel like going out?” he suddenly improvised. “We could take a little sail around the bay. There's a bit more wind than you like, but I promise to be careful.”

Bety wasn't sure; she had absolutely no desire to go out to sea, but Enrique would feel more comfortable in his element. And that could make it easier to achieve her real goal.

“Okay. But don't leave the bay.”

“I promise. Get the stern mooring.”

She moved over the deck with certain unsteadiness. She hadn't been sailing since they divorced; she'd never really cared for it. It wasn't that she didn't appreciate the beauty and the freedom that came with leaving land and steering a sailboat, but because of the sense of fragile insecurity that sailboats gave her. Those thin walls holding back an entire ocean inspired little trust in her, even with a sailor as experienced as Enrique. And she never lost the fear of capsizing, despite Enrique's explanations on how unlikely such a thing was. After all, fears are irrational things, and seldom mastered.

She pulled in the line once Enrique had untied the knot. She coiled it while he started the engine and released the bow mooring. She felt rusty, unpracticed; years back, it wouldn't have taken her so long to do something so simple.

A minute later they were crossing the mouth of the port of San Sebastián. Enrique turned the boat into the wind and first hoisted the mainsail and later, with the starboard side windward, raised the jib. With a graceful tack, the
Hispaniola
glided toward the center of the bay. They were sitting to the left of the helm, which Enrique steered with his right hand. At sea, the wind is never as mild as it seems on land. It blew hard in gusts from the southeast that caused the sailboat to pitch lightly despite Enrique's efforts to avoid it.

“We can turn around for home if you want,” he said, seeing that the movement of the boat was more than Bety seemed willing to take.

“No.”

She was enjoying the sail more than she dared admit. It was the end of October, probably the best season to be on the Cantabrian Sea: constant wind that swept the air clean and, contrary to what the uninitiated thought, weather with little rain or clouds, meteorologically stable. The sun was shining bright, magically sharpening the outlines of the objects that its warm rays fell upon, bringing out that inner quality so rarely seen. The bay sparkled with the brilliance of a gigantic gem.

“It's beautiful, don't you think?” Enrique asked with the complicity that comes from already knowing the answer.

Suddenly, Bety knew that he too had something to say; that was why he'd suggested they sail.

“Our ‘unparalleled scenery.' I'd never seen it like this.”

They skirted the island, distancing themselves from it, tacking toward the beach, to avoid the surrounding sandbanks. Behind them, Mount Urgull, with most of its trees bare, and its summit capped by the castle. Before them, Mount Igueldo sat baking in the sun, and beyond them, further inland, they could see other hills and mountains, covered by the inevitable green of the Basque Country.

“Neither had I. And sailing around this bay is like taking a walk down La Concha Esplanade to me.”

They kept silent. Bety tried to order her thoughts. Enrique … Who could have known? She gathered all her courage and was the first to speak. She needed to know all those things that, at the time, out of caution or respect for Enrique's feelings, she hadn't dared to ask.

“Why did she do it?” She decided to begin with the most difficult question. “You didn't make it all that clear in the book.”

“I didn't need to. Like always, let each reader think whatever they want.”

“The Stone could give its holder enormous power. That's what Manolo told us. Do you think that's what made her do it? Ambition?”

“What do you think?”

“I don't know what to think, Enrique. I don't know. If I knew, I wouldn't have come to ask.”

He smiled, amused by some private thought he didn't share.

“Do you think the Stone's magic powers were real?”

“Before, when we were in the thick of the investigation, I thought they were, that anything was possible,” she replied. “Now … I guess … no, I don't believe in it. It's … too irrational, too strange. Magic doesn't form part of our times. But what about you? What do you think?”

“Me? The Stone disappeared as soon as I threw it at Mariola and it fell to the presbytery. As much as Fornells's men looked for it, it never appeared. We'll never know if its supposed power was anything but a legend. They think someone in the audience took a souvenir home from the concert. Who knows?”

“What do you mean they ‘think' someone took it? What other explanation could there be?”

“I'd rather think that God, seeing that humankind was incapable of using it correctly, took it back for Himself. I know that's an old-fashioned, romantic interpretation, out of step with the times, but it's nicer to explain its disappearance that way than chalking it up to pure and simple greed.”

“You still haven't answered my first question.”

“Let's come about,” he said, momentarily dodging the matter.

They were about to reach the other side of the bay, near Ondarreta Beach. The maneuver was necessary to keep from running aground on any of the sandbars in the area. With one hand still on the helm, Enrique used the other to trim the jib. The boat responded to his orders with a docility that proved how deep his knowledge of the
Hispaniola
was.

“You won't be able to handle my explanation. It's too … ,” he searched for the word, “strange, to put it one way.”

“Try me.”

“I think she did it … for the Stone.” He gauged Bety's reaction. If she was surprised she didn't show it. “It's a very complex matter that I've thought long and hard about, without much of a conclusion. Don't get me wrong, but when I think about it, the ideas seem to fly around my head, without giving me time to pin them down. See, I don't think it was ambition, lust for power, or greed. Once she found out about the Stone's true meaning from Samuel, she decided to get it, at any cost.”

“Why?”

“Because she had no other choice.”

“You're right, I don't understand you.”

Enrique flashed another, not quite as natural, smile.

“The Stone was invested with magical powers. That magic is what made Mariola act like she did. Manolo knew, through Shackermann, that the Stone had to be hidden to keep it out of ‘simple mortal hands.' Remember it was meant for a deadly purpose. It was so loaded with negative energy that even the Jews, led by the mysterious S., kept it concealed, protected by a secret ritual, and whoever violated it would meet instant death at the hands of a powerful demon. The Stone, to put it in comprehensible terms, was
alive—not alive like you and me, but possessed by the presence of a sephirah. The Stone was conscious of itself and longed to see the light. And Mariola was the channel it chose to do it.”

Dazed, Bety looked at him uncertain of how to react. She didn't know whether to laugh or try to refute the whole outrageous bundle of bullshit justifications. He decided for her.

“You don't believe me, do you? I can see it in your face. You think I've gone nuts. That the pain has gotten to me. That the books I was reading every day after I finished working on the computer have dulled my wits. Well, you're wrong. And I'm going to try to show you why, though I don't feel obligated to, by you or anybody else.

“Think back to the very beginning. The Stone was hidden next to the Ark so that no one could fall under its spell unawares. Only the highest priests, as they could resist its powers, had access to it. With the fall of Jerusalem, the Stone traveled into bitter exile with one of those priests, a responsible man, as he knew that leaving it there would mean giving whoever found it a power that shouldn't fall into human hands. And also responsible, because the temptation to use it for his private purposes must have been very great. Years, perhaps centuries, later the holder of the Stone, a descendant of that original priest, settled in Barcelona with others of his people and prospered with time. Only the envy of the resentful—and as always there were many of them—incapable of rising in society on their own, brought on the ruin of the Jews. The atmosphere became unbearable, and robbing and killing soon followed. S., probably a rabbi with kabbalistic knowledge, knew that his days in Barcelona were numbered. Sooner or later, they would be stripped of their possessions and expelled. That meant that the Stone was in danger. If they took it with them it would be confiscated; if they left it behind it would be discovered. Casadevall was the answer. In him, S. found someone he could entrust
the secret to. Casadevall believed him and became the next depositary of the Stone. But he couldn't resist the powerful magic the Stone had over him either. If his mission was to hide it forever, why do you think he wrote the stupid manuscript we named after him, and that partly caused my father's death? Why would he do it? I'll say it loud and clear: he had no reason to! The Stone made him do it.”