I raised my eyes, and there he was. Fermin Romero de Torres, the one and only, wearing his best suit, and with that ragged posture like a cheap cigar. He came in through the shop door with a victorious smile and a fresh carnation in his lapel.
'But what are you doing here? Weren't you supposed to be resting?'
'Rest takes care of itself. I'm a man of action. And if I'm not here, you two won't even sell a catechism.'
Ignoring the doctor's advice, Fermin had come along, determined to take up his post again. His face was yellow and covered in bruises; he limped badly and moved like a broken puppet.
'You're going straight to bed, Fermin, for God's sake,' said my father, horrified.
'Wouldn't hear of it. Statistics prove that more people die in bed than in the trenches.'
All our protests went unheeded. After a while my father gave in, because something in poor Fermin's eyes suggested that even though his bones hurt him terribly, the prospect of being alone in his pension room was even more painful.
'All right, but if I see you lifting anything besides a pencil, I'll give you an earful.'
'Yes, sir! You have my word of honour that I won't even lift a finger.'
Fermin proceeded to put on his blue overalls and arm himself with a rag and a bottle of alcohol. He set himself up behind the counter, planning to clean the covers and spines of the fifteen secondhand books that had arrived that morning. They were all copies of a much-sought-after title, The Three-Cornered Hat: A History of the Civil Guard in Alexandrine Verse, by the exceedingly young graduate Fulgencio Capon, acclaimed as a prodigy by critics all over the country. While he devoted himself to his task, Fermin kept throwing me surreptitious looks, winking like a scheming devil.
'Your ears are as red as peppers, Daniel.'
'It must be from hearing you talk so much nonsense.'
'Or from the fever that's gripped you. When are you seeing the young maid?'
'None of your business.'
'You look really bad. Are you avoiding spicy food? Hot spices are fatal; they dilate your blood vessels.'
'Piss off.'
It was going to be a long, miserable day.
The afternoon was closing in when the subway train left me at the foot of Avenida del Tibidabo. I could distinguish the shape of the blue tram, moving away through folds of violet mist. I decided not to wait for its return but to make my way on foot. Soon I discerned the outline of The Angel of Mist. I pulled out the key Bea had given me and opened the small door within the gate. I stepped into the properly, leaving the door almost closed, so that it looked shut but could be opened by Bea. I had deliberately arrived early. I knew that Bea would take at least half an hour or forty-five minutes more. I wanted to feel the presence of the house on my own and explore it before Bea arrived and made it hers. I stopped for a moment to look at the fountain and the hand of the angel rising from the waters that were tinted scarlet. The accusing index finger seemed sharp as a dagger. I went up to the edge of the bowl. The sculpted face, with no eyes and no soul, quivered beneath the water.
I walked up the wide staircase that led to the entrance. The main door was slightly ajar. I felt a pang of anxiety, because I thought I'd closed it when I left the place the other night. I examined the lock, which didn't seem to have been tampered with, and came to the conclusion that I must have forgotten to close it. I pushed it gently inwards, and I felt the breath from inside the house brushing my face, a scent of burned wood, damp, and dead flowers. I pulled out a box of matches I'd picked up before leaving the bookshop and knelt down to light the first of the candles Bea had left behind. A copper-coloured bubble lit up in my hands and revealed the dancing shapes of the walls that wept tears of dampness, the fallen ceilings and dilapidated doors.
I proceeded to the second candle and lit it. Slowly, almost ritualistically, I followed the trail of the candles and lit them one by one, conjuring up a halo of amber light that seemed to float in the air like a cobweb trapped in the midst of darkness. My journey ended by the sitting-room fireplace, by the blankets that were still lying on the floor, stained with ash. I sat there, facing the rest of the room. I had expected silence, but the house exhaled a thousand sounds. The creaking of wood, the brush of the wind over the roof tiles, a thousand and one tapping sounds inside the walls, under the floor, moving from place to place.
After about thirty minutes, I noticed that the cold and the dark were beginning to make me feel drowsy. I stood up and began to walk up and down the room to warm up. There was only the charred husk of a log in the hearth. By the time Bea arrived, the temperature inside the old mansion would have vanquished the feverish ideas that had been plaguing me for days and filled me with nothing but pure and chaste thoughts. Having found an aim more practical than the contemplation of the ruins of time, I picked up one of the candles and set off to explore the house in search of something to burn.
My notions of Victorian literature suggested that the most logical place to begin searching was the cellar, which must have once housed the ovens and a great coal bunker. With this idea in mind, I spent almost five minutes trying to find a door or staircase leading to the lower floor. I chose a large door made of carved wood at the end of a passage. It looked like a piece of exquisite cabinet making, with reliefs in the shape of angels and a large cross in the centre. The handle was in the middle of the door, under the cross. I tried unsuccessfully to turn it. The mechanism was probably jammed or simply ruined by rust. The only way that door would yield would be by forcing it open with a crowbar or knocking it down with an axe, alternatives I quickly ruled out. I studied the large piece of wood by candlelight and thought that somehow it looked more like a sarcophagus than a door. I wondered what was hidden behind it. .
A closer examination of the carved angels discouraged me from looking any further, and I left the place. I was about to give up my search for a way down to the cellar when, by chance, I came across a tiny door at the other end of the passage, which at first I took to be the door of a broom cupboard. I tested the doorknob, and it gave way instantly. On the other side, a steep staircase plunged into a pool of blackness. A powerful smell of damp earth hit me. It seemed a strangely familiar smell, and as I stood there with my eyes on the black well in front of me, I was seized by a memory from my childhood, buried beneath years of fear.
A rainy afternoon on the eastern slope of Montjuic, looking at the sea through a forest of incomprehensible mausoleums, a forest of crosses and gravestones carved with skulls and faces of children with no lips or eyes, a place that stank of death; and the silhouettes of about twenty adults that I could only remember as black suits dripping with rain, and my father's hand holding mine too tightly, as if by doing so he could stop his weeping, while a priest's empty words fell into that marble tomb into which three faceless gravediggers pushed a grey coffin. The downpour slithered like melted wax over the coffin, and I thought I heard my mother's voice calling me from within, begging me to free her from that prison of stone and darkness, but all I could do was tremble and ask my father in a voiceless whisper not to hold my hand so tight, tell him he was hurting me, and that smell of fresh earth, earth and ash and rain, was devouring everything, a smell of emptiness and death.
I opened my eyes and went down the steps almost blindly, because the light from the candle dispelled only an inch or two of darkness. When I reached the bottom, I held the candle up high and looked about me. I found no kitchen, no cupboard full of dry wood. A narrow passage extended before me, ending in a semicircular chamber. In the chamber stood a figure, its face lined with tears of blood from two hollow eyes, its arms unfolded like wings and a serpent of thorns sprouting from its temples. I felt an icy cold stabbing me in the nape of the neck. At some point I regained my composure and realized I was staring at an effigy of Christ carved in wood on the wall of a chapel. I stepped forward a few yards and beheld a ghostly sight. A dozen naked female torsos were piled up in one corner of the old chapel. Their heads and arms were missing, and they were supported by a tripod. Each one was shaped differently, replicating the figures of women of varying ages and constitutions. On their bellies were words written in charcoal: 'Isabel, Eugenia, Penelope.' For once, my Victorian reading came to the rescue, and I realized that what I was beholding was none other than the remains of an old custom no longer in use, the echo of an era when the homes of the wealthy had mannequins made to measure for different members of the family, used for tailoring their dresses and trousseaux. Despite Christ's threatening, grim look, I could not resist the temptation of stretching out my hand and touching the torso with Penelope Aldaya's name written on it.
At that moment I thought I heard footsteps on the floor above. I imagined that Bea had arrived and was wandering through the old mansion, looking for me. Relieved, I left the chapel and made my way back to the staircase. I was about to go up when I noticed that at the other end of the corridor there was a boiler and a central heating system that seemed to be in good order. It seemed incongruent with the rest of the cellar. I remembered Bea mentioning that the estate agency, which for years had tried to sell the Aldaya mansion, had carried out some renovation work, hoping to attract potential buyers. I went up to examine the contraption more closely and saw that it consisted of a radiator system fed by a small boiler. At my feet I found a few pails full of charcoal, bits of plywood, and a few tins that I presumed must contain kerosene. I opened the boiler latch and had a look inside. Everything seemed to be in order. The idea of being able to get that old machine to work after so many years struck me as a bit far-fetched, but that didn't stop me filling the boiler with bits of charcoal and wood and spraying them with a good shower of kerosene. While I was doing this, I thought I heard the creaking of old wood, and for a moment I turned my head to look behind me. Suddenly I had a vision of bloodstained thorns being pulled out of the wood, and as I faced the darkness, I was afraid of seeing the figure of Christ emerge only a few steps away, coming towards me with a wolfish smile.
When I put the candle to it, the boiler lit up with a sudden blaze that provoked a metallic roar. I closed the latch and moved back a few steps, increasingly unsure about the soundness of my plan. The boiler appeared to be drawing with some difficulty, so I decided to return to the ground floor and check whether my efforts were yielding any practical results. I went up the stairs and returned to the large room, hoping to find Bea there, but there was no trace of her. I calculated that an hour must have passed since my arrival, and my fear that the object of my desire might never turn up grew more acute. To kill that anxiety, I decided to continue with my plumbing exploits and set off in search of radiators which might confirm whether the resurrection of the boiler had been a success. All the ones I found proved resistant to my hopes; they were icy cold. But then, in a small room of no more than four or five square yards, a bathroom that I supposed must be situated immediately above the boiler, I could feel a little warmth. I knelt down and realized joyfully that the floor tiles were lukewarm. That is how Bea found me, crouching on the floor, feeling the tiles of the bathroom like an idiot, an asinine smile plastered on my face.
When I look back and try to reconstruct the events of that night in the Aldaya mansion, the only excuse that occurs to me that might justify my behaviour is to say that when you're eighteen, in the absence of subtlety and greater experience, an old bathroom can seem like paradise. It only took me a couple of minutes to persuade Bea that we should take the blankets from the sitting room and lock ourselves in that minute bathroom, with only two candles and some bathroom fittings that looked like museum pieces. My main argument -climatological - soon convinced Bea. The warmth that emanated from those floor tiles made her put aside her initial fear that my crazy invention might burn the house down. Later, in the reddish half-light of the candles, as I undressed her with trembling fingers, she smiled, her eyes searching mine.
I remember her sitting with her back against the closed door of that room, her arms hanging down by her sides, the palms of her hands opened towards me. I remember how she held her face up, defiant, while I stroked her throat with the tips of my fingers. I remember how she took my hands and placed them on her breasts, and how her eyes and lips quivered when, enraptured, I took her nipples between my fingers and squeezed them, how she slid down to the floor while I searched out her belly with my lips and how her white thighs received me.
'Had you ever done this before, Daniel?'
'In dreams.'
'Seriously.'
'No. Had you?'
'No. Not even with Clara Barcelo?'
I laughed. Probably at myself. 'What do you know about Clara Barcelo?'
'Nothing.'
'I know less than nothing,' I said.
'I don't believe you.' .
I leaned over her and looked into her eyes. 'I have never done this before with anybody.'
Bea smiled. My hand found its way between her thighs, and I threw myself on her, searching her lips, convinced by now that cannibalism was the supreme incarnation of wisdom.
'Daniel?' said Bea in a tiny voice.
'What?' I asked.
The answer never came to her lips. Suddenly a shaft of cold air whistled under the door, and in that endless moment before the wind blew out all the candles, our eyes met and we felt that the passion of that moment had been shattered. An instant was enough for us to know that there was somebody on the other side of the door. I saw fear sketched on Bea's face, and a second later we were covered in darkness. The bang on the door came later. Brutal, like a steel fist hammering on the wood, almost pulling it off its hinges.
I felt Bea's body jump in the dark, and I put my arms around her. We moved to the other end of the room just before the second blow hit the door, throwing it with tremendous force against the wall. Bea screamed and shrank back against me. For a moment all I could see was the blue mist that crept up from the corridor and the snakes of smoke from the candles as they were blown out, rising in a spiral. The doorframe cast fanglike shadows, and I thought I saw an angular figure on the threshold of the darkness.
I peered into the corridor, fearing, or perhaps hoping, that I would find only a stranger, a tramp who had ventured into the ruined mansion looking for shelter on an unpleasant night. But there was no one there, only ribbons of blue air that seemed to blow in through the windows. Huddled in a corner of the room, trembling, Bea whispered my name.
'There's nobody there,' I said. 'Perhaps it was a gust of wind.'
'The wind doesn't beat on doors, Daniel. Let's go.'
I went back to the room and gathered up our clothes.
'Here, get dressed. We'll go and have a look.'
'We'd better leave.'
'Yes, right away. I just want to check one thing.'
We dressed hurriedly in the dark, our breath forming clouds in the air. I picked up one of the candles from the floor and lit it again. A draught of cold air glided through the house, as if someone had opened doors and windows.
'You see? It's the wind.'
Bea shook her head but kept silent. We made our way back towards the sitting room, shielding the flame with our hands. Bea followed close behind me, holding her breath.
'What are we looking for, Daniel?'
'It'll only take a minute.'
'No, let's leave right away.'
'All right.'
We turned to walk towards the exit, and it was then that I noticed. The large sculpted door at the end of the corridor, which I had tried unsuccessfully to open, was ajar.
'What's the matter?' asked Bea.
'Wait for me here.'
'Daniel, please I walked down the corridor, holding the candle that flickered in gusts of cold air. Bea sighed and followed me reluctantly. I stopped in front of the door. Marble steps were just visible descending into the darkness. I started to go down them. Petrified, Bea stood at the entrance holding the candle.
'Please, Daniel, let's go now.
I descended, step by step, to the bottom of the staircase. The ghostly aura from the candle that was raised behind me seemed to scratch at the shape of a rectangular room, made of bare stone walls covered in crucifixes. The icy cold in that chamber took my breath away. Before me stood a marble slab, and on top of it I saw what looked like two similar white objects of different sizes, lined up one next to the other. They reflected the tremor of the candle with more intensity than the rest of the room, and I guessed they were made of lacquered wood. I took one more step forward, and only then did I understand. The two objects were white coffins. One of them was scarcely two feet long. I felt a shiver down the back of my neck. It was a child's sarcophagus. I was in a crypt.
Without realizing what I was doing, I came closer to the marble stone until I was near enough to stretch out my hand and touch it. I then noticed that on each coffin a cross and a name had been carved, but a blanket of dust obscured them. I put my hand on one of the coffins, the larger one. Slowly, almost in a trance, without stopping to think what I was doing, I brushed off the dust that covered the lid. I could barely read the words in the dim red candlelight.
PENELOPE ALDAYA 1902-1919.
I froze. Something or somebody was moving about in the dark. I could feel the cold air sliding down my skin, and only then did I retreat a few steps.
'Get out of here,' murmured a voice in the shadows.
I recognized him immediately. Lain Coubert. The voice of the devil.
I charged up the stairs, and as soon as I reached the ground floor, I grabbed Bea by the arm and dragged her as fast as I could towards the exit. We had lost the candle and were running blindly. Bea was frightened, and unable to comprehend my sudden alarm. She hadn't seen anything. She hadn't heard anything. I didn't pause to give her an explanation. I expected that at any moment something would jump out from the shadows and block our way, but the main door was waiting for us at the end of the corridor, a rectangle of light shining through the cracks in the doorframe.
'It's locked,' Bea whispered.
I felt my pockets for the key. I turned my head for a fraction of a second and was sure that two shining points were slowly advancing towards us from the other end of the passageway. Eyes. My fingers found the key. I inserted it desperately into the lock, opened the door, and pushed Bea out roughly. Bea must have sensed the fear in me, because she rushed towards the gate and didn't stop until we were both on the pavement of Avenida del Tibidabo, breathless and covered in cold sweat.
'What happened down there, Daniel? Was there someone there?'
'No.'
'You look pale.'
'I've always been pale. Come on. Let's go.'
'What about the key?'
I had left it inside, stuck in the lock. I felt no desire to go back and look for it.
'I think I dropped it on the way out. We'll look for it some other day.'
We walked briskly away down the avenue, crossed over to the other side, and did not slow down until we were a good hundred yards from the mansion. It was then I noticed that my hand was still stained with ashes. I was thankful for the mantle of the night, for it concealed the tears of terror running down my cheeks.
We descended Calle Balmes to Plaza Nunez de Arce, where we found a solitary taxi. As we drove down Balmes to Consejo de Ciento, we hardly spoke a word. Bea held my hand, and a couple of times I caught her gazing at me with glassy, impenetrable eyes. I leaned over to kiss her, but she didn't open her lips.
'When will I see you again?'
'I'll call you tomorrow, or the next day,' she said.
'Do you promise?'
She nodded.
'You can call me at home or at the bookshop. It's the same number. You have it, don't you?'
She nodded again. I asked the driver to stop for a moment on the corner of Muntaner and Diputacion. I offered to see Bea to her front door, but she refused and walked away without letting me kiss her again, or even brush her hand. She started to run as I looked on from the taxi. The lights were on in the Aguilars' apartment, and I could clearly see my friend Tomas watching me from his bedroom window, where we had spent so many afternoons together chatting or playing chess. I waved at him, forcing a smile that he probably could not see. He didn't return the greeting. He remained static, glued to the windowpane, gazing at me coldly. A few seconds later, he moved away and the window went dark. He was waiting for us, I thought.
35.
When I got home, I found the remains of a dinner for two on the table. My father had already gone to bed, and I wondered whether, by chance, he had plucked up the courage to invite Merceditas around for dinner. I tiptoed off towards my room and went in without turning on the light. The moment I sat on the edge of the mattress, I realized there was someone else in the room, lying on the bed in the dark like a dead body with his hands crossed over his chest. I felt an icy spasm in my stomach, but soon I recognized the snoring, and the profile of that incomparable nose. I turned on the light on the bedside table and found Fermin Romero de Torres lying on the bedspread, lost in a blissful dream and moaning gently with pleasure. I sighed, and the sleeper opened his eyes. When he saw me, he looked surprised. He was obviously expecting some other company. He rubbed his eyes and looked about him, taking in his surroundings more closely.
'I hope I didn't scare you. Bernarda says that when I'm asleep, I look like a Spanish Boris Karloff.'
'What are you doing on my bed, Fermin?'
He half closed his eyes with longing.
'Dreaming of Carole Lombard. We were in Tangiers, in some Turkish baths, and I was covering her in oil, the sort they sell for babies' bottoms. Have you ever covered a woman with oil, from head to toe?'