The Angel's Game

  I looked at Barrido and then at Escobillas. Lady Venom was about to burst into tears from the emotion.

  “With no advance, needless to say.”

  Barrido clapped his hands euphorically in the air.

  “What do you say?”

  …

  I began work that very day. My plan was as simple as it was crazy. During the day I would rewrite Vidal’s book and at night I’d work on mine. I would polish all the dark arts Ignatius B. Samson had taught me and place them at the service of what little decency and dignity were left in my heart. I would write out of gratitude, despair, and vanity. I would write especially for Cristina, to prove to her that I too was able to pay the debt I had with Vidal and that, even if he was about to drop dead, David Martín had earned himself the right to look her in the eye without feeling ashamed of his ridiculous hopes.

  …

  I didn’t return to Dr. Trías’s surgery. I didn’t see the point. The day I could no longer write another word, or imagine one, I would be the first to know. My trustworthy and unscrupulous chemist supplied me with as many codeine treats as I requested, without asking any questions, as well as the occasional delicacy that set my veins alight, obliterating both pain and consciousness. I didn’t tell anyone about my visit to the doctor or about the test results.

  My basic needs were covered by a weekly delivery that I ordered from Can Gispert, a wonderful grocer’s emporium on Calle Mirallers, behind the cathedral of Santa María del Mar. The order was always the same. It was usually brought to me by the owner’s daughter, a girl who stared at me like a frightened fawn when I told her to wait in the entrance hall while I fetched the money to pay her.

  “This is for your father, and this is for you.”

  I always gave her a ten céntimos tip, which she accepted without saying a word. Every week the girl rang my doorbell with the delivery, and every week I paid her and gave her a ten céntimos tip. For nine months and a day, the time it took me to write the only book that would bear my name, that young girl whose name I didn’t know and whose face I forgot every week until I saw her standing in the doorway again was the person I saw the most.

  Without warning, Cristina had stopped coming to our afternoon meetings. I was beginning to fear that Vidal might have got wind of our ploy. Then one afternoon when I was waiting for her after about a week’s absence, I opened the door thinking it was her, and instead there was Pep, one of the servants at Villa Helius. He brought me a parcel sent by Cristina. It was carefully sealed and contained the whole of Vidal’s manuscript. Pep explained that Cristina’s father had suffered an aneurysm that had left him practically disabled and she’d taken him to a sanatorium in Puigcerdà, in the Pyrenees, where apparently there was a young doctor who was an expert in the treatment of such ailments.

  “Señor Vidal has taken care of everything,” Pep explained. “No expense spared.”

  Vidal never forgot his servants, I thought, not without some bitterness.

  “She asked me to deliver this to you by hand. And not to tell anyone about it.”

  The young man handed me the parcel, relieved to be free of the mysterious item.

  “Did she leave an address where I could find her if I needed to?”

  “No, Señor Martín. All I know is that Señorita Cristina’s father has been admitted to a place called Villa San Antonio.”

  A few days later, Vidal paid me one of his surprise visits and spent the whole afternoon in my house, drinking my anisette, smoking my cigarettes, and talking to me about his chauffeur’s misfortune.

  “It’s hard to believe. A man who was as strong as an ox, and suddenly he’s struck down, just like that. He doesn’t even know who he is anymore.”

  “How is Cristina?”

  “You can imagine. Her mother died years ago and Manuel is the only family she has left. She took a family album with her and shows him photographs every day to see whether the poor fellow can remember anything.”

  While Vidal spoke, his novel—or should I say my novel—rested facedown on the table in the gallery, a pile of papers only half a meter from his hands. He told me that in Manuel’s absence he had urged Pep—apparently a good horseman—to take up the art of driving, but so far the young man was proving hopeless.

  “Give him time. A motorcar isn’t a horse. The secret is practice.”

  “Now that you mention it, Manuel taught you how to drive, didn’t he?”

  “A little,” I admitted. “And it’s not as easy as it seems.”

  “If the novel you’re writing doesn’t sell, you can always become my chauffeur.”

  “Let’s not bury poor Manuel yet, Don Pedro.”

  “That comment was in bad taste,” Vidal admitted. “I’m sorry.”

  “How’s your novel going, Don Pedro?”

  “It’s going well. Cristina has taken the final manuscript with her to Puigcerdà so that she can type up a clean copy and get it all shipshape while she’s there with her father.”

  “I’m glad to see you looking happy.”

  Vidal gave me a triumphant smile.

  “I think it’s going to be something big,” he said. “After all those months I thought I’d wasted, I reread the first fifty pages Cristina typed out for me and I was quite surprised at myself. I think it will surprise you too. I may still have some tricks to teach you.”

  “I’ve never doubted that, Don Pedro.”

  That afternoon Vidal was drinking more than usual. Over the years I’d got to know the full range of his anxieties and reservations, and I guessed that this visit was not a simple courtesy call. When he had polished off my supply of anisette, I served him a generous glass of brandy and waited.

  “David, there are things about which you and I have never spoken …”

  “About football, for example.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’m listening, Don Pedro.”

  He looked at me for a while, hesitating.

  “I’ve always tried to be a good friend to you, David. You know that, don’t you?”

  “You’ve been much more than that, Don Pedro. I know and you know.”

  “Sometimes I ask myself whether I shouldn’t have been more honest with you.”

  “About what?”

  Vidal stared into his glass of brandy.

  “There are some things I’ve never told you, David. Things that perhaps I should have told you years ago …”

  I let a moment or two go by. It seemed an eternity. Whatever Vidal wanted to tell me, it was clear that all the brandy in the world wasn’t going to get it out of him.

  “Don’t worry, Don Pedro. If these things have waited for years, I’m sure they can wait until tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow I may not have the courage to tell you.”

  I had never seen him look so frightened. Something had got stuck in his heart and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

  “Here’s what we’ll do, Don Pedro. When your book and mine are published we’ll get together to celebrate and you can tell me whatever it is you need to tell me. Invite me to one of those expensive places I’m not allowed into unless I’m with you, and then you can confide in me as much as you like. Does that sound all right?”

  When it started to get dark I went with him as far as Paseo del Borne, where Pep was waiting by the Hispano-Suiza, wearing Manuel’s uniform—which was far too big for him, as was the motorcar. The bodywork was peppered with unsightly new scratches and bumps.

  “Keep at a relaxed trot, eh, Pep?” I advised him. “No galloping. Slowly but surely, as if it were a draft horse.”

  “Yes, Señor Martín. Slowly but surely.”

  When he left, Vidal hugged me tight, and as he got into the car it seemed to me that he was carrying the whole world on his shoulders.

  16

  A few days after I had put the finishing touches to both novels, Vidal’s and my own, Pep turned up at my house unannounced. He was wearing the uniform inherited from Manuel that made him look like
a boy dressed up as a field marshal. At first I thought he was bringing me some message from Vidal, or perhaps from Cristina, but his somber expression spoke of an anxiety that made me rule out that possibility as soon as our eyes met.

  “Bad news, Señor Martín.”

  “What has happened?”

  “It’s Señor Manuel.”

  While he was explaining what had happened his voice faltered and when I asked him whether he wanted a glass of water he almost burst into tears. Manuel Sagnier had died three days earlier at the sanatorium in Puigcerdà after prolonged suffering. At his daughter’s request he had been buried the day before in a small cemetery at the foot of the Pyrenees.

  “Dear God,” I murmured.

  Instead of water I handed Pep a large glass of brandy and parked him in an armchair in the gallery. When he was calmer, Pep explained that Vidal had sent him to meet Cristina, who was returning that afternoon on a train due to arrive at five o’clock.

  “Imagine how Señorita Cristina must be feeling,” he mumbled, distressed at the thought of having to be the one to meet her and comfort her on the journey back to the small apartment above the coach house of Villa Helius, the home she had shared with her father since she was a little girl.

  “Pep, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go meet Señorita Sagnier.”

  “Orders from Don Pedro.”

  “Tell Don Pedro that I’ll do it.”

  By dint of alcohol and persuasion I convinced him that he should go home and leave the matter in my hands. I would meet her and take her to Villa Helius in a taxi.

  “I’m very grateful, Señor Martín. You’re a man of letters so you’ll have a better idea of what to say to the poor thing.”

  At a quarter to five I made my way toward the recently opened Estación de Francia railway station. That year’s International Exhibition had left the city strewn with wonders, but my favorite was that temple-like vault of glass and steel, even if only because it was so close and I could see it from the study in the tower house. That afternoon the sky was scattered with black clouds galloping in from the sea and clustering over the city. Flashes of lightning echoed on the horizon and a charged warm wind smelling of dust announced a powerful summer storm. When I reached the station I noticed the first few drops, shiny and heavy, like coins falling from heaven. By the time I walked down to the platform where the train was due to arrive, the rain was already pounding the station’s vault. Night seemed to fall suddenly, interrupted only by the lightning now bursting over the city, leaving a trail of noise and fury.

  The train came in almost an hour late, a serpent of steam slithering beneath the storm. I stood by the engine waiting for Cristina to appear among the passengers emerging from the carriages. Ten minutes later everybody had descended and there was still no trace of her. I was about to go back home, thinking that perhaps Cristina hadn’t taken that train after all, when I decided to have a last look and walked all the way down to the end of the platform, peering carefully into all the compartment windows. I found her in the carriage before the last, sitting with her head against the window, staring into the distance. I climbed into the carriage and walked up to the door of her compartment. When she heard my steps she turned and looked at me without surprise, smiling faintly. She stood up and hugged me silently.

  “Welcome back,” I said.

  Cristina’s only baggage was a small suitcase. I gave her my hand and we went down to the platform, which by now was deserted. We walked all the way to the main foyer without exchanging a word. When we reached the exit we stopped. It was raining hard and the line of taxis that had been there when I arrived had vanished.

  “I don’t want to return to Villa Helius tonight, David. Not yet.”

  “You can stay at my house if you like, or we can find you a room in a hotel.”

  “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Let’s go home. If there’s one thing I have it’s too many bedrooms.”

  I sighted a porter who had put his head out to look at the storm and was holding an impressive-looking umbrella. I went up to him and offered to buy it for five times its worth. He gave it to me wreathed in an obliging smile.

  Protected by the umbrella we ventured out into the deluge and headed toward the tower house, where we arrived ten minutes later, completely drenched, thanks to the gusts of wind and the puddles. The storm had caused the power to go out; the streets were buried in a liquid darkness speckled here and there with the light cast by oil lamps or candles from balconies and doors. I had no doubt that the marvelous electrical system in my house must have been one of the first to succumb. We had to fumble our way up the stairs, and when we opened the front door of the apartment a flash of lightning emphasized its gloomiest and most inhospitable aspect.

  “If you’ve changed your mind and you’d rather we looked for a hotel …”

  “No, it’s fine. Don’t worry.”

  I left Cristina’s suitcase in the hall and went to the kitchen in search of a box of assorted candles I kept in the larder. I started to light them, one by one, fixing them on plates and in tumblers and glasses. Cristina watched me from the door.

  “It will take only a minute,” I assured her. “I have a lot of practice.”

  I began to distribute the candles around the rooms, along the corridor, and in various corners, until the whole house was enveloped in a flickering twilight of pale gold.

  “It looks like a cathedral,” Cristina said.

  I took her to one of the rooms that I didn’t use but kept clean and tidy because of the few times Vidal, too drunk to return to his mansion, had stayed the night.

  “I’ll bring you some clean towels. If you don’t have anything to change into I can offer you a wide selection of dreadful Belle Epoque clothes the former owners left in the wardrobes.”

  My clumsy attempt at humor barely drew a smile from her and she simply nodded. I left her sitting on the bed while I rushed off to fetch the towels. When I returned she was still sitting there, motionless. I left the towels next to her on the bed and brought over a couple of candles that I’d placed by the door, to give her a bit more light.

  “Thanks,” she murmured.

  “While you change, I’ll go prepare some hot soup for you.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “It will do you good, all the same. If you need anything, let me know.”

  I left her alone and went off to my room to remove my sodden shoes. I put water on to boil and sat waiting in the gallery. The rain was still crashing down, angrily machine-gunning the large windows; it poured through the gutters up in the tower and funneled along the flat roof, sounding like footsteps on the ceiling. Farther out, the Ribera quarter was plunged into almost total darkness.

  After a while the door of Cristina’s room opened and I heard her approaching. She was wearing a white dressing gown and had thrown an ugly woolen shawl over her shoulders.

  “I’ve borrowed this from one of the wardrobes,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “You can keep it if you like.”

  She sat in one of the armchairs and glanced round the room, stopping to look at a pile of paper on the table. She looked at me and I nodded.

  “I finished it a few days ago,” I said.

  “And yours?”

  I thought of both manuscripts as mine, but I just nodded again.

  “May I?” she asked, taking a page and bringing it nearer the candlelight.

  “Of course.”

  I watched her read, a thin smile on her lips.

  “Pedro will never believe he’s written this,” she said.

  “Trust me,” I replied.

  Cristina put the sheet back on the pile and looked at me for a long time.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said. “I didn’t want to, but I have.”

  “Me too.”

  “Some days, before going to the sanatorium, I’d walk to the station and sit on the platform to wait for the train coming from Barcelona, hop
ing you might be on it.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “I thought you didn’t want to see me,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought, too. My father often asked after you, you know? He asked me to look after you.”

  “Your father was a good man,” I said. “A good friend.”

  Cristina nodded and smiled, but I could see that her eyes were filling with tears.

  “In the end he couldn’t remember anything. There were days when he confused me with my mother and would ask me to forgive him for the years he spent in prison. Then weeks would go by when he hardly seemed to notice I was there. Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn’t go away.”

  “I’m sorry, Cristina.”

  “In the last few days I thought he was better. He was beginning to remember things. I had brought with me one of his albums and I started to show him the photographs again, pointing out who was who. There is one very old picture, taken at Villa Helius, in which you and he are both sitting in the motorcar. You’re at the steering wheel and my father is teaching you how to drive. You’re both laughing. Do you want to see it?”

  I hesitated but didn’t dare break that moment.

  “Of course.”

  Cristina went to look for the album in her suitcase and returned with a small book bound in leather. She sat next to me and started turning pages that were filled with old snapshots, cuttings, and postcards. Manuel, like my father, had barely learned to read and write and his memories were made up mostly of images.

  “Look, here you are.”

  I looked at the photograph and vividly recalled the summer day when Manuel had let me climb into the first car Vidal ever bought and had taught me the basics of driving. Then we had taken the car out along Calle Panamá and, doing about five kilometers per hour—a dizzying speed to me at the time—had driven as far as Avenida Pearson, returning with me at the wheel.