“Impossible,” I muttered.
“Of course, I could have got it wrong, but …”
“Did you get a chance to visit the offices?”
“As a matter of fact, I did try, because my hotel was opposite the Pantheon, very close by, and the former offices of the publishing house were on the southern side of the boulevard, between Rue St.-Jacques and Boulevard St.-Michel.”
“And?”
“The building was empty, bricked up, and it looked as if there’d been a fire or something similar. The only thing remaining was the door knocker, an exquisite object in the shape of an angel. Bronze, I think. I would have taken it if a gendarme hadn’t been watching me disapprovingly. I didn’t have the courage to provoke a diplomatic incident—heaven forbid France should decide to invade us again!”
“The way things are going, they might be doing us a favor.”
“Now that you mention it … But going back to the subject, when I saw what a state the place was in, I went to the café next door to make some inquiries and they told me the building had been like that for twenty years.”
“Were you able to discover anything about the publisher?”
“Corelli? From what I gathered, the publishing house closed when he decided to retire, although he can’t even have been fifty years old. I think he moved to a villa in the south of France, in the Lubéron, and died shortly afterwards. They say a snake bit him. A viper. That’s what you get for retiring to Provence.”
“Are you sure he died?”
“Père Coligny, an old competitor of Corelli’s, showed me his death notice—he had it framed and treasures it like a trophy. He said he looks at it every day to remind himself that the damned bastard is dead and buried. His exact words, although in French they sounded much prettier and more musical.”
“Did Coligny mention whether the publisher had any children?”
“I got the impression that Corelli was not his favorite topic, because as soon as he could he slipped away from me. It seems there was some scandal—Corelli stole one of his authors from him, someone called Lambert.”
“What happened?”
“The funniest thing about all this is that Coligny had never actually set eyes on Corelli. His only contact with him was by correspondence. The root of the problem, I think, was that Monsieur Lambert signed an agreement to write a book for Éditions de la Lumière behind Coligny’s back, when Coligny had sole rights to his work. Lambert was an opium addict and had accumulated enough debts to pave the Rue de Rivoli from end to end. Coligny suspected that Corelli had offered Lambert an astronomical sum and that the poor man, who was dying, had accepted it because he wanted to leave his children well provided for.”
“What sort of book was it?”
“Something with a religious theme. Coligny mentioned the title, some fancy Latin expression that was fashionable at the time, but I can’t remember it now. As you know, the titles of missals are all pretty much the same. Pax Gloria Mundi or something like that.”
“And what happened to the book and Lambert?”
“That’s where matters become complicated. It seems that poor Lambert, in a fit of madness, wanted to burn his manuscript, so he set fire to it, and to himself, in the offices of the publishing house. A lot of people thought the opium had frazzled his brain, but Coligny suspected that it was Corelli who pushed him toward suicide.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“Who knows? Perhaps he didn’t want to pay him the sum he had promised. Perhaps it was all just Coligny’s fantasy—he seemed to be a great fan of young Beaujolais twelve months a year. He told me that Corelli had tried to kill him in order to release Lambert from his contract and that Corelli left him in peace only when he decided to terminate the agreement and let Lambert go.”
“Didn’t you say he’d never seen him?”
“Exactly. I think Coligny must have been raving. When I visited him in his apartment I saw more crucifixes, Madonnas, and figures of saints than you’d find in a shop selling Christmas mangers. I got the impression that he wasn’t all that well in the head. When I left he told me to stay away from Corelli.”
“But hadn’t he told you Corelli was dead?”
“Ecco qua.”
I fell silent. Barceló looked at me with curiosity.
“I have the feeling that my discoveries aren’t a huge surprise to you.”
I gave him a carefree smile, trying to make light of it all.
“On the contrary. Thank you for taking the time to investigate.”
“Not at all. Going to Paris in search of gossip is a pleasure in itself. You know me.”
Barceló tore the page with the information out of his notebook and handed it to me.
“In case it’s of any use to you. I’ve noted down everything I was able to discover.”
I stood up and we shook hands. He came with me to the door, where Dalmau had the parcel ready for me.
“How about a print of the Baby Jesus, one of those where he opens and closes his eyes depending how you look at it? Or one of the Virgin Mary surrounded by lambs that turn into rosy-cheeked cherubs when you move it? A wonder of stereoscopic technology.”
“The revealed word is enough for the time being.”
“Amen.”
I was grateful to the bookseller for his attempts to cheer me up, but as I walked away from the shop I was beset by anxiety and I had the feeling that the streets and my destiny rested on nothing but quicksand.
15
On my way home I stopped by a stationer’s in Calle Argenteria to look at the shop window. On a sheet of fabric was a case containing a set of nibs, an ivory pen, and a matching inkpot engraved with what looked like fairies or Muses. There was something melodramatic about the whole set, as if it had been stolen from the writing desk of some Russian novelist, the sort who would bleed to death over thousands of pages. Isabella had beautiful handwriting that I envied, as pure and clear as her conscience, and the set seemed to have been made for her. I went in and asked the shop assistant to show it to me. The nibs were gold-plated and the whole business cost a small fortune, but I decided that it would be a good idea to repay my young assistant’s kindness and patience with this little gift. I asked the man to wrap it in bright purple paper with a ribbon the size of a carriage.
When I got home I was looking forward to the selfish satisfaction that comes from arriving with a gift in one’s hand. I was about to call Isabella as if she were a faithful pet with nothing better to do than wait devotedly for her master’s return, but what I saw when I opened the door left me speechless. The corridor was as dark as a tunnel. The door of the room at the other end was open, casting a square of flickering yellow light across the floor.
“Isabella?” I called out. My mouth was dry.
“I’m here.”
The voice came from inside the room. I left the parcel on the hall table and walked down the corridor. I stopped in the doorway and looked inside. Isabella was sitting on the floor. She had placed a candle inside a tall glass and was earnestly devoting herself to her second vocation after literature: tidying up other people’s belongings.
“How did you get in here?”
“I was in the gallery and I heard a noise. I thought it was you coming back, but when I went into the corridor I saw that this door was open. I thought you’d told me it was locked.”
“Get out of here. I don’t want you coming into this room. It’s very damp.”
“Don’t be silly. With all the work there is to do here? Come on. Look at all the things I’ve found.”
I hesitated.
“Here, come in.”
I stepped into the room and knelt down beside her. Isabella had separated all the items and boxes into categories: books, toys, photographs, clothes, shoes, spectacles. I looked at all the objects with a certain apprehension. Isabella seemed to be delighted, as if she’d discovered King Solomon’s mines.
“Is all of this yours?”
I shoo
k my head.
“It belonged to the previous owner.”
“Did you know him?”
“No. It had all been here for years when I moved in.”
Isabella held a packet of letters out to me as if it were evidence in a magistrate’s court.
“Well, I think I’ve discovered his name.”
“You don’t say.”
Isabella smiled, clearly delighted with her detective work.
“Marlasca,” she announced. “His name was Diego Marlasca. Don’t you think it’s odd?”
“What?”
“That his initials are the same as yours: D.M.”
“It’s just a coincidence. Tens of thousands of people in this town have the same initials.”
Isabella winked at me. She was really enjoying herself.
“Look what else I’ve found.”
Isabella had salvaged a tin box full of old photographs. They were images from another age, postcards of old Barcelona, of pavilions that had been demolished in Ciudadela Park after the 1888 Universal Exhibition, of large crumbling houses and avenues full of people dressed in the formal style of the time, of carriages and memories the color of my childhood. Faces with absent expressions stared at me from forty years back. In some of those photographs I thought I recognized the face of an actress who had been popular when I was a young boy and who had long since disappeared into obscurity. Isabella watched me in silence.
“Do you remember her?” she asked, after a time.
“I think her name was Irene Sabino. She was quite a famous actress in the Paralelo theaters. This was a long time ago. Before you were born.”
“Just look at this, then.”
Isabella handed me a photograph in which Irene Sabino appeared leaning against a window. It didn’t take me long to identify it as the one in my study at the top of the tower.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Isabella asked. “Do you think she lived here?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Maybe she was Diego Marlasca’s lover …”
“I don’t think that’s any of our business.”
“Sometimes you’re so boring.”
Isabella put the photographs back in the box. As she did so, one of them slipped from her hands. The picture fell at my feet. I picked it up and examined it: Irene Sabino, wearing a dazzling black gown, posed with a group of people dressed for a party in what seemed to be the grand hall of the Equestrian Club. It was just a picture of a social gathering that wouldn’t have caught my eye had I not noticed in the background, almost blurred, a gentleman with white hair standing at the top of a staircase. Andreas Corelli.
“You’ve gone pale,” said Isabella.
She took the photograph from my hand and perused it silently. I stood up and made a sign to Isabella to leave the room.
“I don’t want you to come in here again,” I said weakly.
“Why?”
I waited for her to leave the room and closed the door behind us. Isabella looked at me as if I weren’t altogether sane.
“Tomorrow you’ll call the Sisters of Charity and tell them to come and collect all this. They’re to take everything. What they don’t want, they can throw away.”
“But—”
“Don’t argue with me.”
I didn’t want to face her and went straight to the stairs that led up to the study. Isabella watched me from the corridor.
“Who is that man, Señor Martín?”
“Nobody,” I murmured. “Nobody.”
16
I went up to the study. Night had fallen, but there was no moon or stars in the sky. I opened the windows and gazed at the city in shadows. Only a light breeze was blowing and the sweat tingled on my skin. I sat on the windowsill smoking the second of the cigars Isabella had left on my desk a few days before and waiting for a breath of fresh air or a more presentable idea than the collection of clichés with which I was supposed to begin work on the boss’s commission. I heard the shutters in Isabella’s bedroom opening on the floor below. A rectangle of light fell across the courtyard, punctured by the profile of her silhouette. Isabella went up to her window and gazed into the darkness without noticing my presence. I watched her slowly undress. I saw her walk over to the mirror and examine her body, stroking her belly with the tips of her fingers and going over the cuts she had made on the inside of her arms and thighs. She looked at herself for a long time, wearing nothing but a defeated air, then turned off the light.
I returned to my desk and sat in front of my pile of notes. I went over sketches of stories full of mystic revelations and prophets who survived extraordinary trials and who returned bearing the revealed truth; of messianic infants abandoned at the doors of humble families with pure souls, who were persecuted by evil, godless empires; of promised paradises for those who would accept their destiny and play the game with a sporting spirit; and of idle, anthropomorphic deities with nothing better to do than keep a telepathic watch on the consciences of millions of fragile primates—primates who learned to think just in time to discover that they had been abandoned to their lot in a remote corner of the universe and whose vanity, or despair, made them slavishly believe that heaven and hell were eager to know about their paltry little sins.
I asked myself if this was what the boss had seen in me, a mercenary mind with no qualms about hatching a narcotic story fit for sending small children to sleep or for convincing some poor hopeless devil to murder his neighbor in exchange for the eternal gratitude of some god who subscribed to rule of the gun. Some days earlier another letter had arrived, requesting that I meet with the boss to discuss the progress of my work. Setting aside my scruples, I realized that I had barely twenty-four hours until the meeting and at the rate I was going I’d arrive with my hands empty but with my head full of doubts and suspicions. Since there was no alternative, I did what I’d done for so many years in similar circumstances. I placed a sheet of paper in the Underwood and, with my hands poised on the keyboard like a pianist waiting for the beat, I began to squeeze my brain to see what would come out.
17
“Interesting,” the boss pronounced when he’d finished the tenth and last page. “Strange, but interesting.”
We were sitting on a bench in the gilded haze of the Shade House in Ciudadela Park. A vault of wooden strips filtered the sun until it was reduced to a golden shimmer, and all around us a garden of plants shaped the play of light and dark in the peculiar luminous gloom. I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rise from my fingers in blue spirals.
“Coming from you, strange is a disturbing adjective,” I noted.
“I meant strange as opposed to vulgar,” Corelli specified.
“But?”
“There are no buts, Martín. I think you’ve found an interesting route with a lot of potential.”
For a novelist, when someone comments that their pages are interesting and have potential, it is a sign that things aren’t going well. Corelli seemed to read my anxiety.
“You’ve turned the question round. Instead of going straight for the mythological references you’ve started with the more prosaic. May I ask you where you got the idea of a warrior messiah instead of a peaceful one?”
“You mentioned biology.”
“Everything we need to know is written in the great book of nature,” Corelli agreed. “We only need the courage and the mental and spiritual clarity with which to read it.”
“One of the books I consulted explained that among humans the male attains the plenitude of his fertility at the age of seventeen. The female attains it later and preserves it and somehow acts as selector and judge of the genes she agrees to reproduce. The male, on the other hand, simply offers himself and wastes away much faster. The age at which he reaches his maximum reproductive strength is also when his combative spirit is at its peak. A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity—or none at all—with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it.
Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors. Our protagonist was an envoy from heaven, but an envoy who, in the first flush of youth, took arms and liberated truth with blows of iron.”
“Have you decided to mix history with biology, Martín?”
“From what you said, I understood them to be one and the same thing.”
Corelli smiled. I don’t know whether he was aware of it, but when he smiled he looked like a hungry wolf. I swallowed hard and tried to ignore the goosebumps.
“I’ve given this some thought,” I said, “and I realized that most of the great religions either were born or reached their apogee at a time when the societies that adopted them had a younger and poorer demographic base. Societies in which 70 percent of the population was under the age of eighteen—half of them males with their veins bursting with violence and the urge to procreate—were perfect breeding grounds for an acceptance and explosion of faith.”
“That’s an oversimplification, but I see where you’re going, Martín.”
“I know. But with these general ideas in mind, I asked myself, why not get straight to the point and establish a mythology around this warrior messiah? A messiah full of blood and anger, who saves his people, his genes, his womenfolk, and his patriarchs from the political and racial dogma of his enemies—that is to say, from anyone who does not subject himself to his doctrine.”
“What about the adults?”
“We’ll get to the adult by having recourse to his frustration. As life advances and we have to give up the hopes, dreams, and desires of our youth, we acquire a growing sense of being a victim of the world and of other people. There is always someone else to blame for our misfortunes or failures, someone we wish to exclude. Embracing a doctrine that will turn this grudge and this victim mentality into something positive provides comfort and strength. The adult then feels part of the group and sublimates his lost desires and hopes through the community.”