The sun was rising in a blue sky the color of good luck and a clean breeze brought with it the smell of the sea. I was walking briskly, as if relieved of a tremendous burden, and I began to think that the city had decided to let me go without any ill feeling. In Paseo del Borne I stopped to buy flowers for Cristina, white roses tied with a red ribbon. I climbed the steps to the apartment, two at a time, with a smile on my lips, certain that this would be the first day of a life I thought I had lost forever. I was about to open the door when, as I put the key in the lock, it gave way. It was open.
I stepped into the hall. The house was silent.
“Cristina?”
I left the flowers on a shelf and put my head round the door of the bedroom. Cristina wasn’t there. I walked up the corridor to the gallery. There was no sign of her. I went to the staircase that led up to the study and called out in a loud voice.
“Cristina?”
Nothing but an echo. I checked the clock on one of the glass cabinets in the gallery. It was almost nine. I imagined that Cristina must have gone out to get something and, being used to leaving such matters as doors and keys to the servants in Pedralbes, she had left the front door open. While I waited, I decided to lie down on the sofa in the gallery. The sun poured in through the large windows, a clean, bright winter sun that felt like a warm caress. I closed my eyes and tried to think about what I was going to take with me. I’d spent half my life surrounded by all these objects and now, when it was time to part from them, I felt incapable of making a short list of the ones I considered essential. Slowly, without noticing, lying in the warmth of the sun and lulled by tepid hope, I fell asleep.
…
When I woke up and looked at the clock, it was twelve thirty. There was barely half an hour before the train was due to leave. I jumped up and ran to the bedroom.
“Cristina?”
This time I went through the whole house, room by room, until I reached the study. There was nobody, but I thought I could smell something odd. Phosphorous. The light from the windows trapped a faint web of blue filaments of smoke suspended in the air. I found a couple of burned matches on the study floor. Feeling a pang of anxiety, I knelt down by the trunk. I opened it and sighed with relief. The folder containing the manuscript was still there. I was about to close the lid when I noticed something: the red ribbon of the folder was undone. I picked the folder up and opened it, leafing through the pages, but nothing seemed to be missing. I closed it again, this time tying the ribbon with a double knot, and put it back in its place. After closing the trunk, I went down to the lower floor. I sat on a chair in the gallery, facing the long corridor that led to the front door, and waited. The minutes went by with infinite cruelty.
Slowly, the awareness of what had happened fell all upon me and my desire to believe and to trust turned to bitterness. I heard the bells of Santa María strike two o’clock. The train to Paris had left the station and Cristina had not returned. I realized then that she had gone, that those brief hours we had shared were nothing but a mirage. I went up to the study again and sat down. The dazzling day I saw through the window-panes was no longer the color of luck; I imagined her back in Villa Helius, seeking the shelter of Pedro Vidal’s arms. Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes. I remained there, incapable of taking a single step, watching the city grow dark as the afternoon went by and the shadows lengthened. Finally I stood up and went to the window, I opened it wide and looked out. Beneath me, a sheer drop, sufficiently high. Sufficiently high to crush my bones, to turn them into daggers that would pierce my body and let it die in a pool of blood on the courtyard below. I wondered whether the pain would be as bad as I imagined it or whether the impact would be enough to numb the senses and offer a quick, efficient death.
Then I heard three knocks on the door. One, two, three. Insistent. I turned, still dazed by my thoughts. The knocks came again. My heart skipped a beat and I rushed downstairs, convinced that Cristina had returned, that something had happened along the way that had detained her, that my miserable, despicable feelings of betrayal were unjustified and that today was, after all, the first day of that promised life. I ran to the door and opened it. She was there in the shadows, dressed in white. I was about to embrace her, but then I saw her face, wet with tears. It was not Cristina.
“David,” Isabella whispered in a broken voice. “Señor Sempere has died.”
1
Night had fallen by the time we reached the bookshop. A golden glow broke through the blue of the night outside Sempere & Sons, where about a hundred people had gathered holding candles. Some cried quietly, others looked at one another, not knowing what to do. I recognized some of the faces—friends and customers of Sempere, people to whom the old bookseller had given books as presents, readers who had been initiated into the art of reading through him. As the news spread through the area, more people arrived, all finding it hard to believe that Señor Sempere had died.
The shop lights were on and I could see Don Gustavo Barceló inside, embracing a young man who could hardly stand. I didn’t realize it was Sempere’s son until Isabella pressed my hand and led me into the bookshop. When Barceló saw me come in, he looked up and smiled dolefully. The bookseller’s son was weeping in his arms and I didn’t have the courage to go and greet him. It was Isabella who went over and put her hand on his back. Sempere’s son turned round and I saw his distraught face. Isabella led him to a chair and helped him sit down; he collapsed like a rag doll and Isabella knelt down beside him and hugged him. I had never felt as proud of anyone as I was that day of Isabella. She seemed no longer a girl but a woman, stronger and wiser than any of the rest us.
Barceló held out a trembling hand. I shook it.
“It happened a couple of hours ago,” he explained in a hoarse voice. “He’d been left alone in the bookshop for a moment and when his son returned … They say he was arguing with someone … I don’t know. The doctor said it was his heart.”
I swallowed hard.
“Where is he?”
Barceló nodded toward the door of the back room. I walked over, but before going in I took a deep breath and clenched my fists. Then I walked through the doorway and saw him: he was lying on a table, his hands crossed over his belly. His skin was as white as paper and his features seemed to have sunk in on themselves. His eyes were still open. I found it hard to breathe and felt as if I’d been dealt a strong blow to the stomach. I leaned on the table and tried to steady myself. Then I bent over him and closed his eyelids. I stroked his cheek, which was cold, and looked around me at that world of pages and dreams he had created. I wanted to believe that Sempere was still there, among his books and his friends. I heard steps behind me and turned. Barceló was accompanied by two somber-looking men, both dressed in black.
“These gentlemen are from the undertaker’s,” said Barceló.
They nodded with professional gravitas and went over to examine the body. One of them, who was tall and gaunt, took a brief measurement and said something to his colleague, who wrote down his instructions in a little notebook.
“Unless there is any change, the funeral will be tomorrow afternoon, in the Pueblo Nuevo cemetery,” said Barceló. “I thought it best to take charge of the arrangements because his son is devastated, as you can see. And with these things, the sooner—”
“Thank you, Don Gustavo.”
The bookseller glanced at his old friend and smiled tearfully.
“What are we going to do now that the old man has left us?” he said.
“I don’t know …”
One of the undertakers discreetly cleared his throat.
“If it’s all right with you, in a moment my colleague and I will go and fetch the coffin and—”
“Do whatever you have to do,” I cut in.
“Any preferences regarding the ceremony?”
I stared at him, not understanding.
“Was the deceased a believer?”
“Seño
r Sempere believed in books,” I said.
“I see,” he replied as he left the room.
I looked at Barceló, who shrugged his shoulders.
“Let me ask his son,” I added.
I went back to the front of the bookshop. Isabella glanced at me inquisitively and stood up. She left Sempere’s son and came over to me and I whispered the problem to her.
“Señor Sempere was a good friend of the local parish priest—from the church of Santa Ana right next door. People say the bigwigs in the diocese have been wanting to get rid of him for years because they consider him a rebel in the ranks, but he’s so old they decided to wait for him to die instead. He’s too tough a nut for them to crack.”
“Then he’s the man we need,” I said.
“I’ll speak to him,” said Isabella.
I pointed toward Sempere’s son.
“How is he?”
Isabella met my gaze.
“And how are you?” she replied.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “Who’s going to stay with him tonight?”
“I am,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation.
I kissed her on the cheek and returned to the back room. Barceló was sitting in front of his old friend, and while the two undertakers took further measurements and debated about suits and shoes, he poured two glasses of brandy and offered one to me. I sat down next to him.
“To the health of our friend Sempere, who taught us all how to read, and even how to live,” he said.
We toasted and drank in silence. We remained there until the undertakers returned with the coffin and the clothes in which Sempere was going to be buried.
“If it’s all right with you, we’ll take care of this,” the one who seemed to be the brighter of the two suggested. I agreed. Before leaving the room and going back to the front of the shop, I picked up the old copy of Great Expectations, which I’d never come back to collect, and put it in Sempere’s hands.
“For the journey,” I said.
A quarter of an hour later, the undertakers brought out the coffin and placed it on a large table that had been set up in the middle of the bookshop. A multitude had been gathering in the street, waiting in silence. I went over to the door and opened it. One by one, the friends of Sempere & Sons filed through. Some were unable to hold back the tears, and such were the scenes of grief that Isabella took the bookseller’s son by the hand and led him up to the apartment above the bookshop, where he had lived all his life with his father. Barceló and I stayed in the shop, keeping old Sempere company while people came in to say their farewells. Those closest to him stayed on.
The wake lasted the entire night. Barceló remained until five in the morning and I didn’t leave until Isabella came down to the shop shortly after dawn and ordered me to go home, if only to change my clothes and freshen up.
I looked at poor Sempere and smiled. I couldn’t believe I’d never see him again, standing behind the counter, when I came through that door. I remembered the first time I’d visited the bookshop, when I was just a child and the bookseller had seemed tall and strong. Indestructible. The wisest man in the world.
“Go home, please,” murmured Isabella.
“What for?”
“Please …”
She came out into the street with me and hugged me.
“I know how fond you were of him and what he meant to you,” she said.
Nobody knew, I thought. Nobody. But I nodded and, after kissing her on the cheek, I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn’t stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn’t notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.
2
The crowd had gathered by the cemetery gates to await the arrival of the hearse. Nobody dared speak. We could hear the murmur of the sea in the distance and the echo of a freight train rumbling toward the city of factories that spread out beyond the graveyard. It was cold and snowflakes drifted in the wind. Shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon, the hearse, pulled by a team of black horses, turned into Avenida de Icaria, which was lined by rows of cypress trees and old storehouses. Sempere’s son and Isabella traveled with it. Six colleagues from the Barcelona booksellers’ guild, Don Gustavo among them, lifted the coffin onto their shoulders and carried it into the cemetery. The crowd followed, forming a silent cortege that advanced through the streets and mausoleums of the cemetery beneath a blanket of low clouds that rippled like a sheet of mercury. I heard someone say that the bookseller’s son looked as if he’d aged fifteen years in one night. They referred to him as Señor Sempere, because he was now the person in charge of the bookshop; for four generations that enchanted bazaar in Calle Santa Ana had never changed its name and had always been managed by a Señor Sempere. Isabella held his arm—without her support he looked as if he might have collapsed like a puppet with no strings.
The parish priest of Santa Ana, a veteran the same age as the deceased, waited at the foot of the tomb, a sober slab of marble without decorative elements that could almost have gone unnoticed. The six booksellers who had carried the coffin left it resting beside the grave. Barceló noticed me and greeted me with a nod. I preferred to stay toward the back of the crowd, I’m not sure whether out of cowardice or respect. From there I could see my father’s grave, some thirty meters away.
Once the congregation had spread out, the parish priest looked up and smiled.
“Señor Sempere and I were friends for almost forty years, and in all that time we spoke about God and the mysteries of life on only one occasion. Almost nobody knows this, but Sempere had not set foot in a church since the funeral of his wife, Diana, to whose side we bring him today so that they might lie next to each other forever. Perhaps for that reason people assumed he was an atheist, but he was truly a man of faith. He believed in his friends, in the truth of things, and in something to which he didn’t dare put a name or a face because he said as priests that was our job. Señor Sempere believed that we are all a part of something and that when we leave this world our memories and our desires are not lost but go on to become the memories and desires of those who take our place. He didn’t know whether we created God in our own image or whether God created us without quite knowing what he was doing. He believed that God, or whatever brought us here, lives in each of our deeds, in each of our words, and manifests himself in all those things that show us to be more than mere figures of clay. Señor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost. He believed, and he made me believe it too, that as long as there is one person left in the world who is capable of reading them and experiencing them, a small piece of God, or of life, will remain. I know that my friend would not have liked us to say our farewells to him with prayers and hymns. I know that it would have been enough for him to realize that his friends, many of whom have come here today to say goodbye, will never forget him. I have no doubt that the Lord, even though old Sempere was not expecting it, will receive our dear friend at his side, and I know that he will live forever in the hearts of all those who are here today, all those who have discovered the magic of books thanks to him, and all those who, without even knowing him, will one day go through the door of his little bookshop, where, as he liked to say, the story has only just begun. May you rest in peace, Sempere, dear friend, and may God give us all the opportunity to honor your memory and feel grateful for the privilege of having known you.”
An endless silence fell over the graveyard when the priest finished speaking. He retreated a few steps, blessing the coffin, his eyes downcast. At a sign from the chief undertaker, the gravediggers moved forward and slowly lowered the coffin with ropes. I remember the sound as it touched the bottom and the stifled sobs among the crowd. I remember that I stood there, unable to move, watching the gravediggers cover the tomb with the large slab of marble on which a s
ingle word was written, “Sempere,” the tomb in which his wife, Diana, had lain buried for twenty-six years.
The congregation shuffled away toward the cemetery gates, where they separated into groups, not quite knowing where to go, because nobody wanted to leave the place and abandon poor Señor Sempere. Barceló and Isabella led the bookseller’s son away, one on each side of him. I stayed on until I thought everyone else had left; only then did I dare go up to Sempere’s grave. I knelt and put my hand on the marble.
“See you soon,” I murmured.
I heard him approaching and knew who it was before I saw him. I got up and turned round. Pedro Vidal offered me his hand and the saddest smile I have ever seen.
“Aren’t you going to shake my hand?” he asked.
I didn’t and a few seconds later Vidal nodded to himself and pulled his hand away.
“What are you doing here?” I spat out.
“Sempere was my friend too,” replied Vidal.
“I see. And are you here alone?”
Vidal looked puzzled.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Who?”
I let out a bitter laugh. Barceló, who had noticed us, was coming over, looking concerned.
“What did you promise her, to buy her back?”
Vidal’s eyes hardened.
“You don’t know what you’re saying, David.”
I drew closer, until I could feel his breath on my face.
“Where is she?” I insisted.
“I don’t know,” said Vidal.
“Of course,” I said, looking away.
I was about to walk toward the exit when Vidal grabbed my arm and stopped me.
“David, wait—”
Before I realized what I was doing, I turned and hit him as hard as I could. My fist crashed against his face and he fell backwards. I noticed that there was blood on my hand and heard steps hurrying toward me. Two arms caught hold of me and pulled me away from Vidal.