The Angel's Game

  I felt ashamed.

  “I’m sorry if—”

  The doctor raised his hand to silence me. Then he stood up and put on his overcoat.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

  “Thank you, doctor.”

  “Thank you. For coming here.”

  …

  The following morning I left the hotel just as the sun was beginning to rise over the frozen lake. A group of children were playing by the shore, throwing stones at the hull of a small boat wedged in the ice. It had stopped snowing and white mountains were visible in the distance. Large clouds paraded across the sky like monumental cities built of mist. I reached Villa San Antonio shortly before nine o’clock. Dr. Sanjuán was waiting for me in the garden with Cristina. They were sitting in the sun and the doctor held Cristina’s hand as he spoke to her. She barely glanced at him. When he saw me crossing the garden, he beckoned me over to join them. He had kept a chair for me opposite Cristina. I sat down and looked at her, her eyes on mine without seeing me.

  “Cristina, look who’s here,” said the doctor.

  I took Cristina’s hand and moved closer to her.

  “Speak to her,” said the doctor.

  I nodded, lost in her absent gaze, but could find no words. The doctor stood up and left us alone. I saw him disappear into the sanatorium, but not without first asking a nurse to keep a close eye on us. Ignoring the presence of the nurse, I pulled my chair even closer to Cristina’s. I brushed her hair from her forehead and she smiled.

  “Do you remember me?” I asked.

  I could see my reflection in her eyes but didn’t know whether she could see me or hear my voice.

  “The doctor says you’ll get better soon and we’ll be able to go home. Or wherever you like. I’ll leave the tower house and we’ll go far away, just as you wanted. A place where nobody will know us and nobody will care who we are or where we’re from.”

  Her hands were covered with long woolen gloves that hid the bandages on her arms. She had lost weight and there were deep lines on her skin; her lips were cracked and her eyes dull and lifeless. All I could do was smile and stroke her cheek and her forehead, talking nonstop, telling her how much I’d missed her and how I’d looked for her everywhere. We spent a couple of hours like that, until the doctor returned and Cristina was taken indoors. I stayed there, sitting in the garden, not knowing where else to go, until I saw Dr. Sanjuán reappear at the door. He came over and sat down beside me.

  “She didn’t say a word,” I said. “I don’t think she was even aware that I was here.”

  “You’re wrong, my friend,” he replied. “This is a long process, but I can assure you that your presence helps her—a lot.” I accepted the doctor’s meager reassurance and kindhearted lie.

  “We’ll try again tomorrow,” he said.

  It was only midday.

  “And what am I going to do until tomorrow?” I asked him.

  “Aren’t you a writer? Then write. Write something for her.”

  9

  I walked round the lake back to the hotel. The receptionist had told me where to find the only bookshop in the village, and I was able to buy some blank sheets of paper and a fountain pen that must have been there since time immemorial. Thus equipped, I locked myself in my room. I moved the table over to the window and asked for a flask of coffee. I spent almost an hour gazing at the lake and the mountains in the distance before writing a single word. I remembered the old photograph Cristina had given me, that image she had never been able to place, of a girl walking along a wooden jetty that stretched out to sea. I imagined myself walking down that pier, my steps following behind her, and slowly the words began to flow and the outline of a story emerged. I knew I was going to write the story that Cristina could never remember, the story that had led her, as a child, to walk over those shimmering waters holding on to a stranger’s hand. I would write the tale of a memory that never was, the memory of a stolen life. The images and the light that began to appear between sentences took me back to the old, shadowy Barcelona that had shaped us both. I wrote until the sun had set and there was not a drop of coffee left in the flask, until the frozen lake was lit up by a blue moon and my eyes and hands were aching. I let the pen drop and pushed aside the sheets of paper lying on the table. When the receptionist came to knock on my door to ask if I was coming down for dinner, I didn’t hear him. I had fallen fast asleep, for once dreaming and believing that words, even my own, had the power to heal.

  …

  Four days passed with the same rhythm. I rose at dawn and went out onto the balcony to watch the sun tint with scarlet the lake at my feet. I would arrive at the sanatorium around half past eight and usually find Dr. Sanjuán sitting on the entrance steps, gazing at the garden with a steaming cup of coffee in his hands.

  “Do you never sleep, doctor?” I would ask.

  “No more than you,” he replied.

  Around nine o’clock the doctor would take me to Cristina’s room and open the door, then leave us. I always found her sitting in the same armchair facing the window. I would bring over a chair and take her hand. She was barely aware of my presence. Then I would read out the pages I’d written for her the night before. Every day I started again from the beginning. Sometimes, when I interrupted my reading and looked at her, I would be surprised to discover the hint of a smile on her lips. I spent the day with her until the doctor returned in the evening and asked me to leave. Then I would trudge back to the hotel through the snow, eat some dinner, and go up to my room to continue writing until I was overcome by exhaustion. The days ceased to have a name.

  When I went into Cristina’s room on the fifth day, as I did every morning, the armchair in which she was usually waiting for me was empty. I looked around anxiously and found her on the floor, curled up into a ball in a corner, clasping her knees, her face covered with tears. When she saw me she smiled, and I realized that she had recognized me. I knelt down next to her and hugged her. I don’t remember ever having been as happy as I was during those miserable seconds when I felt her breath on my face and saw that a glimmer of light had returned to her eyes.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  That afternoon Dr. Sanjuán gave me permission to take her out for an hour. We walked down to the lake and sat on a bench. She started to tell me a dream she’d had, about a child who lived in the dark maze of a town in which the streets and buildings were alive and fed on the souls of its inhabitants. In her dream, as in the story I had been reading to her, the girl managed to escape and came to a jetty that stretched out over an endless sea. She was holding the hand of the faceless stranger with no name who had saved her and who now went with her to the very end of the wooden platform, where someone was waiting for her, someone she would never see, because her dream, like the story I had been reading to her, was unfinished.

  …

  Cristina had a vague recollection of Villa San Antonio and Dr. San-juán. She blushed when she told me she thought he’d proposed to her a week ago. Time and space seemed to be confused in her mind. Sometimes she thought that her father had been admitted to one of the rooms and she’d come to visit him. A moment later she couldn’t remember how she’d got there and at times she ceased to care. She remembered that I’d gone out to buy the train tickets and referred to the morning she disappeared as if it were just the previous day. Sometimes she confused me with Vidal and asked me to forgive her. At others, fear cast a shadow over her face and she began to tremble.

  “He’s getting closer,” she would say. “I have to go. Before he sees you.”

  Then she would grow silent, unaware of my presence, unaware of the world itself, as if something had dragged her to some remote and inaccessible place.

  After a few days, the certainty that Cristina had lost her mind began to affect me deeply. My initial hope became tinged with bitterness, and on occasion, when I returned at night to my hotel cell, I felt that old pit of darkness and hatred, which I had thought forgott
en, opening up inside me. Dr. Sanjuán, who watched over me with the same care and tenacity with which he treated his patients, had warned me that this would happen.

  “Don’t give up hope, my friend,” he would say. “We’re making great progress. Have faith.”

  I nodded meekly and returned day after day to the sanatorium to take Cristina out for a stroll as far as the lake and listen to the dreamed memories that she’d already described dozens of times but that she discovered anew every day. Each day she would ask me where I’d been, why I hadn’t come back to fetch her, and why I’d left her alone. Each day she looked at me from her invisible cage and asked me to hold her tight. Each day when I said good-bye to her, she asked me if I loved her and I always gave her the same reply.

  “I’ll always love you,” I would say. “Always.”

  …

  One night I was woken by the sound of someone knocking on my door. It was three in the morning. I stumbled over, in a daze, and found one of the nurses from the sanatorium standing in the doorway.

  “Dr. Sanjuán has asked me to come and fetch you.”

  “What’s happened?”

  Ten minutes later I was walking through the gates of Villa San Antonio. The screams could be heard from the garden. Cristina had apparently locked the door of her room from the inside. Dr. Sanjuán, who looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week, and two male nurses were trying to force the door open. Inside, Cristina could be heard shouting and banging on the walls, knocking down furniture as if she were destroying everything she could find.

  “Who is in there with her?” I asked, petrified.

  “Nobody,” replied the doctor.

  “But she’s speaking to someone,” I protested.

  “She’s alone.”

  An orderly rushed up, carrying a large crowbar.

  “It’s the only thing I could find,” he said.

  The doctor nodded and the orderly levered the crowbar between the door and the frame.

  “How was she able to lock herself in?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  For the first time I thought I saw fear in the doctor’s face, and he avoided my eyes. The orderly was about to force the door when suddenly there was silence on the other side.

  “Cristina?” called the doctor.

  There was no reply. The door finally gave way and flew open with a bang. I followed the doctor into the room. It was dark. The window was open and an icy wind was blowing. The chairs, tables, and armchair had been knocked over and the walls were stained with an irregular line of what looked like black ink. It was blood. There was no trace of Cristina.

  The male nurses ran out to the balcony and scanned the garden for footprints in the snow. The doctor looked right and left, searching for Cristina. Then we heard laughter coming from the bathroom. I went to the door and opened it. The floor was scattered with bits of glass. Cristina was sitting on the tiles, leaning against the metal bathtub like a broken doll. Her hands and feet were bleeding, covered in cuts and splinters of glass, and her blood still trickled down the cracks in the mirror she had destroyed with her fists. I put my arms around her and searched her eyes. She smiled.

  “I didn’t let him in,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “He wanted me to forget, but I didn’t let him in,” she repeated.

  The doctor knelt down beside me and examined the wounds covering Cristina’s body.

  “Please,” he murmured, pushing me aside. “Not now.”

  One of the male nurses had rushed to fetch a stretcher. I helped him lift Cristina onto it and held her hand as they wheeled her to a treatment room. There, Dr. Sanjuán injected her with a sedative and in a matter of seconds her consciousness stole away. I stayed by her side, looking into her eyes until they became empty mirrors and one of the nurses led me gently from the room. I stood there, in the middle of a dark corridor that smelled of disinfectant, my hands and clothes stained with blood. I leaned against the wall and then slid to the floor.

  …

  Cristina woke up the following morning to find herself lying on a bed, bound with leather straps, locked up in a windowless room with no other light than the pale glow from a bulb on the ceiling. I had spent the night in a corner, sitting on a chair, observing her, with no notion of time passing. Suddenly she opened her eyes and grimaced at the stabbing pain from the wounds that covered her arms.

  “David?” she called out.

  “I’m here,” I replied.

  When I reached the bed I leaned over so that she could see my face and the anemic smile I’d rehearsed for her.

  “I can’t move.”

  “They’ve strapped you down. It’s for your own good. As soon as the doctor comes he’ll take them off.”

  “You take them off.”

  “I can’t. It must be the doctor—”

  “Please,” she begged.

  “Cristina, it’s better—”

  “Please.”

  I saw pain and fear in her eyes but above all a lucidity and a presence that had not been there in all the days I had visited her in that place. She was herself again. I untied the first two straps, which crossed over her shoulders and waist, and stroked her face. She was shaking.

  “Are you cold?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you want me to call the doctor?”

  She shook her head again.

  “David, look at me.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and met her gaze.

  “You must destroy it,” she said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You must destroy it.”

  “What must I destroy?”

  “The book.”

  “Cristina, I’d better call the doctor—”

  “No. Listen to me.”

  She grabbed my hand.

  “The morning you went to buy the tickets, do you remember? I went up to your study again and opened the trunk.”

  I took a breath.

  “I found the manuscript and began to read it.”

  “It’s just a fable, Cristina …”

  “Don’t lie to me. I’ve read it, David. At least enough to know that I had to destroy it.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that now. I told you: I’ve abandoned the manuscript.”

  “But it hasn’t abandoned you. I tried to burn it …”

  For a moment I let go of her hand when I heard those words, repressing the surge of anger I felt when I remembered the burned matches I’d found on the floor of the study.

  “You tried to burn it?”

  “But I couldn’t,” she muttered. “There was someone else in the house.”

  “There was no one in the house, Cristina. Nobody.”

  “As soon as I lit the match and held it close to the manuscript, I sensed him behind me. I felt a blow to the back of my neck and then I fell.”

  “Who hit you?”

  “It was all very dark, as if the daylight had suddenly vanished. I turned round but could see only his eyes. Like the eyes of a wolf.”

  “Cristina …”

  “He took the manuscript from my hands and put it back in the trunk.”

  “Cristina, you’re not well. Let me call the doctor.”

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  I smiled at her and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Of course I’m listening to you. But there was no one else in the house.”

  She closed her eyes and tilted her head, moaning as if my words were like daggers cutting her inside.

  “I’m going to call the doctor.”

  I bent over to kiss her again and then stood up. I went toward the door, feeling her eyes on my back.

  “Coward,” she said.

  When I came back to the room with Dr. Sanjuán, Cristina had undone the last strap and was staggering round the room, leaving bloody footprints on the white tiles. We laid her back on the bed and held her down. Cristina shouted and fought with such anger it made my blood freez
e. The noise alerted the other staff. An orderly helped us restrain her while the doctor tied the straps. Once she was immobilized, the doctor looked at me severely.

  “I’m going to sedate her again. Stay here and this time don’t even think of untying her straps.”

  I was left alone with her for a moment but could not calm her. Cristina went on fighting to escape. I held her face and tried to catch her eye.

  “Cristina, please—”

  She spat at me.

  “Go away.”

  The doctor returned with a nurse who carried a metal tray with a syringe, dressings, and a glass bottle containing a yellowish solution.

  “Leave the room,” he ordered.

  I went to the doorway. The nurse held Cristina against the bed and the doctor injected the sedative into her arm. Cristina’s shrieks pierced the room. I covered my ears and went out into the corridor.

  Coward, I told myself. Coward.

  10

  Beyond Villa San Antonio, a tree-lined path led out of the village, following an irrigation channel. The framed map in the hotel dining room bestowed on it the saccharine name of Lovers’ Lane. That afternoon, after leaving the sanatorium, I ventured down the gloomy path, which was suggestive more of loneliness than of romance. I walked for about half an hour without meeting a soul, leaving the village behind, until the sharp outline of Villa San Antonio and the large rambling houses that surrounded the lake were small cardboard cutouts on the horizon. I sat on one of the benches dotting the path and watched the sun setting at the other end of the Cerdanya valley. Some two hundred meters from where I sat, I could see the silhouette of a small, isolated country chapel in the middle of a snow-covered field. Without quite knowing why, I got up and made my way toward it. When I was about a dozen meters away, I noticed that the chapel had no door. The stone walls had been blackened by the flames that had devoured the building. I climbed the steps to what had once been the entrance and went in. The remains of burned pews and loose pieces of timber that had fallen from the ceiling were scattered among the ashes. Weeds had crept into the building and grown up around the former altar. The fading light shone through the narrow stone windows. I sat on what remained of a pew in front of the altar and heard the wind whispering through the cracks in the burned-out vault. I looked up and wished I had even a breath of the faith my old friend Sempere had possessed—his faith in God or in books—with which I could pray to God, or to hell, to give me another chance and let me take Cristina away from that place.