The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1)

  And I hung up.

  Terrific! The night had really begun with all the big guns firing.

  With that, I entered the restaurant, where everyone else was already seated. We were almost twenty all together, with the curators of all the departments and the interns. Salva was sitting next to me again. Iago was diagonally across from me, like the bishops in chess that Jairo knew so much about.

  “Are you okay?” asked Elisa, leaning toward me. “You seem to be miles away.”

  “I’ve just found out that my father has a partner,” I whispered to her.

  “Ah. Marian’s really lovely.”

  “You’ve met her?”

  “Yes, she and your father came to Santander last summer.”

  “And why did no one tell me?”

  “You must have been at some conference, I guess.”

  Touché. At the University of Les Aysies, I remembered. I couldn’t complain that the family no longer counted on my presence at their gatherings; the past few years, I’d always been away.

  “Come on, order something; everyone’s waiting for you,” she said to me. “We can talk about all that later. We don’t want everyone thinking you’re antisocial.”

  At which point I remembered that we were surrounded by people.

  “You’re right. I need to clear my mind. Do you have any surf and turf on the menu?” I asked, turning my head toward the waiter, who stood beside me with a look of infinite patience on his face.

  Then Salva, who had been waiting to add his two cents’ worth, took the conversation in a totally different direction. “So, since when have you and Elisa known each other?”

  “Since we were studying history at the Complutense,” I replied. “We used to run into each other in the faculty bar.”

  Elisa didn’t want people to know that I was her husband’s cousin. She felt that they might accuse her of a lack of professionalism if they found out she had recommended a family member for the position. I didn’t share her concerns. I liked to think that the Holy Trinity had hired me on my own merit, but I went along with her game. Several of the people who were sitting at our end of the table leaned forward to follow our conversation.

  Elisa was happy to hold court. “The day I met her, Adriana was analyzing the handwriting of some friends of mine, so I decided to join in and wrote down what she told me to on a piece of paper. She got it all right: she told me I was very sociable, that I was very focused in my studies, and that the same thing would happen with my work. I can’t remember what else she said right now . . . Oh, yes! That I was a person who liked to speak her mind . . .”

  “I’d forgotten that detail,” I said, fixing Elisa with a piercing gaze. I wasn’t sure I’d sounded very convincing, but it was true.

  “Don’t tell me you know graphology. Hey, what you do you see in my handwriting?” Salva egged me on.

  I wasn’t pleased with the direction this conversation was taking. I knew exactly what lay ahead: analyzing the handwriting of everyone at the table.

  “That was ages ago. I don’t remember any of it anymore.”

  “Come ooon . . .”

  “Honest. A total blank.”

  “Come on. You’re just making excuses. I want you to interpret my signature,” said Paz as she put a paper napkin adorned with two scribbles on my as-yet-unsullied plate.

  Paz was in charge of the Middle Ages Department. She had a mop of thick white hair that reminded me of the cotton candy kids bought in summer at the fairs in all the coastal towns. The first time I met her, she came into the MAC in her hiking boots and faded camouflage pants, and I thought she’d come straight from a dig. I looked for her backpack and field notebooks, but I couldn’t see them. I soon understood that was normal attire for her, and as much a part of her as her grandmotherly manner.

  “And mine,” added Cifuentes from accounting.

  “Don’t be too tough with mine,” said Salva as his scrawled-on napkin joined the small pile rapidly turning into a paper salad on my plate. Iago’s was the last one to join them. He handed it over with an air of amusement, and everyone at the table fell silent.

  Okay, I thought, let the show begin.

  I took a big gulp of the wine they were serving us and deliberately ignored several of the napkins, including Iago’s—although I was very curious to see how he formed his letter g—and focused on Salva’s.

  “The first thing you have to do is write on normal paper rather than on a napkin,” I told him.

  I took out my small notebook and tore off a page. “I want you to write a few words or phrases that contain the following letters, even if they don’t make any sense: t, rr, i, g, and d, let’s say.”

  He quickly wrote something down and passed me back the piece of paper:

  Cantabrum indoctum iuga ferre nostra.

  The Cantabrian is intolerant of our yoke.

  Horace.

  “I made Iago carve it above the entrance to the Archaic period exhibition hall,” he told me with obvious pride.

  Iago winked at him.

  “His proposal struck me as most appropriate,” he said, draining his glass. “That Horace must have known what he was talking about.”

  I took my time, though I thought, The sooner we begin, the sooner we’ll be done. Whatever it takes to be part of the group.

  “You have a very particular hand. Sometimes your writing has a forward slant, at other times it’s straight up and down, and on occasion it even leans backward. That means you’re a moody person, and at times you don’t control your emotions very well. Somewhat chaotic, perhaps.”

  “That doesn’t score many points. Everyone knows I’m crazy.”

  “In any event, the rounded shapes predominate. That tells us you’re very outgoing, everyone’s friend. Now for the individual letters. The way you write your d indicates that you’re a person of faith, right?”

  “Very good. I’m impressed. Three out of three. Come on, keep going,” he encouraged me.

  “That said, you cross your t very low down, which is a sign of someone who’s not very domineering. You dot your i very close to the actual letter, which means you’re not much of a dreamer, but rather, a practical guy. As far as the g is concerned, that’s the letter that shows how we relate to other people sexually. The lower stroke of your g doesn’t come all the way back up and over; you leave it open. That’s typical of people who have few fantasies. The fact that you don’t join the g to the next letter suggests that you’re not sexually intimate with anyone right now. I mean, that you don’t have a regular partner.”

  “Enough, woman! Now you’re starting to scare me.”

  It was always the same: as soon as you started scratching below the surface, the game began to make people feel uncomfortable.

  “Hey, can you tell me what you see in my g?” asked Onofre in a slurred voice from the end of the table. The bottles of wine were already populating the entire surface, and the effects of their contents were starting to be noticeable.

  “One at a time,” I said, calming him down with a smile. “There are still some odd characteristics left to cover.”

  “Odd?” Salva repeated, removing his cap and putting it back on several times.

  “Well, you ended all your quotations with a period, even ‘Horace,’ which is neither necessary, nor is it usual practice. If you put a period where it doesn’t belong, it’s because you want to finalize a situation; something significant in this instance, because you yourself set it in motion. I don’t know; maybe it suggests you’re impatient, or that you want this dinner or this evening to be over as soon as possible.”

  I stopped because I sensed a possessive gleam in Chisca’s eye. I didn’t want any issues to do with territory. Definitely not with Chisca. And even less so over Salva. He’s all yours, I thought.

  I gave Salva back his piece of paper with a look
of complicity. “Here, as a souvenir.”

  Everyone smiled, and I did too. Drink something, I told myself. The evening will finish soon. Then you can go home and shred that family photo in the hall, the one with your cousin, your father, your grandfather—with all the blood relatives who’ve kept quiet for fifteen years.

  “I’m sorry, hija.”

  No problem, Mamá. You’re forgiven. Anyway, what do you have to be sorry for? Don’t worry about me; I’ve muddled through okay; really. Don’t be sorry.

  The whole table was looking at me expectantly, waiting for me to choose the next napkin, while Salva insisted on filling my glass with cheap wine. Luckily, after thirty-two years of playing the invisible man, my father decided that very evening to change character and become insistent, so I showed everyone that my phone was flashing and got up from the table to move away from all the noise in the room.

  “What do you want now, Papá?” I asked him, part intrigued, part annoyed. “It’s almost midnight. Has something happened?”

  “No, hija, of course not. It’s just that I’ve been thinking that now that you know about my partner, you could come for a visit over Easter, and that way we could all spend a few days together.”

  “Listen, Papá, I’ve already told you I have no intention of coming to Madrid soon, and something unexpected has come up here at the museum that will keep me busy for the next few months. By the way, I had something to ask you.”

  “Ask away, hija.”

  “Do you know anything about a safe in Mamá’s study?”

  “No, I didn’t know there was one. It would have belonged to your mother, but don’t worry about her jewelry. It’s in a safe place in a bank in Santander.”

  I was afraid he was going to say that. A real tribute to marital communication.

  “I’m not worried about the jewelry, Papá. I’m not one for pearls, not even at baptisms. And now I’ll say good-bye; I’ve already told you I’m at a dinner.”

  “Think over the possibility of Easter, Adri,” he insisted.

  “Adriana, Papá: it’s Adriana.” When will he give up on “Adri”? “We’ll talk again some other time.”

  I hung up, returned to the table, and discovered that they’d all gone. Clearly, the call had lasted longer than I thought. I went up to the bar to check with the waiter, and he confirmed that the bill had been paid and they’d left, so I headed outside. All I could make out in the dark was a hooded figure standing with his back to me. He turned around as if he had heard me coming out despite the noise of the rain.

  “Let’s go,” said Iago. “They’ve moved on to La Habana.”

  We turned into the dark alley behind the restaurant and started to walk down the wet stone surface in silence, with our heads down. The wine had affected me more than usual, but I tried to disguise its impact: the best thing I could do was to concentrate on walking without stumbling on the slippery stones.

  “Thanks for waiting for me,” I said apologetically. “I’d completely lost track of time.”

  “Don’t thank me just yet, because I plan to demand a favor in return,” he said with a mischievous grin. “Will you deign to analyze my handwriting now?”

  “No way. Sorry. I’ve closed my little stall for tonight. Finito. Shut.”

  He looked at me, pretending to be disappointed.

  “I could read your palm, if you like,” I offered, carried away by the euphoria brought on by the damned wine.

  “And what other sorcery do you practice: interpreting goats’ intestines, reading the bark of birch trees?” he asked, mocking me.

  Nevertheless, he held out his hand as we stopped under a streetlight. Iago pulled back his hood. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it so I wouldn’t be talking to a shadow or as a concession to the fact that I didn’t have an umbrella to shelter under, but it was a gentlemanly gesture either way. In any event, it made no difference: in his company I didn’t even notice that my hair was soaking wet. I looked down, incapable of sustaining his gaze, and focused on the palm of his hand. I concentrated on the three main lines, following them with the tip of my index finger. It was a palm with thousands—literally thousands—of tiny lines strewn all over it.

  Fascinating.

  I allowed myself to get swept up in the moment and scanned his palm, brushing the surface lightly with my fingers. I asked myself what effect that action might be having, since it was our first physical contact apart from the usual greetings. For those few moments my entire stomach, my brain, my heart, or wherever it was that the soul of an archaeologist resides, was concentrated in the tips of my fingers. Something that the neurologists refer to as “temporal awareness” alerted me to the fact that I might be spending too much rain-soaked time holding on to Iago’s hand. The well-trained Adriana forced herself—myself—to concentrate on the little palmistry I could remember.

  He has the palm of an old man, I thought.

  “You have the palm of an old man,” I said.

  I cursed the wine again; it seemed to be acting like a truth serum.

  Suddenly I spotted something impossible. Incredulous, I turned over his hand. It couldn’t be.

  “What?” he asked, intrigued.

  “You’re going to have a very long life.”

  “If you say so,” he said with amusement.

  Iago hadn’t stopped observing me with a bemused smile. He seemed unaffected by the alcohol.

  “No, seriously, look: this line is the life line.”

  “And what’s the matter with mine?”

  “The longer it is, the longer the person will live. It usually ends at the base of the Mount of Venus—here.” I drew a circle with my index finger around the little cushion of flesh at the base of his thumb. “But in your case it doesn’t stop there; it keeps going all the way round the other side of your hand. I’ve never seen such a long line,” I said to him, taken aback.

  “Adriana, that’s not my life line. I wish it were, but it isn’t. It’s the scar I was left with after I cut myself so badly that my thumb was hanging by a thread.”

  Exaggerator, I thought.

  “And now, may I have my hand back, please?”

  “It’s all yours,” I mumbled as I relinquished it.

  I didn’t push the palm reading any further, but he did have some very unusual lines. The work line was cut into little segments, suggesting a person who changed jobs often, and not just the place of employment, but the profession. It was customary to see one continuous line or, at most, one line branching into two. How many times can a person change professions in a lifetime? I thought Iago liked what he was doing, but I realized that I hardly knew anything about him.

  On the other hand, his line of fate suggested mixed fortune, with many changes in his financial status. No stability, on the whole. He had a thick Mount of Venus, usually associated with the passions of a very sexual person. I could have gone on like that all night but for the fact that I personally didn’t believe in all that palmistry stuff, and my party tricks had scattered my thoughts in all kinds of unprofessional directions.

  We set off again down the cold, wet streets, although our pace was better suited to a lazy stroll on the beach on a hot summer’s day than a wet winter’s night. I raised my rain-soaked face to look at him and saw that Iago was looking at me in silence, a teasing expression on his face.

  “What?” I finally asked him.

  “So you maintain that the Neanderthals didn’t speak, but the lines on people’s hands do,” he said, shaking his head like a father who thinks there’s no hope for his young child. “That’s some recruit we’ve signed up for the MAC.”

  “I knew you’d laugh at my expense,” I said with a sigh.

  “No, no, believe me, I’m not making fun of you. It’s just that I find it surprising that you’re such an orthodox archaeologist, but in your private life you dedicate yourself t
o such strange hobbies.”

  “In the first place, I don’t do psychic interpretations of handwriting, I analyze it. And secondly, I don’t take it seriously. Or at least the last time I did it was ten years ago, at university. People change.”

  “Right! Where have I heard that before?”

  He was amusing himself at my expense, so I opted to explain myself. “Okay, here’s how it is.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye with interest. “If truth be told, what I did tonight doesn’t strike me as the most scientific thing in the world. And if Elisa hadn’t put me on the spot, I would never have raised the subject. But it is true that I used to do it a fair bit years ago.”

  “Go on. I’m listening,” he encouraged me. Then he looked up and stopped. “Hold on. We’re almost at La Habana.”

  The place was shut, and we assumed that the MAC people had gone off to find somewhere else.

  “I’ll call Elisa; they can’t be far away,” I said, taking my phone out of my pocket.

  “Elisa will have gone home to her husband and children. It’s almost one o’clock,” he replied, checking his watch. “And the rest of them will be wandering out there somewhere, or they’ll also have gone home.”

  He was right. It was not a night for walking.

  “Well then, I’ll head home. I live in Plaza de Pombo, next door to the Gil Bookstore.” I didn’t want him to realize that, as far as I was concerned, we could keep walking around Santander, around all of Cantabria, or even do the whole Camino de Santiago that very night as long as he was by my side.

  “My apartment is in Paseo de Pereda. Come on, I’ll walk you home. It’s on my way, and on top of that you’ve got me intrigued. Go on with your story.”

  “In reality, I don’t have much faith in palm reading. As far as graphology goes, I’m interested in it as a curiosity. My mother, apart from being a psychologist, was a handwriting expert and sometimes worked with the police and the courts. She had several books on it, and she taught me the basics. But I have to say that it’s one thing to compare documents using all the appropriate tools of the trade, and quite another to hazard a description of someone’s character just by reading his or her handwriting. I’m skeptical. But having said that, I admit it: I’ve made use of it, and many more times than I should have.”