“You look really bad. Are you avoiding spicy food? Hot spices are fatal; they dilate your blood vessels.”
“Piss off.”
It was going to be a long, miserable day.
THE AFTERNOON WAS CLOSING IN WHEN THE SUBWAY TRAIN LEFT ME AT the foot of Avenida del Tibidabo. I could distinguish the shape of the blue tram, moving away through folds of violet mist. I decided not to wait for its return but to make my way on foot in the twilight. Soon I discerned the outline of The Angel of Mist. I pulled out the key Bea had given me and opened the small door within the gate. I stepped into the property, leaving the door almost closed, so that it looked shut but was ready to be opened by Bea. I had arrived early deliberately. I knew that Bea would take at least half an hour or forty-five minutes more. I wanted to feel the presence of the house on my own and explore it before Bea arrived and made it hers. I stopped for a moment to look at the fountain and the hand of the angel rising from the waters that were tinted scarlet. The accusing index finger seemed sharp as a dagger. I went up to the edge of the bowl. The sculpted face, with no eyes and no soul, quivered beneath the water.
I walked up the wide staircase that led to the entrance. The main door was slightly ajar. I felt a pang of anxiety, because I thought I’d closed it when I left the place the other night. I examined the lock, which didn’t seem to have been tampered with, and came to the conclusion that I must have forgotten to close the door. I pushed it gently inward, and felt the breath from inside the house brushing my face, a whiff of burned wood, damp, and dead flowers. I pulled out a box of matches I’d picked up before leaving the bookshop and knelt down to light the first of the candles Bea had left. A copper-colored bubble lit up in my hands and revealed the dancing shapes of the walls that wept with tears of dampness, the fallen ceilings and dilapidated doors.
I proceeded to the second candle and lit it. Slowly, almost ritualistically, I followed the trail of the candles and lit them one by one, conjuring up a halo of amber light that seemed to float in the air like a cobweb trapped between mantles of impenetrable darkness. My journey ended by the sitting-room fireplace, by the blankets that were still lying on the floor, stained with ash. I sat there, facing the rest of the room. I had expected silence, but the house exhaled a thousand sounds. The creaking of wood, the brush of the wind over the roof tiles, a thousand and one tapping sounds inside the walls, under the floor, moving from place to place.
After about thirty minutes, I noticed that the cold and the dark were beginning to make me feel drowsy. I stood up and began to walk up and down the room to get warm. There was only the charred husk of a log in the hearth. By the time Bea arrived, the temperature inside the old mansion would have gone down enough to chill from my mind the feverish ideas I had been harboring for days and fill me with pure and chaste thoughts. Having found an aim more practical than the contemplation of the ruins of time, I picked up one of the candles and set off to explore the house in search of something to burn.
My notions of Victorian literature suggested that the most logical place to begin searching was the cellar, which must have once housed the cookers and a great coal bunker. With this idea in mind, I spent almost five minutes trying to find a door or staircase leading to the lower floor. I chose a large door made of carved wood, at the end of a passage. It looked like a piece of exquisite cabinetmaking, with reliefs in the shape of angels and a large cross in the center. The handle was in the middle of the door, under the cross. I tried unsuccessfully to turn it. The mechanism was probably jammed or simply ruined by rust. The only way that door would yield would be by forcing it open with a crowbar or knocking it down with an ax, alternatives I quickly ruled out. I studied the large piece of wood by candlelight and thought that somehow it looked more like a sarcophagus than a door. I wondered what was hidden behind it.
A closer examination of the carved angels discouraged me from looking any further, and I left the place. I was about to give up my search for a way down to the cellar when, by chance, I came across a tiny door at the other end of the passage, which at first I took for the door of a broom closet. I tested the doorknob, and it gave way instantly. On the other side, a steep staircase plunged into a pool of blackness. A powerful smell of wet earth hit me. It seemed a strangely familiar smell, and as I stood there with my eyes on the black well in front of me, I was seized by a memory I had kept since my childhood, buried behind curtains of fear.
A rainy afternoon on the eastern slope of Montjuïc, looking at the sea through a forest of incomprehensible mausoleums, a forest of crosses and gravestones carved with skulls and faces of children with no lips or eyes, a place that stank of death; and the silhouettes of about twenty adults that I could remember only as black suits that were dripping with rain, and my father’s hand holding mine too tightly, as if by doing so he could stop his weeping, while a priest’s empty words fell into that marble tomb into which three faceless gravediggers pushed a gray coffin. The downpour slithered like melted wax over the coffin, and I thought I heard my mother’s voice calling me from within, begging me to free her from that prison of stone and darkness, but all I could do was tremble and ask my father in a voiceless whisper not to hold my hand so tight, tell him he was hurting me, and that smell of fresh earth, earth of ash and rain, was devouring everything, a smell of death and emptiness.
I opened my eyes and went down the steps almost blindly, because the light from the candle dispelled only an inch or two of darkness. When I reached the bottom, I held the candle up high and looked about me. I found no kitchen, no closet full of dry wood. A narrow passage extended before me, ending in a semicircular chamber. In the chamber stood a figure, its face lined with tears of blood from two hollow eyes, its arms unfolded like wings and a serpent of thorns sprouting from its temples. I felt an icy cold stabbing me in the nape of the neck. At some point I regained my composure and realized I was staring at an effigy of Christ carved in wood on the wall of a chapel. I stepped forward a few yards and beheld a ghostly sight. A dozen naked female torsos were piled up in one corner of the old chapel. Their heads and arms were missing, and they were supported by tripods. Each one was shaped differently, replicating the figures of women of varying ages and constitutions. On their bellies were words written in charcoal: “Isabel, Eugenia, Penélope.” For once my Victorian reading came to the rescue, and I realized that what I was beholding was none other than the remains of an old custom no longer in use, the echo of an era when the homes of the wealthy had mannequins made to measure for different members of the family, used for tailoring their dresses and trousseaux. Despite Christ’s threatening, grim look, I could not resist the temptation of stretching out my hand and touching the torso with Penélope Aldaya’s name written on it.
At that moment I thought I heard footsteps on the floor above. I imagined that Bea had arrived and was wandering through the old mansion, looking for me. Relieved, I left the chapel and made my way back to the staircase. I was about to go up when I noticed that at the other end of the corridor there was a boiler and a central heating system that seemed to be in good order. It seemed incongruent with the rest of the cellar. I remembered Bea’s mentioning that the estate agency, which for years had tried to sell the Aldaya mansion, had carried out some renovation work, hoping to attract potential buyers. I went up to examine the contraption more closely and saw that it consisted of a radiator system fed by a small boiler. At my feet I found a few pails full of charcoal, bits of plywood, and a few tins that I presumed must contain kerosene. I opened the boiler latch and had a look inside. Everything seemed to be in order. The idea of being able to get that old machine to work after so many years struck me as a bit far-fetched, but that didn’t stop me filling the boiler with bits of charcoal and wood and spraying them with a good shower of kerosene. While I was doing this, I thought I heard the creaking of old wood, and for a moment I turned my head to look behind me. Suddenly I had a vision of bloodstained thorns being pulled out of the wood, and as I faced the darkness, I was afraid o
f seeing the figure of Christ emerge only a few steps away, coming toward me with a wolfish smile.
When I put the candle to it, the boiler lit up with a sudden blaze that provoked a metallic roar. I closed the latch and moved back a few steps, becoming increasingly unsure about the soundness of my plan. The boiler appeared to be drawing with some difficulty, so I decided to return to the ground floor and check whether my efforts were yielding any practical results. I went up the stairs and returned to the large room, hoping to find Bea there, but there was no trace of her. I calculated that an hour must have passed since my arrival, and my fear that the object of my desires might never turn up grew more acute. To kill that anxiety, I decided to continue with my plumbing and set off in search of radiators that might confirm whether the resurrection of the boiler had been a success. All the ones I found proved resistant to my hopes; they were icy cold. But then, in a small room of no more than four or five square yards, a bathroom that I supposed must be situated immediately above the boiler, I could feel a little warmth. I knelt down and realized joyfully that the floor tiles were lukewarm. That is how Bea found me, crouching on the floor, feeling the tiles of the bathroom like an idiot, with an asinine smile plastered on my face.
WHEN I LOOK BACK AND TRY TO RECONSTRUCT THE EVENTS OF THAT night in the Aldaya mansion, the only excuse that occurs to me that might justify my behavior is to allege that when you’re eighteen, in the absence of subtlety and greater experience, an old bathroom can seem like paradise. It only took me a couple of minutes to persuade Bea that we should take the blankets from the sitting room and lock ourselves in that minute bathroom, with only two candles and some bathroom fittings that looked like museum pieces. My main argument—climatological—soon convinced Bea, the warmth that emanated from those floor tiles making her put aside her initial fear that my crazy invention might burn the house down. Later, in the reddish half-light of the candles, as I undressed her with trembling fingers, she smiled, her eyes searching mine and proving that then and forever afterward anything that might occur to me had already occurred to her.
I remember her sitting with her back against the closed door of that room, her arms hanging down beside her, the palms of her hands opened toward me. I remember how she held her face up, defiant, while I stroked her throat with the tips of my fingers. I remember how she took my hands and placed them on her breasts, and how her eyes and lips quivered when, enraptured, I took her nipples between my fingers and squeezed them, how she slid down to the floor while I searched out her belly with my lips and her white thighs received me.
“Had you ever done this before, Daniel?”
“In dreams.”
“Seriously.”
“No. Had you?”
“No. Not even with Clara Barceló?”
I laughed. Probably at myself. “What do you know about Clara Barceló?”
“Nothing.”
“I know less than nothing,” I said.
“I don’t believe you.”
I leaned over her and looked into her eyes. “I have never done this with anybody.”
Bea smiled. My hand found its way between her thighs, and I threw myself on her, searching her lips, convinced by now that cannibalism was the supreme incarnation of wisdom.
“Daniel?” said Bea in a tiny voice.
“What?” I asked.
The answer never came to her lips. Suddenly a shaft of cold air whistled under the door, and in that endless moment before the wind blew out all the candles, our eyes met and we felt that the passion of that moment had been shattered. An instant was enough for us to know that there was somebody on the other side of the door. I saw fear sketched on Bea’s face, and a second later we were covered in darkness. The bang on the door came later. Brutal, like a steel fist hammering on the door, almost pulling it off its hinges.
I felt Bea’s body jump in the dark, and I put my arms around her. We moved to the other end of the room just before the second blow hit the door, throwing it with tremendous force against the wall. Bea screamed and shrank back against me. For a moment all I could see was the blue mist that crept up from the corridor and the snakes of smoke from the candles as they were blown out, rising in a spiral. The doorframe cast fanglike shadows, and I thought I saw an angular figure in the threshold of darkness.
I peered into the corridor, fearing, or perhaps hoping, that I would find only a stranger, a tramp who had ventured into the ruined mansion looking for shelter on an unpleasant night. But there was no one there, only ribbons of blue air that seemed to blow in through the windows. Huddled in a corner of the room, trembling, Bea whispered my name.
“There’s nobody here,” I said. “Perhaps it was a gust of wind.”
“The wind doesn’t beat on doors, Daniel. Let’s go.”
I went back to the room and gathered up our clothes.
“Here, get dressed. We’ll go and have a look.”
“We’d better leave.”
“Yes, right away. I just want to check one thing.”
We dressed hurriedly in the dark. In a matter of seconds, we could see our breath forming puffs in the air. I picked up one of the candles from the floor and lit it again. A draft of cold air glided through the house, as if someone had opened doors and windows.
“You see? It’s the wind.”
Bea shook her head but kept silent. We made our way back toward the sitting room, shielding the flame with our hands. Bea followed close behind me, holding her breath.
“What are we looking for, Daniel?”
“It’ll only take a minute.”
“No, let’s leave right away.”
“All right.”
We turned to walk toward the exit, and it was then that I noticed. The large sculpted door at the end of a corridor, which I had tried unsuccessfully to open, was ajar.
“What’s the matter?” asked Bea.
“Wait for me here.”
“Daniel, please…”
I walked down the corridor, holding the candle that flickered in gusts of cold air. Bea sighed and followed me reluctantly. I stopped in front of the door. Marble steps were just visible, descending into the darkness. I started to go down them. Petrified, Bea stood at the entrance holding the candle.
“Please, Daniel, let’s go now….”
I descended, step by step, to the bottom of the staircase. The ghostly aura from the candle that was raised behind me seemed to scratch at the shape of a rectangular room, made of bare stone walls that were covered in crucifixes. The icy cold in that chamber took my breath away. Before me stood a marble slab, and on top of it I saw what looked like two similar white objects in different sizes, lined up one next to the other. They reflected the tremor of the candle with more intensity than the rest of the room, and I guessed they were made of lacquered wood. I took one more step forward, and only then did I understand. The two objects were white coffins. One of them was scarcely two feet long. I felt a shiver. It was a child’s sarcophagus. I was in a crypt.
Without realizing what I was doing, I got closer to the marble stone until I was near enough to stretch out my hand and touch it. I then noticed that on each coffin a cross and a name had been carved. A blanket of ash obscured them. I put my hand on one of the coffins, the larger one. Slowly, almost in a trance, without stopping to think what I was doing, I brushed off the ashes that covered the lid. I could barely read the words in the dim red candlelight.
†
PENÉLOPE ALDAYA
1902–1919
I froze. Something or somebody was moving about in the dark. I could feel the cold air sliding down my skin, and only then did I retreat a few steps.
“Get out of here,” murmured a voice in the shadows.
I recognized him immediately. Laín Coubert. The voice of the devil.
I charged up the stairs, and as soon as I reached the ground floor, I grabbed Bea by the arm and dragged her as fast as I could toward the exit. We had lost the candle and were running blindly. Bea was frightened and unabl
e to comprehend my sudden alarm. She hadn’t seen anything. She hadn’t heard anything. I didn’t pause to give her an explanation. I expected that at any moment something would jump out from the shadows and block our way, but the main door was waiting for us at the end of the corridor, forming a rectangle of light around the cracks in the doorframe.
“It’s locked,” Bea whispered.
I felt my pockets for the key. I turned my head for a fraction of a second and was sure that two shining points were slowly advancing toward us from the other end of the passageway. Eyes. My fingers found the key. I inserted it desperately into the lock, opened the door, and pushed Bea out roughly. Bea must have sensed the fear in me, because she rushed toward the gate in the garden and didn’t stop until we were both on the pavement of Avenida del Tibidabo, breathless and covered in cold sweat.
“What happened down there, Daniel? Was there someone there?”
“No.”
“You look pale.”
“I’ve always been pale. Come on. Let’s go.”
“What about the key?”
I had left it inside, stuck in the lock. I felt no desire to go back and look for it.
“I think I dropped it on the way out. We’ll look for it some other day.”
We walked briskly away down the avenue, crossed over to the other side, and did not slow down until we were a good hundred yards from the mansion and its outline could hardly be distinguished in the dark. It was then I noticed that my hand was still stained with ashes. I was thankful for the mantle of the night, for it concealed the tears of terror running down my cheeks.
WE DESCENDED CALLE BALMES TO PLAZA NÚÑEZ DE ARCE, WHERE WE found a solitary taxi. As we drove down Balmes to Consejo de Ciento, we hardly spoke a word. Bea held my hand, and a couple of times I caught her gazing at me with glassy, impenetrable eyes. I leaned over to kiss her, but she didn’t part her lips.
“When will I see you again?”