CHAPTER 26
IT WAS A MISTY SUNDAY. THE SHADOWS OF THE TREES with their dry branches conjured up skeletal shapes. The church bells rang in time to my footsteps. I stopped in front of the gate that barred my way. I noticed tyre marks on the fallen leaves and wondered whether Germán had taken his old Tucker out of the garage again. I slipped in like a thief by jumping over the gate and walked into the garden.
The mansion’s silhouette loomed in utter silence, darker and more desolate than ever. I noticed Marina’s bike lying abandoned among the weeds. The chain was rusty, the handlebars blackened by damp. As I stared at the scene I felt I was standing before a ruin inhabited only by old bits of furniture and invisible echoes.
‘Marina?’ I called.
The wind carried my voice away. I walked around the house towards the back door that led to the kitchen. It was open. An empty table, covered with a layer of dust. I walked into the rooms. Silence. I reached the large hall with the paintings. Marina’s mother looked at me from them all, but for me those were the eyes of Marina . . . It was then that I heard someone crying behind me.
Germán was curled up in one of the armchairs, still as a statue. Only his tears were moving. I had never seen a man of his age cry like that. It froze my blood. His eyes were lost in the portraits and he looked pale, haggard. He’d aged since the last time I’d seen him. He was wearing one of the formal suits I remembered, but it was creased and dirty. I wondered how many days he’d been like this. How many days he’d spent in that armchair.
I knelt down in front of him and patted his hand.
‘Germán . . .’
His hand was so cold it scared me. Suddenly the painter put his arms around me and hugged me, trembling like a child. I felt my mouth dry up. I hugged him back and held him while he wept on my shoulder. I was afraid the doctors had given him bad news, that he’d lost all the hope of the past few months, so I let him weep while I wondered where Marina was, why she wasn’t there with Germán . . .
Then the old man raised his head. One look into his eyes was enough for me to understand the truth. I understood it with the brutal clarity with which dreams vanish. Like a cold poisoned dagger that plunges without mercy into your soul.
‘Where’s Marina?’ I stammered.
Germán was unable to utter a single word. There was no need. From the look in his eyes I knew that Germán’s visits to Sant Pau Hospital had never happened. I knew that the doctor at La Paz Hospital had never treated the painter. I knew that Germán’s joy and hope when they returned from Madrid had nothing to do with him. Marina had fooled me from the start.
‘The illness that took her mother away . . .’ Germán murmured, ‘is taking her away, Oscar, my friend. It’s taking my Marina away . . .’
I felt my eyelids closing like slabs of stone as the world around me slowly disappeared. Germán hugged me again, and there, in that desolate room of the old house, I cried like a poor fool while the rain began to fall over Barcelona.
From the taxi Sant Pau Hospital looked to me like an enchanted citadel floating on clouds, with its maze of pointed turrets and extravagant domes. Germán had put on a clean suit and sat next to me without speaking. I held a parcel wrapped in the shiniest paper I’d been able to find. When we arrived, the doctor who took care of Marina, one Damián Rojas, looked me up and down and gave me a list of instructions. I must not tire Marina. I must appear positive and optimistic. She was the one who needed my help, and not the other way round. I wasn’t there to weep or complain. I was there to help her. If I was unable to follow those rules, I’d better not bother coming back. Damián Rojas was a young doctor and his white coat still had a whiff of medical school. He had a stern, impatient tone, and spared very little politeness on me. In other circumstances I would have taken him for an arrogant individual, but something in his manner told me that he hadn’t yet learned to isolate himself from his patients’ pain, and this was his way of dealing with it.
We walked up to the fourth floor and then down a seemingly endless corridor. It smelled of hospital, a mixture of illness, disinfectant and air freshener. The moment I set foot in that part of the building I let out a sigh and lost what little courage I had left in me. When we reached the room, Germán went in first. He asked me to wait outside while he announced my visit to Marina. I sensed that Marina would have preferred I didn’t see her there.
‘Let me speak to her first, Oscar . . .’
I waited. The corridor was an endless gallery of doors and lost voices. Faces burdened with pain and loss passed one another in silence. Again and again I repeated Dr Rojas’s instructions to myself. I was there to help. Finally Germán peered round the door and nodded at me. I swallowed hard and went in. Germán stayed outside.
The room was a long rectangle where light seemed to evaporate before it touched the floor. From the large window Avenida Gaudí stretched towards infinity. The towers of the Sagrada Familia sliced the sky in two. There were four beds separated by coarse curtains. Through them you could see the silhouettes of other visitors, like watching a shadow play. Marina’s bed was the last on the right, next to the window.
The hardest thing during those first few seconds was to hold her gaze. They had cut her hair like a boy’s. Without her long hair Marina seemed humiliated, naked. I bit my tongue hard, trying to ward off the tears that rose from my soul.
‘They had to cut it,’ she said, guessing. ‘Because of the tests.’
I noticed marks on her throat and on the nape of her neck. Just looking at them was painful. I tried to smile and handed her the parcel.
‘I like it,’ I said as a greeting.
She accepted the parcel and set it on her lap. I drew closer and sat down next to her, silently. She took my hand and pressed it hard. She had lost weight. Her ribs showed through the white hospital nightdress and there were dark circles under her eyes. Her lips were two thin parched lines. Her ash-coloured eyes no longer shone. With shaky hands she opened the parcel and pulled the book out. She leafed through it and looked up, intrigued.
‘All the pages are blank . . .’
‘For the time being,’ I replied. ‘We have a good story to tell, and I’m only good at bricks and mortar.’
She pressed the book against her chest.
‘How is Germán doing?’ she asked me.
‘Fine,’ I lied. ‘Tired but fine.’
‘And you, how are you?’
‘Me?’
‘No, me, who do you think I mean?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Sure, especially after Sergeant Rojas’s lecture . . .’
I raised my eyebrows as if I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she said.
‘Me too.’
Our words were left hanging in the air. For a long moment we looked at one another without speaking. I could see Marina’s façade crumbling.
‘You have every right to hate me,’ she said then.
‘Hate you? Why should I hate you?’
‘I lied to you,’ said Marina. ‘When you came to return Germán’s watch, I already knew I was ill. I was selfish; I wanted to have a friend . . . and I think we got lost along the way.’
I turned my head to look out of the window.
‘No, I don’t hate you.’
She pressed my hand again. Marina sat up and embraced me.
‘Thank you for being the best friend I’ve ever had,’ she whispered into my ear.
I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to run away. Marina held me tight and I prayed that she wouldn’t notice I was crying. Dr Rojas would take away my pass.
‘If you hate me just a little bit, Dr Rojas won’t be annoyed,’ she said then. ‘I’m sure it’s good for my blood cells or something like that.’
‘Just a bit, then.’
‘Thank you.’
CHAPTER 27
IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, GERMÁN BLAU became my best friend. As soon as my classes were over, at five t
hirty in the afternoon, I’d run to meet the old painter. We would take a taxi to the hospital and spend the rest of the afternoon with Marina until the nurses threw us out. Our journeys from Plaza Sarriá to Avenida Gaudí made me realise that Barcelona can be the saddest city in the world in wintertime. Germán’s stories and his memories became my own.
During the long waits in those desolate hospital corridors Germán shared confidences with me that he had never shared with anyone but his wife. He spoke to me about his years with his teacher, Salvat, about his marriage and how only Marina’s company had enabled him to survive the loss of his wife. He spoke to me about his doubts and fears, of how experience had taught him that all the things he considered certain were only an illusion, that too many lessons were not worth learning. I, too, spoke to him for the first time without holding anything back. I spoke to him about Marina, about my dreams of becoming an architect at a time when I’d stopped believing in the future. I told him of my loneliness and how until I met them I’d felt as if I were drifting aimlessly through life. I told him how much I feared that I would feel the same way again if I lost them. Germán listened and understood me. He knew that my words were just an attempt at clarifying my own feelings, and he let me talk.
I cherish a special memory of Germán Blau and the days we shared in his house and in the hospital corridors. We both knew that our only bond was Marina and that under other circumstances we would never have exchanged a single word. I always thought Marina became who she was thanks to him, and I have no doubt that what little I am is also due to Germán more than I care to admit. I keep his advice under lock and key in the coffer of my memory, convinced that one day it will serve as an answer to my own fears and doubts.
That month of March it rained almost every day. Marina wrote the story of Kolvenik and Eva Irinova in the book I had given her while dozens of doctors and their assistants came and went with tests and check-ups, and more tests and more check-ups. It was then I remembered the promise I’d made to Marina in the Vallvidrera funicular and began to work on the cathedral. Her cathedral. I found a book on Chartres Cathedral in the school library and started drawing the pieces for the model I was planning to build. First I cut them out of cardboard. After a thousand attempts which almost convinced me I’d never be able to design even a telephone booth, I asked a carpenter on Calle Margenat to cut out my pieces in sheets of wood.
‘What are you building, young man?’ he asked me, intrigued. ‘A radiator?’
‘A cathedral.’
Marina watched with curiosity as I erected her little cathedral on the windowsill. Sometimes she made jokes that kept me from sleeping for days.
‘Aren’t you in a bit of a hurry, Oscar?’ she would ask. ‘Anyone would think you’re expecting me to die tomorrow.’
My cathedral soon became popular with the other patients in the room and their visitors. Doña Carmen, an eighty-four-year-old lady from Seville who occupied the next bed, would throw me sceptical looks. She had enough strength of character to destroy an army, and a backside the size of a small car. Doña Carmen seemed to rule the hospital staff with a policeman’s whistle. She had been a black marketeer, a cabaret singer, a burlesque dancer, a cook, a tobacconist and God knows what else. She had buried two husbands and three children. Some twenty grandchildren, nephews and other relatives came to visit and worship her. She kept them in line by telling them that sweet talk was for idiots. I always felt that Doña Carmen had been born in the wrong century. Had she been around at the time, Napoleon would never have crossed the Pyrenees. All of us present – excepting her diabetes – felt the same way.
On the other side of the room was Isabel Llorente, a lady with the airs of a model who spoke in a whisper and looked as if she’d come straight out of the pages of a pre-war fashion magazine. She spent the day doing her make-up, looking at herself in a small mirror and adjusting her wig. Chemotherapy had left her as bald as a snooker ball, but she was convinced that nobody knew. I found out that she had been Miss Barcelona in 1934 and the lover of one of the city’s mayors. She kept telling us about a romance with an amazing spy who, any moment now, would reappear and rescue her from that horrible place to which she’d been confined. Doña Carmen would roll her eyes every time she heard her. Nobody ever visited her, and all you had to do was tell her how attractive she looked to keep her smiling for a week. One Thursday afternoon at the end of March we went into the room and found her bed empty. Isabel Llorente had passed away that morning without giving her beau time to come and rescue her.
The other patient in the room was Valeria Astor, a nine-year-old girl who was able to breathe thanks to a tracheotomy. She always smiled at me when I walked in. Her mother spent all the hours permitted by her side and, when she wasn’t allowed in, she’d sleep in the corridor. Every day she looked a month older. Valeria always asked me whether my friend was a writer, and I’d tell her she was, and a famous one too. Once she enquired – I’ll never know why – whether I was a policeman. Marina would tell her stories she invented as she went along. Valeria had a preference for ghost stories, followed by tales about princesses or about trains, in that order. Doña Carmen would listen to Marina’s tales and roar with laughter. Valeria’s mother, an emaciated woman, simple to the point of despair, whose name I could never remember, knitted a woollen shawl for Marina in gratitude.
Dr Damián Rojas came by a few times each day. Bit by bit, I grew to like him. I discovered that, years ago, he’d been a pupil at my school and had been on the point of joining the seminary. He had a stunning fiancée called Lulú. Lulú wore a collection of miniskirts and black silk stockings that took my breath away. She would visit him every Saturday and would often pop in to say hello and ask us whether her brute of a fiancé was behaving himself. I always went bright red when Lulú spoke to me. Marina would tease me and say that if I kept staring at her like that I’d end up with eyes as big as garters. Lulú and Dr Rojas were married in April. When the doctor returned from his brief honeymoon in Minorca a week later, he was as thin as a rake. The nurses only had to look at him to start giggling.
For a few months that was my only world. The school lessons were an interlude that I blanked out. Rojas seemed optimistic about Marina. He said she was young and strong and the treatment was producing good results. Germán and I couldn’t thank him enough. We gave him cigars, ties, books and even a Mont Blanc pen. He would protest, arguing that he was only doing his job, but we both knew that he was putting in many more hours than any other doctor on the floor.
By the end of April Marina had gained a little weight and her colour had improved. We would take short walks down the corridor, and when the cold weather began to emigrate, we’d step out into the hospital cloister for a while. Marina was still writing in the book I’d given her, although she hadn’t allowed me to read a single word.
‘Where have you got to?’ I’d ask her.
‘That’s a stupid question.’
‘Stupid people ask stupid questions. Clever people answer them. Where have you got to?’
She would never say. I guessed that to write down the story we had lived through together had a special significance for her. During one of our walks round the cloister she told me something that gave me goose pimples.
‘Promise that if something should happen to me, you’ll finish the story.’
‘You’ll finish it,’ I replied. ‘And anyhow, you have to dedicate it to me.’
Meanwhile the small wooden cathedral was growing, and although Doña Carmen said it reminded her of the rubbish incinerator in San Adrián del Besós, by then the spire over the vaulted ceiling was clearly visible. Germán and I started to make plans to take Marina on an excursion to her favourite place – the secret beach between Tossa and Sant Feliu de Guíxols – as soon as she was allowed to leave the hospital. Dr Rojas, always prudent, gave us an approximate date: the middle of May.
During those weeks I learned that one can live off hope and little else.
Dr Rojas was in f
avour of Marina spending as much time as possible walking about and getting some exercise on the hospital premises.
‘It will do her good to dress up a bit,’ he said.
Since he’d got married, Rojas had become an expert on female matters, or that’s what he thought. One Saturday he sent me out with his wife Lulú to buy a silk dressing gown for Marina. It was a present and he paid for it himself. I went along with Lulú to a shop selling women’s lingerie in Rambla de Cataluña, next to the Alexandra Cinema. The shop assistants knew her. I trailed through the shop behind Lulú, watching her size up an endless display of ingenious undergarments that set my pulse racing. This was far more stimulating than chess.
‘Will your girlfriend like this?’ Lulú would ask me, licking her rouged lips.
I didn’t tell her that Marina wasn’t my girlfriend. I felt proud that someone thought she was. Besides, the experience of buying women’s underwear with Lulú turned out to be so intoxicating that all I did was nod like a fool to everything she said. When I told Germán he burst out laughing and admitted that he also thought the doctor’s wife was a danger to public health, the way she set one’s pulse soaring. It was the first time in months I’d seen him laugh.
One Saturday morning, while we were getting ready to go to the hospital, Germán asked me to go up to Marina’s room to see if I could find a bottle of her favourite perfume. As I searched in her chest of drawers, I found a folded sheet of paper at the back of a drawer. I opened it and recognised Marina’s writing instantly. It was about me. The page was full of crossed-out words and deleted paragraphs. Only these lines had survived:
My friend Oscar is one of those princes without a kingdom who wander around hoping you’ll kiss them so they won’t turn into frogs. He gets everything back to front and that’s why I like him. People who think they get everything right do things wrong, and this, coming from a left-handed person, says it all. He looks at me and thinks I don’t see him. He imagines I’ll evaporate if he touches me and if he doesn’t touch me, then he’ll evaporate. He’s got me on such a high pedestal he doesn’t know how to get up there. He thinks my lips are the door to paradise, but doesn’t know they’re poisoned. I’m such a coward that I don’t tell him so as not to lose him. I pretend I don’t see him, and that I am, indeed, going to evaporate . . .