Desperate and utterly disappointed with his alleged firstborn, the head of the Blau dynasty decided to place his hopes on his second son, Gaspar, a more pliable soul who was keen to learn the textile business and showed a greater willingness to continue the family traditions. For all his fury, however, the captain of industry was not one to let resentment prevail over good form or appearances. Thus, fearing for Germán’s financial future, Blau put the Sarriá mansion, which had been semi-abandoned for years, into his eldest son’s name. ‘Even if you shame us all,’ he informed Germán, ‘I haven’t worked like a slave to have a son of mine end up without a roof over his head.’ In its heyday the mansion had been one of the most talked-about residences among the carriage-driven upper class, but nobody took care of it any longer. It was cursed, some said, even if the curse was a touch prosaic: rumour had it that the clandestine meetings between Diana and the libertine Salvat had taken place there. And so, by one of those ironies of fate, the house in which he had supposedly been conceived passed into Germán’s hands and became his residence. A short time later, once he was liberated from the ambitions and hopes his father had placed upon him, his mother secretly intervened and Germán became apprenticed to none other than Quim Salvat. On the first day Salvat looked Germán straight in the eye and pronounced the following words:
‘One, I’m not your father and I only know your mother by sight. Two, an artist’s life is a life of risk, uncertainty and, almost always, of poverty. You don’t choose it; it chooses you. If you have any doubts about either of these points, you’d better leave through that door right now.’
Germán stayed.
His years of apprenticeship under Quim Salvat provided Germán with the keys to another world and, most importantly, to another self. For the first time in his life he realised that someone actually believed in him, in his talent and worth. For the first time ever he thought he really had a chance of becoming something more than a pale copy of his father, a man who had in turn devoted his life to becoming an even paler copy of his own father. Once he’d stepped into Salvat’s studio, Germán felt like a different person. During the first six months he learned and improved his skills more than in all his preceding years combined. Before long he had begun to understand the nature of light and what it was trying to tell him.
Despite his frivolous reputation, Salvat was just a rather extravagant but truly generous man who happened to love the most exquisite things in life. He only painted at night, and although he was not good-looking by any standards (other than those of a grizzly bear), he was deemed a real heartbreaker, touched by an uncanny gift for seduction which he handled with rather more ability than his paintbrush.
Breathtaking models and nubile ladies of high society paraded through his studio eager to shed their clothes, their modesty and any other qualms to pose for him and, Germán suspected, for something more. Salvat knew about obscure wines, obscurer poets, legendary lost cities and newly imported amorous techniques from Bombay. He’d lived his forty-seven years with enviable panache and intensity, maintaining that human beings foolishly allowed their existence to drift by as if they were going to live for ever: that was their undoing. He laughed at life and at death, at the divine and the human, and mostly at himself. He cooked better than the great chefs in the Michelin Guide and ate as much as they all did put together. During the time Germán spent by his side, Salvat became his best friend. Germán would always appreciate that everything he achieved in his life, both as a man and a painter, he owed to Quim Salvat.
Salvat was one of the privileged few who knew the secret of light. Light, he said, was like a whimsical ballerina fully aware of her charms. In Quim’s hands, light was transformed into wondrous lines that lit up the canvas and opened doors into the soul. At least, that is what was written in the promotional prose of his exhibition catalogues.
‘To paint is to write with light,’ Salvat would say. ‘First you must learn its alphabet; then its grammar. Only then will you be able to possess the style and the magic.’
It was Quim Salvat who widened Germán’s vision of the world, taking him along on his travels. Together they went to Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Rome . . . It didn’t take long for Germán to realise that Salvat was as good a promoter of his art as he was an artist, if not better. That was the key to his success.
‘Out of every thousand people who purchase a painting or a work of art, only one of them has the remotest idea of what it is they’re buying,’ Salvat would say, a sly smile on his lips. ‘The rest don’t buy the work, they buy the artist, what they’ve heard and, more often than not, what they imagine about him. This business is no different from selling a quack’s remedies or love potions, Germán. The only difference lies in the price.’
Quim Salvat’s big heart stopped on 17 July 1938. Some said it was due to his manifold excesses. But Germán always thought that what truly killed his mentor’s faith and his will to live were the horrors of the civil war.
‘I could go on painting for a thousand years,’ Salvat murmured on his deathbed, ‘but that wouldn’t change men’s folly, bigotry and savagery in the slightest. Beauty is a breath of air that blows against the wind of reality, Germán. My art makes no sense. It’s entirely useless . . .’
An endless list of lovers, creditors, friends and colleagues, the dozens of people he’d helped without asking for anything in return, mourned him at his funeral. They knew that a light had gone out in the world and from that day on they’d all feel lonelier. Emptier.
Salvat left Germán a very modest sum of money and his studio. He asked him to distribute the rest (which wasn’t much because Salvat spent more than he earned and before he earned it) among his lovers and his friends. The solicitor dealing with the will handed Germán a letter that Salvat had entrusted to him when he felt his end approaching. Germán was to open it once Salvat had died.
With tears in his eyes and a shattered soul the young man spent a whole night wandering aimlessly through the city. Dawn found him walking along the breakwater in the port, and it was there, in the first light of day, that he read the last words Quim Salvat had reserved for him.
Dear Germán,
I didn’t tell you this when I was alive because I thought I had to wait for the right moment. But I’m afraid I won’t be there when that moment comes.
This is what I have to tell you. I’ve never known a painter with more talent than you, Germán. You don’t know it yet, nor can you understand it, but you possess that talent and my only merit has been to recognise it. I’ve learned more from you than you have from me, without you realising. I wish you could have had the teacher you deserve, someone who could have guided your talent better than this poor apprentice. Light speaks through you, Germán. The rest of us only listen. Don’t ever forget this. From now on, your teacher will be your pupil and your best friend, always.
SALVAT
A week later, fleeing from unbearable memories, Germán travelled to Paris. He had been offered a post as a teacher in an art school. He wasn’t to set foot in Barcelona again for the next ten years.
In Paris Germán quickly earned himself some renown as a portraitist and discovered a passion that would never abandon him: the opera. His paintings were beginning to sell, and an art dealer who knew him from his days with Salvat decided to take him on. Apart from his teaching salary, he made enough from his paintings to lead a simple but dignified life. By carefully managing his income, and with the help of the director of the art school, who seemed to have well-placed relatives all over Paris, Germán managed to obtain a seat at the Opéra for the entire season. Nothing grand: dress circle, row six, a little to the left. Twenty per cent of the stage was not visible, but the music could be heard just as gloriously as from the highly priced stalls and boxes.
That is where he first saw her. She looked like a creature that had stepped out of one of Salvat’s paintings, but not even her beauty could do justice to her voice. Her name was Kirsten Auermann, she was nineteen and, according to the p
rogramme, one of the most promising young talents in the opera world. That same evening Germán was introduced to her at a reception held by the opera company after the performance. Germán managed to sneak in saying he was the musical critic for Le Monde. When he shook her hand, he was lost for words.
‘Considering you’re a critic, you speak very little and that with a strong accent,’ Kirsten joked.
Germán decided there and then that he was going to marry that woman, if it was the last thing he did in his life. He tried to conjure up all the arts of seduction he’d seen Salvat use over the years. But there was only one Salvat, and he had been in a class of his own. A long game of cat and mouse ensued. It went on for six years and ended in a small chapel in Normandy one summer’s afternoon in 1946. On his wedding day the spectre of the war still wafted in the air like the stench of hidden carrion.
Kirsten and Germán returned to Barcelona shortly afterwards and settled in Sarriá. The house had become a ghostly museum during his years of absence. Kirsten’s luminosity and three weeks of vigorous cleaning-up did the rest.
The old mansion now experienced an era of unprecedented splendour. Germán worked without pause, possessed by an energy even he couldn’t understand. His works began to be prized among the well-to-do, and soon to own ‘a Blau’ became an essential requirement for those who aspired to join, or remain, in polite society. In yet another ironic twist of fate his long-estranged father saw his parental pride rekindled and took to praising Germán in public. ‘I always believed in his talent and knew he would triumph,’ ‘It’s in his blood, like all Blaus’ and ‘I’m the proudest father in the world’ became his favourite phrases, and, by repeating them so often, he ended up believing them. Art dealers and gallery owners who years ago hadn’t had the time of day for Germán were now bending over backwards to gain his attention. Yet for all the flatterers courting his favour and even though Vanity Fair was claiming him as one of its own, Germán never forgot what Salvat had taught him.
Kirsten’s musical career was also moving along splendidly. In the days when the new 33 rpm long-play records were beginning to conquer the market, she was one of the first voices to immortalise her repertoire. Those were years of happiness and light in the Sarriá villa, years when everything seemed possible and there was not a hint of a shadow on the horizon.
Nobody thought anything of Kirsten’s dizzy spells and fainting fits until it was too late. Success, travel, first-night nerves explained it all. The day Kirsten was seen by Dr Cabrils two bits of news changed her world for ever. The first: she was pregnant. The second: an irreversible illness in her blood was slowly stealing away her life. She had a year left. Two at most.
That same day, when she left the doctor’s surgery, Kirsten ordered a watch from the General Relojera Suiza – a venerable shop on Vía Augusta – with an inscription dedicated to Germán.
That watch would mark the hours they had left together.
Kirsten abandoned the stage and her career. The farewell gala took place at the Liceo in Barcelona, and featured Lakmé, by Delibes, her favourite composer. Nobody would ever again hear a voice like hers. During the months of her pregnancy Germán painted a series of portraits of his wife that surpassed any of his previous work. Despite receiving many an exorbitant offer, he refused to sell them.
On 24 September 1964 a baby girl with fair hair and ash-coloured eyes, identical to her mother’s, was born in the Sarriá house. She would be called Marina and her face would always bear her mother’s image and radiance. Kirsten Auermann died six months later, in the same room where she’d given birth to her daughter and where she’d spent the happiest hours of her life with Germán. Her husband held her pale trembling hand in his. She was already cold when dawn took her away as quietly as a sigh.
A month after her death Germán went back to his studio in the attic of the family home. Little Marina played at his feet. Germán picked up his brush and tried to draw a line over the canvas. His eyes filled with tears and the brush fell from his hands. Germán Blau never painted again. The light inside him had gone out for ever.
CHAPTER 9
FOR THE REST OF THAT AUTUMN MY VISITS TO Germán and Marina’s house turned into a daily ritual. I counted the hours as I daydreamed in the classroom, waiting for the moment when I could escape to that secret alleyway. My new friends were waiting for me there, except of course on Mondays, when Marina took Germán to the hospital for his treatment. We drank coffee and chatted in the sombre rooms. Germán agreed to teach me the rudiments of chess. Despite his lessons, Marina always checkmated me within five or six minutes, but I didn’t lose hope.
Bit by bit, almost without my noticing it, the world of Germán and Marina became my world. Their house, the memories that seemed to haunt those walls, became mine. I discovered that Marina didn’t go to school, so she could care for her father and didn’t leave him alone. She told me that Germán had taught her to read, write and think.
‘All the geography, trigonometry and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself,’ Marina would argue. ‘No school teaches you that. It’s not on the curriculum.’
Germán had opened her mind to the world of art, literature, history and science. The vast library in their house had become her universe. Each one of its books was a door into new worlds and new ideas. One afternoon towards the end of October we sat on a windowsill on the second floor and gazed at the faraway lights on Mount Tibidabo. Marina confided in me that her dream was to become a writer. She had a trunk full of stories she’d been writing since she was nine. When I asked her to show me one of them, she looked at me as if I were drunk and refused point-blank. ‘This is like chess,’ I thought. ‘Just give it time.’
Often, when they weren’t aware of it, I’d watch Germán and Marina bantering playfully, reading or facing one another silently across the chessboard. To feel the invisible bond that joined them, the self-contained world they had built far from everything and everyone, was like being under a magical spell. An enchantment that sometimes I feared might break with my presence. There were days when, as I walked back to the school, I felt like the happiest person in the world simply being able to share it.
Without quite knowing why, I kept the friendship hidden. I hadn’t told anyone about them, not even my friend JF. In just a few weeks Germán and Marina had become my secret life and in all honesty the only life I wished to live. I remember the time when Germán went to bed early, excusing himself as usual with the impeccable manners of an old-fashioned gentleman. I was left alone with Marina in the room with the portraits. She smiled enigmatically and told me she was writing something on me. I found the very idea terrifying.
‘On me? What do you mean writing something on me?’
‘I mean about you, not on top of you as if you were a desk.’
‘That much I’d understood.’
Marina was enjoying my sudden nervousness.
‘Well then?’ she asked. ‘Do you have such a low opinion of yourself that you don’t think there’s any point in writing about you?’
I couldn’t think of a good answer to that question. I decided to change my strategy and go on the offensive. It was something Germán had taught me in his chess lessons. Basic strategy: when you’re caught with your trousers down, start screaming and attack.
‘Well, if that’s the case, you have no choice – you’ll have to show it to me,’ I remarked.
Marina looked hesitant. She raised an eyebrow.
‘I have a right to know what is being written about me,’ I added.
‘You might not like it.’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps I will.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘I’ll be waiting.’
That winter the cold weather struck Barcelona in its usual fashion: like a meteorite. In barely twenty-four hours thermometers began to plunge. Armies of coats were released from their wardrobes, replacing the light autumn raincoats. Leaden skies and lashing winds that bit one’s ear
s took possession of the streets. Germán and Marina surprised me by giving me a wool cap that must have cost them a fortune.
‘It’ll keep your ideas warm, my friend,’ said Germán. ‘We don’t want your brain to go into hibernation.’
Halfway through November Marina announced that she and Germán had to travel to Madrid for a week. A doctor at La Paz Hospital, a leading authority in his field, had agreed to put Germán on a treatment that was still in an experimental phase and had only been used a couple of times in all of Europe.
‘They say this doctor can perform miracles. We’ll see . . .’ said Marina.
The thought of spending a week without them fell on me like a stone slab. All my efforts to hide it were in vain. Marina, who by then could see inside my head as if I were transparent, patted my hand.
‘It’s just a week, OK? Then we’ll see each other again.’
I nodded but found no consolation in her words.
‘I spoke to Germán yesterday about the possibility that you might keep an eye on Kafka and the house while we’re away,’ Marina proposed.
‘Of course. I’ll do whatever is needed.’
Her face lit up.
‘I hope this doctor is as good as they say,’ I said.
Marina looked at me for a long while. Behind her smile those ash-coloured eyes radiated a sadness that disarmed me.
‘I hope so too,’ she said.
The train to Madrid departed from the Estación de Francia at nine o’clock in the morning. I’d slipped out at daybreak. After an appraisal of my meagre savings proved them to be insufficient, I’d arranged a loan from my friend and occasional lender JF, who knew better than to ask me what I needed the money for – ‘I only hope it’s for something our dear Jesuit fathers wouldn’t approve of,’ he remarked. Freshly funded, I’d booked a taxi to collect Germán and Marina and take them to the station. That Sunday morning came wrapped in bluish streaks of mist that slowly faded in the amber of dawn. We spent a good part of the taxi ride in silence. The meter of the old Seat 1500 clicked away like a metronome, relentlessly increasing my principal and interest.