Authors: Carlos Ruiz Zafon
15
The staircase was in darkness when I left the Valera family mansion. I groped my way towards the entrance and, as I opened the door, the street lamps cast a rectangle of blue light back across the hall, at the end of which I spotted the stern eyes of the porter. I hurried away towards Calle Trafalgar, where the tram set out on its journey down to the gates of Pueblo Nuevo Cemetery - the same tram I had taken so many times with my father when I accompanied him on his night shifts at
The Voice of Industry
.
The tram was almost empty and I sat at the front. As we approached Pueblo Nuevo we entered a network of shadowy streets covered in large puddles. There were hardly any street lamps and the tram’s headlights revealed the contours of the buildings like a torch shining through a tunnel. At last I sighted the gates of the cemetery, its crosses and sculptures set against an endless horizon of factories and chimneys injecting red and black into the vault of the sky. A group of emaciated dogs prowled around the foot of the two large angels guarding the graveyard. For a moment they stood still, staring into the lights of the tram, their eyes lit up like the eyes of jackals, before they scattered into the shadows.
I jumped from the tram while it was still moving and set off, skirting the walls of the cemetery. The tram sailed away like a ship in the fog and I quickened my pace. I could hear and smell the dogs following behind me in the dark. When I reached the back of the cemetery I stopped on the corner of the alley and blindly threw a stone at them. I heard a sharp yelp and then the sound of paws galloping away into the night. The alley was just a narrow walkway trapped between the wall and the row of stonemasons’ workshops, all jumbled together. The notice SANABRE & SONS swung in the dusty light of a street lamp that stood about thirty metres further on. I went to the door, just a grille secured with chains and a rusty lock, and blew it open with one shot.
The echo of the shot was swallowed by the wind as it gusted up the passageway, carrying salt from the breaking waves of the sea only a hundred metres away. I opened the grille and walked into the Sanabre & Sons workshop, drawing back the dark curtain that masked the interior so that the light from the street lamp could penetrate. Beyond was a deep, narrow nave, populated by marble figures seemingly frozen in the shadows, their faces only half-sculpted. I took a few steps past madonnas cradling infants in their arms, white women holding marble roses and looking heavenward, and blocks of stone on which I could just make out the beginnings of an expression. The scent of dust from the stone filled the air. There was nobody there except for these nameless effigies. I was about to retrace my steps when I saw it. The hand peeped out from behind a tableau of figures covered with a cloth at the back of the workshop. As I walked towards it, the shape gradually revealed itself to me. Finally I stood in front of it and gazed up at that great angel of light, the same angel the boss had worn on his lapel and I had found at the bottom of the trunk in the study. The figure must have been two and a half metres high, and when I looked at its face I recognised the features, especially the smile. At its feet was a gravestone, with an inscription:
DAVID MARTÍN
1900-1930
I smiled. One thing I had to admit about my good friend Diego Marlasca was that he had a sense of humour and a taste for the unexpected. It shouldn’t have surprised me, I told myself, that in his eagerness he’d got ahead of himself and prepared such a heartfelt send-off. I knelt down by the gravestone and stroked my name. Behind me I heard light footsteps. I turned and saw a familiar face. The boy wore the same black suit he had worn when he followed me weeks ago in Paseo del Borne.
‘The lady will see you now,’ he said.
I nodded and stood up. The boy offered me his hand, and I took it.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said, as he led me towards the exit.
‘I’m not,’ I whispered.
The boy took me to the end of the alleyway. From there I could make out the line of the beach, hidden behind a row of run-down warehouses and the remains of a cargo train abandoned on a weed-covered siding. Its coaches were eaten away by rust, and all that was left of the engine was a skeleton of boilers and metal struts waiting for the scrapyard.
Up above, the moon peeped through the gaps in a bank of leaden clouds. Out at sea, the blurred shapes of distant freighters appeared between the waves, and on the sands of Bogatell beach lay the skeletons of old fishing boats and coastal vessels, spewed up by storms. On the other side, like a mantle of rubbish stretching out from the great, dark fortress of industry, stood the shacks of the Somorrostro encampment. Waves broke only a few metres from the first row of huts made of cane and wood. Plumes of white smoke slithered among the roofs of the miserable hamlet growing between the city and the sea like an endless human dumping ground. The stench of burned rubbish floated in the air. We stepped into the streets of that forgotten city, passages that opened up between structures held together with stolen bricks, mud and driftwood. The boy led me on, unaware of the distrustful stares of the locals. Unemployed day labourers, Gypsies ousted from similar camps on the slopes of Montjuïc or opposite the communal graves of the Can Tunis Cemetery, homeless old men, women and children. They all observed me with suspicion. As we walked by, women of indeterminate age stood by fires outside their shacks, heating up water or food in tin canisters. We stopped in front of a whitish structure, at the door of which we saw a girl with the face of an old woman, limping on a leg withered by polio. She was dragging a bucket with something grey and slimy moving about inside it. Eels. The boy pointed to the door.
‘It’s here,’ he said.
I took a last look at the sky. The moon was hiding behind the clouds again and a veil of darkness advanced towards us from the sea.
I went in.
16
Her face was lined with memories and the look in her eyes could have been ten or a hundred years old. She was sitting by a small fire watching the dancing flames with the fascination of a child. Her hair was the colour of ash and she wore it tied up in a plait. She had a slim, austere figure; her movements were subtle and unhurried. She was dressed in white and wore a silk scarf knotted round her throat. She smiled warmly and offered me a chair next to her. I sat down. We spent a couple of minutes in silence, listening to the crackle of the embers and the murmur of the sea. In her presence time seemed to stop, and the urgency that had brought me to her door had strangely disappeared. Slowly, as I absorbed the heat from the fire, the cold that had gripped my bones melted away. Only then did she turn her eyes from the flames and, holding my hand, she opened her lips.
‘My mother lived in this house for forty-five years,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t even a house then, just a hut made of cane and old rubbish washed up by the sea. Even when she had earned herself a reputation and had the chance to get out of this place, she refused. She always said that the day she left the Somorrostro, she would die. She was born here, among the people of the beach, and she would remain here until her last day. Many things were said about her. Many people talked about her, but very few really knew her. Many feared and hated her. Even after her death. I’m telling you all this because I think it’s fair that you should know: I’m not the person you’re looking for, or you think you’re looking for. The one many called The Witch of Somorrostro was my mother.’
I looked at her in confusion.
‘When...?’
‘My mother died in 1905,’ she said. ‘She was killed a few metres away from here, by the sea; stabbed in the neck.’
‘I’m sorry. I thought that—’
‘A lot of people do. The wish to believe can even conquer death.’
‘Who killed her?’
‘You know who.’
It took me a few seconds to reply.
‘Diego Marlasca . . .’
She nodded.
‘Why?’
‘To silence her. To cover his tracks.’
‘I don’t understand. Your mother had helped him . . . He even gave her a large amount of money in exchange.’
‘That’s exactly why he wanted to kill her, so that she would take his secret to the grave.’
She watched me, a half-smile playing on her lips as if my confusion amused her and made her pity me at the same time.
‘My mother was an ordinary woman, Señor Martín. She grew up in poverty and the only power she possessed was her will to survive. She never learned to read or write, but she knew how to see inside people. She felt what they felt, knew their secrets and their longings. She could read it in their eyes, in their gestures, in their voices, in the way they walked or their mannerisms. She knew what they were going to say or do before they did. That’s why a lot of people called her a sorceress, because she was able to see in them what they refused to see themselves. She earned her living selling love potions and enchantments which she prepared with water from the riverbed, herbs and a few grains of sugar. She helped lost souls believe what they wanted to believe. When she gained a certain popularity, a lot of people from well-to-do families began to pay her visits and seek her favours. The rich wanted to become even richer. The powerful wanted more power. The mean wanted to feel like saints, and the pious wanted to be punished for sins they regretted not having had the courage to commit. My mother listened to them all and accepted their coin. With this money she sent me and my siblings to the same schools as the sons of her customers. She bought us another name and another life far from this place. My mother was a good person, Señor Martín. Don’t be fooled. She never took advantage of anyone, nor did she make them believe more than they needed to believe. Life had taught her that we all require big and small lies in order to survive, just as much as we need air. She used to say that if during one single day, from dawn to dusk, we could see the naked reality of the world, and of ourselves, we would either take our own lives or lose our minds.’
‘But—’
‘If you’ve come here in search of magic, I’m sorry to disappoint you. My mother told me there was no magic; she said there was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or innocence. Or sometimes madness.’
‘That’s not what she told Diego Marlasca when she accepted his money,’ I objected. ‘Seven thousand pesetas in those days must have bought quite a few years of a good name and good schools.’
‘Diego Marlasca needed to believe. My mother helped him to do so. That’s all.’
‘Believe in what?’
‘In his own salvation. He was convinced that he had betrayed himself and those he loved. He believed that he had placed his life on a path of evil and falsehood. My mother thought this didn’t make him any different from most men who at some point in their lives stop to look at themselves in the mirror. The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world. But Diego Marlasca was a man with a conscience, and he was not satisfied with what he saw. That’s why he went to my mother. Because he had lost all hope, and probably his mind.’
‘Did Marlasca say what he had done?’
‘He said he’d handed his life over to a shadow.’
‘A shadow?’
‘Those were his words. A shadow who followed him and possessed the same shape, face and voice as his own.’
‘What did that mean?’
‘Guilt and remorse have no meaning. They are feelings, emotions, not ideas.’
It occurred to me that not even the boss could have explained this more clearly.
‘And what was your mother able to do for him?’ I asked.
‘Only comfort him and help him find some peace. Diego Marlasca believed in magic and that’s why my mother thought she should convince him that his road to salvation passed through her. She spoke to him of an ancient spell, a fisherman’s legend she had heard as a child among the hovels by the sea. When a man lost his way in life and felt that death had put a price on his soul, the legend said that if he found a pure soul who would agree to be sacrificed in order to save him, he would be able to disguise his own black heart with it, and death, which cannot see, would pass him by.’
‘A pure soul?’
‘Free of sin.’
‘And how was this to be carried out?’
‘With pain, of course.’
‘What sort of pain?’
‘A blood sacrifice. One soul in exchange for another. Death in exchange for life.’
A long silence amid the whisper of the sea and the wind swirling among the shacks.
‘Irene would have pulled out her own eyes and heart for Marlasca. He was her reason for living. She loved him blindly and, like him, believed that his only salvation lay in magic. At first she wanted to take her own life, offering it to him as a sacrifice, but my mother dissuaded her. She told her what she already knew, that her soul was not free of sin and that her sacrifice would be in vain. She said that to save her. To save them both.’
‘From whom?’
‘From themselves.’
‘But she made a mistake . . .’
‘Even my mother couldn’t see everything.’
‘What did Marlasca do?’
‘My mother never wanted to tell me - she didn’t want me and my siblings to be a part of it. She separated us and sent each of us far away to different boarding schools so that we would forget where we came from and who we were. She said that now we were the ones who were cursed. She died shortly afterwards, alone. We didn’t find out until much later. When they discovered her body nobody dared touch it: they let the sea take it away. Nobody dared speak about her death either. But I knew who had killed her and why. Even today I believe my mother knew she was going to die soon and by whose hand. She knew and she did nothing about it because in the end she too believed. She believed because she was unable to accept what she’d done. She believed that by handing over her soul she would save ours, the soul of this place. That’s why she didn’t want to flee, because, as the legend says, the soul that sacrifices itself should always remain in the place where the treasonable act was committed, like a bandage over the eyes of death.’
‘And where is the soul that saved Diego Marlasca?’
The woman smiled.
‘There are no souls or salvations, Señor Martín. That’s just an old wives’ tale, gossip. Only ashes and memories remain, but if there are any they will be in the place where Marlasca committed his crime, the secret he has hidden all these years to mock his own destiny.’
‘The tower house . . . I’ve lived there for almost ten years and there’s nothing . . .’
She smiled again and, with her eyes fixed on mine, leaned towards me and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were frozen, like the lips of a corpse, and her breath smelled of dead flowers.
‘Perhaps you haven’t been looking in the right place,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Perhaps the trapped soul is your own.’
Then she untied the scarf she wore round her neck and revealed a large scar across her throat. This time her smile was malicious and her eyes shone with a cruel, defiant light.
‘Soon the sun will rise. Leave while you can,’ said the Witch of Somorrostro, turning her back to me and looking into the flames once more.
The boy in the black suit appeared in the doorway and offered me his hand, an indication that my time was up. I stood and followed him. When I turned I caught my reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall. In it I could see the profile of an old hag, dressed in rags, hunched over by the fire. Her dark, cruel laughter stayed with me until I was out of the door.