The Angel's Game (8 page)

11

I spent the whole morning running about the house, straightening things and tidying up, airing the rooms, cleaning objects and corners I didn’t even know existed. I rushed down to a florist in the market and when I returned, laden with bunches of flowers, I realised I had forgotten where I’d hidden the vases in which to put them. I dressed as if I was going out to look for work. I practised words and greetings that sounded ridiculous. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that Vidal was right: I looked like a vampire. Finally I sat down in an armchair in the gallery to wait, with a book in my hands. In two hours I hadn’t turned over the first page. At last, at exactly four o’clock in the afternoon, I heard Cristina’s footsteps on the stairs and jumped up. By the time she rang the front doorbell I’d been at the door for an eternity.

‘Hello, David. Is this a bad moment?’

‘No, no, on the contrary. Please come in.’

Cristina smiled politely and stepped into the corridor. I led her to the reading room in the gallery, and offered her a seat. She was examining everything carefully.

‘It’s a very special place,’ she said. ‘Pedro did tell me you had an elegant home.’

‘He prefers the term “gloomy”, but I suppose it’s just a question of degrees.’

‘May I ask why you came to live here? It’s a rather large house for someone who lives alone.’

Someone who lives alone, I thought. You end up becoming what you see in the eyes of those you love.

‘The truth?’ I asked. ‘The truth is that I came to live here because for years I had seen this house almost every day on my way to and from the newspaper. It was always closed up, and I began to think it was waiting for me. In the end I dreamed, literally, that one day I would live in it. And that’s what happened.’

‘Do all your dreams come true, David?’

The ironic tone reminded me too much of Vidal.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘This is the only one. But you wanted to talk to me about something and I’m distracting you with stories that probably don’t interest you.’

I sounded more defensive that I would have wished. The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn’t know where to put it.

‘I wanted to talk to you about Pedro,’ Cristina began.

‘Ah.’

‘You’re his best friend. You know him. He talks about you as if you were his son. He loves you more than anyone. You know that.’

‘Don Pedro has treated me like a father,’ I said. ‘If it hadn’t been for him and for Señor Sempere, I don’t know what would have become of me.’

‘The reason I wanted to talk to you is that I’m very worried about him.’

‘Why are you worried?’

‘You know that some years ago I started work as his secretary. The truth is that Pedro is a very generous man and we’ve ended up being good friends. He has behaved very well towards my father, and towards me. That’s why it hurts me to see him like this.’

‘Like what?’

‘It’s that wretched book, the novel he wants to write.’

‘He’s been at it for years.’

‘He’s been destroying it for years. I correct and type out all his pages. Over the years I’ve been working as his secretary he’s destroyed at least two thousand pages. He says he has no talent. He says he’s a fraud. He’s constantly at the bottle. Sometimes I find him upstairs in his study, drunk, crying like a child . . .’

I swallowed hard.

‘He says he envies you, he wants to be like you, he says people lie and praise him because they want something from him - money, help - but he knows that his book is worthless. He keeps up appearances with everyone else, his smart suits and all that, but I see him every day, and I know he’s losing hope. Sometimes I’m afraid he’ll do something stupid. It’s been going on for some time now. I haven’t said anything because I didn’t know who to speak to. If he knew I’d come to see you he’d be furious. He always says: don’t bother David with my worries. He’s got his whole life ahead of him and I’m nothing now. He’s always saying things like that. Forgive me for telling you all this, but I didn’t know who to turn to . . .’

We sank into a deep silence. I felt an intense cold invading me: the knowledge that while the man to whom I owed my life had plunged into despair, I had been locked in my own world and hadn’t paused for one second to notice.

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have come . . .’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’ve done the right thing.’

Cristina looked at me with a hint of a smile and for the first time I felt that I was not a stranger to her.

‘What can we do?’ she asked.

‘We’re going to help him,’ I said.

‘What if he doesn’t let us?’

‘Then we’ll do it without him noticing.’

12

I will never know whether I did it to help Vidal, as I kept telling myself, or simply as an excuse to spend more time with Cristina. We met almost every afternoon in my tower house. Cristina would bring the pages Vidal had written in longhand the day before, always full of deletions, with whole paragraphs crossed out, notes all over the page and a thousand and one attempts to save what was beyond repair. We would go up to the study and sit on the floor. Cristina would read the pages out loud and then we would discuss them at length. My mentor was attempting to write an epic saga covering three generations of a Barcelona family that was not very different from his own. The action began a few years before the Industrial Revolution with the arrival in the city of two orphaned brothers and developed into a sort of biblical parable in the Cain and Abel mode. One of the brothers ended up becoming the richest and most powerful magnate of his time, while the other devoted himself to the Church and helping the needy, only to end his days tragically during an episode that was quite evidently borrowed from the misfortunes of the priest and poet Jacint Verdaguer. Throughout their lives the two brothers were at loggerheads, and an endless list of characters filed past in torrid melodramas, scandals, murders, tragedies and other requirements of the genre, all of it set against the background of the birth of modern Barcelona and its world of industry and finance. The narrator was a grandchild of one of the two brothers, who reconstructed the story while he watched the city burn from a palatial mansion in Pedralbes during the riots of the Tragic Week of 1909.

The first thing that surprised me was that the story was one that I had suggested to him some years earlier, as a means of getting him started on his most significant work, the novel he always said he would write one day. The second thing was that he had never told me he’d decided to use the idea, or that he’d already spent years on it, and not through any lack of opportunity. The third thing was that the novel, as it stood, was a complete and utter flop: not one of the elements of the book worked, starting with the characters and the structure, passing through the atmosphere and the plot, ending with a language and a style that suggested the efforts of a pretentious amateur with too much spare time on his hands.

‘What do you think of it?’ Cristina asked. ‘Can it be saved?’

I preferred not to tell her that Vidal had borrowed the premise from me, not wishing her to be more worried than she already was, so I smiled and nodded.

‘It needs some work, that’s all.’

As the day grew dark, Cristina would sit at the typewriter and between us we rewrote Vidal’s book, letter by letter, line by line, scene by scene.

The storyline put together by Vidal was so vague and insipid that I decided to recover the one I had invented when I originally suggested it to him. Slowly we brought the characters back to life, rebuilding them from head to toe. Not a single scene, moment, line or word survived the process and yet, as we advanced, I had the impression that we were doing justice to the novel that Vidal carried in his heart and had decided to write without knowing how.

Cristina told me that sometimes, weeks after he remembered writing a scene, Vidal would reread it in its final typewritten version, and was surprised at his craftsmanship and the fullness of a talent in which he had ceased to believe. She feared he might discover what we were doing and told me we should be more faithful to his original work.

‘Never underestimate a writer’s vanity, especially that of a mediocre writer,’ I would reply.

‘I don’t like to hear you talking like that about Pedro.’

‘I’m sorry. Neither do I.’

‘Perhaps you should slow down a bit. You don’t look well. I’m not worried about Pedro any more - I’m concerned about you.’

‘Something good had to come of all this.’

In time I grew accustomed to savouring the moments I shared with her. It wasn’t long before my own work suffered the consequences. I found the time to work on
City of the Damned
where there was none, sleeping barely three hours a day and pushing myself to the limit to meet the deadlines in my contract. Both Barrido and Escobillas made it a rule not to read any book - neither the ones they published nor the ones published by the competition - but Lady Venom did read them and soon began to suspect that something strange was happening to me.

‘This isn’t you,’ she would say every now and then.

‘Of course it’s not me, dear Herminia. It’s Ignatius B. Samson.’

I was aware of the risks I was taking, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I woke up every day covered in sweat and with my heart beating so hard I felt as if it was going to crack my ribs. I would have paid that price and much more to retain the slow, secret contact that unwittingly turned us into accomplices. I knew perfectly well that Cristina could read this in my eyes every time she came, and I knew perfectly well that she would never respond to my advances. There was no future, or great expectations, in that race to nowhere, and we both knew it.

Sometimes, when we grew tired of attempting to refloat the leaking ship, we would abandon Vidal’s manuscript and try to talk about something other than the intimacy which, from being so hidden, was beginning to weigh on our consciences. Now and then, I would muster enough courage to take her hand. She let me, but I knew it made her feel uncomfortable: she felt that it was not right, that our debt of gratitude to Vidal united and separated us at the same time. One night, shortly before she left, I held her face in my hands and tried to kiss her. She remained motionless and when I saw myself in the mirror of her eyes I didn’t dare speak. She stood up and left without saying a word. After that, I didn’t see her for two weeks, and when she returned she made me promise nothing like that would ever happen again.

‘David, I want you to understand that when we finish working on Pedro’s book we won’t be seeing one another as we do now.’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why.’

My advances were not the only thing Cristina didn’t approve of. I began to suspect that Vidal had been right when he said she disliked the books I was writing for Barrido & Escobillas, even if she kept quiet about it. It wasn’t hard to imagine her thinking that my efforts were strictly mercenary and soulless, that I was selling my integrity for a pittance, thereby lining the pockets of a couple of sewer rats, because I didn’t have the courage to write from my heart, with my own name and my own feelings. What hurt me most was that, deep down, she was probably right. I fantasised about ending my contract and writing a book just for her, a book with which I could earn her respect. If the only thing I knew how to do wasn’t good enough for Cristina, perhaps I should return to the grey, miserable days of the newspaper. I could always live off Vidal’s charity and favours.

I had gone out for a walk after a long night’s work, unable to sleep. Wandering about aimlessly, my feet led me uphill until I reached the building site of the Sagrada Familia. When I was small, my father had sometimes taken me there to gaze up at the babel of sculptures and porticoes that never seemed to take flight, as if the building were cursed. I liked going back to visit the place and discover that it had not changed; that although the city was endlessly growing around it, the Sagrada Familia remained forever in a state of ruin.

Dawn was breaking when I arrived: the towers of the Nativity facade stood in silhouette against a blue sky, scythed by red light. An eastern wind carried the dust from the unpaved streets and the acid smell from the factories shoring up the edges of the Sant Martí quarter. I was crossing Calle Mallorca when I saw the lights of a tram approaching through the early morning mist. I heard the clatter of the metal wheels on the rails and the sound of the bell which the driver was ringing to warn people of the tram’s advance. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. I stood there, glued to the ground between the rails, watching the lights of the tram leaping towards me. I heard the driver’s shouts and saw the plume of sparks that shot out from the wheels as he slammed on the brakes. Even then, with death only a few metres away, I couldn’t move a muscle. The smell of electricity invaded the white light that blazed in my eyes, and then the tram’s headlight went out. I fell over like a puppet, only conscious for a few more seconds, time enough to see the tram’s smoking wheel stop just centimetres from my face. Then all was darkness.

13

I opened my eyes. Thick columns of stone rose like trees in the shadows towards a naked vault. Needles of dusty light fell diagonally, revealing what looked like endless rows of ramshackle beds. Small drops of water fell from the heights like black tears, exploding with an echo as they touched the ground. The darkness smelled of mildew and damp.

‘Welcome to purgatory.’

I sat up and turned to find a man dressed in rags who was reading a newspaper by the light of a lantern. He brandished a smile that showed half of his teeth were missing. The front page of the newspaper he was holding announced that General Primo de Rivera was taking over all the powers of the state and installing a gentlemanly dictatorship to save the country from imminent disaster. That newspaper was at least five years old.

‘Where am I?’

The man peered over his paper and looked at me curiously.

‘At the Ritz. Can’t you smell it?’

‘How did I get here?’

‘Half dead. They brought you in this morning on a stretcher and you’ve been sleeping it off ever since.’

I felt my jacket and realised that all the money I’d had on me had vanished.

‘What a mess the world is in,’ cried the man, reading the news in his paper. ‘It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.’

‘How do I get out of here?’

‘If you’re in such a hurry . . . There are two ways, the permanent and the temporary. The permanent way is via the roof: one good leap and you can rid yourself of all this rubbish forever. The temporary way is somewhere over there, at the end, where that idiot is holding his fist in the air with his trousers falling off him, making the revolutionary salute to everyone who passes. But if you go out that way you’ll come back sooner or later.’

The first man was watching me with amusement and the kind of lucidity that shines occasionally only in madmen.

‘Are you the one who stole my money?’

‘Your suspicion offends me. When they brought you here you were already as clean as a whistle, and I only accept bonds that can be cashed at a bank.’

I left the lunatic sitting on his bed with his out-of-date newspaper and his up-to-date speeches. My head was still spinning and I was barely able to walk more than four steps in a straight line, but I managed to reach a door that led to a staircase on one of the sides of the huge vault. A faint light seemed to filter down from the top of the stairwell. I went up four or five floors until I felt a gust of fresh air that was coming through a large doorway at the top. I walked outside and at last understood where I was.

Spread out before me was a lake, suspended above the treetops of Ciudadela Park. The sun was beginning to set over Barcelona and the weed-covered water rippled like spilt wine. The Water Reservoir building looked like a crude castle or a prison. It had been built to supply water to the pavilions of the 1888 Universal Exhibition, but in time its vast, cathedral-like interior had ended up as a shelter for the destitute and the dying who had no other refuge from the night or the cold. The huge water basin on the flat rooftop was now a murky stretch of water that slowly bled away through the cracks in the building.

Then I noticed a figure posted on one of the corners of the roof. As if the mere touch of my gaze had alerted him, he turned round sharply and looked at me. I still felt a bit dazed and my vision was blurred, but I thought the figure seemed to be getting closer. He was approaching too fast, as if his feet weren’t touching the ground when he walked, and he moved in sudden agile bursts, too quick for the eye to catch. I could barely see his face against the light, but I was able to tell that he was a gentleman with black, shining eyes that seemed too big for his face. The closer he got to me the more his shape seemed to lengthen and the taller he seemed to grow. I felt a shiver as he advanced and took a few steps back without realising that I was moving towards the water’s edge. I felt my feet treading air and began to fall backwards into the pond when the stranger suddenly caught me by the arm. He pulled me up gently and led me back to solid ground. I sat on one of the benches that surrounded the water basin and took a deep breath, then looked up and saw him clearly for the first time. His eyes were a normal size, his height similar to mine, and his walk and gestures were like those of any other gentleman. He had a kind and reassuring expression.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Just a bit dizzy.’

The stranger sat down next to me. He wore a dark, exquisitely tailored three-piece suit with a small silver brooch on his lapel, an angel with outspread wings that looked oddly familiar. It occurred to me that the presence of an impeccably dressed gentleman here on the roof terrace was rather unusual. As if he could read my thoughts, the stranger smiled at me.

‘I hope I didn’t alarm you,’ he ventured. ‘I suppose you weren’t expecting to meet anyone up here.’

I looked at him in confusion and saw my face reflected in his black pupils as they dilated like an ink stain on paper.

‘May I ask what brings you here?’

‘The same thing as you: great expectations.’

‘Andreas Corelli,’ I mumbled.

His face lit up.

‘What a great pleasure it is to meet you in person at last, my friend.’

He spoke with a light accent which I was unable to identify. My instinct told me to get up and leave as fast as possible, before the stranger could utter another word, but there was something in his voice, in his eyes, that transmitted calm and trust. I decided not to ask myself how he could have known he would find me there, when even I had not known where I was. He held out his hand and I shook it. His smile seemed to promise redemption.

‘I suppose I should thank you for all the kindness you have shown me over the years, Señor Corelli. I’m afraid I’m indebted to you.’

‘Not at all. I’m the one who is indebted to you, my friend, and I should excuse myself for approaching you in this way, at so inconvenient a place and time, but I confess that I’ve been wanting to speak to you for a while and have never found the opportunity.’

‘Go ahead then. What can I do for you?’ I asked.

‘I want you to work for me.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I want you to write for me.’

‘Of course. I’d forgotten you’re a publisher.’

The stranger laughed. He had a sweet laugh, the laugh of a child who has never misbehaved.

‘The best of them all. The publisher you have been waiting for all your life. The publisher who will make you immortal.’

The stranger offered me one of his business cards, which was identical to the one I still had, the one I was holding when I awoke from my dream of Chloé.

ANDREAS CORELLI
Éditeur
Éditions de la Lumière
Boulevard St.-Germain, 69, Paris

‘I’m flattered, Señor Corelli, but I’m afraid it’s not possible for me to accept your invitation. I have a contract with . . .’

‘Barrido & Escobillas, I know. Riff-raff with whom, without wishing to offend you, you should have no dealings whatsoever.’

‘It’s an opinion shared by others.’

‘Señorita Sagnier, perhaps?’

‘You know her?’

‘I’ve heard of her. She seems to be the sort of woman whose respect and admiration one would give anything to win, don’t you agree? Doesn’t she encourage you to abandon those parasites and be true to yourself?’

‘It’s not that simple. I have an exclusive contract that ties me to them for another six years.’

‘I know, but that needn’t worry you. My lawyers are studying the matter and I can assure you there are a number of ways in which legal ties can be rendered null and void, should you wish to accept my proposal.’

‘And your proposal is?’

Corelli gave me a mischievous smile, like a schoolboy sharing a secret.

‘That you devote a year exclusively to working on a book I would commission, a book whose subject matter you and I would discuss when we signed the contract and for which I would pay you, in advance, the sum of one hundred thousand francs.’

I looked at him in astonishment.

‘If that sum does not seem adequate I’m open to considering any other sum you might think more appropriate. I’ll be frank, Señor Martín: I’m not going to quarrel with you about money. And between you and me, I don’t think you’ll want to either, because I know that when I tell you the sort of book I want you to write for me, the price will be the least of it.’

I sighed, laughing quietly.

‘I see you don’t believe me.’

‘Señor Corelli, I’m an author of penny dreadfuls that don’t even carry my name. My publishers, whom you seem to know, are a couple of second-rate fraudsters who are not worth their weight in manure, and my readers don’t even know I exist. I’ve spent years earning my living in this trade and I have yet to write a single page that satisfies me. The woman I love thinks I’m wasting my life, and she’s right. She also thinks I have no right to desire her because we’re a pair of insignificant souls whose only reason for existence is the debt of gratitude we owe to a man who pulled us both out of poverty, and perhaps she’s right about that too. It doesn’t matter. Before I know it, I’ll be thirty and I’ll realise that every day I look less like the person I wanted to be when I was fifteen. If I reach thirty, that is, because recently my health has been about as consistent as my work. Right now I’m satisfied if I manage one or two decent sentences in an hour. That’s the sort of author and the sort of man I am. Not the sort who receives visits from Parisian publishers with blank cheques for writing a book that will change his life and make all his dreams come true.’

Corelli observed me with a serious expression, carefully weighing every word.

‘I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth. Believe me when I say that throughout my professional life I’ve come across hundreds of characters for whom you wouldn’t have given a toss and who had an extremely high opinion of themselves. But I want you to know that, even if you don’t believe me, I know exactly what sort of author and what sort of man you are. I’ve been watching you for years, as you are well aware. I’ve read all your work, from the very first story you wrote for
The Voice of Industry
to
The Mysteries of Barcelona
, and now each of the instalments of the Ignatius B. Samson series. I dare say I know you better than you know yourself. Which is why I’m sure that in the end you will accept my offer.’

‘What else do you know?’

‘I know we have something, or a great deal, in common. I know you lost your father, and so did I. I know what it is like to lose one’s father when you still need him. Yours was snatched from you in tragic circumstances. Mine, for reasons that are neither here nor there, rejected me and threw me out of his house - perhaps that was even more painful. I know that you feel lonely, and believe me when I tell you that this is a feeling I have also experienced. I know that in your heart you harbour great expectations, none of which has come true, and that, although you’re not aware of it, this is slowly killing you with every passing day.’

His words brought about a long silence.

‘You know a lot of things, Señor Corelli.’

‘Enough to think that I would like to be better acquainted with you and become your friend. I don’t suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don’t trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It’s a sure sign that they don’t really know anyone.’

‘But you’re not looking for a friend, you’re looking for an employee.’

‘I’m looking for a temporary partner. I’m looking for you.’

‘You seem very sure of yourself.’

‘It’s a fault I was born with,’ Corelli replied, standing up. ‘Another is my gift for seeing into the future. That’s why I realise that perhaps it’s still too soon: hearing the truth from my lips is not enough for you yet. You need to see it with your own eyes. Feel it in your flesh. And, believe me, you’ll feel it.’

He held out his hand and waited until I took it.

‘Can I at least be reassured that you will think about what I’ve told you and that we’ll speak again?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what to say, Señor Corelli.’

‘Don’t say anything right now. I promise that next time we meet you’ll see things more clearly.’

With those words he gave me a friendly smile and walked off towards the stairs.

‘Will there be a next time?’ I asked.

Corelli stopped and turned.

‘There always is.’

‘Where?’

In the last rays of daylight falling on the city his eyes glowed like embers.

I saw him disappear through the door to the staircase. Only then did I realise that during the entire conversation I had not once seen him blink.