The Prisoner of Heaven: A Novel (19 page)

‘I don’t like the thought of you living on the streets, Fermín. It’s dangerous. You can stay here as long as you like.’

Fermín looked around him.

‘I know this isn’t the Hotel Colón, but I have a camp bed in the back there, I don’t snore and, quite frankly, I could use the company.’

‘Don’t you have a girlfriend?’

‘My fiancée was the daughter of the founding partner in the firm from which Valls and company managed to get me fired.’

‘You’re paying dearly for this Martín business. A vow of poverty and chastity.’

Brians smiled.

‘Give me a lost cause and you’ll make me happy.’

‘That makes two of us. All right then, I’ll take you up on your generous offer. But only if you allow me to help and contribute. I can clean, tidy up, type, cook and offer you advice as well as investigative and security services. And if, in a moment of weakness, you find yourself in a tight spot and need to unwind a bit, I’m sure that through my friend Rociíto I can provide you with professional services that will leave you as good as new: when you’re young and tender you have to watch out for a build-up of seminal fluids going to your head, or you could make matters worse.’

Brians shook his hand.

‘That’s a deal. I hereby hire you as assistant articled clerk for Brians & Brians, defenders of the insolvent.’

‘As my name is Fermín, I swear that before the week is over I will have found you a customer of the sort who pays up front and in cash.’

That is how Fermín Romero de Torres moved temporarily into Brians’s minuscule office, where he began by rearranging, cleaning and updating all his files, folders and open cases. Within a couple of days the practice looked as if it had trebled in size thanks to Fermín, who had left the place as clean as a pin. Fermín spent most of the day closeted in the office, but he devoted a couple of hours to sundry expeditions from which he returned with handfuls of flowers he nicked from the lobby of the Tivoli Theatre, a bit of coffee – which he obtained by buttering up a waitress from the bar on the ground floor – and fine foods from the Quílez grocers, which he charged to the account of the legal firm that had fired Brians, having first introduced himself as their new errand boy.

‘Fermín, this ham is fabulous, where did you get it?’

‘Try the Manchego, it’s out of this world.’

He spent the mornings going through all Brians’s cases and copying his notes out neatly. In the afternoons he would pick up the telephone and, working his way through the directory, plunge into a search for solvent clients. When he sniffed a possibility, he would then round off the phone call with a visit to the prospect’s address. Out of a total of fifty cold calls to businesses, professionals and private citizens in the district, ten turned into visits and three into new clients for Brians.

The first of these was a widow who had entered into a dispute with an insurance company because they’d refused to make the payment due on the death of her husband, arguing that the cardiac arrest he had suffered after a huge dish of red-hot spicy prawns at the Siete Puertas restaurant was in fact a case of suicide, not covered by the policy. The second was a taxidermist to whom a retired bullfighter had taken the five-hundred-kilo Miura bull with which he’d ended his career in the rings. Once the bull was stuffed, the bullfighter had refused to pay for it and take it home. He said that the glass eyes the taxidermist had given it made it look as if it were possessed by malevolent forces from the other side, and he’d rushed out of the shop claiming Gypsy sorcery had brought on an irritable colon emergency. And the third client was a tailor from Ronda San Pedro who had had five perfectly healthy molars extracted by a dentist with no qualifications but plenty of gall. They were small cases, but all the clients had paid a deposit and signed a contract.

‘Fermín, I’m going to put you on the payroll.’

‘I won’t hear of it. Consider my services strictly pro bono.’

Fermín refused to accept any emolument for his good offices, except occasional small loans with which on Sunday afternoons he took Rociíto to the cinema, to dance at La Paloma or to the fun-fair at the top of the Tibidabo mountain. Romance was in the air, and Fermín was slowly reclaiming his old self. Once, in the funfair’s hall of mirrors, Rociíto gave him a love bite on the neck that smarted for a whole week. On another occasion, taking advantage of the fact that they were the only passengers on the full-sized aeroplane replica that gyrated, suspended from a crane, between Barcelona and the blue heavens, Fermín recovered full command of his manhood after a long absence from the scenarios of rushed love.

Not long after that, one lazy afternoon when Fermín was savouring Rociíto’s splendid attributes on the top of the big wheel, it occurred to him that those times, against all expectations, were turning out to be good times. Then he felt afraid, because he knew they couldn’t last long and those stolen drops of happiness and peace would evaporate sooner than the youthful bloom of Rociíto’s flesh and eyes.

11

That same night Fermín sat in the office waiting for Brians to return from his rounds of courts, offices, practices, prisons and the thousand and one audiences with the high and mighty he had to endure to obtain information. It was almost eleven when he heard the young lawyer’s footsteps approaching down the corridor. He opened the door for him and Brians came in dragging his feet and his soul, looking more crestfallen than ever. He collapsed in a corner and put his hands over his head.

‘What’s happened, Brians?’

‘I’ve just come from the castle.’

‘Bad news?’

‘Worse. Valls refused to see me. They made me wait for four hours and then they told me to leave. They’ve withdrawn my visitor’s licence and my permit for entering the premises.’

‘Did they let you see Martín?’

Brians shook his head.

‘He wasn’t there.’

Fermín looked at him without understanding. Brians didn’t speak for a few moments, searching for the right words.

‘When I was leaving Bebo followed me and told me what he knew. It happened two weeks ago. Martín had been writing like a man possessed, day and night, barely sleeping. Valls suspected something was up and instructed Bebo to confiscate the pages Martín had written so far. Three guards were needed to hold him down and pull the manuscript from him. He’d written over five hundred pages in under two months.

‘Bebo handed them to Valls, and when Valls started to read, it seems he flew into a rage.’

‘It wasn’t what he was expecting, I take it …’

Brians shook his head.

‘Valls spent all night reading and the following morning went up to the tower, escorted by four of his men. He had Martín shackled hand and foot and then stepped into the cell. Bebo was listening through a chink in the cell door and heard part of the conversation. Valls was furious. He told him he was very disappointed in him. He’d handed him the seeds of a masterpiece and Martín, ungratefully, instead of following his instructions, had embarked on that rubbish that made no sense whatsoever. “This isn’t the book I was expecting from you, Martín,” Valls kept repeating.’

‘And what did Martín say?’

‘Nothing. He ignored him. As if he weren’t there. Which made Valls all the more furious. Bebo heard Valls slap and punch Martín, but Martín didn’t utter a sound. When Valls grew tired of hitting and insulting him and getting no response at all, Bebo says that Valls pulled out a letter he had in his pocket, a letter Señor Sempere had written to Martín months before which had been confiscated. In this letter there was a note Isabella had written to Martín on her deathbed …’

‘Son-of-a-bitch …’

‘Valls left him there, locked up with that letter, because he knew that nothing would hurt him more than to know Isabella had died … Bebo says that when Valls left and Martín read the letter he started to scream, and he screamed all night, banging on the walls and the iron door with his hands and with his head …’

Brians looked up and Fermín knelt down in front of him and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Are you all right, Brians?’

‘I’m his lawyer,’ he said in a shaky voice. ‘I’m supposed to protect him and get him out of there …’

‘You’ve done everything you could, Brians. And Martín knows that.’

Brians dissented, murmuring to himself.

‘And that’s not the end of it,’ he said. ‘Bebo told me that since Valls didn’t allow him any more paper, Martín started writing on the back of the pages the governor had thrown in his face. And as he had no ink, he would cut his hands and arms and use his own blood …

‘Bebo tried to talk to him, to calm him … He no longer accepted the cigarettes or the sugar lumps he liked so much … He didn’t even acknowledge Bebo’s presence. Bebo thinks that when he heard about Isabella’s death he lost his sanity altogether and moved into the hell he’d created in his mind … At night he shouted so loud everyone could hear him. Rumours began to circulate among visitors, prisoners and the prison staff. Valls was getting nervous. Finally, he ordered two of his gunmen to take Martín away one night …’

Fermín gulped.

‘Where to?’

‘Bebo isn’t sure. From what he was able to hear, he thinks he was taken to an old house next to Güell Park … it seems that during the war a number of men were killed in that place and then buried in the garden … When the gunmen returned they told Valls that everything had been taken care of, but Bebo told me that on that very night he heard them talking among themselves and they seemed rattled. Something had happened in the house. It seems there was someone else there.’

‘Someone?’

Brians shrugged his shoulders.

‘So then David Martín is alive?’

‘I don’t know, Fermín. Nobody knows.’

12

Barcelona, 1957

Fermín was speaking in a feeble voice and looked disconsolate. Conjuring up those memories seemed to have left him lifeless. I poured him one last glass of wine and watched him dry his tears with his hands. I handed him a napkin but he ignored it. The rest of the Can Lluís clientele had gone home some time ago, and I imagined that it must be past midnight, but nobody had wanted to disturb us and they’d left us alone in the dining room. Fermín looked at me exhausted, as if having revealed the secrets he’d kept for so many years had robbed him of his will to live.

‘Fermín …’

‘I know what you’re going to ask me. The answer is no.’

‘Fermín, is David Martín my father?’

Fermín looked at me severely.

‘Your father is Señor Sempere, Daniel. You must never be in any doubt about that. Never.’

I nodded. Fermín remained anchored in his chair, looking absent, staring into space.

‘What about you, Fermín? What happened to you?’

Fermín took a while to reply, as if that part of the story were completely unimportant.

‘I went back to the streets. I couldn’t stay there, with Brians. Nor could I stay with Rociíto. Nor with anyone else …’

Fermín broke off his account, and I took up the thread of the narrative for him.

‘You returned to the streets, a beggar without a name, with nobody and nothing in the world, a man whom everyone thought was mad and who would have wished to die, had it not been for a promise he had made …’

‘I’d promised Martín I’d take care of Isabella and her son … of you. But I was a coward, Daniel. I was in hiding for so long, I was so frightened of returning, that when I did your mother was no longer there …’

‘And is that why I found you that night in Plaza Real? It wasn’t a coincidence? How long had you been following me?’

‘Months. Years.’

I imagined him following me as a child, when I went to school, when I played in Ciudadela Park, when I stopped with my father in front of that shop window to gaze at the pen I believed blindly had belonged to Victor Hugo, when I sat in Plaza Real to read to Clara and caress her with my eyes thinking nobody could see me. A beggar, a shadow, a figure nobody noticed and all eyes avoided. Fermín, my protector and friend.

‘And why didn’t you tell me the truth years later?’

‘At first I wanted to, but then I realised that it would do you more harm than good. Nothing could change the past. I decided to hide the truth because I thought it best for you to be more like your father and less like me.’

We fell into a long silence during which we eyed each other furtively, not knowing what to say.

‘Where’s Valls?’ I asked at last.

‘Don’t even think of it,’ Fermín cut in.

‘Where is he now?’ I asked again. ‘If you don’t tell me I’ll find out myself.’

‘And what will you do? Will you turn up at his house, ready to kill him?’

‘Why not?’

Fermín laughed bitterly.

‘Because you have a wife and a son, because you have a life ahead of you and people who love you and whom you love. Because you have it all, Daniel.’

‘All except my mother.’

‘Revenge won’t give you back your mother, Daniel.’

‘That’s easy to say. Nobody murdered yours …’

Fermín was about to say something, but he bit his tongue.

‘Why do you think your father never told you about the war, Daniel? Do you think he doesn’t imagine what happened?’

‘If that’s so, why did he keep quiet? Why didn’t he do anything?’

‘Because of you, Daniel. Because of you. Your father, like so many people who had to live through those years, swallowed everything and kept quiet. They just had to lump it. You pass them in the street every day and don’t even see them. They’ve rotted away all these years with that pain inside them so that you, and others like you, could live. Don’t you dare judge your father. You have no right to.’

I felt as if my best friend had slapped me.

‘Don’t be angry with me, Fermín …’

Fermín shook his head.

‘I’m not angry.’

‘I’m just trying to take all this in, Fermín. Let me ask you a question. Just one.’

‘About Valls? No.’

‘Just one question, Fermín. I swear. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to reply.’

Fermín nodded reluctantly.

‘Is this Mauricio Valls the same Valls I think he is?’ I asked.