The Prisoner of Heaven: A Novel (7 page)

Fermín nodded his head slowly. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about that until then. Suddenly I understood the dilemma my good friend was facing.

‘Do you remember what I told you years ago, Daniel?’

I remembered it perfectly. During the civil war and thanks to the nefarious dealings of Inspector Fumero who, before joining the fascists, acted as a hired thug for the communists, my friend had landed himself in prison, where he’d been on the verge of losing his mind and his life. When he managed to get out, alive by some sheer miracle, he decided to adopt a new identity and erase his past. He was at death’s door when he borrowed a name he saw on an old poster in the Arenas bullring. That is how Fermín Romero de Torres was born, a man who invented his life story day after day.

‘That’s why you didn’t want to fill in those papers in the parish church,’ I said. ‘Because you can’t use the name Fermín Romero de Torres.’

Fermín nodded.

‘Look, I’m sure we can find a way of getting you new documentation. Do you remember Lieutenant Palacios, the one who left the police force? He teaches physical education at a school in the Bonanova area, but sometimes he drops by the bookshop. Well, one day, talking about this and that, he told me there was a whole underground market of new identities for people who were returning to Spain after spending years away. He said he knows someone with a workshop near the old Royal Shipyards who has contacts in the police force and for a hundred pesetas can supply people with a new identity card and get it registered in the ministry.’

‘I know. His name was Heredia. Quite an artist.’

‘Was?’

‘He turned up floating in the port a couple of months ago. They said he’d fallen off a pleasure boat while he was sailing towards the breakwater. With his hands tied behind his back. Fascist humour.’

‘You knew him?’

‘We met now and then.’

‘Then you do have documents that certify you are Fermín Romero de Torres …’

‘Heredia managed to get them for me in 1939, towards the end of the war. It was easier then, Barcelona was a madhouse, and when people realised the ship was sinking they’d even sell you their coat of arms for a couple of
duros
.

‘Then why can’t you use your name?’

‘Because Fermín Romero de Torres died in 1940. Those were bad times, Daniel, far worse than these. He didn’t even last a year, poor bastard.’

‘He died? Where? How?’

‘In the prison of Montjuïc Castle. In cell number thirteen.’

I remembered the dedication the stranger had left for Fermín in the copy of
The Count of Monte Cristo
.

For Fermín Romero de Torres,
who came back from among the dead
and holds the key to the future.
13

‘That night I only told you a small part of the story, Daniel.’

‘I thought you trusted me.’

‘I would trust you with my life. If I only told you part of it, it was to protect you.’

‘Protect me? From what?’

Fermín looked down, devastated.

‘From the truth, Daniel … from the truth.’

Part Two

From Among the Dead

1

Barcelona, 1939

New prisoners were brought in by night, in cars or black vans that set off from the police station on Vía Layetana and crossed the city silently, nobody noticing or wishing to notice them. The vehicles of the political police drove up the old road scaling the slopes of Montjuïc and more than one prisoner would relate how, the moment they glimpsed the castle on top of the hill silhouetted against black clouds that crept in from the sea, they felt certain they would never get out of that place alive.

The fortress was anchored at the highest point of the rocky mountain, suspended between the sea to the east, Barcelona’s carpet of shadows to the north and, to the south, the endless city of the dead – the old Montjuïc Cemetery whose stench rose up among the boulders and filtered through cracks in the stone and through the bars of the cells. In times past, the castle had been used for bombarding the city below, but only a few months after the fall of Barcelona, in January, and the final defeat in April, death came to dwell there in silence and Barcelonians, trapped in the longest night of their history, preferred not to look skywards and recognise the prison’s outline crowning the hill.

Upon arrival, prisoners brought in by the political police were assigned a number, usually that of the cell they were going to occupy and where they were likely to die. For most tenants, as some of the jailers liked to refer to them, the journey to the castle was only one-way. On the night tenant number 13 arrived in Montjuïc it was raining hard. Thin veins of black water bled down the stone walls and the air reeked of excavated earth. Two police officers escorted him to a room containing only a metal table and a chair. A naked bulb hung from the ceiling and flickered every time the generator’s flow diminished. He stood there waiting in his soaking clothes for almost half an hour, watched by a guard with a rifle.

At last he heard footsteps, the door opened and in came a man who couldn’t have been a day over thirty. He wore a freshly ironed wool suit and smelled of eau de cologne. He had none of the martial looks of a professional soldier or police officer: his features were soft and his expression seemed pleasant. To the prisoner he came across as someone affecting the manners of a wealthy young man, giving off a condescending air of superiority in a setting that was beneath him. His most striking feature were his eyes. Blue, penetrating and sharp, alive with greed and suspicion. Only his eyes, behind that veneer of studied elegance and kind demeanour, betrayed his true nature.

Two round lenses augmented them, and his pomaded hair, combed back, lent him a vaguely affected look that didn’t match the sinister decor. The man sat down on the chair behind the desk and opened a folder he was carrying. After a quick inspection of its contents, he joined his hands, placed his fingertips under his chin and sat scrutinising the prisoner, who finally spoke up.

‘Excuse me, but I think there has been a mistake …’

The blow on the prisoner’s stomach with the rifle butt knocked the wind out of him and he fell, curled up into a ball.

‘You only speak when the governor asks you a question,’ the guard told him.

‘On your feet,’ commanded the governor in a quavering voice, still unused to giving orders.

The prisoner managed to stand up and face the governor’s uncomfortable gaze.

‘Name?’

‘Fermín Romero de Torres.’

The prisoner noticed disdain and indifference in those blue eyes.

‘What sort of name is that? Do you think I’m a fool? Come on: name, the real one.’

The prisoner, a small, frail man, held out his papers for the governor. The guard snatched them from him and took them over to the table. The governor had a quick look at them, then clicked his tongue and smiled.

‘Another Heredia job …’ he murmured before throwing the documents into the wastepaper basket. ‘These papers are no good. Are you going to tell me your name or do we have to get serious?’

Tenant number 13 tried to utter a few words, but his lips trembled and all he managed to do was stammer something incomprehensible.

‘Don’t be afraid, my good man, nobody’s going to bite you. What have you been told? There are plenty of fucking reds out there who like to spread slanders around, but here, if people collaborate, they get treated well, like Spaniards. Come on, clothes off.’

The new tenant seemed to hesitate for a moment. The governor looked down, as if the whole situation was making him feel uncomfortable and only the prisoner’s stubbornness was keeping him there. A second later, the guard dealt him another blow with the rifle butt, this time in the kidneys, and knocked him down again.

‘You heard the governor. Strip down. We don’t have all night.’

Tenant number 13 managed to get up on his knees and remove his dirty, bloodstained clothes. Once he was completely naked, the guard stuck the rifle barrel under a shoulder and forced him to stand up. The governor looked up from the desk and grimaced with disgust when he saw the burns covering his torso, buttocks and much of his thighs.

‘It looks like our champion is an old acquaintance of Fumero’s,’ the guard remarked.

‘Keep your mouth shut,’ ordered the governor without much conviction.

He looked at the prisoner with impatience and realised he was crying.

‘Come on, stop crying and tell me your name.’

The prisoner whispered his name again.

‘Fermín Romero de Torres …’

The governor sighed wearily.

‘Look, I’m beginning to lose my patience. I want to help you and I don’t really feel like having to call Inspector Fumero and tell him you’re here …’

The prisoner started to whimper like a wounded dog and was shaking so violently that the governor, who clearly found the scene distasteful and wanted to put an end to the matter as soon as possible, exchanged a glance with the guard and, without saying a word, wrote the name the prisoner had given him in the register, swearing under his breath.

‘Bloody war,’ he muttered to himself when they took the prisoner to his cell, dragging him naked through the flooded tunnels.

2

The cell was a dark, damp rectangle. Cold air blew in through a small hole drilled in the rock. The walls were covered with crudely etched marks and messages left by previous tenants. Some had written their names, a date, or left some other proof of their existence. One of them had busied himself scratching crucifixes in the dark, but heaven did not seem to have noticed them. The iron bars securing the cell were rusty and left a film of brown on one’s hands.

Huddled up on the ramshackle bunk, Fermín tried to cover his nakedness with a bit of ragged cloth which, he imagined, served as blanket, mattress and pillow. The half-light was tinged with a coppery hue, like the breath of a dying candle. After a while, his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and his ears sharpened, allowing him to pick up the sound of slight movements through a litany of dripping leaks and echoes carried by the draught that seeped in from outside.

Fermín had been sitting there for half an hour when he noticed a shape in the dark, at the other end of the cell. He stood up and stepped slowly towards it: it was a dirty canvas bag. The cold and the damp had started to get into his bones and, although the smell from that bundle, spattered with dark stains, did not augur well, Fermín thought that perhaps it contained the prisoner’s uniform nobody had bothered to give him and, with a bit of luck, a blanket to protect him from the bitter cold. He knelt down and untied the knot closing one end of the bag.

When he drew the canvas aside, the dim light from the oil lamps flickering in the corridor revealed what at first he took to be the face of a doll, one of those dummies tailors place in their shop windows to show off their suits. The stench and his nausea made him realise it was no dummy. Covering his nose and mouth with one hand, he pulled the rest of the canvas to one side, then stepped backwards until he collided with the wall of the cell.

The corpse seemed to be that of an adult anywhere between forty and seventy-five years of age, who couldn’t have weighed more than fifty kilos. A tangle of white hair and a beard covered much of his face and skeletal torso. His bony hands, with long, twisted nails, looked like the claws of a bird. His eyes were open, the corneas shrivelled up like overripe fruit. His mouth was open too, with his tongue, black and swollen, wedged between rotten teeth.

‘Take his clothes off before they come and fetch him,’ came a voice from the cell on the other side of the corridor. ‘You won’t get anything else to wear until next month.’

Fermín peered into the shadows and spied two shining eyes observing him from the bunk in the other cell.

‘Don’t be afraid, the poor soul can’t hurt anyone any more,’ the voice assured him.

Fermín nodded and walked over to the sack again, wondering how he was going to carry out the operation.

‘My sincerest apologies,’ he mumbled to the deceased. ‘May God rest your soul.’

‘He was an atheist,’ the voice from the opposite cell informed him.

Fermín gave another nod and decided to skip the formalities. The cold permeating the cell was so intense it cut through one’s bones and any courtesy seemed redundant. Holding his breath, he set to work. The clothes smelled the same as the dead man. Rigor mortis had begun to spread through the body and the task of undressing the corpse turned out to be much harder than he’d anticipated. Once the deceased’s best clothes had been plucked off, Fermín covered him again with the sack and closed it with a reef knot that even the great Houdini would have been unable to tackle. At last, dressed in a ragged and foul-smelling prison uniform, Fermín huddled up again on the bed, wondering how many prisoners had worn it before him.

‘Much appreciated,’ he said finally.

‘You’re very welcome,’ said the voice on the other side of the corridor.

‘Fermín Romero de Torres, at your service.’

‘David Martín.’

Fermín frowned. The name sounded familiar. For five long minutes he shuffled through distant memories and echoes from the past and then, suddenly, it came to him. He remembered whole afternoons spent in a corner of the library on Calle del Carmen, devouring a series of books with racy covers and titles.

‘Martín the author? Of
City of the Damned
?’

A sigh in the shadows.

‘Nobody appreciates pen names any more.’

‘Please excuse my indiscretion. It’s just that I had an almost scholarly devotion to your work. That’s why I know you were the person writing the novels of the immortal Ignatius B. Samson …’

‘At your service.’

‘Well, Señor Martín, it’s an honour to meet you, even if it is in these wretched circumstances, because I’ve been a great admirer of yours for years and …’

‘Are you two lovebirds going to shut up? Some people here are trying to sleep,’ roared a bitter voice that seemed to come from the next-door cell.

‘There goes old Sourpuss,’ a second voice cut in, coming from further down the corridor. ‘Pay no attention to him, Martín. If you fall asleep here you just get eaten alive by bedbugs, starting with your privates. Go on, Martín, why don’t you tell us a story? One about Chloé …’