‘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.’