‘Inspector?’ I called.
Grandes stopped and turned round.
‘You don’t think that…’
Grandes gave a weary smile.
‘Take care, Martín.’
I went to bed early and woke all of a sudden thinking it was the following day, only to discover that it was just after midnight.
In my dreams I had seen Barrido and Escobillas trapped in their office. The flames crept up their clothes until every inch of their bodies was covered. First their clothes, then their skin began to fall off in strips, and their panic-stricken eyes cracked in the heat. Their bodies shook in spasms of agony until they collapsed among the rubble. Flesh peeled off their bones like melted wax, forming a smoking puddle at my feet, in which I could see my own smiling reflection as I blew out the match I held in my fingers.
I got up to fetch a glass of water and, assuming I’d missed the train to sleep, I went up to the study, opened the drawer in my desk and pulled out the book I had rescued from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. I turned on the reading lamp and twisted its flexible arm so that it focused directly on the book. I opened it at the first page and began to read:
Lux Aeterna
D. M.
At first glance, the book was a collection of texts and prayers that seemed to make no sense. It was a manuscript, a handful of typed pages bound rather carelessly in leather. I went on reading and after a while thought I sensed some sort of method in the sequence of events, songs and meditations that punctuated the main body of the text. The language possessed its own cadence and what had at first seemed like a complete absence of form or style gradually turned into a hypnotic chant that permeated the reader’s mind, plunging him into a state somewhere between drowsiness and forgetfulness. The same thing happened with the content, whereby the central theme did not become apparent until well into the first section, or chant – for the work seemed to be structured in the manner of ancient poems written in an age when time and space proceeded at their own pace. I realised then that Lux Aeterna was, for want of a better description, a sort of book of the dead.
After reading the first thirty or forty pages of circumlocutions and riddles, I found myself caught up in a precise, extravagant and increasingly disturbing puzzle of prayers and entreaties, in which death, referred to at times – in awkwardly constructed verses – as a white angel with reptilian eyes, and at other times as a luminous boy, was presented as a sole and omnipresent deity, made manifest in nature, desire and in the fragility of existence.
Whoever the mysterious D. M. was, death hovered over his verses like an all-consuming and eternal force. A Byzantine tangle of references to various mythologies of heaven and hell were knotted together here into a single plane. According to D. M. there was only one beginning and one end, only one creator and one destroyer who presented himself under different names to confuse men and tempt them in their weakness, a sole God whose true face was divided into two halves: one sweet and pious, the other cruel and demonic.
That much I was able to deduce, but no more, because beyond those principles the author seemed to have lost the course of his narrative and it was almost impossible to decipher the prophetic references and images that peppered the text. Storms of blood and fire pouring over cities and peoples. Armies of corpses in uniform running across endless plains, destroying all life as they passed. Babies strung up with torn flags at the gates of fortresses. Black seas where thousands of souls in torment were suspended for all eternity beneath icy, poisoned waters. Clouds of ashes and oceans of bones and rotten flesh infested with insects and snakes. The succession of hellish, nauseating images went on unabated.
As I turned the pages I had the feeling that, step by step, I was following the map of a sick and broken mind. Line after line, the author of those pages had, without being aware of it, documented his own descent into a chasm of madness. The last third of the book seemed to suggest an attempt at retracing his steps, a desperate cry from the prison of his insanity so that he might escape the labyrinth of tunnels that had formed in his mind. The text ended suddenly, midway through an imploring sentence, offering no explanation.
By this time my eyelids were beginning to close. A light breeze wafted through the window. It came from the sea, sweeping the mist off the rooftops. I was about to close the book when I realised that something was trapped in my mind’s filter, something connected to the type on those pages. I returned to the beginning and started to go over the text. I found the first example on the fifth line. From then on the same mark appeared every two or three lines. One of the characters, the capital S, was always slightly tilted to the right. I took a blank page from the drawer, slipped it behind the roller of the Underwood typewriter on my desk and wrote a sentence at random:
‘Sometimes I hear the bells of Santa María del Mar.’
I pulled out the paper and examined it under the lamp.
‘Sometimes…of Santa María…’
I sighed. Lux Aeterna had been written on that very same typewriter and probably, I imagined, at that same desk.
4
The following morning I went out to have my breakfast in a café opposite Santa María del Mar. The Borne district was heaving with carts and people going to the market, with shopkeepers and wholesalers opening their stores. I sat at one of the outdoor tables, asked for a café con leche and adopted an orphaned copy of La Vanguardia that was lying on the next table. While my eyes slid over the headlines and leads, I noticed a figure walking up the steps to the church door and sitting down at the top to observe me on the sly. The girl must have been about sixteen or seventeen and was pretending to write things down in a notebook while she stole glances at me surreptitiously. I sipped my coffee calmly. After a while I beckoned to the waiter.
‘Do you see that young lady sitting by the church door? Tell her to order whatever she likes. It’s on me.’
The waiter nodded and went up to her. When she saw him approaching she buried her head in her notebook, assuming an expression of total concentration that made me smile. The waiter stopped in front of her and cleared his throat. She looked up from her notebook and stared at him. He explained what his mission was and then pointed in my direction. The girl looked at me in alarm. I waved at her. She went crimson. She stood up and came over to my table, with short steps, her eyes fixed firmly on the ground.
‘Isabella?’ I asked.
The girl looked up and sighed, annoyed at herself.
‘How did you know?’ she asked.
‘Supernatural intuition,’ I replied.
She held out her hand and I shook it without much enthusiasm.
‘May I sit down?’ she asked.
She sat down without waiting for a reply. In the next half a minute the girl changed her position about six times until she returned to the original one. I observed her with a calculated lack of interest.
‘You don’t remember me, do you, Señor Martín?’
‘Should I?’
‘For years I delivered your weekly order from Can Gispert.’
The image of the girl who for so long had brought my food from the grocer’s came into my mind, then dissolved into the more adult and slightly more angular features of this Isabella, a woman of soft shapes and steely eyes.
‘The little girl I used to tip,’ I said, although there was little or nothing left of the girl in her.
Isabella nodded.
‘I always wondered what you did with all those coins.’
‘I bought books at Sempere & Sons.’
‘If only I’d known…’
‘I’ll go if I’m bothering you.’