‘Why? Did the story make you feel drowsy?’
‘What’s the time, Isabella?’
‘It must be about ten o’clock.’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘No sarcasm before noon,’ Isabella replied.
I smiled triumphantly and handed her my empty cup. She took it and headed off towards the kitchen.
When she returned with the steaming coffee, I had just read the last page. Isabella sat down opposite me. I smiled and slowly sipped the delicious brew. The girl wrung her hands and gritted her teeth, glancing now and then at the pages of her story, which I had left face down on the table. She held out for a couple of minutes without saying a word.
‘And?’ she said at last.
‘Superb.’
Her face lit up.
‘My story?’
‘The coffee.’
She gave me a wounded look and went to gather her pages.
‘Leave them where they are.’
‘Why? It’s obvious that you didn’t like them and you think I’m nothing but a poor idiot.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You didn’t say anything, which is worse.’
‘Isabella, if you really want to devote yourself to writing, or at least to writing something others will read, you’re going to have to get used sometimes to being ignored, insulted and despised, and almost always to being considered with indifference. It comes with the territory.’
Isabella looked down and took a deep breath.
‘I don’t know if I have any talent. I only know that I like to write. Or, rather, that I need to write.’
‘Liar.’
She looked up and gazed at me harshly.
‘OK. I am talented. And I don’t care two hoots if you think that I’m not.’
I smiled.
‘That’s better; I couldn’t agree with you more.’
She looked confused.
‘In that I have talent, or in that you think that I don’t?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Then, do you believe I have potential?’
‘I think you are talented and passionate, Isabella. More than you think and less than you expect. But there are a lot of people with talent and passion, and many of them never get anywhere. This is only the first step for achieving anything in life. Natural talent is like an athlete’s strength. You can be born with more or less ability, but nobody can become an athlete just because he or she was born tall, or strong, or fast. What makes the athlete, or the artist, is the work, the vocation and the technique. The intelligence you are born with is just ammunition. To achieve something with it you need to transform your mind into a high-precision weapon.’
‘Why the military metaphor?’
‘Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist’s life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one’s limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.’
Isabella considered my words.
‘Do you hurl that speech at everyone, or have you just made it up?’
‘The speech isn’t mine. It was “hurled” at me, as you put it, by someone to whom I asked the same questions that you’re asking me today. It was many years ago, but not a day goes by when I don’t realise how right he was.’
‘So, can I be your assistant?’
‘I’ll think about it.’
Isabella nodded, satisfied. On the table, close to where she was sitting, lay the photograph album Cristina had left behind. She opened it at random, starting from the back, and was soon staring at a picture of Señora de Vidal, taken by the gates of Villa Helius two or three years before she was married. I swallowed hard. Isabella closed the album and let her eyes wander around the gallery until they came to rest on me. I was observing her impatiently. She gave me a nervous smile, as if I’d caught her poking around where she had no business.
‘Your girlfriend is very beautiful,’ she said.
The look I gave her removed the smile in an instant.
‘She’s not my girlfriend.’
‘Oh.’
A long silence ensued.
‘I suppose the fifth rule is that I’m not to meddle in anything that doesn’t concern me, right?’
I didn’t reply. Isabella nodded to herself and stood up.
‘Then I’d better leave you in peace and not bother you any more today. If you like, I can come back tomorrow and we’ll start then.’
She gathered her pages and smiled shyly. I nodded.
Isabella left discreetly and disappeared down the corridor. I heard her steps as she walked away and then the sound of the door closing. Her absence made me aware, for the first time, of the silence that bewitched that house.
6
Perhaps there was too much caffeine coursing through my veins, or maybe it was just my conscience trying to return, like electricity after a power cut, but I spent the rest of the morning turning over in my mind an idea that was far from comforting. It was hard to imagine that there was no connection between the fire in which Barrido and Escobillas had perished, Corelli’s proposal – I hadn’t heard a single word from him, which made me suspicious – and the strange manuscript I had rescued from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which I suspected had been written within the four walls of my study.
The thought of returning to Corelli’s house uninvited, to ask him about the fact that our conversation and the fire should have occurred practically at the same time, was not appealing. My instinct told me that when the publisher decided he wanted to see me again he would do so motu propio and I was in no great hurry to pursue our inevitable meeting. The investigation into the fire was already in the hands of Inspector Víctor Grandes and his two bulldogs, Marcos and Castelo, on whose list of favourite people I came highly recommended. The further away I kept from them, the better. This left only the connection between the manuscript and the tower house. After years of telling myself it was no coincidence that I had ended up living here, the idea was beginning to take on a different significance.
I decided to start my own investigation in the place to which I had confined most of the belongings left behind by the previous inhabitants. I found the key to the room at the far end of the corridor in the kitchen drawer, where it had spent many years. I hadn’t been in that room since the men from the electrical company had wired up the house. When I put the key into the lock, I felt a draught of cold air from the keyhole brushing across my fingers, and I realised that Isabella was right; the room did give off a strange smell, reminiscent of dead flowers and freshly turned earth.
I opened the door and covered my mouth and nose. The stench was intense. I groped around the wall for the light switch, but the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling didn’t respond. The light from the corridor revealed the outline of the boxes, books and trunks I had banished to that room years before. I looked at everything with disgust. The wall at the end was completely covered by a large oak wardrobe. I knelt down by a box full of old photographs, spectacles, watches and other personal items. I began to rummage without really knowing what I was looking for, but after a while I abandoned the undertaking with a sigh. If I was hoping to discover anything I needed a plan. I was about to leave the room when I heard the wardrobe door slowly opening behind my back. A puff of icy, damp air touched the nape of my neck. I turned round slowly. The wardrobe door was half open and I could see the old dresses and suits that hung inside it, eaten away by time, fluttering like seaweed under water. The current of fetid cold air was coming from within. I stood up and walked towards the wardrobe. I opened the doors wide and pulled aside the clothes hanging on the rail. The wood at the back was rotten and had begun to disintegrate. Behind it I noticed what looked like a wall of plaster with a hole in it, a few centimetres wide. I leaned in to see what was on the other side of the wall, but it was almost pitch dark. The faint glow from the corridor cast only a vaporous thread of light through the hole into the space beyond, and all I could perceive was a murky gloom. I put my eye closer, trying to make out some shape, but at that moment a black spider appeared at the mouth of the hole. I recoiled quickly and the spider ran into the wardrobe, disappearing among the shadows. I closed the wardrobe door, left the room, turned the key in the lock and put it safely in the top of a chest of drawers in the corridor. The stench that had been trapped in the room had spread down the passage like poison. I cursed the moment I had decided to open that door and went outside to the street, hoping to forget, if only for a few hours, the darkness that throbbed at the heart of the tower house.