People bored him, and the few friends he had finally tired of him too. They would say: Your mind always seems elsewhere. He had maintained only one friendship, that of Esteve Aran, a man engrossed in the study of the mystery of existence, who was jealous of his knowledge and rarely made any reference to it. The bond between them was so strong that they could almost guess each other’s thoughts. The furniture in Carrer Aragó ended up at Els Encants flea market or in antiques shops: Everything was scattered. Senyor Ardèvol went to live in the house in the village, a place he had loved since his first visit there.
The façade gave onto a quiet road. In the back was a flowerless garden enclosed by a low wall with a door in the middle that was kept open and led to a field bordering a beach of fine sand and clear waters. The house had two floors. On one side was an abandoned vegetable garden, on the other, a derelict shed. On the ground floor, on either side of the foyer, were two rooms that faced the street: a sitting room and an office. At the end of the foyer, a glass door opened onto the dining room, to the right of which was the kitchen and, to the left, a storage room filled with firewood. A spiral staircase in the dining room led upstairs to a large parlor with book-lined walls. The room he had kept for himself was off that parlor. On the street side there were two other bedrooms, one reserved for his friend Aran to use during his visits, the other for storing odds and ends.
The furniture was black, the rugs red and worn in spots. The lights were curious: simple electrical wires that hung from the ceiling and ended in lightbulbs that cast a tenuous yellow glow. The very day after his arrival — he recounted — the doorbell rang while he was still asleep. He dressed in a hurry and rushed to the door sleepy-eyed. Before him stood an old woman who reminded him of his nanny. My name is Isabel. She informed him that his uncle had employed her to cook and clean for him whenever he came to stay. And if Senyor Ardèvol so wished, she would be pleased to serve him as well. She knew he was Senyor Arnau’s nephew and that he had inherited everything; in other words, that he was the master now. He took her on. She arrived at nine in the morning, worked well and cooked well, and after lunch she washed the dishes and left.
Time passed quickly those first few weeks. Little by little he grew accustomed to acting the part of the idle property owner. After living for so long in family-run lodgings and pensions, the house seemed to him a palace. He asked the carpenter to build him more shelves to hold the books he had brought from Barcelona, old tomes with strange names: a book of advice on dealing with the devil, a book about the confessions of the saintliest saints. He moved into the house in mid-autumn. Seated at his desk on the second floor, he had a view of the sea, the choppy waters, the great surging waves.
On turning a page, I came upon a few brief notes explaining his difficulty in recalling a certain dream. Many details had slipped his mind, and others had appeared only to vanish again, all of it welling up from the deepest recesses of his spirit. Wishing to relive a dream is futile, Senyor Ardèvol wrote. He explained that he had never dreamed that he was blinded by the sun, never dreamed of colors, never heard any sounds or people talking or screaming. . and yet on that particular night he had dreamed in vivid colors. He recalled a storm from which he had struggled to escape. The wind upturned leaves he could not see but whose suffering on the branches he could feel. Drops of water fell from every leaf as though the entire orchard were weeping, blinded by lightning, furiously shaken by the winds. But before he could retell that night’s dream, which had left him riddled with anxiety, he said he first needed to discuss the issue of knives and the fear they had caused him as a child.
The mere sight of a knife forced him to close his eyes; it terrified him. There had been a boy, Fermí Baixeres, who was the best student in his class and had stirred many of his classmates’ interest with the odd things he said and did. One morning during recess, near a grotto with a saint’s shrine surrounded by hydrangeas, the boy had stood in the middle of a group of admirers and announced that he was going to cut his hand to the bone to show them how little he cared about physical pain. Fermí had greyish-blond hair and eyes so blue they seemed empty; the clique of boys who disliked him — there were those, too — had nicknamed him “symphony in grey.” He was thin, with broad shoulders and arms that were too long for his body. He had once said in jest that he was clearly descended from the chimpanzee. It was a kitchen knife with a thick handle and a thin, sharp blade. Concentrating, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, Fermí traced a line that started from his palm and ended at the base of his little finger. Over and over he ran the knife along the line, till gouts of blood welled forth. The boys watching him held their breath. And perhaps he would have accomplished what he set out to do, which was to cut deeper until he hit the bone, had he not first collapsed to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
There was no knife in that night’s dream, but there was a dagger with an undulated blade, perforated with five holes. The following day Senyor Ardèvol had the same dream. This time, it was not a dagger but a sword. The first dream had begun with wind rustling the leaves under a sky of black clouds pierced by streaks of lightning. He had never known how to describe a tempest, much less one born of emptiness, one that filled him with forgotten sensations that wiped out everything in their wake, as if calmly tossing everything into a well to meld with time and color. In the dream he found himself walking through an unfamiliar village in a driving rain when he came upon a small square with houses on three sides, none more than two stories high, with tiled roofs. On the fourth side, atop a low wall with an iron railing, sat a grey cat with eyes like Fermí Baixeres’s, looking at him, studying him. He did not know how he had arrived at the square. The rain stopped. Everything was soothing. Decorated with flowering plants, the windows seemed full of people whom he could not see but could feel watching his every move, as was the sitting cat. And suddenly he found he was dressed in a fashion typical of ages past, a loose-fitting frock that covered his shoulders and fell to his feet. Standing in the middle of the penumbral square, with the cat’s eyes glimmering, the thick quietude clouded his senses. Had his perception failed him? The loose-fitting frock, which had appeared black, was in fact white with an embroidered cross in the center of the chest, like the frocks worn by the entourage that accompanied him. He was approaching a shadowy patch. From it slowly emerged a figure, also dressed in white, also bearing a cross in the middle of the chest, with arms wrapped in chain mail, as were all the men’s arms, including his own. When they were abreast of each other, the figure extended an arm. His hand held a moon-colored sword with an iron hilt. The tip of the sword grazed his forehead and the flat of it came to rest first on one shoulder, then the other. And everything faded as if it were somehow being pulled from afar. Around him remained only the houses, the wall with the railing, and the cat staring at him. At that moment he sensed a presence behind him. He wanted to turn around but could not, he felt a dagger sinking into his back. A puddle of blood formed at his feet and he collapsed.