‘Then we’ll do it without him noticing.’
12
I will never know whether I did it to help Vidal, as I kept telling myself, or simply as an excuse to spend more time with Cristina. We met almost every afternoon in my tower house. Cristina would bring the pages Vidal had written in longhand the day before, always full of deletions, with whole paragraphs crossed out, notes all over the page and a thousand and one attempts to save what was beyond repair. We would go up to the study and sit on the floor. Cristina would read the pages out loud and then we would discuss them at length. My mentor was attempting to write an epic saga covering three generations of a Barcelona family that was not very different from his own. The action began a few years before the Industrial Revolution with the arrival in the city of two orphaned brothers and developed into a sort of biblical parable in the Cain and Abel mode. One of the brothers ended up becoming the richest and most powerful magnate of his time, while the other devoted himself to the Church and helping the needy, only to end his days tragically during an episode that was quite evidently borrowed from the misfortunes of the priest and poet Jacint Verdaguer. Throughout their lives the two brothers were at loggerheads, and an endless list of characters filed past in torrid melodramas, scandals, murders, tragedies and other requirements of the genre, all of it set against the background of the birth of modern Barcelona and its world of industry and finance. The narrator was a grandchild of one of the two brothers, who reconstructed the story while he watched the city burn from a palatial mansion in Pedralbes during the riots of the Tragic Week of 1909.
The first thing that surprised me was that the story was one that I had suggested to him some years earlier, as a means of getting him started on his most significant work, the novel he always said he would write one day. The second thing was that he had never told me he’d decided to use the idea, or that he’d already spent years on it, and not through any lack of opportunity. The third thing was that the novel, as it stood, was a complete and utter flop: not one of the elements of the book worked, starting with the characters and the structure, passing through the atmosphere and the plot, ending with a language and a style that suggested the efforts of a pretentious amateur with too much spare time on his hands.
‘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.