‘If you’ve changed your mind and you’d rather we looked for a hotel…’
‘No, it’s fine. Don’t worry.’
I left Cristina’s suitcase in the hall and went to the kitchen in search of a box of assorted candles I kept in the larder. I started to light them, one by one, fixing them on plates, and in tumblers and glasses. Cristina watched me from the door.
‘It will only take a minute,’ I assured her. ‘I have a lot of practice.’
I began to distribute the candles around the rooms, along the corridor and in various corners, until the whole house was enveloped in a flickering twilight of pale gold.
‘It looks like a cathedral,’ Cristina said.
I took her to one of the rooms that I didn’t use but kept clean and tidy because of the few times Vidal, too drunk to return to his mansion, had stayed the night.
‘I’ll bring you some clean towels. If you don’t have anything to change into, I can offer you a wide selection of dreadful belle époque clothes, which the former owners left in the wardrobes.’
My clumsy attempt at humour barely drew a smile from her, and she simply nodded. I left her sitting on the bed while I rushed off to fetch the towels. When I returned she was still sitting there, motionless. I left the towels next to her on the bed and brought over a couple of candles that I’d placed by the door, to give her a bit more light.
‘Thanks,’ she murmured.
‘While you change I’ll go and prepare some hot soup for you.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘It will do you good, all the same. If you need anything, let me know.’
I left her alone and went off to my room to remove my sodden shoes. I put water on to boil and sat waiting in the gallery. The rain was still crashing down, angrily machine-gunning the large windows; it poured through the gutters up in the tower and funnelled along the flat roof, sounding like footsteps on the ceiling. Further out, the Ribera quarter was plunged into almost total darkness.
After a while the door of Cristina’s room opened and I heard her approaching. She was wearing a white dressing gown and had thrown an ugly woollen shawl over her shoulders.
‘I’ve borrowed this from one of the wardrobes,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
‘You can keep it if you like.’
She sat in one of the armchairs and glanced round the room, stopping to look at a pile of paper on the table. She looked at me and I nodded.
‘I finished it a few days ago,’ I said.
‘And yours?’
I thought of both manuscripts as mine, but I just nodded again.
‘May I?’ she asked, taking a page and bringing it nearer the candlelight.
‘Of course.’
I watched her read, a thin smile on her lips.
‘Pedro will never believe he’s written this,’ she said.
‘Trust me,’ I replied.
Cristina put the sheet back on the pile and looked at me for a long time.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to, but I have.’
‘Me too.’
‘Some days, before going to the sanatorium, I’d walk to the station and sit on the platform to wait for the train coming from Barcelona, hoping you might be on it.’
I swallowed hard.
‘I thought you didn’t want to see me,’ I said.
‘That’s what I thought, too. My father often asked after you, you know? He asked me to look after you.’
‘Your father was a good man,’ I said. ‘A good friend.’
Cristina nodded and smiled, but I could see that her eyes were filling with tears.
‘In the end he couldn’t remember anything. There were days when he confused me with my mother and would ask me to forgive him for the years he spent in prison. Then weeks would go by when he hardly seemed to notice I was there. Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn’t go away.’
‘I’m sorry, Cristina.’
‘In the last few days I thought he was better. He was beginning to remember things. I had brought with me one of his albums and I started to show him the photographs again, pointing out who was who. There is one very old picture, taken in Villa Helius, in which you and he are both sitting in the motor car. You’re at the steering wheel and my father is teaching you how to drive. You’re both laughing. Do you want to see it?’
I hesitated, but didn’t dare break that moment.
‘Of course…’
Cristina went to look for the album in her suitcase and returned with a small book bound in leather. She sat next to me and started turning the pages, which were filled with old snapshots, cuttings and postcards. Manuel, like my father, had barely learned to read and write and his memories were mostly made up of images.
‘Look, here you are.’
I looked at the photograph and vividly recalled the summer day when Manuel had let me climb into the first car Vidal ever bought and had taught me the basics of driving. Then we had taken the car out along Calle Panamá and, doing about five kilometres per hour – a dizzying speed to me at the time – had driven as far as Avenida Pearson, returning with me at the wheel.
‘You’re an ace driver!’ Manuel had concluded. ‘If you’re ever stuck with your stories, you could consider a future in racing.’
I smiled, remembering that moment which I thought I had lost. Cristina handed me the album.
‘Keep it. My father would have liked you to have it.’
‘It’s yours, Cristina. I can’t accept it.’
‘I would rather you kept it.’
‘It’s in storage then, until you want to come and collect it.’
I started to turn the pages, revisiting faces I remembered and gazing at others I had never seen. There was the wedding photograph of Manuel Sagnier and his wife Marta, whom Cristina resembled a great deal, studio portraits of Cristina’s uncles and grandparents, a picture of a street in the Raval quarter with a procession going by, another of the San Sebastián bathing area on La Barceloneta beach. Manuel had collected old postcards of Barcelona and newspaper cuttings with photos of a very young Vidal – one of him posing by the doors of the Hotel Florida at the top of Mount Tibidabo, and another where he stood arm in arm with a staggering beauty in the halls of La Rabasada casino.
‘Your father worshipped Don Pedro.’
‘He always said we owed everything to him,’ Cristina answered.
I continued to travel through poor Manuel’s memories until I came to a page with a photograph that didn’t seem to fit in with the rest. It was a picture of a girl of about eight or nine, walking along a small wooden jetty that stretched out into a sheet of luminous sea. She was holding the hand of an adult, a man dressed in a white suit, who was partly cut off by the frame. At the end of the jetty you could make out a small sailing boat and an endless horizon on which the sun was setting. The girl, who was standing with her back to the camera, was Cristina.
‘This is my favourite,’ murmured Cristina.
‘Where was it taken?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember that place or that day. I’m not even sure whether that man is my father. It’s as if the moment never existed. I found the picture years ago in my father’s album and I’ve never known what it means. It seems to be trying to say something to me.’
I went on turning the pages while Cristina told me who each person was.
‘Look, this is me when I was fourteen.’
‘I know.’
Cristina looked at me sadly.
‘I didn’t realise, did I?’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘You’ll never be able to forgive me.’
I preferred to go on turning the pages than to look into her eyes.
‘There’s nothing to forgive.’
‘Look at me, David.’
I closed the album and did as she asked.
‘It’s a lie,’ she said. ‘I did realise. I realised every day, but I thought I had no right.’
‘Why?’
‘Because our lives don’t belong to us. Not mine, not my father’s, not yours…’
‘Everything belongs to Vidal,’ I said bitterly.