‘Isabella, you mustn’t tell anyone what you’re about to see tonight.’
‘Not even Sempere junior?’
I sighed.
‘Of course you can tell him. You can tell him everything. We can hardly keep any secrets from him.’
When the doors opened, Isaac, the keeper, smiled at us and stepped aside.
‘It’s about time we had an important visit,’ he said, bowing to Isabella. ‘Am I right in supposing you’d rather be the guide, Martín?’
‘If you don’t mind…’
Isaac stretched out his hand and I shook it.
‘Good luck,’ he said.
The keeper withdrew into the shadows, leaving me alone with Isabella. My ex-assistant – now the new manager of Sempere & Sons – observed everything with a mixture of astonishment and apprehension.
‘What sort of a place is this?’ she asked.
I took her hand and led her the remaining distance to the large hall that housed the entrance.
‘Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Isabella.’
Isabella looked up towards the glass dome and became lost in that impossible vision of white rays of light that criss-crossed a babel of tunnels, footbridges and bridges, all leading into a cathedral made of books.
‘This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands, a new spirit…’
Later I left Isabella waiting by the entrance to the labyrinth and set off alone through the tunnels, clutching that accursed manuscript I had not had the courage to destroy. I hoped my feet would guide me to the place where I was to bury it forever. I turned a thousand corners until I thought I was lost. Then, when I was convinced I’d followed the same path a dozen times, I discovered I was standing at the entrance to the small chamber where I’d seen my own reflection in the mirror in which the eyes of the man in black were ever-present. I found a gap between two spines of black leather and there, without thinking twice, I buried the boss’s folder. I was about to leave the chamber when I turned and went back to the shelf. I picked up the volume next to the slot in which I had confined the manuscript and opened it. I’d only read a couple of sentences when I heard that dark laughter again behind me. I returned the book to its place and picked another at random, flicking through the pages. I took another, then another, and went on in this way until I had examined dozens of the volumes that populated the room. I realised that they all contained different arrangements of the same words, that the same images darkened their pages and the same fable was repeated in them like a pas de deux in an infinite hall of mirrors. Lux Aeterna.
When I emerged from the labyrinth Isabella was waiting for me, sitting on some steps, holding the book she had chosen. I sat down next to her and she leaned her head on my shoulder.
‘Thank you for bringing me here,’ she said.
I suddenly understood that I would never see that place again, that I was condemned to dream about it and to sculpt what I remembered of it into my memory, considering myself lucky to have been able to walk through its passages and touch its secrets. I closed my eyes for a moment so that the image might become engraved in my mind. Then, without daring to look back, I took Isabella’s hand and made my way towards the exit, leaving the Cemetery of Forgotten Books behind me forever.
Isabella came with me to the dock, where the ship was waiting to take me far away from that city, from everything I knew.
‘What did you say the captain was called?’
‘Charon.’
‘I don’t think that’s funny.’
I hugged her for the last time and looked into her eyes. On the way we had agreed there would be no farewells, no solemn words, no promises to fulfil. When the midnight bells rang in Santa María del Mar, I went on board. Captain Olmo greeted me and offered to take me to my cabin. I said I would rather wait. The crew cast off and gradually the hull moved away from the dock. I positioned myself at the stern, watching the city fade in a tide of lights. Isabella remained there, motionless, her eyes fixed on mine, until the dock was lost in the night and the great mirage of Barcelona sank into the black waters. One by one the lights of the city went out, and I realised that I had already begun to remember.
Epilogue
Fifteen long years have passed since the night I fled the city of the damned. For a long time mine has been an existence filled with absences, with no other name or presence than that of a travelling stranger. I’ve had a hundred names and a hundred trades, none of them my own.
I have disappeared into huge cities and villages so small that nobody had a past or a future. In no place did I linger more than was necessary. Sooner rather than later I would flee again, without warning, leaving behind me only a couple of old books and second-hand clothes in sombre rooms where time showed no pity and memory burned. Uncertainty has been my only recollection. The years have taught me to live in the body of a stranger who does not know whether he committed those crimes he can still smell on his hands, or whether he has indeed lost his mind and is condemned to roam a world in flames which he dreamed up in exchange for a few coins and the promise of evading a death that now seems to him like the sweetest of rewards. I have often asked myself whether the bullet that Inspector Grandes fired at my heart went right through the pages of the book, whether I was the one who died in the cabin suspended in the sky.
During my years of pilgrimage I’ve seen how the inferno promised in the pages I wrote for the boss has taken on a life of its own. I have fled from my own shadow a thousand times, always looking over my shoulder, always expecting to find it round a corner, on the other side of the street or at the foot of my bed in the endless hours that precede dawn. I’ve never allowed anyone to know me long enough to ask why I never grow old, why no lines appear on my face, why my reflection is the same as the night I left Isabella in the port of Barcelona, and not a minute older.
There came a time when I believed I had exhausted all the hiding places of the world. I was so tired of being afraid, of living and dying from my memories, that I stopped where the land ended and an ocean began – an ocean which, like me, looks the same every morning – and, worn out, I collapsed.
It is a year to the day since I came to this place and recovered my name and my trade. I bought this old hut on the beach, just a shed that I share with the books left behind by the previous owner and a typewriter which I like to think might be the same one on which I wrote hundreds of pages that perhaps nobody remembers – I will never know. From my window I see a small wooden jetty that stretches out into the sea and, moored at the end, the boat that came with the house, a simple rowing boat in which I sometimes go out as far as the reef, at which point the coast almost disappears from view.
I had not written again until I got here. The first time I slipped a page into the typewriter and placed my hands on the keyboard, I was afraid I’d be unable to write a single line. I began writing this story during my first night in the hut. I wrote until dawn, just as I did years ago, without yet knowing who I was writing it for. During the day I walked along the beach or sat on the jetty opposite the hut – a gangway between sky and sea – reading through the piles of old newspapers I found in one of the cupboards. Their pages brought me stories of the war, of the world in flames that I had dreamed up for the boss.