‘You first,’ he offered.
The entrance resembled one of those interior courtyards in the old palaces of the area, paved with large flagstones and with a stone staircase that led to the front door of the living quarters. Daylight filtered in through a glass skylight, completely covered in pigeon and seagull excrement, that was set on high.
‘There aren’t any rats,’ I announced once I was inside the building.
‘A sign of good taste and common sense,’ said the property manager behind me.
We proceeded up the stairs until we reached the landing on the main floor, where the auditor spent ten minutes trying to find the right key for the lock. The mechanism yielded with an unwelcoming groan and the heavy door opened, revealing an endless corridor strewn with cobwebs that undulated in the gloom.
‘Holy Mother of God,’ mumbled the manager.
No one else dared take the first step, so once more I had to lead the expedition. The secretary held the lamp up high, looking at everything with a baleful air.
The manager and the auditor exchanged a knowing look. When they noticed that I was observing them, the auditor smiled calmly.
‘A good bit of dusting and some patching up and the place will look like a palace,’ he said.
‘Bluebeard’s palace,’ the manager added.
‘Let’s be positive,’ the auditor corrected him. ‘The house has been empty for some time: there’s bound to be some minor damage.’
I was barely paying attention to them. I had dreamed about that place so often as I walked past its front door that now I hardly noticed the dark, gloomy aura that possessed it. I walked up the main corridor, exploring rooms of all shapes and sizes in which old furniture lay abandoned under a thick layer of dust and shadow. One table was still covered with a frayed tablecloth on which sat a dinner service and a tray of petrified fruit and flowers. The glasses and cutlery were still there, as if the inhabitants of the house had fled in the middle of dinner.
The wardrobes were crammed with threadbare faded clothes and shoes. There were whole drawers filled with photographs, spectacles, fountain pens and watches. Dust-covered portraits observed us from every surface. The beds were made and covered with a white veil that shone in the half-light. A gramophone rested on a mahogany table. It had a record on it and the needle had slid to the end. I blew on the film of dust that covered it and the title of the recording came into view: W. A. Mozart’s Lacrimosa.
‘The symphony orchestra performing in your own home,’ said the auditor. ‘What more could one ask for? You’ll live like a lord here.’
The manager shot him a murderous look, clearly in disagreement. We went through the apartment until we reached the gallery at the back, where a coffee service lay on a table and an open book on an armchair was still waiting for someone to turn over the page.
‘It looks like whoever lived here left suddenly, with no time to take anything with them,’ I said.
The auditor cleared his throat.
‘Perhaps the gentleman would like to see the study?’
The study was at the top of a tall tower, a peculiar structure at the heart of which was a spiral staircase that led off the main corridor, while its outside walls bore the traces of as many generations as the city could remember. There it stood, like a watchtower suspended over the roofs of the Ribera quarter, crowned by a narrow dome of metal and tinted glass that served as a lantern, and topped by a weathervane in the shape of a dragon. We climbed the stairs, and when we reached the room at the top, the auditor quickly opened the windows to let in air and light. It was a rectangular room with high ceilings and dark wooden flooring. Its four large arched windows looked out on all four sides, giving me a view of the cathedral of Santa María del Mar to the south, the large Borne market to the north, the railway station to the east and to the west the endless maze of streets and avenues tumbling over one another towards Mount Tibidabo.
‘What do you say? Marvellous!’ proposed the auditor enthusiastically.
The property manager examined everything with a certain reserve and displeasure. His secretary held the lamp up high, even though it was no longer needed. I went over to one of the windows and leaned out, spellbound.
The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that when I opened those windows – my new windows – each evening its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets in my ear, that I could catch on paper and narrate to whoever cared to listen. Vidal had his exuberant and stately ivory tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees and fairytale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the Rose of Fire.
What finally decided the matter was the desk that dominated the centre of the study. On it, like a great sculpture of metal and light, stood an impressive Underwood typewriter for which, alone, I would have paid the price of the rent. I sat in the plush armchair facing the desk, stroked the typewriter keys, and smiled.
‘I’ll take it,’ I said.
The auditor sighed with relief and the manager rolled his eyes and crossed himself. That same afternoon I signed a ten-year rental agreement. While workmen were busy wiring the house for electricity, I devoted my time to cleaning, tidying and straightening the place up with the help of three servants whom Vidal sent trouping down without first asking me whether or not I wanted any help. I soon discovered that the modus operandi of that commando of electrical experts consisted in first drilling holes right, left and centre and then asking. Three days after their deployment, the house did not have a single light bulb that worked, but one would have thought that the place had been infested by a plague of woodworm that devoured plaster and the noblest of minerals.
‘Are you sure there isn’t a better way of fixing this?’ I would ask the head of the battalion, who resolved everything with blows of the hammer.
Otilio, as the talented man was called, would show me the building plans supplied by the property manager when I was handed the keys, and argue that the problem lay with the house, which was badly built.
‘Look at this,’ he would say. ‘I mean, when something is badly made, it’s badly made, and there are no two ways about it. Here, for example. Here it says that you have a water tank on the terrace. Well, no, sir, you have a water tank in the back yard.’
‘What does it matter? The water tank has nothing to do with you, Otilio. Concentrate on the electrics. Light. Not taps, not water pipes. Light. I need light.’
‘But everything is connected. What do you think about the gallery?’
‘I think it has no light.’
‘According to the plans this should be a supporting wall. Well, my mate Remigio here tapped it ever so slightly and half the wall came crashing down. And you should see the bedrooms. According to this plan, the size of the room at the end of the corridor should be almost forty square metres. Not in a million years! I’d be surprised if it measured twenty. There’s a wall where there shouldn’t be a wall. And as for the waste pipes, well, best not talk about them. Not one of them is where it’s supposed to be.’
‘Are you sure you know how to read the plans?’
‘Listen, I’m a professional. Mark my words: this house is a jigsaw puzzle. Everybody’s grandmother has poked their nose into this place.’
‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to make do with what there is. Perform a few miracles or do whatever you want, but by Friday I want to see all the walls plastered and painted, and the lights working.’