‘If anything should happen to me,’ he said then, ‘you would help her, wouldn’t you, Señor Martín? You would do that for me?’
‘Of course, Manuel. But nothing is going to happen to you!’
The chauffeur bade me farewell. I saw him get into the car and drive away slowly. I wasn’t absolutely sure, but I could have sworn that, after a journey in which he had hardly opened his mouth, he was now talking to himself.
11
I spent the whole morning running about the house, straightening things and tidying up, airing the rooms, cleaning objects and corners I didn’t even know existed. I rushed down to a florist in the market and when I returned, laden with bunches of flowers, I realised I had forgotten where I’d hidden the vases in which to put them. I dressed as if I was going out to look for work. I practised words and greetings that sounded ridiculous. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that Vidal was right: I looked like a vampire. Finally I sat down in an armchair in the gallery to wait, with a book in my hands. In two hours I hadn’t turned over the first page. At last, at exactly four o’clock in the afternoon, I heard Cristina’s footsteps on the stairs and jumped up. By the time she rang the front doorbell I’d been at the door for an eternity.
‘Hello, David. Is this a bad moment?’
‘No, no, on the contrary. Please come in.’
Cristina smiled politely and stepped into the corridor. I led her to the reading room in the gallery, and offered her a seat. She was examining everything carefully.
‘It’s a very special place,’ she said. ‘Pedro did tell me you had an elegant home.’
‘He prefers the term “gloomy”, but I suppose it’s just a question of degrees.’
‘May I ask why you came to live here? It’s a rather large house for someone who lives alone.’
Someone who lives alone, I thought. You end up becoming what you see in the eyes of those you love.
‘The truth?’ I asked. ‘The truth is that I came to live here because for years I had seen this house almost every day on my way to and from the newspaper. It was always closed up, and I began to think it was waiting for me. In the end I dreamed, literally, that one day I would live in it. And that’s what happened.’
‘Do all your dreams come true, David?’
The ironic tone reminded me too much of Vidal.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘This is the only one. But you wanted to talk to me about something and I’m distracting you with stories that probably don’t interest you.’
I sounded more defensive that I would have wished. The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn’t know where to put it.
‘I wanted to talk to you about Pedro,’ Cristina began.
‘Ah.’
‘You’re his best friend. You know him. He talks about you as if you were his son. He loves you more than anyone. You know that.’
‘Don Pedro has treated me like a father,’ I said. ‘If it hadn’t been for him and for Señor Sempere, I don’t know what would have become of me.’
‘The reason I wanted to talk to you is that I’m very worried about him.’
‘Why are you worried?’
‘You know that some years ago I started work as his secretary. The truth is that Pedro is a very generous man and we’ve ended up being good friends. He has behaved very well towards my father, and towards me. That’s why it hurts me to see him like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘It’s that wretched book, the novel he wants to write.’
‘He’s been at it for years.’
‘He’s been destroying it for years. I correct and type out all his pages. Over the years I’ve been working as his secretary he’s destroyed at least two thousand pages. He says he has no talent. He says he’s a fraud. He’s constantly at the bottle. Sometimes I find him upstairs in his study, drunk, crying like a child…’
I swallowed hard.
‘He says he envies you, he wants to be like you, he says people lie and praise him because they want something from him – money, help – but he knows that his book is worthless. He keeps up appearances with everyone else, his smart suits and all that, but I see him every day, and I know he’s losing hope. Sometimes I’m afraid he’ll do something stupid. It’s been going on for some time now. I haven’t said anything because I didn’t know who to speak to. If he knew I’d come to see you he’d be furious. He always says: don’t bother David with my worries. He’s got his whole life ahead of him and I’m nothing now. He’s always saying things like that. Forgive me for telling you all this, but I didn’t know who to turn to…’
We sank into a deep silence. I felt an intense cold invading me: the knowledge that while the man to whom I owed my life had plunged into despair, I had been locked in my own world and hadn’t paused for one second to notice.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have come…’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’ve done the right thing.’
Cristina looked at me with a hint of a smile and for the first time I felt that I was not a stranger to her.
‘What can we do?’ she asked.
‘We’re going to help him,’ I said.
‘What if he doesn’t let us?’
‘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.