The doctor raised his hand to silence me. Then he stood up and put on his overcoat.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Thank you, doctor.’
‘Thank you. For coming here.’
The following morning I left the hotel just as the sun was beginning to rise over the frozen lake. A group of children was playing by the shore, throwing stones at the hull of a small boat wedged in the ice. It had stopped snowing and white mountains were visible in the distance. Large clouds paraded across the sky like monumental cities built of mist. I reached Villa San Antonio shortly before nine o’clock. Doctor Sanjuán was waiting for me in the garden with Cristina. They were sitting in the sun and the doctor held Cristina’s hand as he spoke to her. She barely glanced at him. When he saw me crossing the garden, he beckoned me over to join them. He had kept a chair for me opposite Cristina. I sat down and looked at her, her eyes on mine without seeing me.
‘Cristina, look who’s here,’ said the doctor.
I took Cristina’s hand and moved closer to her.
‘Speak to her,’ said the doctor.
I nodded, lost in her absent gaze, but could find no words. The doctor stood up and left us alone. I saw him disappear into the sanatorium, but not without first asking a nurse to keep a close eye on us. Ignoring the presence of the nurse, I pulled my chair even closer to Cristina’s. I brushed her hair from her forehead and she smiled.
‘Do you remember me?’ I asked.
I could see my reflection in her eyes, but didn’t know whether she could see me or hear my voice.
‘The doctor says you’ll get better soon and we’ll be able to go home. Or wherever you like. I’ll leave the tower house and we’ll go far away, just as you wanted. A place where nobody will know us and nobody will care who we are or where we’re from.’
Her hands were covered with long woollen gloves that masked the bandages on her arms. She had lost weight and there were deep lines on her skin; her lips were cracked and her eyes dull and lifeless. All I could do was smile and stroke her cheek and her forehead, talking non-stop, telling her how much I’d missed her and how I’d looked for her everywhere. We spent a couple of hours like that, until the doctor returned and Cristina was taken indoors. I stayed there, sitting in the garden, not knowing where else to go, until I saw Doctor Sanjuán reappear at the door. He came over and sat down beside me.
‘She didn’t say a word,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she was even aware that I was here…’
‘You’re wrong, my friend,’ he replied. ‘This is a long process, but I can assure you that your presence helps her – a lot.’
I accepted the doctor’s meagre reassurance and kind-hearted lie.
‘We’ll try again tomorrow,’ he said.
It was only midday.
‘And what am I going to do until tomorrow?’ I asked him.
‘Aren’t you a writer? Then write. Write something for her.’
9
I walked round the lake back to the hotel. The receptionist had told me where to find the only bookshop in the village, and I was able to buy some blank sheets of paper and a fountain pen that must have been there since time immemorial. Thus equipped, I locked myself in my room. I moved the table over to the window and asked for a flask of coffee. I spent almost an hour gazing at the lake and the mountains in the distance before writing a single word. I remembered the old photograph Cristina had given me, that image she had never been able to place, of a girl walking along a wooden jetty that stretched out to sea. I imagined myself walking down that pier, my steps following behind her, and slowly the words began to flow and the outline of a story emerged. I knew I was going to write the story that Cristina could never remember, the story that had led her, as a child, to walk over those shimmering waters holding on to a stranger’s hand. I would write the tale of a memory that never was, the memory of a stolen life. The images and the light that began to appear between sentences took me back to the old, shadowy Barcelona that had shaped us both. I wrote until the sun had set and there was not a drop of coffee left in the flask, until the frozen lake was lit up by a blue moon and my eyes and hands were aching. I let the pen drop and pushed aside the sheets of paper lying on the table. When the receptionist came to knock on my door to ask if I was coming down for dinner, I didn’t hear him. I had fallen fast asleep, for once dreaming and believing that words, even my own, had the power to heal.
Four days passed with the same rhythm. I rose at dawn and went out onto the balcony to watch the sun tint with scarlet the lake at my feet. I would arrive at the sanatorium around half past eight in the morning and usually found Doctor Sanjuán sitting on the entrance steps, gazing at the garden with a steaming cup of coffee in his hands.
‘Do you never sleep, doctor?’ I would ask.
‘No more than you,’ he replied.
Around nine o’clock the doctor would take me to Cristina’s room and open the door, then leave us. I always found her sitting in the same armchair facing the window. I would bring over a chair and take her hand. She was barely aware of my presence. Then I would read out the pages I’d written for her the night before. Every day I started again from the beginning. Sometimes, when I interrupted my reading and looked at her, I would be surprised to discover the hint of a smile on her lips. I spent the day with her until the doctor returned in the evening and asked me to leave. Then I would trudge back to the hotel through the snow, eat some dinner and go up to my room to continue writing until I was overcome by exhaustion. The days ceased to have a name.
When I went into Cristina’s room on the fifth day, as I did every morning, the armchair in which she was usually waiting for me was empty. I looked around anxiously and found her on the floor, curled up into a ball in a corner, clasping her knees, her face covered with tears. When she saw me she smiled, and I realised that she had recognised me. I knelt down next to her and hugged her. I don’t remember ever having been as happy as I was during those miserable seconds when I felt her breath on my face and saw that a glimmer of light had returned to her eyes.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
That afternoon Doctor Sanjuán gave me permission to take her out for an hour. We walked down to the lake and sat on a bench. She started to tell me a dream she’d had, about a child who lived in the dark maze of a town in which the streets and buildings were alive and fed on the souls of its inhabitants. In her dream, as in the story I had been reading to her, the girl managed to escape and came to a jetty that stretched out over an endless sea. She was holding the hand of the faceless stranger with no name who had saved her and who now went with her to the very end of the wooden platform, where someone was waiting for her, someone she would never see, because her dream, like the story I had been reading to her, was unfinished.
Cristina had a vague recollection of Villa San Antonio and Doctor Sanjuán. She blushed when she told me she thought he’d proposed to her a week ago. Time and space seemed to be confused in her mind. Sometimes she thought that her father had been admitted to one of the rooms and she’d come to visit him. A moment later she couldn’t remember how she’d got there and at times she ceased to care. She remembered that I’d gone out to buy the train tickets and referred to the morning in which she had disappeared as if it were just the previous day. Sometimes she confused me with Vidal and asked me to forgive her. At others, fear cast a shadow over her face and she began to tremble.
‘He’s getting closer,’ she would say. ‘I have to go. Before he sees you.’
Then she would sink into a deep silence, unaware of my presence, unaware of the world itself, as if something had dragged her to some remote and inaccessible place.