When Señor Agustín sees his sister come in with the shopping, he leaves the newspaper open on the counter and carries the basket into the kitchen. Señora Paquita stays on her feet, passes by Ringo without looking at him, and as she is taking off her coat announces that she’s going upstairs to change her shoes.
“Put the fish in the fridge and get along to the dentist, I’ll sort out everything else,” she says, raising her voice so that her brother will hear her. “The cod is for Violeta and her grandmother.”
While she is upstairs, Señor Agustín appears in a raincoat and beret. I’m off, Paqui! he shouts from the street door, and makes the usual gesture to Ringo: keep an eye out for anyone coming in. As soon as he is on his own, Ringo gets up from the stool, lifts the hem of his jersey, and undoes his shirt. It takes only three quick strides to leave the envelope on the open newspaper. Shortly afterwards, it is the first thing Señora Paquita sees when she moves behind the counter, putting on her apron. She picks it up and turns it over and over, as if she does not know what it is. The envelope is sealed; on the front is written the letter V, on the back there is nothing.
“Who brought this?” she asks Ringo. “Why didn’t you call me …? Was Señor Alonso just here?”
“No, it was a boy, Señora Paqui,” Ringo says rapidly, not raising his eyes from his game of Patience. “He left a minute ago. He’s not from the neighbourhood, I’ve never seen him around here … He asked for you, and seemed in a great hurry. I told him you’d be down straightaway, but he didn’t want to wait. He told me the message was from Señor Alonso, and that you would know what to do with it …”
“Goodness.” She doesn’t know whether to be pleased or not. She sketches a smile that reveals her small, dark teeth, and there is a bright gleam in her black eyes. “Is that what he told you?”
“Yes, señora. He told me: I’ve brought this letter for the lady who runs the bar. And he showed me the envelope before leaving it there. For Señora Paquita from Señor Alonso, she’s expecting it, he said. Then he left.”
He is holding a jack of hearts that he can’t place in the game.
“So we’ll have to tell Violeta,” Señora Paquita says to herself, then stands there thinking, still staring at the envelope. “Though I don’t know … He’s got a nerve. But now she has to know about it. Yes, she can decide what to do …”
“Is it something important, Señora Paquita?” There’s no reply. “Do you want me to go and tell Violeta?”
“She’s not at home,” she says vaguely. “She’s dropping by later for her shopping.”
Violeta arrives a few minutes later, tired and in a hurry. She’s spent the night by her mother’s bedside in the hospital, and Grandma Aurora is waiting for her at home. She is carrying a large envelope with X-rays and test results. Her mother is not well at all, she has very high blood pressure and they have found first-stage diabetes. Taking the cod, she says she probably won’t need anything more from the market because her grandmother wants her to go and live with her in Badalona, at least until her mother gets out of hospital.
“I think that’s for the best,” says Señora Paquita. She hesitates a moment, then goes on: “Do you want to make your mother happy? Give her this. She didn’t want you to see it, but …” She takes the letter from beneath her apron. “But you must give it to her. It’s bound to cheer her up.”
“A pleasure?” Before taking the letter, she stares at it suspiciously in Señora Paquita’s hand. “Oh, that. About time too.” Looking disdainfully at the big letter V in blue ink: “And he didn’t even have the guts to write her name.”
Tearing the envelope open, she takes out the two sheets of pink paper, and slowly unfolds them, as if she were touching some infected material.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t read it, my girl …” Señora Paquita hesitates.
But Violeta has moved slightly away from her, and is already reading. With a sullen look on her face, and obviously put out. Her stern, distrustful eyes read the lines of writing quickly, while the impostor sits in his favourite refuge next to the window shuffling the pack for a new game of Patience. He watches her closely, in his mind reading the letter at the same time as her, accompanying her word by word, not forgetting a single one, so carefully chosen and so urgently endowed with meaning, but now all of a sudden so vacuous, so empty and fragile in Violeta’s interior voice:
Canfranc, 7th December 1948
Dear Vicky,
I hope this letter finds you well. Forgive me, because I ought to have written to you long ago. I’ll explain the reason for the delay, but first you need to know that I have never stopped thinking of you.
I’m writing to you from France, from a remote spot lost high in the Pyrenees. It’s a starry night, and I’m sitting on the ground with my knapsack beside me. Cold, ice, and silence. The snowy mountains are shining in the moonlight. Snowstorms on the highest peaks, and tracks in the snow along the path. I’m giving this letter to messengers I can trust, a chain of friendly hands, but I have no idea when it will reach you.
I’ve been told that you are looking for me, that you’ve been seen wandering on Montaña Pelada, or on the loneliest slopes of Parque Güell and up on Monte Carmelo; that you ask after me day and night, that you’ve been seen waiting for me where we used to meet, sitting for hours under the blossoming lime tree in the ruins of Can Xirot. You shouldn’t do that, Vicky. Out of the love I have for you, I beg you not to. Because I no longer go where I used to go, light of my life, because I’m not what you think I am, because nothing is exactly the same any more, pumpkinhead; because, although my love is still the same, I am not the man I was and am not where I once was. Think of me as an impostor, that we are all living an illusion, and that nobody knows when we will be free of it, but that our love is real.
An unexpected dirty trick of fate, which is always against me and all my plans, has obliged me to absent myself for a time from this city I hate, full of blue rats and broken promises, but I am sure you will forgive me. Urgent matters of the greatest importance, that I should not explain for your own safety, because what you don’t know you can’t tell, have brought me to France fleeing from justice and I don’t know when I’ll be able to return. But you have been and continue to be my lucky star, and I know I shall not get lost. I’d like to live in words, because in them I shall be faithful to you for ever, to the far side of death.
It is possible that this letter is not what you were hoping for, the one announcing our rapid, so greatly desired reunion. Possibly I should ask you to forget me, perhaps it would be best for us to say farewell, I don’t know, I have never lived a love as strong as this, and have never felt so confused … What would a woman as generous as you think if she knew that the man she loved so much, who always made so much of his ideals, is now no more than a charlatan, a good-for-nothing, a restless soul, a cheap smuggler who one day could end up in prison? Don’t you think that there’s no longer any place for our love in Barcelona? All I can say to you is this: Don’t wait for me, but let me wait for you everywhere, in everything. The land I’m going to is called Shangri-la, and they say it’s a land of fantasy. But what does that matter if we have dreamt it, what does it matter if it is a lie?