The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten 2)

“Your father was a good man,” I said. “A good friend.”

Cristina nodded and smiled, but I could see that her eyes were filling with tears.

“In the end he couldn’t remember anything. There were days when he confused me with my mother and would ask me to forgive him for the years he spent in prison. Then weeks would go by when he hardly seemed to notice I was there. Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn’t go away.”

“I’m sorry, Cristina.”

“In the last few days I thought he was better. He was beginning to remember things. I had brought with me one of his albums and I started to show him the photographs again, pointing out who was who. There is one very old picture, taken at Villa Helius, in which you and he are both sitting in the motorcar. You’re at the steering wheel and my father is teaching you how to drive. You’re both laughing. Do you want to see it?”

I hesitated but didn’t dare break that moment.

“Of course.”

Cristina went to look for the album in her suitcase and returned with a small book bound in leather. She sat next to me and started turning pages that were filled with old snapshots, cuttings, and postcards. Manuel, like my father, had barely learned to read and write and his memories were made up mostly of images.

“Look, here you are.”

I looked at the photograph and vividly recalled the summer day when Manuel had let me climb into the first car Vidal ever bought and had taught me the basics of driving. Then we had taken the car out along Calle Panamá and, doing about five kilometers per hour—a dizzying speed to me at the time—had driven as far as Avenida Pearson, returning with me at the wheel.

“You’re an ace driver!” Manuel had concluded. “If you’re ever stuck with your stories, you could consider a future in racing.”

I smiled, remembering that moment which I thought I had lost. Cristina handed me the album.

“Keep it. My father would have liked you to have it.”

“It’s yours, Cristina. I can’t accept it.”

“I would rather you kept it.”

“It’s in storage then, until you want to come and collect it.”

I turned the pages, revisiting faces I remembered and gazing at others I had never seen. There was the wedding photograph of Manuel Sagnier and his wife, Marta, whom Cristina resembled a great deal, studio portraits of her uncles and grandparents, a picture of a street in the Raval quarter with a procession going by, another of the San Sebastián bathing area on La Barceloneta beach. Manuel had collected old postcards of Barcelona and newspaper cuttings with photos of a very young Vidal—one of him posing by the doors of the Hotel Florida at the top of Mount Tibidabo and another where he stood arm in arm with a staggering beauty in the halls of La Rabasada casino.

“Your father worshipped Don Pedro.”

“He always said we owed everything to him,” Cristina answered.

I continued to travel through poor Manuel’s memories until I came to a page with a photograph that didn’t seem to fit in with the rest. It was a picture of a girl of about eight or nine, walking along a small wooden jetty that stretched out into a sheet of luminous sea. She was holding the hand of an adult, a man dressed in a white suit who was partly cut off by the frame. At the end of the jetty you could make out a small sailboat and an endless horizon on which the sun was setting. The girl, who was standing with her back to the camera, was Cristina.

“This is my favorite,” said Cristina.

“Where was it taken?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember that place or that day. I’m not even sure whether that man is my father. It’s as if the moment never existed. I found the picture years ago in my father’s album and I’ve never known what it means. It seems to be trying to say something to me.”

I went on turning the pages while Cristina told me who each person was.

“Look, this is me when I was fourteen.”

“I know.”

Cristina looked at me sadly.

“I didn’t realize, did I?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“You’ll never be able to forgive me.”