“I could see it coming. Nothing anyone could do about it.”
“Have you discovered anything about the cause of the fire?” I asked.
The inspector looked at me, then nodded.
“Everything seems to indicate that somebody spilled petrol over Señor Barrido and then set fire to him. The flames spread when he panicked and tried to get out of his office. His partner and the employee who rushed over to help him were trapped.”
I swallowed hard. Grandes smiled reassuringly.
“The publishers’ lawyer was saying this afternoon that, given the personal nature of your agreement, it becomes null and void with the death of the publishers, although their heirs will retain the rights on all the works published until now. I suppose he’ll write to you, but I thought you might like to know in advance, in case you need to take any decision concerning the offer from the other publisher you mentioned.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Grandes took a last puff of his cigarette and threw the butt on the ground. He smiled affably and stood up. Then he patted me on the shoulder and walked off toward Calle Princesa.
“Inspector?” I called.
Grandes stopped and turned round.
“You don’t think that …”
Grandes gave a weary smile.
“Take care, Martín.”
…
I went to bed early and woke all of a sudden thinking it was the following day, only to discover that it was just after midnight.
In my dreams I had seen Barrido and Escobillas trapped in their office. The flames crept up their clothes until every inch of their bodies was covered. First their clothes, then their skin began to fall off in strips, and their panic-stricken eyes cracked under the heat. Their bodies shook in spasms of agony until they collapsed among the rubble. Flesh peeled off their bones like melted wax, forming a smoking puddle at my feet, in which I could see my own smiling reflection as I blew out the match I held in my fingers.
I got up to fetch a glass of water and, assuming I’d missed the train to sleep, I went up to the study, opened the drawer in my desk and pulled out the book I had rescued from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. I turned on the reading lamp and twisted its flexible arm so that it focused directly on the book. I opened to the first page and began to read:
Lux Aeterna
D.M.
At first glance, the book was a collection of texts and prayers that seemed to make no sense. It was a manuscript, a handful of typed pages bound rather carelessly in leather. I went on reading and after a while I thought I sensed some sort of method in the sequence of events, songs, and meditations that punctuated the main body of the text. The language possessed its own cadence, and what had at first seemed like a complete absence of form or style gradually turned into a hypnotic chant that permeated the reader’s mind, plunging him into a state somewhere between drowsiness and forgetfulness. The same thing was true of the content, whose central theme did not become apparent until well into the first section, or chant, for the work seemed to be structured in the manner of ancient poems written in an age when time proceeded at its own pace and was unending. I realized then that Lux Aeterna was, for want of a better description, a sort of book of the dead.
After reading the first thirty or forty pages of circumlocutions and riddles, I found myself caught up in a precise, extravagant, and increasingly disturbing puzzle of prayers and entreaties in which death, referred to at times—in awkwardly constructed verses—as a white angel with reptilian eyes and at other times as a luminous boy, was presented as a sole and omnipresent deity made manifest in nature, desire, and the fragility of existence.
Whoever the mysterious D.M. was, death hovered over his verses like an all-consuming and eternal force. A byzantine tangle of references to various mythologies of heaven and hell were knotted together here into a single plane. According to D.M., there was only one beginning and one end, only one creator and one destroyer who presented himself under different names to confuse men and tempt them in their weakness, a sole God whose true face was divided into two halves: one sweet and pious, the other cruel and demonic.
That much I was able to deduce, but no more, because beyond those principles the author seemed to have lost the course of his narrative and it was almost impossible to decipher the prophetic references and images that peppered the text. Storms of blood and fire pouring over cities and peoples. Armies of corpses in uniform running across endless plains, destroying all life as they passed. Babies strung up with torn flags at the gates of fortresses. Black seas where thousands of souls in torment were suspended for all eternity beneath icy, poisoned waters. Clouds of ashes and oceans of bones and rotten flesh infested with insects and snakes. The succession of hellish, nauseating images went on unabated.
As I turned the pages I had the feeling that, step by step, I was followin
g the map of a sick and broken mind. Line after line, the author of those pages had, without being aware of it, been documenting his own descent into a chasm of madness. The last third of the book seemed to suggest an attempt at retracing his steps, a desperate cry from the prison of his insanity to escape the labyrinth of tunnels that had formed in his mind. The text ended suddenly, midway through an imploring sentence, offering no explanation.
By this time my eyelids were beginning to close. A light breeze wafted through the window. It came from the sea, sweeping the mist off the rooftops. I was about to close the book when I realized that something was trapped in my mind’s filter, something connected to the type on those pages. I returned to the beginning and started to go over the text. I found the first example on the fifth line. From then on the same mark appeared every two or three lines. One of the characters, the capital S, was always slightly tilted to the right. I took a blank page from the drawer, slipped it in the roller of the Underwood typewriter on my desk, and wrote a sentence at random:
Sometimes I hear the bells of Santa María del Mar.
I pulled out the paper and examined it under the lamp:
Sometimes … of Santa María