“Maybe she was Diego Marlasca’s lover …”
“I don’t think that’s any of our business.”
“Sometimes you’re so boring.”
Isabella put the photographs back in the box. As she did so, one of them slipped from her hands. The picture fell at my feet. I picked it up and examined it: Irene Sabino, wearing a dazzling black gown, posed with a group of people dressed for a party in what seemed to be the grand hall of the Equestrian Club. It was just a picture of a social gathering that wouldn’t have caught my eye had I not noticed in the background, almost blurred, a gentleman with white hair standing at the top of a staircase. Andreas Corelli.
“You’ve gone pale,” said Isabella.
She took the photograph from my hand and perused it silently. I stood up and made a sign to Isabella to leave the room.
“I don’t want you to come in here again,” I said weakly.
“Why?”
I waited for her to leave the room and closed the door behind us. Isabella looked at me as if I weren’t altogether sane.
“Tomorrow you’ll call the Sisters of Charity and tell them to come and collect all this. They’re to take everything. What they don’t want, they can throw away.”
“But—”
“Don’t argue with me.”
I didn’t want to face her and went straight to the stairs that led up to the study. Isabella watched me from the corridor.
“Who is that man, Señor Martín?”
“Nobody,” I murmured. “Nobody.”
16
I went up to the study. Night had fallen, but there was no moon or stars in the sky. I opened the windows and gazed at the city in shadows. Only a light breeze was blowing and the sweat tingled on my skin. I sat on the windowsill smoking the second of the cigars Isabella had left on my desk a few days before and waiting for a breath of fresh air or a more presentable idea than the collection of clichés with which I was supposed to begin work on the boss’s commission. I heard the shutters in Isabella’s bedroom opening on the floor below. A rectangle of light fell across the courtyard, punctured by the profile of her silhouette. Isabella went up to her window and gazed into the darkness without noticing my presence. I watched her slowly undress. I saw her walk over to the mirror and examine her body, stroking her belly with the tips of her fingers and going over the cuts she had made on the inside of her arms and thighs. She looked at herself for a long time, wearing nothing but a defeated air, then turned off the light.
I returned to my desk and sat in front of my pile of notes. I went over sketches of stories full of mystic revelations and prophets who survived extraordinary trials and who returned bearing the revealed truth; of messianic infants abandoned at the doors of humble families with pure souls, who were persecuted by evil, godless empires; of promised paradises for those who would accept their destiny and play the game with a sporting spirit; and of idle, anthropomorphic deities with nothing better to do than keep a telepathic watch on the consciences of millions of fragile primates—primates who learned to think just in time to discover that they had been abandoned to their lot in a remote corner of the universe and whose vanity, or despair, made them slavishly believe that heaven and hell were eager to know about their paltry little sins.
I asked myself if this was what the boss had seen in me, a mercenary mind with no qualms about hatching a narcotic story fit for sending small children to sleep or for convincing some poor hopeless devil to murder his neighbor in exchange for the eternal gratitude of some god who subscribed to rule of the gun. Some days earlier another letter had arrived, requesting that I meet with the boss to discuss the progress of my work. Setting aside my scruples, I realized that I had barely twenty-four hours until the meeting and at the rate I was going I’d arrive with my hands empty but with my head full of doubts and suspicions. Since there was no alternative, I did what I’d done for so many years in similar circumstances. I placed a sheet of paper in the Underwood and, with my hands poised on the keyboard like a pianist waiting for the beat, I began to squeeze my brain to see what would come out.
17
“Interesting,” the boss pronounced when he’d finished the tenth and last page. “Strange, but interesting.”
We were sitting on a bench in the gilded haze of the Shade House in Ciudadela Park. A vault of wooden strips filtered the sun until it was reduced to a golden shimmer, and all around us a garden of plants shaped the play of light and dark in the peculiar luminous gloom. I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rise from my fingers in blue spirals.
“Coming from you, strange is a disturbing adjective,” I noted.
“I meant strange as opposed to vulgar,” Corelli specified.
“But?”
“There are no buts, Martín. I think you’ve found an interesting route with a lot of potential.”
For a novelist, when someone comments that their pages are interesting and have potential, it is a sign that things aren’t going well. Corelli seemed to read my anxiety.
“You’ve turned the question round. Instead of going straight for the mythological references you’ve started with the more prosaic. May I ask you where you got the idea of a warrior messiah instead of a peaceful one?”
“You mentioned biology.”
“Everything we need to know is written in the great book of nature,” Corelli agreed. “We only need the courage and the mental and spiritual clarity with which to read it.”