I didn’t and a few seconds later Vidal nodded to himself and pulled his hand away.
“What are you doing here?” I spat out.
“Sempere was my friend too,” replied Vidal.
“I see. And are you here alone?”
Vidal looked puzzled.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Who?”
I let out a bitter laugh. Barceló, who had noticed us, was coming over, looking concerned.
“What did you promise her, to buy her back?”
Vidal’s eyes hardened.
“You don’t know what you’re saying, David.”
I drew closer, until I could feel his breath on my face.
“Where is she?” I insisted.
“I don’t know,” said Vidal.
“Of course,” I said, looking away.
I was about to walk toward the exit when Vidal grabbed my arm and stopped me.
“David, wait—”
Before I realized what I was doing, I turned and hit him as hard as I could. My fist crashed against his face and he fell backwards. I noticed that there was blood on my hand and heard steps hurrying toward me. Two arms caught hold of me and pulled me away from Vidal.
“For God’s sake, Martín …” said Barceló.
The bookseller knelt down next to Vidal, who was gasping as blood streamed from his mouth. Barceló cradled his head and threw me a furious look. I fled, passing some of the people who had been present at the graveside and who had stopped to watch the altercation. I didn’t have the courage to look them in the eye.
3
I didn’t leave the house for several days, sleeping at odd times and barely eating. At night I would sit in the gallery by the open fire and listen to the silence, hoping to hear footsteps outside the door, thinking that Cristina would return, that as soon as she heard about the death of Señor Sempere she’d come back to me, if only out of compassion, which by now would have been enough for me. When almost a week had gone by since the death of the bookseller and I realized that Cristina was not going to return, I began to visit the study again. I rescued the boss’s manuscript from the trunk and started to reread it, savoring every phrase, every paragraph. Reading it produced in me both nausea and a dark satisfaction. When I thought of the hundred thousand francs that at first had seemed so much, I smiled and reflected that I’d sold myself to that son of a bitch too cheaply. Vanity papered over my bitterness, and pain closed the door of my conscience. In an act of pure arrogance, I reread my predecessor Diego Marlasca’s Lux Aeterna and then threw it into the fire. Where he had failed, I would triumph. Where he had lost his way, I would find the path out of the labyrinth.
I went back to work on the seventh day. I waited until midnight and sat down at my desk. A clean sheet in the old Underwood typewriter and the city black behind the windowpanes. The words and images sprang forth from my hands as if they’d been waiting angrily in the prison of my soul. The pages flowed from me without thought or measure, with nothing more than the desire to bewitch, or poison, hearts and minds. I stopped thinking about the boss, about his reward or his demands. For the first time in my life I was writing for myself and nobody else. I was writing to set the world on fire and be consumed along with it. I worked every night until I collapsed from exhaustion. I banged the typewriter keys until my fingers bled and fever clouded my vision.
One morning in January, when I’d lost all notion of time, I heard someone knocking on the door. I was lying on my bed, my eyes lost in the old photograph of Cristina as a small child, walking hand in hand with a stranger along a jetty that reached out into a sea of light. That image seemed to be the only good thing I had left, the key to all mysteries. I ignored the knocking for a few minutes, until I heard her voice and knew she was not going to give up.
“Open the door, damn you! I know you’re there and I’m not leaving until you open it or I knock it down.”
When she saw me Isabella stepped back and looked horrified.
“It’s only me, Isabella.”
She pushed me aside and made straight for the gallery, where she flung open the windows. Then she went to the bathroom and started filling the tub. She took my arm and dragged me there, then made me sit on the edge of the bath and examined my eyes, lifting my eyelids with her fingertips and muttering to herself. Without saying a word she began to remove my shirt.
“Isabella, I’m not in the mood.”
“What are all these cuts? But … what have you done to yourself?”