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

“Do you never sleep, doctor?” I would ask.

“No more than you,” he replied.

Around nine o’clock the doctor would take me to Cristina’s room and open the door, then leave us. I always found her sitting in the same armchair facing the window. I would bring over a chair and take her hand. She was barely aware of my presence. Then I would read out the pages I’d written for her the night before. Every day I started again from the beginning. Sometimes, when I interrupted my reading and looked at her, I would be surprised to discover the hint of a smile on her lips. I spent the day with her until the doctor returned in the evening and asked me to leave. Then I would trudge back to the hotel through the snow, eat some dinner, and go up to my room to continue writing until I was overcome by exhaustion. The days ceased to have a name.

When I went into Cristina’s room on the fifth day, as I did every morning, the armchair in which she was usually waiting for me was empty. I looked around anxiously and found her on the floor, curled up into a ball in a corner, clasping her knees, her face covered with tears. When she saw me she smiled, and I realized that she had recognized me. I knelt down next to her and hugged her. I don’t remember ever having been as happy as I was during those miserable seconds when I felt her breath on my face and saw that a glimmer of light had returned to her eyes.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

That afternoon Dr. Sanjuán gave me permission to take her out for an hour. We walked down to the lake and sat on a bench. She started to tell me a dream she’d had, about a child who lived in the dark maze of a town in which the streets and buildings were alive and fed on the souls of its inhabitants. In her dream, as in the story I had been reading to her, the girl managed to escape and came to a jetty that stretched out over an endless sea. She was holding the hand of the faceless stranger with no name who had saved her and who now went with her to the very end of the wooden platform, where someone was waiting for her, someone she would never see, because her dream, like the story I had been reading to her, was unfinished.

…

Cristina had a vague recollection of Villa San Antonio and Dr. San-juán. She blushed when she told me she thought he’d proposed to her a week ago. Time and space seemed to be confused in her mind. Sometimes she thought that her father had been admitted to one of the rooms and she’d come to visit him. A moment later she couldn’t remember how she’d got there and at times she ceased to care. She remembered that I’d gone out to buy the train tickets and referred to the morning she disappeared as if it were just the previous day. Sometimes she confused me with Vidal and asked me to forgive her. At others, fear cast a shadow over her face and she began to tremble.

“He’s getting closer,” she would say. “I have to go. Before he sees you.”

Then she would grow silent, unaware of my presence, unaware of the world itself, as if something had dragged her to some remote and inaccessible place.

After a few days, the certainty that Cristina had lost her mind began to affect me deeply. My initial hope became tinged with bitterness, and on occasion, when I returned at night to my hotel cell, I felt that old pit of darkness and hatred, which I had thought forgott

en, opening up inside me. Dr. Sanjuán, who watched over me with the same care and tenacity with which he treated his patients, had warned me that this would happen.

“Don’t give up hope, my friend,” he would say. “We’re making great progress. Have faith.”

I nodded meekly and returned day after day to the sanatorium to take Cristina out for a stroll as far as the lake and listen to the dreamed memories that she’d already described dozens of times but that she discovered anew every day. Each day she would ask me where I’d been, why I hadn’t come back to fetch her, and why I’d left her alone. Each day she looked at me from her invisible cage and asked me to hold her tight. Each day when I said good-bye to her, she asked me if I loved her and I always gave her the same reply.

“I’ll always love you,” I would say. “Always.”

…

One night I was woken by the sound of someone knocking on my door. It was three in the morning. I stumbled over, in a daze, and found one of the nurses from the sanatorium standing in the doorway.

“Dr. Sanjuán has asked me to come and fetch you.”

“What’s happened?”

Ten minutes later I was walking through the gates of Villa San Antonio. The screams could be heard from the garden. Cristina had apparently locked the door of her room from the inside. Dr. Sanjuán, who looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week, and two male nurses were trying to force the door open. Inside, Cristina could be heard shouting and banging on the walls, knocking down furniture as if she were destroying everything she could find.

“Who is in there with her?” I asked, petrified.

“Nobody,” replied the doctor.

“But she’s speaking to someone,” I protested.

“She’s alone.”

An orderly rushed up, carrying a large crowbar.

“It’s the only thing I could find,” he said.

The doctor nodded and the orderly levered the crowbar between the door and the frame.

“How was she able to lock herself in?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

For the first time I thought I saw fear in the doctor’s face, and he avoided my eyes. The orderly was about to force the door when suddenly there was silence on the other side.