Fifteen long years have passed since the night I fled the city of the damned. For a long time mine has been an existence filled with absences, with no other name or presence than that of a traveling stranger. I’ve had a hundred names and a hundred trades, none of them my own.
I have disappeared into huge cities and villages so small that nobody had a past or a future. In no place did I linger more than was necessary. Sooner rather than later I would flee again, without warning, leaving behind me only a couple of old books and secondhand clothes in somber rooms where time showed no pity and memory burned. Uncertainty has been my only recollection. The years have taught me to live in the body of a stranger who does not know whether he committed those crimes he can still smell on his hands or whether he has indeed lost his mind and is condemned to roam a world in flames that he dreamed up in exchange for a few coins and the promise of evading a death that now seems to him like the sweetest of rewards. I have often asked myself whether the bullet that Inspector Grandes fired at my heart went right through the pages of the book, whether I was the one who died in the cabin suspended in the sky.
During my years of pilgrimage I’ve seen how the inferno promised in the pages I wrote for the boss has taken on a life of its own. I have fled from my own shadow a thousand times, always looking over my shoulder, always expecting to find it round a corner, on the other side of the street or at the foot of my bed in the endless hours before dawn. I’ve never allowed anyone to know me long enough to ask why I never grow old, why no lines appear on my face, why my reflection is the same as the night I left Isabella in the port of Barcelona, and not a minute older.
There came a time when I believed I had exhausted all the hiding places of the world. I was so tired of being afraid, of living and dying from my memories, that I stopped where the land ended and an ocean began—an ocean that, like me, looks the same every morning—and, worn out, I collapsed.
It is a year to the day since I came to this place and recovered my name and my trade. I bought this old hut on the beach, just a shed that I share with the books left behind by the previous owner and a typewriter that I like to think might be the same one on which I wrote hundreds of pages that perhaps nobody remembers—I will never know. From my window I see a small wooden jetty that stretches out into the sea and, moored at the end, the boat that came with the house, a simple rowboat in which I som
etimes go out as far as the reef, at which point the coast almost disappears from view.
I had not written again until I got here. The first time I slipped a page into the typewriter and placed my hands on the keyboard, I was afraid I’d be unable to write a single line. I began writing this story during my first night in the hut. I wrote until dawn, just as I did years ago, without yet knowing whom I was writing it for. During the day I walked along the beach or sat on the jetty opposite the hut—a gangway between sky and sea—reading through the piles of old newspapers I found in one of the cupboards. Their pages brought me stories of the war, of the world in flames that I had dreamed up for the boss.
It was while I was reading those chronicles about the war in Spain, and then in Europe and the rest of the world, that I decided I no longer had anything to lose; all I wanted to know was whether Isabella was all right and if perhaps she still remembered me. Or maybe I only wanted to know whether she was still alive. I wrote a letter, addressed to the old Sempere & Sons bookshop in Calle Santa Ana in Barcelona, that would take weeks or months to arrive at its destination, if it ever did arrive. For the sender’s name I wrote Mr. Rochester, knowing that if the letter did reach her hands, Isabella would know whom it was from. If she wished, she could leave it unopened and forget me forever.
For months I continued writing this story. I saw my father’s face again, and I walked through the offices of The Voice of Industry, dreaming that I might be able, one day, to emulate the great Pedro Vidal. Once more I saw Cristina Sagnier for the first time, and I went into the tower house to dive into the madness that had consumed Diego Marlasca. I wrote from midnight until dawn without resting, feeling alive for the first time since I had fled from the city.
The reply arrived one day in June. The postman had slipped the envelope under my door while I slept. It was addressed to Mr. Rochester and the return address read simply: Sempere & Sons Bookshop, Barcelona. For a few minutes I walked in circles round the hut, not daring to open it. Finally I went out and sat by the edge of the sea. In the letter I found a single page and a second, smaller, envelope. The second envelope, which looked worn, just had my name on it, David, in a handwriting I had not forgotten despite all the years that had flowed by since I last saw it.
In the letter, Sempere’s son told me that after a few years of tempestuous and intermittent courting, he and Isabella had married on 18 January 1935 in the church of Santa Ana. The ceremony, against all odds, had been conducted by the ninety-year-old priest who had delivered the eulogy at Señor Sempere’s funeral and who, in defiance of the bishop’s eagerness to see the back of him, refused to die and went on doing things his own way. A year later, only days before the civil war broke out, Isabella had given birth to a boy whose name would be Daniel Sempere. The terrible years of the war brought with them all manner of hardships, and shortly after the end of the conflict Isabella contracted cholera and died in her husband’s arms, in the apartment they shared above the bookshop. She was buried in Montjuïc on Daniel’s fourth birthday, during rain that lasted two days and two nights, and when the little boy had asked him if heaven was crying, his father couldn’t bring himself to reply.
The envelope with my name on it contained a letter that Isabella had written to me during her final days and that she’d made her husband swear he would send to me if he ever discovered my whereabouts:
Dear David,
Sometimes I think I began to write this letter to you years ago and still haven’t been capable of finishing it. A lot of time has passed since I last saw you and a lot of terrible, miserable things have happened, and yet not a day goes by when I don’t think of you and wonder where you are, whether you have found peace, whether you are writing, whether you’ve become a grumpy old man, whether you’re in love, or whether you still remember us, the small bookshop of Sempere & Sons and the worst assistant you ever had.
I’m afraid you left without teaching me how to write, and I don’t even know where to begin to put into words all the things I would like to say to you. I would like you to know that I have been happy, that thanks to you I found a man whom I’ve loved and who has loved me. Together we’ve had a child, Daniel. I always talk to him about you, and he has given my life a meaning that all the books in the world wouldn’t be able to explain.
Nobody knows this, but sometimes I still go back to that dock where I saw you leave and I sit there awhile, alone, waiting, as if I believe that some day you’ll return. If you do, you will see that despite all the things that have happened the bookshop is still there, the plot of land on which the tower house once stood is still empty, and all the lies that were said about you have been forgotten. So many people in these streets have blood on their souls that they no longer dare to remember, and when they do they lie to themselves because they cannot look at their own reflection in the mirror. In the bookshop we still sell your books, but under the counter, because they have been declared immoral. This country is filled with more people who are intent on destroying and burning books than with those who want to read them. These are bad times and I often think that there are worse times to come.
My husband and the doctors think they are fooling me, but I know that I have little time left. I know I will die soon and that by the time you receive this letter I will no longer be here. That is why I wanted to write to you, because I wanted you to know that I’m not afraid, that my only sorrow is that I’ll leave behind a good man who has given me his life, and my Daniel, alone in a world that every day seems to me more as you said it was and not as I wanted to believe it could be.
I wanted to write to you so that you know that, despite everything I have experienced, I’m grateful for the time I have spent here, grateful for having met you and for having been your friend. I wanted to write to you because I’d like you to remember me and, one day, if you have someone as I have my little Daniel, I’d like you to talk to that someone about me and, through your words, make me live forever.
From one who loves you,
Isabella
Two days after I received that letter I realized I was not alone on the beach. I felt his presence in the first breath of dawn but I would not, and could not, flee again. It happened one afternoon after I sat down to write by the window, while I waited for the sun to sink into the horizon. I heard the footsteps on the wooden planks of the jetty and I saw him.
The boss, dressed in white, was walking down the jetty holding the hand of a girl of about seven or eight. I recognized the image instantly, the old photograph Cristina had always treasured without knowing where it came from. The boss reached the end of the jetty and knelt down beside the girl. Together they watched the sun spill over the ocean in an endless sheet of molten gold. I stepped out of the hut and walked along the wooden gangway. When I reached the end, the boss turned and smiled at me. There was no threat or resentment on his face, only a hint of melancholy.
“I’ve missed you, dear friend,” he said. “I’ve missed our conversations, even our small arguments …”
“Have you come to settle a score?”
The boss smiled again and shook his head.
“We all make mistakes, Martín. I was the first. I stole what you loved the most. I didn’t do it to hurt you. I did it out of fear. Out of fear that she might drive you away from me, from our work. I was wrong. I’ve taken a long time to admit it, but if there is anything I do have, it is time.”
I observed him carefully. The boss, like me, had not grown a day older.
“Why have you come here, then?”
The boss shrugged his shoulders.
“I came to say good-bye.”