The Prisoner of Heaven (The Cemetery of Forgotten 3)

‘You can’t ask me that, Fermín.’

‘I can and I must.’

At last I nodded and Fermín let go of my arm.

13

When I finally got home it was almost two in the morning. I was about to walk through the front door of the building when I noticed there was light inside the shop, a faint glow coming from behind the back-room curtain. I stepped in through the side door in the hallway and found my father sitting at his desk, enjoying the first cigarette I’d seen him smoke in years. In front of him, on the table, lay an open envelope and the pages of a letter. I pulled a chair over and sat down facing him. My father stared at me, sunk in an impenetrable silence.

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I ventured.

He simply shrugged.

‘Good news?’ I asked, pointing at the letter.

My father handed it to me.

‘It’s from your Aunt Laura, the one who lives in Naples.’

‘I have an aunt in Naples?’

‘She’s your mother’s sister, the one who went to live in Italy with her mother’s side of the family the year you were born.’

I nodded absently. I didn’t remember her. Her name belonged among the strangers who came to my mother’s funeral all those years ago, and whom I’d never seen again.

‘She says she has a daughter who is coming to study in Barcelona and wants to know whether she can stay here for a while. Her name is Sofía.’

‘It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her mentioned,’ I said.

‘That makes two of us.’

The thought of my father sharing his flat with a teenager who was a perfect stranger seemed unlikely.

‘What are you going to say to her?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll have to say something.’

We continued sitting there quietly for almost a minute, gazing at one another without daring to speak about the matter that really filled our minds – not the visit of an unknown cousin.

‘I suppose you were out with Fermín,’ my father said at last, putting out his cigarette.

I nodded.

‘We had dinner at Can Lluís. Fermín finished everything, down to the napkins. I saw Professor Alburquerque there when we arrived and told him to drop by the bookshop.’

The sound of my own voice reciting banalities had an accusatory echo. My father observed me tensely.

‘Did Fermín tell you what’s been the matter with him lately?’

‘I think it’s nerves, because of the wedding and all that stuff that doesn’t agree with him.’

‘And that’s it?’

A good liar knows that the most efficient lie is always a truth that has had a key piece removed from it.

‘Well, he told me about the old days, about when he was in prison and all that.’

‘Then he must have told you about Brians, the lawyer. What did he say?’