THE STORM HAD swept the street of passers-by and left the bookshop bereft of customers. Fermín decided to devote the day to assorted menial undertakings and a dash of low-level philosophizing. Taking no notice of the lightning flashes and the crashing rain, which seemed determined to knock down the shop window, he turned on the radio. Patiently, as if he were coaxing the lock of a safe, he turned the dial until he came across the sound of a big band that was launching into the first bars of “Siboney”. At the first roll of the timbale drums, Fermín began to sway to the Caribbean rhythm and went back to the repair and restoration work of a six-volume edition of The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue, with Daniel as his kitchen boy and helper.
“I used to kill this tune on the dance floor and sweep the chorus girls off their feet at the Tropicana when I was young and still had a good hip movement. What memories it brings . . . If instead of good looks I’d had a talent for literature, I would have written The Mysteries of Havana,” he proclaimed.
“Eros won, and Parnassus lost,” Bea remarked.
Fermín walked over to her, keeping step with the music, his arms wide open, swinging his hips to the clave rhythm.
“Señora Bea, come, I’ll show you the basic steps of the son montuno. Your husband dances as if he were wearing cement clogs, and you haven’t been able to properly experience the frenzy of the Afro-Cuban tempo. Let’s go . . .”
Bea ran to hide in the back room, where she hoped to finish squaring the accounts and keep her distance from Fermín’s bopping and crooning.
“Your wife can sometimes be as dull as the small print on a land-registry list,” Fermín said.
“You’re telling me,” replied Daniel.
“Sound travels here,” warned Bea’s voice from the back room.
This pleasant atmosphere was broken when they heard a car braking suddenly on the wet street. When they looked up, they saw a taxi stop in the pouring rain outside the Sempere & Sons shop window. There was a sudden flash of lightning, and for a split second the car looked like a carriage made of molten lead smouldering in the rain.
“Leave it to a taxi driver . . .” said Fermín.
The rest happened at the speed of disaster. A young boy soaked to the skin, face flattened by terror, came out of the taxi and when he saw the CLOSED notice on the door started banging the glass with his fists. Fermín and Daniel swapped glances.
“And they say nobody wants to buy books any more,” said Fermín.
Daniel walked over to the door and opened it. The boy, who looked as if he were on the verge of collapse, put his hand on his chest, took a deep breath, and asked, almost shouting, “Which of you is Fermín Romero de Torres?”
Fermín raised a hand. “That’s me, the one with the muscles.”
Fernandito rushed over to grab his arm, pulling at him. “I need you,” he begged.
“Look, kid, don’t take this the wrong way, but the most stunning of females have told me the same many a time, and I’ve known how to resist.”
“It’s Alicia,” Fernandito panted. “I think she’s dying . . .”
Fermín went pale. He looked at Daniel in alarm and, without saying a word, let Fernandito drag him to the street and get into the taxi, which sped away.
Bea, who had just poked her head around the back-room curtain and witnessed the scene, looked at Daniel in bewilderment.
“What was that?”
Her husband sighed despondently. “Bad news,” he murmured.
As soon as he landed inside the car, Fermín came up against the taxi driver’s eyes.
“Not you again,” said the driver. “Where are we going now?”
Fermín tried to size up the situation. It took him a few moments to realize that the figure with skin as pale as wax and a faraway look lying on the back seat of the taxi was Alicia. Fernandito was cradling her head in his hands, struggling to hold back his tears of panic.
“Just keep going,” Fermín ordered the taxi driver.
“Where to?”
“For now, just straight ahead. Step on it.”
Fermín searched Fernandito’s eyes.
“I didn’t know what to do,” stammered the boy. “She wouldn’t let me take her to a hospital or a doctor and . . .”
In a brief moment of lucidity, Alicia gazed at Fermín and smiled sweetly at him. “Fermín, always trying to save me.”
When he heard her shaky voice, Fermín’s stomach and all its neighbouring entrails shrank. Since he’d eaten a whole bagful of dry almond biscuits for breakfast, it was triply painful. Alicia dangled between consciousness and the abyss, so Fermín decided to shake the young boy for information, since he seemed the most scared of all three by far. “You, what’s your name?”
“Fernandito.”
“Can you tell me what’s happened here?”
Fernandito began to sum up what had happened in the last twenty-four hours with so much rush and confusion of details that Fermín stopped him, deciding to establish practical priorities. He felt Alicia’s belly and examined her bloodstained fingers.
“Helmsman,” he ordered the taxi driver, “head for the Hospital del Mar. Fly!”
“You should have hailed a balloon. Look at the traffic.”
“Either we get there in the next ten minutes, or I’ll burn down this heap. You have my word.”
The taxi driver grunted and pressed the accelerator. He and Fermín exchanged scowling glances through the rear-view mirror.
“Don’t quarrel, you two,” Fernandito scolded them. “We’re losing Señorita Alicia.”
“Holy shit,” swore the cab driver, dodging the traffic on Vía Layetana on his way to the waterfront.
Fermín pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to Fernandito. “Hold the handkerchief out of the window,” he ordered him.
Fernandito nodded and did as he was told. Taking great care, Fermín lifted Alicia’s blouse and found the hole left by the awl in her belly. Blood was gushing out of it.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph . . .” He pressed the wound with his hand and checked the traffic. Despite his grumbling, the taxi driver was performing juggling tricks with cars, buses and pedestrians at breakneck speed.
Fermín felt his breakfast swiftly rising up his throat. “If at all possible, the idea would be to get to the hospital alive. One person at death’s door is more than enough.”
“Ask the Three Kings for miracles. And if not, you’re welcome to take the wheel,” replied the driver. “How’s it going back there?”
“We could do better.”
Fermín stroked Alicia’s face and patted it gently, trying to revive her. She opened her eyes. Her corneas were bursting with blood from the blows. “You mustn’t fall asleep now, Alicia. Make an effort to stay awake. Do it for me. If you like, I can crack dirty jokes or sing you some Frank Sinatra hits.”
Alicia gave him a dying smile. At least she could still hear.
“Picture the Generalissimo in his hunting outfit, with his little beret and his boots. That always gives me nightmares and won’t let me sleep.”
“I’m cold,” murmured Alicia weakly.
“We’re almost there . . .”
Fernandito was watching her in dismay. “It’s my fault. She kept asking me not to take her to any hospital, and she scared me,” he said. “She kept assuring me that they’d look for her there—”
“It’s to the hospital or to the graveyard,” Fermín interrupted.
Fernandito looked as if he’d been hit in the face. He was only a kid, Fermín remembered; he was probably more frightened than anyone else in the taxi. “Don’t worry, Fernando. You did what you had to do. In moments like these, anyone can get his underwear in a knot.”
Fernandito sighed, consumed by guilt. “If anything should happen to Señorita Alicia, I’ll die . . .”
She took his hand and pressed it feebly.
“What if that man finds her . . . Hendaya?” Fernandito whispered.
“There’s no fucking way anyone’s going to find her,” said Fermín. “I’ll make sure of that.”
With her eyes half-open, Alicia was trying to follow the conversation. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“To Can Solé. Their prawns with garlic resurrect the dead. Just the job, you’ll see.”
“Don’t take me to a hospital, Fermín . . .”
“Who said anything about hospitals? That’s where people die. Hospitals are statistically the most dangerous places in the world. Rest assured. I wouldn’t take a bunch of lice to a hospital.”
In an attempt to dodge the traffic that had solidified on the lower stretch of Vía Layetana, the taxi had moved into the oncoming traffic lane. Fermín saw a bus go past within a hair’s breadth of the window.
“Father, is that you?” called Alicia. “Father, don’t leave me . . .”
Fernandito looked at Fermín, panic-stricken.
“Pay no attention, kid. The poor thing is delirious, she’s hallucinating. It’s quite common in the Spanish temperament. Boss, how’s it going out there?”
“Either we all arrive alive, or we fall by the wayside,” said the taxi driver.
“That’s the spirit.”
Fermín saw they were approaching Paseo de Colón at cruising speed. A wall of trams, cars and humanity rose five seconds ahead. The driver clutched the wheel with all his might, muttering some verbal abuse.
Commending his soul to the goddess Fortune or whoever happened to be on call, Fermín smiled weakly at Fernandito. “Hold tight, son.”
Never had a four-wheeled object sliced through the traffic on Paseo de Colón so recklessly, provoking a roar of hoots, insults and curses. Having crossed the avenue, the taxi plunged into the area leading to La Barceloneta, where it pulled into a street as narrow as a sewage tunnel, taking with it a team of motorbikes parked on the edges.
“Bravo, maestro!” Fermín chanted.
At last they sighted the beach and a purple-tinged Mediterranean. The taxi swung into the hospital’s front entrance and stopped opposite two ambulances, letting out a deep mechanical groan of surrender and scrap metal. A veil of steam emerged from the sides of the bonnet.
“You’re a star,” Fermín declared, patting the driver’s shoulder. “Fernandito, take this champion’s name and his number plate, we’ll send him a Christmas hamper, with ham and turrones included.”
“I’ll be quite happy as long as you never hail my taxi again.”
Twenty seconds later a squadron of nurses took Alicia out of the car, placed her on a stretcher, and rushed off with her to the operating theatre, while Fermín ran alongside her, his hands pressing the wound.
“You’re going to need a few hectolitres of blood,” he warned. “You can take as much as you like from me. I may have a lean frame, but I have more liquid reserves than the national park of Aigüestortes.”
“Are you related to the patient?” asked a porter who came up to him at the entrance to the surgery department.
“I’m the alternate father figure and designated parental backup,” replied Fermín.
“And what does that mean?”
“It means get out of my way or I’ll find myself in the painful need to catapult your scrotum up your neck by kneeing you in the balls. Are we clear?”
The porter stood to one side, and Fermín accompanied Alicia until she was snatched from his hands and he saw her land, pale as a ghost, on an operating table. The nurses were cutting off her clothes with scissors, exposing her battered body, covered in bruises, scratches and cuts, and revealing the wound from which blood flowed unremittingly. Fermín caught a glimpse of the dark scar clamped onto one of her hips, spreading across her anatomy like a web about to devour her. He clenched his fists to stop his hands from shaking.
Alicia searched him with eyes that were veiled with tears, a feeble smile on her lips. Fermín prayed to the Limping Devil, the perennial favourite patron of doomed scenarios, not to take her away yet.
“What’s your blood group?” asked a voice next to him.
Holding Alicia’s gaze, Fermín stretched out one of his arms.
“O negative, universal and top quality.”