IT WAS THE best dream she’d ever had.
Alicia woke up in a room with white walls that smelled of camphor. A distant murmur of voices rose and fell in a tide of whispers. The first thing she noticed was the absence of pain. For the first time in twenty years, she wasn’t suffering. The pain had vanished completely, taking with it that world she’d inhabited almost all her life. In its place she found a space where light travelled through the air like a dense liquid, colliding with specks of dust that floated in the atmosphere, forming iridescent sparks.
Alicia laughed. She could breathe and feel her body resting. There was no more agony in her bones, and her spirit was rid of that biting metal clamp that had always imprisoned her. The face of an angel leaned over her and looked into her eyes. The angel was very tall; he wore a white coat, and had no wings. He barely had any hair either, but he carried a hypodermic syringe, and when she asked him whether she was dead, and whether this was hell, the angel smiled and said it depended how one looked at it, but she shouldn’t worry. She felt a small prick, and a torrent of liquid happiness spread through her veins, leaving a warm trail of peace.
A small devil appeared behind the angel. He was lean and had a huge nose, a nose that could have inspired Molière to write a comedy or Cervantes to invent an epic tale.
“Alicia, we’re going home,” the little devil announced in a voice that seemed strangely familiar.
A spirit with jet-black hair stood next to him. His features were so perfect that Alicia felt like kissing his lips, running her fingers through that fairy-tale hair, and falling in love with him, even if only for a while, enough for her to think she was awake and had bumped into the happiness that some careless person had dropped along the way.
“May I caress you?” she asked him.
The dark prince, for surely he was at least a prince, looked at the little devil uncertainly.
The devil made a gesture to indicate he need pay no attention to her. “That’s my blood running through her veins: it’s made her forget her decorum momentarily and left her on the wrong side of immodesty. It’ll pass.”
At a sign from the prince, a whole gang of dwarfs materialized, except that they weren’t dwarfs and were all dressed in white. Between the four of them, they lifted her off the bed by tugging at the sheets, and placed her on a stretcher. The prince took her hand and squeezed it. He would make a wonderful father, thought Alicia. The way he squeezed her hand and his velvety touch very much confirmed it.
“Would you like to have a child?” she asked.
“I’ve got seventeen, my dear,” said the prince.
“Go to sleep, Alicia, you’re embarrassing me,” said the little devil.
But she didn’t sleep. Holding her beau’s hand and riding aboard the magic stretcher, she went on dreaming as she rode through endless corridors decorated with a crest of white lights. They sailed through elevators and rooms haunted with laments, until Alicia felt that the air was getting colder and the pale ceilings changed into a celestial vault of clouds, stained red by the touch of a cotton-wool sun. The little devil placed a blanket over Alicia, and, following instructions from the prince, the dwarfs lifted her into an incongruous-looking carriage – incongruous, considering this was a fairy tale, because it had no steeds to pull it, nor was it decorated with copper spirals but only a cryptic message on the side:
LA PONDEROSA
COLD MEATS
WHOLESALE
AND HOME DELIVERY
The prince was closing the carriage doors when Alicia heard voices, someone ordering them to stop and shouting threats at them. For a few minutes she was left alone while her champions confronted a posse of peasants, for the air was filled with the unmistakable echo of blows with fists and clubs. When the little devil returned to her side, his hair stood on end, his lip was split, and he wore a victorious smile. The vehicle set off with a rattling movement, and Alicia had the strange impression that she could smell cheap spicy sausage.
*
The ride seemed endless. They plowed through avenues and lanes, following the twisted map of the labyrinth, and when the doors opened and the dwarfs, who had grown and now looked like ordinary men, pulled her out on the stretcher, Alicia noticed that the carriage had miraculously turned into a van and they were in a narrow, dark street that cut a swath through the shadows. The little devil, who suddenly bore Fermín’s unmistakable features, told her she was very nearly safe and sound. They carried her up to a large carved oak door, behind which a man with sparse hair and vulturine eyes peeked out. The man looked at both sides of the street and whispered, “Come in.”
“This is where I say goodbye,” announced the prince.
“Give me a kiss, at least,” Alicia murmured.
Fermín rolled his eyes. “For God’s sake, kiss her, or we’ll never be done.”
And with all his dark grace, Prince Armando kissed her. His lips tasted of cinnamon, and by any reckoning he knew how to kiss a woman: with art, composure, and the long experience of an artist who takes pride and pleasure in his work. Alicia allowed a chill to run through her and stir forgotten corners of her body, and then she closed her eyes, sealing off the tears.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Unbelievable,” said Fermín. “Anyone would say she was fifteen. Thank goodness her father isn’t here to see it.”
What sounded like the mechanism for a cathedral clock sealed the door behind them. They went down a long, palatial corridor peopled with frescoes of fabulous creatures that appeared and disappeared in the light of the oil lamp carried by the keeper of the place. The air smelled of paper and magic, and when the passageway opened up into a large hall with a vaulted ceiling, Alicia saw it.
A labyrinth of shimmering forms ascended towards an immense glass dome. Moonlight, split into a thousand blades, poured down from up high and threw into relief the seemingly impossible geometry of a spell made up of all the books, all the stories and all the dreams in the world. Recognizing the place she had dreamed of so often, Alicia stretched out her arms to touch it, fearing it would vanish in the air. Next to her appeared the faces of Daniel and Bea.
“Where am I? What is this place?”
Isaac Montfort, the keeper who had opened the doors for them and whom Alicia recognized after so many years, knelt down beside her and stroked her face.
“Alicia, welcome back to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”