THE DAY PROVED endless for Daniel. The hours dragged by as he waited for Bea and let his father tend to the customers. Fermín had left, shortly after palming off one of his Byzantine tales on Señor Sempere, consisting of monumental fibs whispered in confidential tones, which he hoped would silence the man’s questions, for a few hours at least, and appease his alarm.
“We must appear more normal than usual, Daniel,” he’d said shortly before sneaking out through the back-room window into the square of the church of Santa Ana, to avoid detection by the officer Hendaya had left watching the bookshop.
“And when have we ever been normal?”
“Don’t get all existential now. As soon as I see that the coast is clear, I’ll slip out and take over from Bea.”
Bea appeared at last around noon, when Daniel’s hair was beginning to grey and he’d bitten his nails up to his elbows.
“Fermín has told me everything,” she said.
“Did he get there all right?”
“Apparently he stopped on the way to buy some sweet biscuits he couldn’t resist because he says they’re called ‘nun’s farts’, and some white wine.”
“White wine?”
“For Alicia. Which Dr. Soldevila has confiscated.”
“How is she?”
“Stable. The doctor says she’s still weak, but there’s no infection and she doesn’t have a fever.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“What about?”
“Why do I have the feeling that everyone is trying to hide something from me?”
Bea stroked his cheek. “Nobody is hiding anything from you, Daniel. Where’s Julián?”
“At the nursery school. Sofía took him.”
“I’ll go and collect him this afternoon. We have to keep up an appearance of normality. Where’s your father?”
“Back there, fuming.”
Bea lowered her voice. “What did you tell him?”
“Fermín foisted one of his epic poems on him.”
“I see. I’m off to the Boquería market to get a few things. Do you want anything?”
“A normal life.”
*
Halfway through the afternoon, Daniel’s father left him alone in the shop. Bea hadn’t returned yet, and Daniel, worried and in a filthy mood because he felt duped, had decided to go up to the apartment with the excuse that he was going to take a nap. For days now he’d harboured the suspicion that Alicia and Fermín were keeping something from him. And now, it seemed, Bea had joined them.
He spent a couple of hours mulling over the matter, winding himself up and gnawing away at his soul. Experience had taught him that in such cases it was better to act dumb and pretend not to have noticed. After all, that was the role he was always given in the show. Nobody expected good old Daniel, the poor motherless boy, the perpetual adolescent with nothing on his conscience, to find things out. That’s what the others were there for, to bring him the answers written down and even the questions to boot. Nobody seemed to have noticed that he hadn’t been wearing short trousers for years. Sometimes even little Julián looked at him out of the corner of his eye and laughed, as if his father had come to the world to play the fool and look like a simpleton while the others revealed life’s mysteries to him.
I’d laugh at myself too if I could, thought Daniel. Not that long ago he’d been able to make fun of his own shadow, to humour Fermín and his jibes, to embody the eternal naive boy adopted by his quixotic guardian angel. It had been a good part to play, and he’d felt comfortable with it. He would have loved to continue being the Daniel that all the others around him saw, and not the Daniel who, in the early hours, when Bea and Julián were fast asleep, would grope his way down to the bookshop, take shelter in the back room, and push the plaster panel hidden behind a broken old radiator.
There, at the very bottom of a box, covered by a thick pile of dusty old books, was the scrapbook filled with the press clippings about Mauricio Valls he’d been stealing from the newspaper library in the Ateneo. The public life of the minister was recorded in those pages, year after year. He knew every one of those news items and press releases by heart. The last one, the one about his death in a traffic accident, was the most painful.
Valls, the man who had stolen his mother from him, had got away.
*
Daniel had learned to hate that face, so eager to be photographed in vainglorious poses. He’d come to the conclusion that you never really know who you are until you learn to hate. And when you really hate, when you abandon yourself to that anger that burns you inside, that slowly consumes what little good you thought you had in your baggage, you do it secretly. Daniel smiled bitterly. Nobody thought him capable of keeping a secret. He’d never been able to, even as a child, when keeping secrets is an art and a way of staving off the world and its emptiness. Not even Fermín or Bea suspected that he kept that folder hidden there, containing the scrapbook in which he so often took refuge, feeding the darkness that had grown inside him since discovering that Mauricio Valls, the great white hope of the regime, had poisoned his mother. It was all conjecture, they told him. Nobody could know the truth of what had happened. Daniel had left the suspicions behind him and lived in a world of certainties.
And the worst of them all, the most difficult to contemplate, was that justice would never be served.
The day he’d dreamed of, poisoning his soul, the day he would find Mauricio Valls, make him look into his eyes and see in them the hatred he had fed – that day would never come. Nor would he pick up the gun he’d bought from a black marketeer who sometimes did business in Can Tunis, which he kept wrapped in rags at the bottom of the box. It was an old gun, dating from the war, but the ammunition was new and the guy had taught him how to use it.
“First you get him in the legs, below the knees. And you wait. You watch him try to pull himself along. Then shoot him in his guts. And you wait. You let him writhe. Then you shoot on the right side of his chest. And you wait. You wait for his lungs to fill with blood, until he chokes in his own shit. Only then, when you think he’s already dead, do you empty the last three bullets into his head. One in the back of the neck, one in his temple, and one under his chin. Then you throw the gun into the Besós River, near the beach, and let the current take it away.”
Perhaps the current would also take with it, forever, the anger and the pain now rotting inside him.
“Daniel?”
He looked up and saw Bea. He hadn’t heard her come in.
“Daniel, are you feeling all right?”
He nodded.
“You look pale. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. A bit tired, from not having slept. That’s all.” Daniel gave her his sweet smile, the one he’d been dragging around since he was a schoolboy, the smile he was known for in the neighbourhood. Good old Daniel Sempere, the son-in-law all good mothers would want for their daughters. The man who hid no shadows in his heart.
“I’ve bought you some oranges. Don’t let Fermín see them, or he’ll eat them all in one go, like last time.”
“Thanks.”
“Daniel, what’s the matter? Aren’t you going to tell me? Is it because of what’s happened with Alicia? Because of that policeman?”
“Nothing’s the matter. I’m a bit worried. It’s normal. But we’ve got out of worse fixes. We’ll get out of this one.”
Daniel had never known how to lie to Bea. She looked into his eyes. For months now, what she saw in them had scared her. She drew closer to him and hugged him. Daniel let her put her arms around him, but he didn’t say anything, as if he weren’t there.
Bea walked away slowly. She put the shopping bag on the table and lowered her eyes. “I’m going to pick up Julián.”
“See you soon.”