LEANDRO ARRIVED EVERY morning at exactly half past eight. He waited for her in the room where breakfast had just been brought in, together with a vase of freshly cut flowers. By then Ariadna Mataix had been awake for an hour. The person in charge of waking her up was the doctor, who now had set aside all formalities and entered the bedroom without knocking first. A nurse always came with him, but Ariadna had never heard her speak.
The first thing was the morning injection, the one that allowed her to open her eyes and remember who she was. Then the nurse would get her up, undress her, take her to the bathroom, and put her under the shower for ten minutes. She dressed her with clothes Ariadna remembered and thought she’d bought sometime or other, every day a new outfit. While the doctor took her pulse and checked her blood pressure, the nurse combed her hair and put on her make-up, because Leandro liked to see her looking smart and presentable. By the time she sat at the table with him, the world had resumed its place.
“Did you have a good night?”
“What is it they’re giving me?”
“A gentle sedative, as I said. If you’d rather, I’ll ask the doctor to stop administering it.”
“No. No, please.”
“As you wish. Would you like something to eat?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“A little orange juice, at least.”
Sometimes Ariadna threw up her food or experienced such intense nausea that she would lose consciousness and fall off her chair. When that happened, Leandro pressed the bell, and seconds later somebody appeared who would lift her and wash her again. In such cases the doctor would give Ariadna another injection, bringing on a state of icy calm that she craved so badly she was often tempted to pretend she was fainting so she could get another fix. She no longer knew how many days she’d been there. She measured time by the space between the injections, between the balm of an unconscious sleep and the awakening. She’d lost weight, and her clothes were falling off her. When she saw herself in the bathroom mirror, she wondered who that woman was. She longed constantly for the moment when Leandro would end the daily session so that the doctor would return with his magic bag and his knockout potions. Those moments when she felt her blood was on fire until she lost consciousness were the closest to happiness she could remember ever having experienced.
“How are you feeling this morning, Ariadna?”
“All right.”
“I thought that today we could talk about those months in which you disappeared, if you don’t mind.”
“We already spoke about that the other day. And the day before that.”
“Yes, but I think that bit by bit new details are emerging. Memory is like that. It likes to play tricks on us.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I’d like to return to the day you ran away from home. Do you remember it?”
“I’m tired.”
“Hold out a bit longer. The doctor will be here very soon, and he’ll give you a tonic to make you feel better.”
“Can it be now?”
“First we’ll talk, and then you can take your medicine.”
Ariadna nodded. Every day the same game was repeated. She no longer remembered what she’d told him and what she hadn’t. What did it matter? It no longer made sense to keep anything from him. They’d all died. And she was never going to get out of there.
“It was the day before my birthday,” she began. “The Ubachs had organized a party for me. All my girlfriends from school had been invited.”
“Your girlfriends?”
“They were not my real friends. It was bought friendship, like everything else in that house.”
“Was that the night you decided to run away?”
“Yes.”
“But someone helped you, right?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about that man. David Martín, wasn’t it?”
“David.”
“How did you meet him?”
“David was a friend of my father’s. They’d worked together.”
“Had they written books together?”
“Radio serials. They’d written one called The Ice Orchid. It was a mystery story set in nineteenth-century Barcelona. My father didn’t allow me to listen to it because he said it wasn’t suitable for little girls, but I used to sneak away and listen to it on the radio in our house in Vallvidrera. Very low.”
“According to my reports, David Martín was sent to prison in 1939, when he was trying to cross the frontier and return to Barcelona at the end of the war. He spent some time imprisoned in Montjuïc Castle, at the same time that your father was there, and was pronounced dead towards the end of 1941. You’re talking about 1948, seven years after this. Are you sure the man who helped you escape was Martín?”
“It was him.”
“Couldn’t it have been someone who pretended to be him? After all you hadn’t seen him for a number of years.”
“It was him.”
“OK. How did you meet up again?”
“Doña Manuela, my tutor, used to take me on Saturdays to Retiro Park. To the Crystal Palace, my favourite place.”
“Mine too. Is that where you met Martín?”
“Yes. I’d seen him a few times. From a distance.”
“Do you think it was just a coincidence?”
“No.”
“When did you first speak to him?”
“Doña Manuela always carried a bottle of anise liqueur in her bag, and sometimes she would fall asleep.”
“And then David Martín would come over?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say to you?”
“I know it’s difficult, Ariadna. Make an effort.”
“I want the medicine.”
“First tell me what Martín said to you.”
“He would talk about my father. About the time they’d spent together in prison. My father had spoken to him about us. About what had happened. I think they’d made some sort of pact. The first one who managed to get out of there would help the family of the other.”
“But David Martín didn’t have a family.”
“He had people he loved.”
“Did he tell you how he managed to escape from the castle?”
“Valls had ordered two of his men to take him to an old house next to Güell Park and murder him. They used to kill a lot of people there, and they buried them in the garden.”
“And what happened?”
“David said there was someone else there, in the house, who helped him escape.”
“An accomplice?”
“He called him the boss.”
“The boss?”
“He had a foreign name. Italian. I remember because it was the same as that of a famous composer my parents liked a lot.”
“Can you remember the name?”
“Corelli. He was called Andreas Corelli.”
“That name doesn’t appear in any of my reports.”
“Because he didn’t exist.”
“I don’t understand.”
“David wasn’t well. He imagined things. People.”
“Do you mean to say that David Martín had imagined that Andreas Corelli person?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know. David had lost his mind, or what little mind he had left, in prison. He was very ill, and he didn’t realize.”
“You always call him David.”
“We were friends.”
“Friends.”
“What did he say to you on that day?”
“That he’d spent three years trying to get access to Mauricio Valls.”
“To take revenge on him?”
“Valls had murdered someone he loved very much.”
“Isabella.”
“Yes. Isabella.”
“Did he tell you how he thought Valls had murdered her?”
“He’d poisoned her.”
“And why did he come to look for you?”
“To keep the promise he’d made to my father.”
“Is that all?”
“And because he thought that if I could provide him with access to my parents’ house, sooner or later Mauricio Valls would turn up there, and he’d be able to kill him. Valls often visited Ubach. They had some businesses together. Financial interests. Otherwise it was impossible to get to Valls, because he always had his bodyguards with him or was protected somehow.”
“But that never happened.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I told him that if he tried to do it, they’d kill him.”
“He must have imagined that already. There must have been something else.”
“Something else?”
“Something else you said to him to make him change his plans.”
“I need my medicine. Please.”
“Tell me what you told David Martín that made him change his mind, so that he abandoned the plan that had brought him to Madrid to take his revenge on Valls and instead decided to help you escape.”
“Please . . .”
“Just a tiny bit more, Ariadna. Afterward we’ll give you your medication, and you’ll be able to rest.”
“I told him the truth. That I was pregnant.”
“I don’t understand. Pregnant? Who by?”
“Your father?”
“He wasn’t my father.”
“Miguel Ángel Ubach, the banker. The man who had adopted you.”
“The man who had bought me.”
“What happened?”
“At night he would often come to my bedroom, drunk. He told me his wife didn’t love him, he said she had lovers, that they no longer shared anything. He would start crying. Then he’d rape me. When he got tired of it, he said it was my fault, he said I tempted him, he said I was a whore, like my mother. He beat me and assured me that if I said anything about this to anyone, he’d have my sister killed. He knew where she was, he said, and a call from him would be enough to have her buried alive.”
“And what did David Martín say when he heard that?”
“He stole a car and got me out of there. I need the medicine, please . . .”
“Of course. Right now. Thank you, Ariadna. Thanks for your frankness.”