“WE HADN’T BEEN there a month when David got worse. I’d gone out to get some food. A few peasants came along every morning with a cartful of groceries and set themselves up by the old bathhouse and the restaurant they called La Taberna del Mar. At first it was David who went there, or to the village, to find provisions, but there came a point when he couldn’t leave the house. He suffered from terrible headaches, fever, nausea . . . Almost every night he paced around the house, delirious and talking to himself. He believed Corelli would come and get him.”
“Did you ever see this Corelli?”
“Corelli didn’t exist. I told you. He was someone who lived only in David’s imagination.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The Vidals had built a small wooden jetty that stretched out into the sea from the little cove below the house. David would often go there and sit at the far end, gazing at the sea. That’s where he held his imaginary conversations with Corelli. Sometimes I would walk over to the pier and sit down next to him. David wouldn’t notice that I was there. I heard him talk to Corelli, just as he had done in the car when we fled from Madrid. Then he would wake up from his trance and smile at me. One day it began to rain, and when I took his hand to take him back home, he hugged me, crying, and called me Isabella. From then on he no longer recognized me, and he spent the last two months of his existence convinced that he was living with Isabella.”
“It must have been very hard for you.”
“No. The months I spent taking care of him were the happiest, and the saddest, of my life.”
“How did David Martín die, Ariadna?”
“One night I asked him who Corelli was and why he was so afraid of him. He told me Corelli was a black soul – those were his words. David had agreed to write a book commissioned by Corelli, but he had betrayed him by destroying the book before Corelli could get his hands on it.”
“What sort of a book?”
“I’m not quite sure. Some sort of religious text or something like that. David called it Lux Aeterna.”
“So David thought Corelli wanted to take his revenge on him.”
“Yes.”
“How, Ariadna?”
“What does it matter? It has nothing to do with Valls or with anything.”
“Everything is connected, Ariadna. Please, help me.”
“David was convinced that the baby I carried in my womb was someone he had known and lost.”
“Did he say who?”
“He called her Cristina. He hardly ever spoke of her. But when he mentioned her, his voice seemed to shrink with remorse and guilt.”
“Cristina was the wife of Pedro Vidal. The police also accused Martín of her death. They assured us that he’d drowned her in a lake in Puigcerdá, very near the old house in the Pyrenees where he took you.”
“Lies.”
“Perhaps. But you’re telling me that when he spoke about her, he showed signs of guilt . . .”
“David was a good man.”
“But you yourself said that he’d completely lost his mind, that he imagined things and people who were not there, that he thought you were his old apprentice, Isabella, who had died ten years earlier . . . Weren’t you afraid for yourself? For your baby?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me it didn’t cross your mind to leave that house and run away.”
“No.”
“All right. What happened next?”