The image of my body wasting away in the mirror of this bedroom makes it hard for me to believe it, but once, a long time ago, I was a child. My family had a grocery behind the church of Santa María del Mar. We lived in a house at the back of the shop. There we had a patio from which we could see the top of the basilica. I liked to imagine it was an enchanted castle that went out for a stroll every night through the streets of Barcelona and returned at dawn to sleep in the sunlight. My father’s family, the Gisperts, came from a long line of Barcelona traders, and my mother’s, the Ferratinis, from a family of Neapolitan sailors and fishermen. I inherited the character of my maternal grandmother, a woman with a rather volcanic temperament who was nicknamed La Vesubia. We were three sisters, but my father used to say he had two daughters and one mule. I loved my father very much, despite the fact that I made him very unhappy. He was a good man who managed groceries better than he managed his daughters. Our father confessor used to say that we all come into this world with a purpose, and mine was to contradict.
My two older sisters were more docile. It was clear to them that their objective was to make a good marriage and better themselves in the world according to the rules of social etiquette. Much to my poor parents’ disappointment, I declared myself a rebel when I was eight and announced that I would never get married, that I would never wear an apron, not even in front of a firing squad, and that I would be a writer or a submariner (Jules Verne had me confused on that point for a while). My father blamed the Brontë sisters, whom I always talked about devotedly. He thought they were a bunch of libertarian nuns entrenched in the old city walls who had lost their minds during the riots of 1909 and now smoked opiates and danced cheek to cheek among themselves after midnight. “This would never have happened if we’d sent her to the Teresian mothers,” he complained. I must admit that I never knew how to be the daughter my parents would have wished me to be, or the young girl the world I was born into expected. Or perhaps I should say I didn’t want to. I always went against everyone’s wishes: against my parents’ wishes, my teachers’ wishes, and, when they all grew tired of battling with me, my own.
I didn’t like playing with the other girls: my speciality was decapitating dolls with a catapult. I preferred to play with boys, who were easily bossed around, although sooner or later they discovered that I always beat them, so I had to start managing on my own. I think that’s when I began to have that feeling of always being distant and separate from the rest. In that respect I was like my mother, who used to say that deep down we were always alone, especially those of us born female. My mother was a melancholy woman with whom I never got along, perhaps because she was the only one in the family who understood me a little. She died when I was still a child. My father got married again, to a widow from Valladolid who never liked me and who, when we were alone, called me “little tart”.
After my mother died, I realized how much I missed her. Perhaps that’s why I started going to the university library, for which she’d managed to get me a reader’s card before she died, without telling my father, who thought all I needed to study was the catechism, and all I needed to read were the lives of saints. My stepmother hated books. Their very presence offended her; she hid them inside cupboards so they wouldn’t ruin the decor of the house.
The library is where my life changed. I didn’t even open the catechism by chance, and the only saint I enjoyed reading about was Saint Teresa, for I was utterly intrigued by those mysterious ecstasies, which I associated with shameful practices that I don’t even dare tell these pages. In the library I read everything I was allowed to read, and especially what some people told me I shouldn’t read. Doña Lorena, a wise librarian who used to be around in the afternoons, always prepared a pile of books she described as “books all young ladies should read and nobody wants them to read”. Doña Lorena said that the level of barbarism in a society is measured by the distance it tries to create between women and books. “Nothing frightens a loutish person more than a woman who knows how to read, write and think, and moreover shows her knees.” During the war she was sent to the women’s prison, and they say she hanged herself in her cell.
I knew from the start that I wanted to live among books, and I began to dream that one day my own stories would end up in one of those tomes I so worshipped. Books taught me to think, to feel, and to live a thousand lives. I’m not ashamed to admit that, just as Doña Lorena predicted, the day came when I also started liking boys. Too much. I can tell these pages and laugh about how my legs trembled when I saw some of the young men who unloaded boxes in the Borne market and looked at me with hungry smiles, their torsos covered in sweat, their skin tanned and, I was sure, tasting of salt. “Oh, what I’d give you, gorgeous,” one of them told me, before my father locked me up in the house for a week, a week I devoted to fantasizing about what that daring young man wanted to give me, while feeling a bit like Saint Teresa.
To tell you the truth, the boys of my age didn’t interest me much. Besides, they were somewhat afraid of me. I’d beaten them at everything except in competitions to see who could pee farthest in the wind. Like all girls of my age, whether they admit it or not, I preferred older boys, especially the ones who fitted into the category defined by all mothers as “the unsuitable ones”. I didn’t know how to doll myself up or look my best, at least at first, but soon I learned to tell when boys liked me. Most of them turned out to be the complete opposite of books: they were simple and could be read instantly. I suppose I never was what is known as a good girl. I’m not going to lie to myself. Who wants to be a good girl voluntarily? Not me. I would corner the boys I liked in a doorway and instruct them to kiss me. Since a lot of them were paralysed with fear or didn’t even know how to begin, I would kiss them. My exploits reached the parish priest’s ears, and he deemed it necessary to perform an immediate act of exorcism, for these were clear signs of demonic possession. My stepmother had a nervous breakdown caused by the shame I’d put her through. It lasted a month. After that episode she declared that I would end up at least as a cabaret artist, or go straight to the “gutter”, her favourite expression. “And then nobody will want you, you little tart.” My father, who was at his wit’s end as to what to do with me, began making arrangements to send me to a strict religious boarding school, but my reputation preceded me, and as soon as they realized who I was, they refused to admit me for fear I might contaminate the other boarders. I write all this without embarrassment because I think that if I committed a sin at all during my teenage years, it was simply that of being too innocent. I broke a heart or two, but never with malice, and then I still believed that nobody would ever break mine.
My stepmother, who had declared a special devotion for Our Lady of Lourdes, never lost hope. She prayed to her constantly, begging that one day I would settle down, or that a tram would run me over and I’d be out of the way once and for all. My salvation, suggested the parish priest, had to come about by channelling my troubled instincts in the Roman Catholic way. An urgent plan was put together for me to become engaged, whether I liked it or not, to Vicentet, whose parents owned the patisserie at the entrance to Calle Flassaders, and who, according to my parents, was a good match. Vicentet had a soul as soft as powdered sugar; he was as tender and supple as the sponge cakes his mother made. I could have eaten him up in half a morning, and the poor guy knew it, but our respective families thought that our union would be a way of killing two birds with one stone – setting up the “boy”, and putting that little tart Isabella back on the straight and narrow.
Vicentet, blessed art thou among confectioners, adored me. For him, poor soul, nothing in the whole wide world could be more beautiful or purer than Isabella. When I walked past, he would gaze at me like a sacrificial lamb, dreaming of our wedding banquet at the Siete Puertas and our honeymoon trip on a pleasure boat to the breakwater point in the port. I, of course, made him as unhappy as I could. Unfortunately for all the Vicentets of the world, and they’re not few in number, the heart of a girl is like a fireworks stand under the summer sun. Poor Vicentet, how he suffered because of me. I was told that in the end he married a second cousin from Ripoll who was about to become a novice and would have married the statue of the unknown soldier if that would have saved her from the convent. Together they still bring babies and sponge cakes into the world. He had a lucky escape.
*
As foreseeable, I stuck to my guns and ended up doing what my father had always feared – even more than the possibility that Grandmother La Vesubia might come and live with them. Now that books had poisoned my feverish brain, his most dreaded nightmare was that I should fall in love with the worst sort of creature in the universe, the most treacherous, cruel and malevolent to have ever set foot on earth, whose main purpose in life, aside from satisfying his infinite vanity, was to cast unhappiness on those poor souls who commit the serious mistake of loving him: a writer. And for that matter, not even a poet, a variety my father thought of as more or less a harmless daydreamer, who could be persuaded to find an honest job in a grocery store and leave his verses for Sunday afternoons after church. No, it would be the worst variety of that species: a novelist. Those were beyond repair, not welcome even in hell.
The only living writer in my world was a somewhat eccentric individual, to put it kindly, who had settled in the neighbourhood. After some enquiries I discovered that he lived in a large old house on Calle Flassaders, near the pastry shop belonging to Vicentet’s family. According to rumours from old gossipmongers, land registrars, and a very bigmouthed night watchman called Soponcio who knew all the tittle-tattle in our streets, the house was haunted and its occupant was a bit soft in the head. His name was David Martín.
I’d never seen him because, supposedly, he only came out at night and hung out in places not suitable for young ladies and respectable people. I didn’t consider myself either one or the other, so I forged a plan to make our destinies collide, like two trains hurtling out of control. David Martín, the only living novelist in a radius of five streets from my home, didn’t know yet, but very soon his life was going to change. For the better. Heaven or hell would send him just what he needed to straighten out his dissolute existence: an apprentice, the great Isabella.