The story of how I became David Martín’s official apprentice is long and detailed. Knowing him, it wouldn’t surprise me if David himself had left his own account of it somewhere, an account in which my character won’t be exactly that of the heroine. The fact is that, despite his iron resistance, I managed to sneak into his house, his strange life, and his consciousness, which in itself was a haunted house. Perhaps it was destiny, perhaps it was the fact that, deep down, David Martín was a tormented spirit who, without knowing it, needed me much more than I needed him. “Lost souls who find one another at midnight,” I wrote at the time as part of my training, in an attempt at a melodramatic poem that my new mentor declared highly dangerous for diabetics. He was like that.
I’ve often thought that David Martín was my first real friend in this life, after Doña Lorena, that is. He was almost twice my age, and sometimes it seemed to me that he’d lived a hundred lives before meeting me, but even when he avoided my company or we quarrelled about something trivial, I felt so close to him that despite myself I understood that, as he sometimes joked, we were “two devils in a pod”. Like many good-natured people, David liked to hide in a shell of gruff cynicism, but despite the numerous jibes he threw at me (no more than the ones I threw at him, to be fair) and however hard he pretended not to, he always showed me great patience and generosity.
David Martín taught me many things: how to create a sentence, how to think about language and all its devices as an orchestra in search of a musical score, how to analyse a text and understand how it is constructed and why . . . He taught me to read and write again, but this time I knew what I was doing, why, and what for. And above all how. He never tired of telling me that in literature there is only one real theme: not what is narrated, but how it is narrated. The rest, he said, was decoration. He also told me that writing was a profession one had to learn, but was impossible to teach: “Whoever doesn’t understand that principle may as well devote their life to something else, for there are lots of things to be done in this world.” He was of the opinion that I had less of a future as a writer than Spain had of being a reasonable country, but he was a born pessimist, or what he called an “informed realist”, so, true to myself, I contradicted him.
*
With David I learned to accept myself just as I was, to think for myself, and even to love myself a little. During the time I spent living in his ghost-ridden house we became friends, good friends. David Martín was a solitary man, who burned his bridges with the world without realizing it, or perhaps he did it deliberately because he thought that nothing good would ever come across them. His was a broken soul, an item that had been damaged since childhood and which he was never able to mend. I began by pretending to hate him, then tried to hide the fact that I admired him, and finally I made an effort not to show that I felt sorry for him, because it infuriated him. The more David tried to push me away, and he never stopped trying, the closer I felt to him. Then I stopped contradicting him in everything and only wanted to protect him. The irony of our friendship is that I came into his life as an apprentice and a nuisance, but deep down it was as if he’d always been waiting for me. To save him, perhaps, from himself or from all that stuff he had trapped inside him, which was eating him alive.
You only truly fall in love when you don’t realize it’s happening. I fell in love with that broken, profoundly unhappy man long before I began to suspect that I even liked him. He, who always read me like an open book, feared for me. It was his idea that I should work in the Sempere & Sons bookshop, where he’d been a customer all his life. It was his idea to convince Juan, who would end up being my husband and who at the time was “the young Sempere”, to court me. In those days Juan was as shy as David could be brazen. In a way they were like day and night; in David’s heart it was always night.
By then I’d begun to realize that I would never be a writer, or even a submariner, and that the Brontë sisters would have to wait for another, more like-minded candidate to succeed them. I had also started to realize that David Martín was ill. A chasm opened up inside him, and after an entire existence spent fighting to maintain his sanity, when I came into his life David had already lost the battle with himself and was losing his mind, like sand slipping through his fingers. If I’d heeded common sense, I would have run away, but by then I’d already started to enjoy contradicting myself.
*
In time, a lot of things were said about David Martín, and terrible crimes were attributed to him. I am convinced – and I think I knew him better than anyone else – that the only crimes he committed were against himself. That is why I helped him escape from Barcelona, after the police had accused him of murdering his protector, Pedro Vidal, and Vidal’s wife Cristina – with whom he thought he was in love, in that stupid and fatal way some men imagine they love a woman they can’t tell apart from an apparition. And that’s why I prayed he would never return to this city, that he would find peace in some faraway place, that I would be able to forget him, or eventually persuade myself that I had. God only listens when one prays for what one doesn’t need.
I spent the next four years trying to forget David Martín, and thinking I had almost managed to do so. Having abandoned my dreams of writing, I’d made my other dream, that of living among books and words, a reality. I worked in the Sempere & Sons bookshop, where, after the death of Grandfather Sempere, Juan had become Señor Sempere. Our engagement was one of those prewar affairs – a modest courtship, cheeks caressed, strolls on Sunday afternoons, and stolen kisses under marquees during the street fiestas in Gracia, when no family members were spying on us. There were no trembling legs, but that wasn’t necessary either. One can’t live one’s whole life as if one were always fourteen.
Juan didn’t take long to propose to me. My father accepted his proposal in three minutes flat, full of gratitude to Saint Rita, patron saint of impossible causes, as he glimpsed the improbable sight of his daughter dressed in white bowing before a priest and doing as she was told. Barcelona, city of miracles. When I said yes to Juan, I did it with the conviction that he was the best man I would ever meet, that I didn’t deserve him, and that I’d learned to love him not only with my heart but also with my mind. My “yes” wasn’t that of a young girl. How wise I felt. My mother would have been proud of me. All those books had served some purpose. I accepted his hand knowing that what I most desired in the world was to make him happy and raise a family with him. And for a while I actually believed that that was how it would be. I was still so innocent.