I suppose one day all the newspapers in the country will publish great eulogies of Don Mauricio Valls and sing his praises to the four winds. Our land abounds with characters of his ilk, men who never lack a retinue of flatterers crawling around to pick up the crumbs that fall from their table, once they’ve reached the top. For the time being, before that moment comes, and it will, Mauricio Valls is still just one of many, an outstanding candidate. During these last few months I’ve learned a great deal about him. I know he began as one more bookworm in café gatherings – a mediocre man with no talent or trade who, as usually happens, made up for his failings with an enormous vanity and insatiable hunger for recognition. Estimating that his merits would never earn him a penny or the position he coveted and felt entitled to, he decided to carve out a career for himself, cultivating a clique of like-minded chums with whom to exchange privileges, excluding those he envied.
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Yes, I’m writing in anger and resentment, and I’m ashamed of it, because I no longer know, nor do I care, whether my words are fair or not, whether I’m judging the innocent or whether the fury and the pain that burn me to the core are also blinding me. During these past months I’ve learned to hate, and it terrifies me to think that I’ll die with this bitterness in my heart.
The first time I heard his name was shortly after I found out that David had been captured and imprisoned. At the time Mauricio Valls was a young pup of the new regime, a loyal follower who had made himself a name by marrying the daughter of a tycoon in the business and financial set-up that had supported the Fascist Nacionales. Valls had started his days as an aspiring man of letters, but his greatest triumph was to seduce a poor soul and lead her down the aisle: a young woman born with a cruel illness that since adolescence had wasted away her bones and confined her to a wheelchair. A rich and unmarriageable heiress, a golden opportunity.
Valls must have imagined that his move was going to catapult him to the top of the national Parnassus, to some important position in the Academy or some prestigious post in the court of Spanish arts and culture. He hadn’t factored in that there were plenty of others who, like him, had begun to appear like late-blossoming flowers out of nowhere when it was clear which side would win the war, all queuing up for the great day.
When the time came for sharing the rewards and booty, Valls received his with a lesson on the rules of the game. The regime didn’t need poets but gaolers and inquisitors. And so, without expecting it, he received an appointment that he considered degrading and well below his intellectual gifts: governor of the prison of Montjuïc Castle. Of course, someone like Valls never wastes an opportunity. He knew how to profit from this reversal of fortune by getting into the regime’s good books, preparing for his future promotion, and while he was at it, incarcerating or exterminating all adversaries, real or imaginary, on his long list, or disposing of them as he pleased. How David Martín ended up on that list is something I will never be able to understand, although he wasn’t the only one. For some reason Valls’s fixation with Martín has been twisted and obsessive.
As soon as Valls found out that David Martín had been sent to La Modelo, he requested his transfer to Montjuïc Castle and didn’t rest until he saw him behind the bars of one of his cells. My husband Juan knew a young lawyer, a customer at the bookshop, called Fernando Brians. I went to see him to find out what I could do to help David. Our savings were practically non-existent, and Brians, a good man who has become a great friend in these difficult months, agreed to work for free. Brians had contacts in Montjuïc, especially one of the gaolers, Bebo, and was able to discover that Valls had some sort of a plan regarding David. Valls knew David’s work, and although he never tired of describing him as “the world’s worst writer”, he was trying to persuade David to write, or rewrite, a sheaf of pages bearing Valls’s name, with which Valls believed he could establish his own reputation as an author, backed up by his new position in the regime. I can just imagine David’s reply.
Brians tried everything, but the charges brought against David were too serious. The only thing left to do was to beg for Valls’s clemency, that the treatment David received in the castle not be what we all imagined. Ignoring Brians’s advice, I went to see Valls. Now I know that I made a mistake, a very serious mistake. By going there, if only because Valls saw me as one more possession belonging to the object of his hatred, David Martín, I made myself the focal point of his greed.
Like so many of his sort, Valls was quickly learning how to take advantage of the anxieties of his prisoners’ relatives. Brians kept warning me. Juan, who suspected that my relationship with David and my devotion for him went beyond a noble friendship, was concerned about my visits to Valls in the castle. “Think of your son,” he would say. And he was right, but I was selfish. I couldn’t just abandon David in that place if there was something I could do. It was no longer a question of dignity. Nobody survives a civil war with even a scrap of dignity to boast about. My error was not realizing that Valls didn’t want merely to possess or humiliate me but to destroy me. He’d finally understood that this was the only real way he had to hurt David and bend him to his will.
All my determination, all the naïveté with which I tried to persuade Valls, was turned against us. It made no difference how much I praised him, how much I pretended to respect and fear him, how much I humiliated myself by begging for his compassion towards his prisoner. Everything I did was just fuel for the fire inside Valls. I now know that in my attempt to help David, I ended up condemning him.
When I realized all this, it was already too late. Bored with his work, with himself, and with the slow arrival of his days of glory, Valls filled his time with fantasies. One of them was that he’d fallen in love with me. I thought that if I could convince him that his fantasy had a future, perhaps Valls would show some magnanimity. But he also got tired of me. In despair, I threatened to unmask him, to make public who he really was and how far his cruelty went. Valls laughed at me and at my ingenuousness, but he wanted to punish me. To wound David and deal him his fatal blow.
Barely a week and a half ago, Valls asked me to meet him at the Café de la Ópera, in the Ramblas. I went to the meeting without saying a word to anyone, not even my husband. I was sure that this was my last chance. I was mistaken. That very night I knew something had gone wrong. In the early hours I woke up feeling nauseous. In the mirror I saw that my eyes looked yellow, and some stains had appeared around my neck and on my chest. At daybreak I began to throw up blood. Then the pain began. A cold pain, like a knife carving you up inside, making its way through your body. I grew feverish, unable to keep down liquids or solids. My hair fell out in clumps. The muscles of my entire body tensed up like cables, making me scream with pain. Blood came out of my skin, my eyes, my mouth.
The doctors and hospitals haven’t been able to help me. Juan thinks I’ve caught an illness, and there is still hope. He can’t bear the thought that I’m going to abandon him and my son Daniel, whom I have failed as a mother by allowing my desire, my yearning to save the man I thought was the love of my life, to supplant my duty.
I know Mauricio Valls poisoned me that night in the Café de la Ópera. I know he did it to hurt David. I know I only have a few days left to live. Everything has happened very fast. My only comfort is laudanum, which numbs the pain inside me, and this notebook in which to confess my sins and my faults. Brians, who visits me every day, knows that I’m writing to stay alive, to contain this fire that is devouring me. I’ve asked him to destroy these pages when I die, and not to read them. Nobody must know what I have explained here. Nobody must know the truth, because I’ve learned that in this world truth only hurts, and God loves and helps those who lie.
I have nobody left to pray to. Everything I once believed in has deserted me. Sometimes I don’t remember who I am, and rereading this notebook is the only thing that lets me understand what is happening. I will write until the end. To remember. To try to survive. I’d like to hug my son Daniel and make him understand that whatever happens, I will never abandon him. That I’ll be with him. That I love him. Dear God, forgive me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t want to die. Dear God, let me live one more day so I can hold Daniel in my arms and tell him how much I love him . . .