FERMÍN WAS DISCHARGED halfway through the afternoon; the hospital could no longer cope with the numbers of wounded, and whoever wasn’t dying was deemed fit to leave. Armed with a wooden crutch and some new clothes lent to him by a dead man, he managed to climb onto a tram outside the Hospital Clínico and travel back to the streets of the Raval. There he began to walk into cafés, grocers, and any other shops that were still open, asking in a loud voice whether anyone had seen a girl called Alicia. People looked at the wiry, gaunt little man and shook their heads silently, thinking that, like so many others, this poor soul was searching in vain for his dead daughter: one more body among the nine hundred – a hundred of them children – that would be picked up in the streets of Barcelona on that eighteenth day of March in 1938.
When evening fell, Fermín walked all the way down the Ramblas. Trams derailed by the bombs were still lying there, smoldering, with their dead passengers on board. Cafés that just hours earlier had been packed with customers were now ghostly galleries full of bodies. Pavements were awash with blood. None of the people trying to take the wounded away, cover up the dead, or simply flee anywhere or nowhere could remember having seen the girl he was describing.
Even so, Fermín didn’t lose hope, not even when he came across a row of corpses lying on the pavement in front of the opera house, the Gran Teatro del Liceo. None of them looked older than eight or nine.
Fermín knelt down. Next to him, a woman stroked the feet of a boy with a black hole the size of a fist in his chest. “He’s dead,” she said, although Fermín hadn’t asked. “They’re all dead.”
All night long, while the city removed the rubble and the ruins of dozens of buildings went on burning, Fermín walked from door to door through the whole of the Raval quarter, asking for Alicia.
Finally, at dawn, he couldn’t take another step. He collapsed on the stairs outside the Church of Belén, and after a while a local policeman in a bloodstained uniform, his face smudged with cinders, sat down next to him. When the policeman asked him why he was crying, Fermín threw his arms around him. He wanted to die, he told him. Fate had placed the life of a little girl in his care, and he’d betrayed her and hadn’t known how to protect her. If either God or the devil had even a hint of decency left in them, he went on, this fucking world would come to an end tomorrow or the next day, because it didn’t deserve to go on existing.
The policeman, who had been tirelessly pulling out bodies from the rubble for hours, including those of his wife and six-year-old son, listened to him calmly.
“My friend,” he said at last. “Don’t lose hope. If there’s anything I’ve learned from this lousy world, it’s that destiny is always just around the corner. It might look like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor, its three most usual personifications. And if you ever decide to go and find it – remember, destiny doesn’t make house calls – you’ll see that it will grant you a second chance.”