SOON AFTER TEN in the morning, a black Packard drove up Gran Vía under the downpour and stopped opposite the entrance to the old Hotel Hispania. Her bedroom window was shrouded by the rain trickling down the pane, but Alicia could see the two emissaries, as grey and cold as the day, getting out of the car in their regulation raincoats and hats. Alicia looked at her watch. Good old Leandro hadn’t even waited fifteen minutes before setting the dogs on her. Thirty seconds later the phone rang. She picked it up at the first loud ring. She knew perfectly well who would be at the other end.
“Señorita Gris, good morning and all that,” Maura’s hoarse voice intoned from reception. “A couple of lizards who reek of political police have just asked for you very rudely and stepped into the lift. I’ve sent them up to the fourteenth floor to give you a couple of minutes in case you might want to evaporate.”
“That’s very kind of you, Joaquín. What are you into today? Anything good?”
Shortly after the fall of Madrid, Joaquin Maura had ended up in Carabanchel Prison. When he came out, sixteen years later, he discovered that he was an old man, his lungs were ruined and his wife, six months pregnant when he was arrested, had managed to get an annulment and was now married to a bemedalled lieutenant-colonel who had furnished her with three children and a modest house on the outskirts of town. From that first short-lived marriage there remained a daughter, Raquel, who grew up convinced that he had died before her mother gave birth to her. The day Maura went to see her surreptitiously on her way out of a shop on Calle Goya, where she worked selling fabrics, Raquel thought he was a beggar and gave him a few coins. Since then Maura had scraped by, living in a dingy room next to the boilers in the basement of the Hispania, doing the night shift and all the shifts he was allowed to do, rereading cheap detective novels, and chain-smoking short Celtas in his lodge while he waited for death to put things in their place and take him back to 1939, from where he should never have emerged.
“I’m in the middle of a romance that makes no sense at all. It’s called The Crimson Tunic, by someone called Martín. It’s part of an old series, The City of the Damned. It was lent to me by that little fat guy Tudela in room 426, who always finds odd things in the Rastro flea market. The story is about your part of the world, Barcelona. You might feel like reading it.”
“I won’t say no.”
“Very good. And keep your eye on that pair. I know you can fend for yourself, but those two don’t leave a pretty shadow.”
Alicia hung up and calmly sat down to wait for Leandro’s jackals to sniff her out. At most, two or three minutes before they stuck their noses around, she reckoned. She lit a cigarette and waited in the armchair facing the door, which she’d left open. The long dark corridor leading to the lifts opened up before her. An odour of dust, old wood, and the threadbare carpet covering the floor of the passageway flooded the room.
The Hispania was an exquisite ruin in a perpetual state of decadence. Built in the early 1920s, the hotel had seen its years of glory among Madrid’s large luxury buildings but fell into disuse after the civil war. After two decades of decline, it had become a graveyard where the dispossessed, the doomed, lost souls with nothing and no one in their lives, languished in drab rooms that they rented by the week. The hotel had hundreds of rooms, but half of them were empty and had been for years. A number of floors were closed off, and eerie tales spread among the guests, recounting what sometimes took place in those long bleak passages: a lift would stop and open its doors when nobody had pressed the button, and for a few seconds a yellowish beam of light would shine out from the car, revealing what looked like the innards of a sunken liner. Maura had told her that the switchboard often rang in the early hours with calls from rooms nobody had occupied since the war. When he answered, there was never anyone on the line, except the time he heard a woman weeping; when he asked what he could do for her, another voice, dark and deep, said to him: “Come with us.”
“From then on, I’m damned if I take calls from any room after midnight,” Maura admitted to her once. “Sometimes I think this place is like a metaphor, you know? Of the whole country, I mean. I feel it’s cursed because of all the blood that was spilled and is still on our hands, however much we insist on pointing the finger at others.”
“You’re a poet, Maura. Not even all those detective novels manage to dampen your lyric vein. What Spain needs is thinkers like you to bring back the great national art of conversation.”
“Laugh at me all you want. It’s easy when you’re on the regime’s payroll, Señorita Gris. Although I’m sure that with what you must make, an important person like you could afford to move somewhere better and not rot in this dungeon. This is no place for a refined, classy mademoiselle like you. People don’t come here to live, they come here to die.”
“As I said. A poet.”
“Get lost.”
Maura wasn’t all that mistaken in his philosophical remarks, and as time went by the Hispania began to be known, among select circles, as Suicide Central. Decades later, when the hotel had already been closed for some time and finally the demolition engineers went through the building, floor by floor, placing the explosive charges that would tear it down forever, rumour had it that in a number of rooms they’d found corpses that had lain mummified on beds or in bathtubs for years, its old night manager among them.