WHILE PROCEEDING TOWARDS the exit, Alicia noticed the figure sitting on a bench by the platform entrance, looking at her out of the corner of his eye – a small, scrawny man whose face orbited around a prominent nose, his features vaguely reminiscent of a Goya painting. He wore a coat that was far too big for him, making him look like a snail carrying his shell. Alicia could have sworn he wore newspaper pages folded under his clothes to keep himself warm, or for goodness knows what other reason, a practice she had not seen since the first postwar years.
The simplest thing would have been to forget him and tell herself he was only another nameless face, caught in the flood of the dispossessed, still floating around the dark areas of large cities almost twenty years after the end of the war – hoping perhaps that history would remember Spain and rescue the country from oblivion. The simplest thing would have been to think that Barcelona would give her at least a few hours’ respite before making her confront her fate. She walked past him without looking back and went straight to the exit, praying to the devil that he hadn’t recognized her. Twenty years had passed since that night, and she’d only been a child at the time.
Outside the station she climbed into a taxi and asked the driver to take her to number 12, Calle Aviñón. Her voice shook as she pronounced those words. The car drove straight up Paseo Isabel II towards Vía Layetana, dodging a pas de deux of intersecting trams that lit up the mist with blue electric sparks crackling on the overhead cables. Alicia scanned Barcelona’s sombre outlines through the window: the arches and towers, the narrow streets penetrating the old town, the lights of Montjuïc Castle far up in the distance. Home, dark home, she told herself.
At that time of night there was hardly any traffic. Ten minutes later, they’d reached their destination. The taxi driver left her by the front door of 12 Calle Aviñón, and after thanking her for the tip, which doubled the fare on the meter, he set off down the road, heading for the port. Alicia abandoned herself to the cold breeze that carried with it that neighbourhood smell of an old Barcelona not even the rain could dispel. She caught herself smiling. In time, even bad memories dress up for the occasion.
*
Her home was just a few steps away from the intersection with Calle Fernando, opposite the old Gran Café. Alicia was fumbling for her keys in her coat pocket when she heard the front door opening. She looked up to meet the smiling face of Jesusa, the caretaker.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Jesusa intoned, visibly excited.
Before Alicia could reply, Jesusa caught her in one of her boa-constrictor embraces and riddled her face with kisses that smelled of aniseed. “Let’s have a good look at you,” said the caretaker as she freed her.
Alicia smiled. “Don’t tell me I’m too thin.”
“Men might say that, and for once they’d be right.”
“You can’t imagine how I’ve missed you, Jesusa.”
“You shameless flatterer. Let me give you another kiss that you don’t deserve. All that time goodness knows where, without coming, or calling, or writing, or anything at all . . .”
Jesusa Labordeta was one of those war widows with enough spirit and determination for nine lives she had never been able to live – and never would. For fifteen years she’d been working as a caretaker in the building. She occupied a tiny apartment with two rooms at the far end of the entrance hall, which she shared with a radio tuned to a station featuring romantic soaps, and a half-dead dog she’d rescued from the street. She’d christened the mutt Napoleon, even though he could barely capture the street corner in time to perform his early-morning urinary duties, and often ended up dropping his load under the row of mailboxes in the hall. She complemented her miserable wages by mending and sewing up old clothes for half the neighborhood. Loose tongues – and most tongues were loose in those days – liked to say that Jesusa was as fond of anise liqueur as of tight-trousered sailors, and that sometimes, when she went overboard with the bottle, she could be heard weeping in her minute home while poor Napoleon howled with fear.
“Come on in, it’s fiendishly cold out here.”
Alicia followed her indoors.
“Señor Leandro called this morning to let me know you were coming.”
“Always so thoughtful, Señor Leandro.”
“He’s a gentleman,” declared Jesusa, who had always put him on a pedestal. “He speaks so well and lovely . . .”
The building had no lift, and the stairs seemed to have been put in by the architect as a deterrent. Jesusa walked ahead, and Alicia followed her as best she could, dragging her case step by step.
“I’ve aired the apartment and tidied the place up a bit, ’cause it really needed it. Fernandito helped me – I hope you don’t mind. As soon as he heard you were coming, he didn’t stop pestering me until I allowed him to make himself useful . . .”
Fernandito was Señora Jesusa’s nephew. A blameless soul of whom even a saint could take advantage, he was dangerously prone to the classic attacks of adolescent infatuation. To spice it all up, Mother Nature had enjoyed herself endowing him with the looks of a bumpkin. He lived with his mother in the next building and worked for a grocer’s as a delivery boy, although the bulk of his toils and talents was devoted to the composition of elaborate amorous verse dedicated to Alicia, in whom he saw an irresistible mixture of the Lady of the Camellias and the wicked queen in Snow White, only racier. Shortly before Alicia left Barcelona, three years earlier, Fernandito had declared his eternal love to her, his readiness to provide her with at least five offspring, God willing, and the promise that his body, soul and other earthly belongings would always be hers, in exchange for a farewell kiss.
“Fernandito, I’m at least ten years older than you,” Alicia had told him at the time, drying his tears. “You shouldn’t think such things, it’s not right.”
“Why don’t you love me, Señorita Alicia? Am I not man enough for you?”
“Fernandito, you’re man enough to sink the Spanish Armada, but what you must do is find yourself a girlfriend who is your age. In a couple of years you’ll realize that I was right. All I can offer you is my friendship.”
Fernandito’s pride was like an earnest young boxer with more willingness than talent: it didn’t matter how many blows it took, it always came back for more. “Nobody will ever love you more than I do, Alicia,” he said. “Nobody.”
The day she was due to take the train to Madrid, Fernandito, who by dint of listening to boleros on the radio carried melodrama in his bloodstream, was waiting for her at the station dressed in his Sunday best, polished shoes and the implausible air of an aspiring matinee idol, though somewhat on the short side. He carried a bunch of red roses that had probably cost him a month’s salary and insisted on handing her a passionate love letter that would have made Lady Chatterley blush but only made Alicia cry, and not in the way poor Fernandito longed for. Before Alicia could step onto the train and get safely away from the would-be Casanova, Fernandito summoned up all the courage and nerve he’d been bottling up since puberty and gave her an almighty kiss, the sort of kiss only a fifteen-year-old can give, making her feel, if only for a while, that there was still hope for the world.
“You’re breaking my heart and sending me to an early grave, Señorita Alicia,” he sobbed. “I’ll die from weeping. I’ve heard that this is a medical certainty. The tear ducts dry up and end up bursting the aorta. They were talking about it on the radio the other day. You’ll see, they’ll send you the funeral notice, and then you’ll be sorry.”
“Fernandito, there’s more life in one of your tears than I could live if I made it to a hundred.”
“That sounds like something you’ve got out of a book.”
“No book can do you justice, Fernandito, unless it’s a treatise on biology.”
“Leave, go off with your deceit and your heart of stone. One day, when you feel you’re all alone with no one to turn to, you’ll miss me.”
Alicia kissed him on his forehead. She would have kissed him on the lips, but that would have killed him. “I’m missing you already. Take care, Fernandito. And try to forget me.”
*
At last they reached the top floor. When Alicia realized she was standing in front of the door to her old home, she emerged from her trance.
Jesusa opened the door and switched on the light. “Don’t worry,” she said, as if she’d read her thoughts. “The boy has a lovely girlfriend now and has wised up no end. Come along in.”
Alicia left her suitcase on the floor and walked into the flat. Jesusa stood waiting in the doorway. There were fresh flowers in a vase in the entrance hall, and the place had a pleasant smell of cleanliness. She went through the rooms and walked along the corridors slowly, as if she were visiting the apartment for the first time.
Hearing Jesusa behind her, setting the keys on the table, she came back into the dining room. The caretaker was looking at her with a half-smile.
“As if three years hadn’t gone by, right?”
“As if thirty had gone by,” replied Alicia.
“How long are you staying?”
“I still don’t know.”
Jesusa nodded.
“Well, you must be tired. You’ll find something for your dinner in the kitchen. Fernandito filled your larder. If you need anything, you know where to find me.”
“Thank you so much, Jesusa.”
The caretaker looked away. “I’m glad you’re home again.”
“Me too.”
Jesusa closed the door, and Alicia heard her footsteps fading down the stairs. She drew back the curtains and opened the windows to take a look at the street. Below spread the ocean of terraced rooftops covering Barcelona’s old town, and in the distance rose the towers of the cathedral and the basilica of Santa María del Mar. She scanned the outline of Calle Aviñón and caught sight of a figure withdrawing into the dark doorway of La Manual Alpargatera, the espadrille shop on the other side of the street. Whoever it was, the person was smoking, and the smoke ascended in silvery spirals up the building’s facade. Alicia kept her eyes fixed on that point for an instant but then gave up. It was too soon to start imagining threatening shadows. There would be enough time for that.
She closed the windows and, although she wasn’t hungry, sat at the kitchen table and ate a little bit of bread and cheese and some dried fruit and nuts. Then she opened a bottle of white wine she’d found on the table, tied with a red ribbon. The gesture had all the hallmarks of Fernandito, who still remembered her weaknesses. She poured herself a glass and sipped the wine with her eyes closed.
“Let’s hope it’s not poisoned,” she said. “To your health, Fernandito.”
The wine was excellent. Alicia poured herself a second glass and huddled up in the sitting-room armchair. She discovered that her radio still worked. Slowly she sipped the wine, a good vintage Penedès, and after a while, tired of the news bulletins that reminded the listeners, in case they’d forgotten, that Spain was the envy and the light of all nations in the world, she turned off the radio and decided to unpack the suitcase she’d brought. After dragging it into the middle of the dining room, she opened it on the floor. Looking at the contents, she wondered why she’d bothered to burden herself with clothes that seemed like remnants from another life, with possessions that, in fact, she had no intention of ever using again. She was tempted to close the suitcase and ask Jesusa, in the morning, to donate it to the Sisters of Charity. The only thing she pulled out was a revolver and two packets of bullets. The firearm had been a gift from Leandro in her second year of service, and Alicia suspected it had a past history her mentor had preferred not to mention.
What’s this? The Great Captain’s gun?
If you’d rather, I can find you a gun for young ladies, with an ivory grip and two golden barrels.
And what do I do with this, aside from using it to practice shooting poodles?
Make sure nobody practises on you.
In the end Alicia had accepted that heavy piece as she’d done with so many of Leandro’s offerings, in a tacit agreement of submission and pretence, where the unmentionable was sealed with a cold smile of politeness and a veil of silence, allowing her to look in the mirror and carry on deceiving herself on the purpose of her life. She held the weapon in her hands and felt its weight, then opened the cylinder. Seeing that it was unloaded, she emptied one of the bullet boxes on the floor and inserted all six bullets, taking her time. She stood up and walked over to the packed bookcase covering one of the walls. Jesusa and her army of feather dusters had left not a speck of dust or a trace of her three-year absence anywhere. She pulled a leather-bound copy of the Bible out from its place next to a French translation of Doctor Faustus and opened it. The pages had been hollowed out with a knife, making a perfect case for her private artillery. After hiding the gun in the Bible, she slipped it back on the bookshelf. “Amen,” she intoned.
She closed her suitcase and went to the bedroom. Freshly ironed and perfumed sheets welcomed her; tiredness from the train journey and the warmth of the wine in her bloodstream did the rest. She closed her eyes and listened to the murmur of the city whispering in her ear.
That night Alicia again dreamed that it was raining fire. She was jumping over the rooftops of the Raval quarter, fleeing from the roar of the bombs while buildings collapsed all around her in columns of fire and black smoke. Swarms of aircraft overflew at a low altitude, machine-gunning those running through the narrow streets as they tried to reach the shelters. When she peeped over a cornice of Calle Arco del Teatro, she saw a woman and four children fleeing in panic towards the Ramblas. A torrent of missiles swept the street, and their bodies burst into pools of blood and entrails as they ran. Alicia closed her eyes, and that is when the explosion happened. She felt it before hearing it, as if a train had charged against her in the dark. A stabbing pain shot through her side, and the flames lifted her up in the air and flung her against a skylight through which she fell, wrapped in blades of red-hot glass. She plunged into the void.
A few seconds later, something broke her fall. She’d landed on a wooden balcony suspended at the top of a huge structure. She crawled over to the edge and, looking down into the darkness, thought she saw the outline of a spiral framework in the faint reddish glow reflected by the clouds.
Alicia rubbed her eyes and looked down again into the shadowy space. Below her lay a fantastically designed citadel made entirely of books. After a while she heard footsteps approaching up one of the staircases of the labyrinth. A man with thinning hair knelt down beside her and examined the wounds covering her body. Holding her in his arms, he took her through tunnels, down stairs and under bridges until they reached the base of the structure. There he laid her on a bed and saw to her wounds. Holding her tight, he kept her from death’s door while the bombs went on falling furiously. A fiery light filtered through the dome, allowing the child Alicia to gaze at the flickering images of that place, the most marvelous she had ever seen: a basilica made of books hidden in a palace that had never existed, a place she could only return to in dreams. Somewhere like that could only belong to the other side, to the place where her mother, Lucía, waited for her, and where her own soul had remained imprisoned.
At dawn the man with the sparse hair picked her up in his arms again, and together they walked through the streets of Barcelona, streets filled with blood and flames. At last they came to an orphanage. There a doctor covered in ashes looked at them and shook his head, muttering under his breath.
“This doll is broken,” he said, turning his back on them.
And then, as she had so often dreamed, Alicia looked at her own body and recognized it as a scorched wooden puppet, still smoking, its strings cut off and dangling. Nurses with no eyes came off the walls, snatched the doll from the hands of the good Samaritan, and dragged it to a vast hangar. There stood a colossal mountain, made up of bits and pieces of hundreds, even thousands, of dolls like her. The nurses threw her onto the pile and went away, laughing.