THE CANDLELIGHT FADES into a tiny pale-blue flame, floating on a pool of wax. Valls draws the hand he no longer feels into the aura of brightness. His skin has a purplish colour, almost black. His fingers are swollen, and his nails, beneath which flows a gelatinous liquid with an indescribable stench, are beginning to fall off. Valls tries to move the fingers, but his hand doesn’t respond. It’s just a piece of dead flesh stuck to his body, beginning to send black lines up his arm. He can feel the rotten blood in his veins clouding his thoughts, dragging him into a dark, feverish sleep. He knows that if he waits a few more hours, he will lose consciousness. He will die in the narcotic sleep of gangrene, his body just a tangle of carrion that will never see the sunlight again.
The saw his gaoler left in the cell is still there. He has considered it various times. He has tried pressing it down on the fingers that no longer belong to him. At first he felt some pain. Now he feels nothing, only nausea. His throat is dry from shouting, moaning, begging for mercy. He knows that sometimes someone comes to see him. When he is asleep. When he’s delirious. It is usually the man with the mask, his gaoler. Other times it’s the angel he remembers seeing by the car door, before a knife cut through his hand and he lost consciousness.
Something has gone wrong. There has been a mistake somewhere in his calculations and suppositions. Martín isn’t here, or hasn’t wanted to show his face. Valls knows, needs to believe, that all this is the work of David Martín. Only his sick mind could think of doing this to someone.
“Tell Martín I’m sorry, tell him I beg his forgiveness . . .” he has pleaded a thousand times in the gaoler’s presence.
He never gets a reply. Martín will let him die there, let him rot a centimetre at a time, not deigning to come down to his cell, even once, to spit in his face.
At some point he loses consciousness again.
*
Valls wakes up soaked in his own urine, convinced this is 1942, and he’s back in Montjuïc Castle. His poisoned blood has snatched what little reason he had left. He laughs. I was inspecting the cells, and I’ve fallen asleep in one of them, he thinks. That’s when he notices a hand that isn’t his, attached to his arm. Panic takes hold of him. He has seen lots of corpses, during the war and in his years as prison governor, and he knows without needing to be told that the hand he is looking at is a dead man’s hand. He creeps along the floor, thinking the hand will drop off, but it follows him. He hits the hand against the wall, and it doesn’t come off. He doesn’t realize he’s screaming when he grabs hold of the saw and starts cutting just above the wrist. The flesh yields like wet clay, but when he hits the top of the bone, a deep nausea invades him. He doesn’t stop. He musters all his strength. His howls drown the sound the bone makes when it breaks under the metal. A pool of black blood spreads at his feet. The only thing linking his hand to his body is a shred of skin.
The pain comes later, like a huge wave. It reminds him of a time when he was a child and he touched the naked cable from which a lightbulb hung – in the basement of his parents’ home. He collapses backwards and feels something rising to his throat. He cannot breathe. He is drowning in his own vomit. It will just take a minute, he tells himself. He thinks of Mercedes and puts all the strength of his being into fixing the image of her face in his mind.
*
Valls barely notices when the cell door opens and the gaoler kneels down beside him. He carries a bucket of scalding tar. He grabs Valls’s arm and dips it in the bucket. Valls feels the fire.
The gaoler is looking into his eyes. “Do you remember now?”
Valls nods.
The gaoler sinks a needle into his arm. The liquid flooding into his veins is ice cold and makes Valls think of a clean blue sea. The second injection is the one that brings peace, a sleep with no end and no consciousness.