VALLS HAS LOST all track of time. He doesn’t know whether he’s been in this cell for days or for weeks. He hasn’t seen the sunlight since one faraway afternoon when he was travelling up the road to Vallvidrera in the car, sitting beside Vicente. His hand hurts, and when he tries to scratch it, he can’t find it. He feels spasms in fingers that no longer exist and a stabbing pain in the knuckles, as if someone were nailing iron spikes into his bones. For some hours, or days, his side has been hurting. He can’t see the colour of the urine that falls into the brass pail, but he thinks it’s darker than usual, tinged with blood. The woman hasn’t returned, and Martín still hasn’t appeared. He can’t understand. Isn’t this what Martín wanted? To see him rotting away in a cell?
The faceless and nameless gaoler checks on him once a day, or so Valls believes. He has started to measure the days by the man’s visits. He brings Valls water and food. The food is always the same: bread, rancid milk, and sometimes a sort of dry meat like salted tuna that he finds hard to chew because most of his teeth are getting loose. Two have already fallen out. Sometimes he runs his tongue over his gums and tastes his own blood, feeling his teeth giving way to the pressure.
“I need a doctor,” he says when the gaoler arrives with the food.
The gaoler hardly ever speaks. He barely looks at him.
“How long have I been here?” Valls asks.
The gaoler ignores his questions.
“Tell her I want to speak to her. To tell her the truth.”
On one occasion he wakes up and discovers there’s someone else in the cell. It’s the gaoler. He is holding something shiny in his hand. Perhaps it’s a knife. Valls makes no attempt to protect himself. He feels the prick in his buttock and the cold. It’s just another injection.
“How long are you going to keep me alive?”
The gaoler straightens up and walks over to the cell door. Valls grabs his leg. A kick in the stomach winds him. He spends hours curled up into a ball, moaning with pain.
That night he dreams about his daughter Mercedes again, when she was just a little girl. They’re in their estate in Somosaguas, in the garden. Valls has been held up speaking to one of his servants, and loses sight of her. When he looks for her, he finds her footprints on the path leading to the dolls’ house. Valls steps into the dark building and calls his daughter. He finds her clothes and a trail of blood.
The dolls are licking their lips with feline glee. They have devoured her.