SHE WANTED TO believe him. She wanted to believe him with the yearning that comes with the suspicion that truth hurts, and that cowards live longer and better, even if they do so in the prison of their own lies.
She looked out the window to watch Leandro walk over to the car waiting for him on the corner. A driver with dark glasses held the door open for him. It was one of those huge black cars, tanks with tinted windows and a cryptic licence plate that were sometimes seen plowing though the traffic like hearses; the sort everyone moved out of the way to avoid because they knew, without having to ask, that they didn’t carry normal people, and the best thing was to step aside. Before he got into the car, Leandro turned around for a second, looked up towards her window, and waved. When Alicia tried to swallow, she found that her mouth was dry. She wanted to believe him.
She spent an hour chain-smoking, walking up and down the apartment like a caged animal. More than once, more than ten times, she went over to the window to scan the other side of the street, hoping to see Vargas in his rooms above the Gran Café. There was no sign of him. He’d had plenty of time to call Madrid and receive his orders. He had probably gone out for a stroll, to clear his head, walking through that Barcelona to which he would soon say goodbye. The last thing he must have wanted right then was to be in Alicia’s company and run the risk of having his eyes pulled out for having told Leandro everything.
He had no option.
She would have liked to believe that too.
As soon as Leandro left, she’d started to feel a stabbing pain in her hip. At first she’d ignored it, but now she could feel a dull ache throbbing with her pulse. It felt as if someone was trying to nail a picture hook into her by gently hitting it with a hammer. She could imagine the tip of the metal scratching the bone’s surface and slowly digging in. She swallowed half a pill with another glass of wine and lay down on the sofa to wait for the drug to take effect. She knew she was drinking too much. She didn’t need Vargas or Leandro to look at her and remind her. She could feel it in her blood and in her breath. But it was the only thing that calmed her anxiety.
*
Alicia closed her eyes and began to go over Leandro’s account. He himself had taught her, when she was barely a child, to always listen and read with the headlights on. “The eloquence of an explanation,” he had told her, “is directly proportional to the intelligence of the person expressing it, in the same way as its credibility is proportional to the stupidity of the person listening to it.”
Sanchís’s confession, in the version recounted by Gil de Partera to Leandro, was perfect at first sight, especially as it didn’t seem perfect. It explained almost everything that had taken place yet left a few loose ends, as usually occurs with the most credible explanations. Truth is never perfect, never squares with all expectations. Truth always poses doubts and questions. Only lies are one hundred percent believable, because they don’t need to justify reality, they simply have to tell us what we want to hear.
Fifteen minutes later the pill began to act. Slowly the pain lessened, until all Alicia felt was a sharp prickling she was used to ignoring. She stretched an arm under the sofa and pulled out the storage box containing the files they’d stolen from Brians’s furniture warehouse. She couldn’t help smiling at the thought that Leandro had spent the morning resting his illustrious bum on that information, without realizing. She had a quick look through the folders inside the box. Much of it, or the bit that mattered, had already been incorporated into the official narrative of the case. As she rummaged around the bottom of the box, however, she recovered the envelope with just the word ISABELLA on it in longhand. She opened it and pulled out a notebook. A piece of fine cardboard slid off the first page.
It was an old photograph, beginning to fade around the edges. The image showed a young girl with fair hair and lively eyes who smiled at the camera, her whole life ahead of her. Something about that face reminded Alicia of the young man she’d passed on her way out of the Sempere & Sons bookshop. She turned it over and immediately recognized Brians’s handwriting:
Isabella
Even the strokes in each letter and the way Brians had avoided adding the surname spoke of a strong feeling. It was not only guilt that was eating away at the defender of lost causes, but also desire. She left the photograph on the table and flicked through the notebook. All the pages were written in a clean, distinct writing that was obviously feminine. Only women write this clearly, without hiding behind absurd flourishes – at least when they’re writing for themselves and for nobody else. Alicia turned back to the first page and began to read:
My name is Isabella Gispert, and I was born in Barcelona in 1917. I’m twenty-two years old and I know I will never reach my twenty-third birthday. I write these words knowing for certain that I only have a few days left to live, and that I will soon have to leave behind those to whom I am most indebted in this world: my son Daniel and my husband Juan Sempere, the kindest man I have ever known. I will die without having merited all the trust, love and devotion he has given me. I’m writing for myself, taking with me secrets that don’t belong to me and knowing that nobody will ever read these pages. I’m writing to reminisce and to cling to life. My only wish is to be able to remember and understand who I was and why I did what I did while I am still able to do so, and before the consciousness that I already feel weakening abandons me forever. I’m writing even if it hurts, because loss and pain are the only things that keep me alive, and I’m afraid of dying. I’m writing to tell these pages what I can’t tell those I love, for fear of hurting them and putting their lives in danger. I’m writing because as long as I’m able to remember, I will be with them one more minute . . .
For a whole hour Alicia lost herself in the pages of that notebook, oblivious to the world, the pain, or the uncertainty in which Leandro’s visit had left her. For an hour, all that existed was the story told by those words, a story that, even before she reached the last page, she knew she would never forget. When she came to the end and closed Isabella’s confession over her chest, her eyes were veiled with tears, and all she could do was take a hand to her lips and suppress a scream.
*
This is how Fernandito found her, a little later. After knocking a few times on the door and getting no reply, he stepped in and saw her curled up into a ball, crying like he’d never seen anyone cry before. He didn’t know what to do except kneel down and put his arms around her, while Alicia moaned with pain as if someone had set fire to her heart.