6

Perhaps there was too much caffeine coursing through my veins, or maybe it was just my conscience trying to return, like electricity after a power cut, but I spent the rest of the morning turning over in my mind an idea that was far from comforting. It was hard to imagine that there was no connection between the fire in which Barrido and Escobillas had perished, Corelli’s proposal – I hadn’t heard a single word from him, which made me suspicious – and the strange manuscript I had rescued from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which I suspected had been written within the four walls of my study.

The thought of returning to Corelli’s house uninvited, to ask him about the fact that our conversation and the fire should have occurred practically at the same time, was not appealing. My instinct told me that when the publisher decided he wanted to see me again he would do so motu propio and I was in no great hurry to pursue our inevitable meeting. The investigation into the fire was already in the hands of Inspector Víctor Grandes and his two bulldogs, Marcos and Castelo, on whose list of favourite people I came highly recommended. The further away I kept from them, the better. This left only the connection between the manuscript and the tower house. After years of telling myself it was no coincidence that I had ended up living here, the idea was beginning to take on a different significance.

I decided to start my own investigation in the place to which I had confined most of the belongings left behind by the previous inhabitants. I found the key to the room at the far end of the corridor in the kitchen drawer, where it had spent many years. I hadn’t been in that room since the men from the electrical company had wired up the house. When I put the key into the lock, I felt a draught of cold air from the keyhole brushing across my fingers, and I realised that Isabella was right; the room did give off a strange smell, reminiscent of dead flowers and freshly turned earth.

I opened the door and covered my mouth and nose. The stench was intense. I groped around the wall for the light switch, but the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling didn’t respond. The light from the corridor revealed the outline of the boxes, books and trunks I had banished to that room years before. I looked at everything with disgust. The wall at the end was completely covered by a large oak wardrobe. I knelt down by a box full of old photographs, spectacles, watches and other personal items. I began to rummage without really knowing what I was looking for, but after a while I abandoned the undertaking with a sigh. If I was hoping to discover anything I needed a plan. I was about to leave the room when I heard the wardrobe door slowly opening behind my back. A puff of icy, damp air touched the nape of my neck. I turned round slowly. The wardrobe door was half open and I could see the old dresses and suits that hung inside it, eaten away by time, fluttering like seaweed under water. The current of fetid cold air was coming from within. I stood up and walked towards the wardrobe. I opened the doors wide and pulled aside the clothes hanging on the rail. The wood at the back was rotten and had begun to disintegrate. Behind it I noticed what looked like a wall of plaster with a hole in it, a few centimetres wide. I leaned in to see what was on the other side of the wall, but it was almost pitch dark. The faint glow from the corridor cast only a vaporous thread of light through the hole into the space beyond, and all I could perceive was a murky gloom. I put my eye closer, trying to make out some shape, but at that moment a black spider appeared at the mouth of the hole. I recoiled quickly and the spider ran into the wardrobe, disappearing among the shadows. I closed the wardrobe door, left the room, turned the key in the lock and put it safely in the top of a chest of drawers in the corridor. The stench that had been trapped in the room had spread down the passage like poison. I cursed the moment I had decided to open that door and went outside to the street, hoping to forget, if only for a few hours, the darkness that throbbed at the heart of the tower house.

Bad ideas always come in twos. To celebrate the fact that I’d discovered some sort of camera obscura hidden in my home, I went to Sempere & Sons with the idea of taking the bookseller to lunch at La Maison Dorée. Sempere the elder was reading a beautiful edition of Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa and wouldn’t even hear of it.

‘I don’t need to pay to see snobs and halfwits congratulating one another, Martín.’

‘Don’t be grumpy. I’m buying.’

Sempere declined. His son, who had witnessed the conversation from the entrance to the back room, looked at me, hesitating.

‘What if I take your son with me? Will you stop talking to me?’

‘It’s up to you how you waste your time and money. I’m staying here to read: life’s too short.’

Sempere’s son was the very model of discretion. Even though we’d known one another since we were children, I couldn’t remember having had more than three or four short conversations with him. I didn’t know of any vices or weaknesses he might have, but I had it on good authority that among the girls in the quarter he was considered to be quite a catch, the official golden bachelor. More than one would drop by the bookshop with any old excuse and stand sighing by the shop window. But Sempere’s son, even if he did notice, never tried to cash in on these promises of devotion and parted lips. Anyone else would have made a brilliant career in seduction with only a tenth of the capital. Anyone but Sempere’s son who, one sometimes felt, deserved to be called a saint.

‘At this rate, he’s going to end up on the shelf,’ Sempere complained from time to time.

‘Have you tried throwing a bit of chilli pepper into his soup to stimulate the blood flow in key areas?’ I would ask.

‘You can laugh, you rascal. I’m close to seventy and I don’t have a single grandson.’

We were received by the same head waiter I remembered from my last visit, but without the servile smile or welcoming gesture. When I told him we hadn’t made a reservation he nodded disdainfully, clicking his fingers to summon a young waiter, who guided us unceremoniously to what I imagined was the worst table in the room, next to the kitchen door and buried in a dark, noisy corner. During the following twenty-five minutes nobody came near our table, not even to offer us the menu or pour us a glass of water. The staff walked past, banging the door and utterly ignoring our presence and our attempts to attract their attention.

‘Don’t you think we should leave?’ Sempere’s son said at last. ‘I’d be happy with a sandwich in any old place…’

He’d hardly finished speaking when I saw them arrive. Vidal and his wife were advancing towards their table escorted by the head waiter and two other waiters who were falling over themselves to offer their congratulations. The Vidals sat down and a couple of minutes later the royal audience began: one after the other, all the diners in the room went over to congratulate Vidal. He received these obeisances with divine grace and sent each one away shortly afterwards. Sempere’s son, who had become aware of the situation, was observing me.

‘Martín, are you all right? Why don’t we leave?’

I nodded slowly. We got up and headed for the exit, skirting the edges of the dining room on the opposite side from the Vidals’ table. Before we left the restaurant we passed by the head waiter, who didn’t even bother to look at us, and as we reached the main door I saw, in the mirror above the doorframe, that Vidal was leaning over and kissing Cristina on the lips. Once outside, Sempere’s son looked at me, mortified.