When I got home I found her sitting at the kitchen table. She had washed all the dishes from the night before, had made coffee and had dressed and styled her hair so that she resembled a saint in a religious picture. Isabella, who was no fool, knew perfectly well where I’d been and looked at me like an abandoned dog, smiling meekly. I left the bags with the delicacies from Don Odón by the sink.

‘Didn’t my father shoot you with his gun?’

‘He’d run out of bullets and decided to throw all these pots of jam and Manchego cheese at me instead.’

Isabella pressed her lips together, trying to look serious.

‘So the name Isabella comes from your grandmother?’

‘La mamma,’ she confirmed. ‘In the area they called her Vesuvia.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘They say I’m a bit like her. When it comes to persistence.’

There was no need for a judge to pronounce on that, I thought.

‘Your parents are good folk, Isabella. They don’t misunderstand you any more than you misunderstand them.’

The girl didn’t say anything. She poured me a cup of coffee and waited for the verdict. I had two options: throw her out and give the two shopkeepers a fit; or be bold and patient for two or three more days. I imagined that forty-eight hours of my most cynical and cutting performance would be enough to break the iron determination of the young girl and send her, on her knees, back to her mother’s apron strings, begging for forgiveness and full board.

‘You can stay here for the time being-’

‘Thank you!’

‘Not so fast. You can stay here under the following conditions: one, that you go and spend some time in the shop every day, to say hello to your parents and tell them you’re well; and two, that you obey me and follow the rules of this house.’

It sounded patriarchal but excessively faint-hearted. I maintained my austere expression and decided to make my tone more severe.

‘What are the rules of this house?’ Isabella enquired.

‘Basically, whatever I damn well please.’

‘Sounds fair.’

‘It’s a deal, then.’

Isabella came round the table and hugged me gratefully. I felt the warmth and the firm shape of her seventeen-year-old body against mine. I pushed her away delicately, keeping my distance.

‘The first rule is that this is not Little Women and we don’t hug one another or burst into tears at the slightest thing.’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘That will be the motto on which we’ll build our coexistence: whatever I say.’

Isabella laughed and rushed off into the corridor.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘To tidy up your study. You don’t mean to leave it like that, do you?’

11

I had to find a place where I could think, where I could escape from my new assistant’s domestic pride and her obsession with cleanliness. So I went to the library in Calle del Carmen, set in a nave of Gothic arches that had once housed a medieval hospice. I spent the rest of the day surrounded by volumes that smelled like a papal tomb, reading about mythology and the history of religions until my eyes were about to fall out onto the table and roll away along the library floor. After hours of reading without a break, I worked out that I had barely scratched a millionth of what I could find beneath the arches of that sanctuary of books, let alone everything else that had been written on the subject. I decided to return the following day and the day after that: I would spend at least a week filling the cauldron of my thoughts with pages and pages about gods, miracles and prophecies, saints and apparitions, revelations and mysteries – anything rather than think about Cristina, Don Pedro and their life as a married couple.

As I had an obliging assistant at my disposal, I instructed her to find copies of catechisms and school books currently used for religious instruction, and to write me a summary of each one. Isabella did not dispute my orders, but she frowned when I gave them.

‘I want to know, in numbing detail, how children are taught the whole business, from Noah’s Ark to the Feeding of the Five Thousand,’ I explained.

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s the way I am. I have a wide range of interests.’

‘Are you doing research for a new version of “Away in a Manger”?’

‘No. I’m planning a novel about the adventures of a second lieutenant nun. Just do as I say and don’t question me or I’ll send you back to your parents’ shop to sell quince jelly galore.’

‘You’re a despot.’

‘I’m glad to see we’re getting to know one another.’

‘Does this have anything to do with the book you’re writing for that publisher, Corelli?’

‘It might.’

‘Well, I get the feeling it’s not a book that will have much commercial scope.’

‘And what would you know?’

‘More than you think. And there’s no need to get so worked up, either. I’m only trying to help you. Or have you decided to stop being a professional writer and change into an elegant amateur?’

‘For the moment I’m too busy being a nanny.’

‘I wouldn’t bring up the question of who is the nanny here, because I’d win that debate hands down.’

‘So what debate does Your Excellency fancy?’

‘Commercial art versus stupid moral idiocies.’

‘Dear Isabella, my little Vesuvia: in commercial art – and all art that is worthy of the name is commercial sooner or later – stupidity is almost always in the eye of the beholder.’

‘Are you calling me stupid?’

‘I’m calling you to order. Do as I say. End of story. Shush.’

I pointed to the door and Isabella rolled her eyes, mumbling some insult or other which I didn’t quite hear as she walked off down the passageway.

While Isabella went around schools and bookshops in search of textbooks and catechisms to precis for me, I went back to the library in Calle del Carmen to further my theological education, an endeavour I undertook fuelled by strong doses of coffee and stoicism. The first seven days of that strange creative process only enlightened me with more doubts. One of the few truths I discovered was that the vast majority of authors who had felt a calling to write about the divine, the human and the sacred must have been exceedingly learned and pious, but as writers they were dreadful. For the long-suffering reader forced to skim over their pages it was a real struggle not to fall into a coma induced by boredom with each new paragraph.

After surviving thousands of pages on the subject, I was beginning to get the impression that the hundreds of religious beliefs catalogued throughout the history of the printed letter were all extraordinarily similar. I attributed this first impression to my ignorance or to a lack of adequate information, but I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that I’d been going through the storyline of dozens of crime novels in which the murderer turned out to be either one person or another, but the mechanics of the plot were, in essence, always the same. Myths and legends, either about divinities or the formation and history of peoples and races, began to look like pictures on a jigsaw puzzle, slightly different from one another but always built with the same pieces, though not in the same order.

After two days I had already become friends with Eulalia, the head librarian, who picked out texts and volumes from the ocean of paper in her care and from time to time came to see me at my table in the corner to ask whether I needed anything else. She must have been around my age, and had wit coming out of her ears, usually in the form of sharp, somewhat poisonous jibes.

‘You’re reading a lot of hagiography, sir. Have you decided to become an altar boy now, at the threshold of maturity?’

‘It’s only research.’

‘Ah, that’s what they all say.’

The librarian’s clever jokes provided an invaluable balm that enabled me to survive those texts that seemed to be carved in stone, and to press on with my pilgrimage. Whenever Eulalia had a free moment she would come over to my table and help me classify all that bilge – pages abounding with stories of fathers and sons; of pure, saintly mothers; betrayals and conversions; prophets and martyrs; envoys from heaven; babies born to save the universe; evil creatures, horrifying to look at and usually taking the form of an animal; ethereal beings with racially acceptable features who acted as agents of good; and heroes subjected to terrible tests to prove their destiny. Earthly existence was always perceived as a temporary rite of passage which invited one to a docile acceptance of one’s lot and the rules of the tribe, because the reward was always in the hereafter, a paradise brimming with all the things one had lacked during corporeal life.