Carlos Zafón - The Angel's Game

‘Welcome back,’ I said.

Cristina’s only baggage was a small suitcase. I gave her my hand and we went down to the platform, which by now was deserted. We walked all the way to the main foyer without exchanging a word. When we reached the exit we stopped. It was raining hard and the line of taxis that had been there when I arrived had vanished.

‘I don’t want to return to Villa Helius tonight, David. Not yet.’

‘You can stay at my house if you like, or we can find you a room in a hotel.’

‘I don’t want to be alone.’

‘Let’s go home. If there’s one thing I have it’s too many bedrooms.’

I sighted a porter who had put his head out to look at the storm and was holding an impressive-looking umbrella. I went up to him and offered to buy it for five times its real value. He gave it to me wreathed in an obliging smile.

Protected by that umbrella we ventured out into the deluge and headed towards the tower house, at which we arrived completely drenched ten minutes later, thanks to the gusts of wind and the puddles. The storm had caused a power cut; the streets were buried in a liquid darkness speckled here and there with the light cast by oil lamps or candles from balconies and doors. I had no doubt that the marvellous electrical system in my house must have been one of the first to succumb. We had to fumble our way up the stairs and when we opened the front door of the apartment, a breath of lightning emphasised its gloomiest and most inhospitable aspect.

‘If you’ve changed your mind and you’d rather we looked for a hotel…’

‘No, it’s fine. Don’t worry.’

I left Cristina’s suitcase in the hall and went to the kitchen in search of a box of assorted candles I kept in the larder. I started to light them, one by one, fixing them on plates, and in tumblers and glasses. Cristina watched me from the door.

‘It will only take a minute,’ I assured her. ‘I have a lot of practice.’

I began to distribute the candles around the rooms, along the corridor and in various corners, until the whole house was enveloped in a flickering twilight of pale gold.

‘It looks like a cathedral,’ Cristina said.

I took her to one of the rooms that I didn’t use but kept clean and tidy because of the few times Vidal, too drunk to return to his mansion, had stayed the night.

‘I’ll bring you some clean towels. If you don’t have anything to change into, I can offer you a wide selection of dreadful belle époque clothes, which the former owners left in the wardrobes.’

My clumsy attempt at humour barely drew a smile from her, and she simply nodded. I left her sitting on the bed while I rushed off to fetch the towels. When I returned she was still sitting there, motionless. I left the towels next to her on the bed and brought over a couple of candles that I’d placed by the door, to give her a bit more light.

‘Thanks,’ she murmured.

‘While you change I’ll go and prepare some hot soup for you.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘It will do you good, all the same. If you need anything, let me know.’

I left her alone and went off to my room to remove my sodden shoes. I put water on to boil and sat waiting in the gallery. The rain was still crashing down, angrily machine-gunning the large windows; it poured through the gutters up in the tower and funnelled along the flat roof, sounding like footsteps on the ceiling. Further out, the Ribera quarter was plunged into almost total darkness.

After a while the door of Cristina’s room opened and I heard her approaching. She was wearing a white dressing gown and had thrown an ugly woollen shawl over her shoulders.

‘I’ve borrowed this from one of the wardrobes,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

‘You can keep it if you like.’

She sat in one of the armchairs and glanced round the room, stopping to look at a pile of paper on the table. She looked at me and I nodded.

‘I finished it a few days ago,’ I said.

‘And yours?’

I thought of both manuscripts as mine, but I just nodded again.

‘May I?’ she asked, taking a page and bringing it nearer the candlelight.

‘Of course.’

I watched her read, a thin smile on her lips.

‘Pedro will never believe he’s written this,’ she said.

‘Trust me,’ I replied.

Cristina put the sheet back on the pile and looked at me for a long time.

‘I’ve missed you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to, but I have.’

‘Me too.’

‘Some days, before going to the sanatorium, I’d walk to the station and sit on the platform to wait for the train coming from Barcelona, hoping you might be on it.’

I swallowed hard.

‘I thought you didn’t want to see me,’ I said.

‘That’s what I thought, too. My father often asked after you, you know? He asked me to look after you.’

‘Your father was a good man,’ I said. ‘A good friend.’

Cristina nodded and smiled, but I could see that her eyes were filling with tears.

‘In the end he couldn’t remember anything. There were days when he confused me with my mother and would ask me to forgive him for the years he spent in prison. Then weeks would go by when he hardly seemed to notice I was there. Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn’t go away.’

‘I’m sorry, Cristina.’

‘In the last few days I thought he was better. He was beginning to remember things. I had brought with me one of his albums and I started to show him the photographs again, pointing out who was who. There is one very old picture, taken in Villa Helius, in which you and he are both sitting in the motor car. You’re at the steering wheel and my father is teaching you how to drive. You’re both laughing. Do you want to see it?’

I hesitated, but didn’t dare break that moment.

‘Of course…’

Cristina went to look for the album in her suitcase and returned with a small book bound in leather. She sat next to me and started turning the pages, which were filled with old snapshots, cuttings and postcards. Manuel, like my father, had barely learned to read and write and his memories were mostly made up of images.

‘Look, here you are.’

I looked at the photograph and vividly recalled the summer day when Manuel had let me climb into the first car Vidal ever bought and had taught me the basics of driving. Then we had taken the car out along Calle Panamá and, doing about five kilometres per hour – a dizzying speed to me at the time – had driven as far as Avenida Pearson, returning with me at the wheel.

‘You’re an ace driver!’ Manuel had concluded. ‘If you’re ever stuck with your stories, you could consider a future in racing.’

I smiled, remembering that moment which I thought I had lost. Cristina handed me the album.

‘Keep it. My father would have liked you to have it.’

‘It’s yours, Cristina. I can’t accept it.’

‘I would rather you kept it.’

‘It’s in storage then, until you want to come and collect it.’

I started to turn the pages, revisiting faces I remembered and gazing at others I had never seen. There was the wedding photograph of Manuel Sagnier and his wife Marta, whom Cristina resembled a great deal, studio portraits of Cristina’s uncles and grandparents, a picture of a street in the Raval quarter with a procession going by, another of the San Sebastián bathing area on La Barceloneta beach. Manuel had collected old postcards of Barcelona and newspaper cuttings with photos of a very young Vidal – one of him posing by the doors of the Hotel Florida at the top of Mount Tibidabo, and another where he stood arm in arm with a staggering beauty in the halls of La Rabasada casino.

‘Your father worshipped Don Pedro.’