The City of Mist Read online

  ‘What business?’

  ‘Let me remind you that this is a confessional and if you lie to a priest Our Lord may well strike you down with a deadly bolt on your way out,’ the confessor threatened.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘If I were you I wouldn’t risk it. Come on, spit it out.’

  ‘Where do I begin?’

  ‘Skip the playing with yourself and the swear words and tell me what it is you do every day in my parish at four o’clock in the afternoon.’

  The kneeling, the darkness and the smell of wax have something about them that invite one to unburden one’s conscience. I even confessed my first sneeze. The priest listened in silence, clearing his throat every time I stopped. At the end of my confession, when I supposed he was going to send me straight to hell, I heard him chuckling.

  ‘Aren’t you going to give me a penance?’

  ‘What’s your name, kid?’

  ‘David Martín, sir.’

  ‘It’s “father”, not “sir”. One would say “sir” to your father, and “Lord” to the Most High. But I’m not your father, I’m a father, in this case, Father Sebastián.’

  ‘Forgive me, Father Sebastián.’

  ‘Just “father” will be fine. And the one who forgives is the Lord. I only do the administering. Now: back to business. For today I’ll let you go with only a warning and a couple of Hail Marys. And as I believe that the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen this most unusual path to persuade you to come to church, I’ll offer you a deal. Every other day, half an hour before you meet up with your little damsel, you come and help me clean the sacristy. In exchange I’ll keep the maid here for at least half an hour to give you more time.’

  ‘You’ll do this for me, Father?’

  ‘Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. And now clear off.’

  3

  Father Sebastián proved to be a man of his word. I would arrive half an hour early and help him in the sacristy, for the poor fellow was almost lame and could barely manage on his own. He liked to listen to my stories, which according to him were little blasphemies of a venial nature, but which amused him, especially the ones about ghosts and curses. He seemed to me as solitary a person as I was, and when I admitted that Blanca was my only friend, he agreed to help me. I lived for those meetings.

  Blanca always arrived looking pallid and cheerful, dressed in ivory-coloured clothes. She always wore new shoes and necklaces with silver medals. She listened to the tales I invented for her and told me about her world and the large dark house, close by, where her father had gone to live, a frightening place she loathed. Sometimes she talked about her mother, Alicia, with whom she lived in the old family house in Sarriá. Other times, speaking almost in tears, she mentioned her father, whom she adored but who, she said, was ill and now barely left the house.

  ‘My father is a writer,’ she explained. ‘Like you. But he doesn’t write stories for me any more, the way he used to. Now he only writes stuff for a man who sometimes comes to the house at night to visit him. I’ve never seen him, but once I spent the night there and I heard them talking until very late, locked up in my father’s study. That man isn’t good. He scares me.’

  Every afternoon, when we parted, I walked back home daydreaming about the moment when I would rescue her from that existence marked by absences, from that night visitor who scared her, from that pampered life that stole the light from her with every passing day. Every afternoon I told myself that I wasn’t going to forget her and that, so long as I remembered her, I’d be able to save her.

  One November day – it had dawned blue with frosty windows – I went out to meet her as usual, but Blanca didn’t come to our rendezvous. For two weeks I waited in vain for my friend to appear in the basilica. I looked everywhere for her, and when my father caught me weeping at night I lied to him and told him I had toothache, although no tooth could hurt as much as that absence. Father Sebastián, who began to worry every time he saw me waiting there like a lost soul, sat down next to me one day and tried to comfort me.

  ‘Perhaps you should forget your friend, David.’

  ‘I can’t. I promised I would never forget her.’

  A month had gone by since her disappearance when I realised I was beginning to forget her. I’d stopped going to the church every other day, I’d stopped inventing stories for her and holding her image in the dark every night as I fell asleep. I had begun to forget the sound of her voice, her smell and the light of her face. When I realised that I was losing her, I wanted to go and see Father Sebastián to beg his forgiveness, to beg him to pull away the pain that was devouring me, the pain that was telling me to my face that I’d broken my promise and had been incapable of remembering the only friend I’d ever had.

  The last time I saw Blanca was at the beginning of that December. I’d gone down to the street and was standing by the front door staring at the rain when I caught sight of her. She was walking alone in the rain, her white patent shoes and her ivory-coloured dress stained with muddy water. I ran towards her and saw that she was weeping. I asked her what had happened and she hugged me. Blanca told me that her father was very ill and that she’d run away from home. I told her not to be afraid, we would run away together. If necessary I’d steal the money to buy two train tickets and we’d leave the city forever. Blanca smiled and embraced me. We stood like that, hugging silently beneath the scaffolding of the concert hall, until a large black carriage appeared through the mist of the downpour and stopped in front of us. A dark figure stepped out of the carriage. It was Antonia, the maid. She pulled Blanca from my arms and shoved her inside the carriage. Blanca screamed and when I tried to grab her arm the maid turned and slapped me as hard as she could. I fell backwards on the cobblestones, dazed by the blow. When I got up again the carriage was moving into the distance.

  I ran after the carriage in the rain until I reached the roadworks for the construction of Vía Layetana. The new avenue was a long valley of waterlogged ditches that was destroying the jungle of side streets and houses in the Ribera quarter as it advanced with hammer blows of dynamite and demolition cranes. I saw the carriage dodging potholes and puddles, getting further and further away from me. In an attempt not to lose sight of it I climbed onto a ridge of cobblestones and earth that ran alongside a ditch flooded by the rain. Suddenly I felt the earth give way beneath my feet and I slipped. I tumbled into the ditch, falling face down into the well of water that had collected below. When I managed to stand up and get my head out of the liquid that covered me up to my waist, I realised that the water was poisoned and alive with black spiders that floated and walked over the surface. The insects hurled themselves over me and covered my hands and my arms. I screamed, waving my arms about and climbing up the mud walls of the trench, panic-stricken. By the time I got out of the flooded ditch it was too late. The carriage was disappearing into the upper reaches of the city, its outline enveloped in the blanket of rain. Soaked to my bones I dragged myself back home where my father was still asleep and locked up in his room. I took my clothes off and got into bed trembling with anger and cold. I noticed that my arms were covered in tiny red, bleeding dots. Bites. The spiders in the ditch hadn’t wasted their time. I could feel the poison burning in my blood and then I lost consciousness, falling into a crater of darkness somewhere between awareness and sleep.

  I dreamed that I was walking through the deserted streets of the neighbourhood looking for Blanca in the storm. Black rain pounded the facades and through flashes of lightning I could make out distant figures. A large black carriage crept along in the fog. Blanca travelled inside the carriage, shouting and banging the windows with her fists. I followed her shouts as far as a narrow, murky street where I saw the carriage come to a halt opposite a tall, dark house – a house that seemed to twist upwards, forming a tower that pierced the sky. Blanca was stepping out of the carriage and looking at me, stretching her pleading hands towards me. I wanted to run to her but my steps would
only advance a few metres. It was then that the large, dark silhouette appeared, standing at the door of the house – a huge angel with a face of marble that looked at me and smiled like a wolf, spreading its black wings over Blanca and wrapping her in an embrace. I screamed, but utter silence had descended over the city. During an endless moment the rain was left suspended in mid-air, a million glass tears floating in the void, and I saw the angel kiss her on the forehead, its lips leaving a mark on her skin like that of a red-hot iron. When the rain brushed the ground they had both disappeared forever.

  NAMELESS

  Translated by Lucia Graves

  BARCELONA, 1905

  Years later, I was told that she was last seen walking up that sombre avenue leading to the gates of the Pueblo Nuevo Cemetery. Evening was falling and an icy wind was dragging a cupola of red clouds over the city. She walked alone, shivering with cold and leaving a wake of uncertain footsteps on the mantle of snow that had started to fall in mid-afternoon. When she reached the entrance to the graveyard she paused for a moment to catch her breath. A forest of angels and crosses peered over the walls. The stench of dead flowers, lime and sulphur licked her face, inviting her in. She was about to start walking again when a stabbing pain throbbed through her entrails like a red-hot iron. She put her hands on her belly and took a deep breath, trying to stop the nausea. For an endless moment all she could feel was agony and the fear of being unable to take another step, of collapsing by the entrance to the cemetery and being discovered there at dawn, clinging to its spiked gates like a figure of bile and frost, with the child she was carrying trapped hopelessly in an icy sarcophagus.

  It would have been so easy to give in, there and then, stretched out on the snow, and close her eyes forever. But she could feel the breath of life beating inside her, a breath that did not want to be extinguished, that kept her upright, and she knew she would not succumb to the suffering or the cold. She gathered all the strength she didn’t possess and got back on her feet. Ribbons of pain knotted themselves in her belly but she ignored them and hastened on. She didn’t stop until she’d left the labyrinth of tombs and mouldy statues behind her. Only then, when she raised her head to look, did a ray of hope flash through her: for silhouetted against the murky twilight stood the large wrought-iron door that led to the Old Book Factory.

  Further on, the Pueblo Nuevo neighbourhood spread towards a horizon of ashes and shadows. The city of factories outlined the dark reflection of a Barcelona bewitched by hundreds of chimneys that exhaled their black breath over the scarlet of the sky. As the young woman entered the maze of narrow streets entangled among cavernous stores and warehouses, her eyes recognised some of the large structures that shored up the neighbourhood, from the factory of Can Saladrigas to the great water tower. The Old Book Factory stood out among them all. Turrets and hanging bridges emerged from its extravagant profile, suggesting the work of a diabolical architect who had discovered how to flout the laws of perspective. Domes, minarets and chimney stacks seemed to charge through a chaos of vaults and naves supported by dozens of flying buttresses and columns. Sculptures and reliefs snaked along its walls, and rotundas, speckled with windows, sent out shafts of ghostly light.

  The girl observed the row of gargoyles along its cornices – they oozed streaks of vapour, spreading a bitter perfume of ink and paper. Feeling another wave of pain coming she hurried to the large front door and pulled the bell rope. The muffled echo of a chime could be heard behind the large wrought-iron door. The girl looked behind her and noticed that in just a few seconds the snow had covered the trail of her footsteps. A cold, biting wind cornered her against the iron door. She pulled the bell rope again, harder and repeatedly, but no answer came. All around her, the faint light seemed to be vanishing with every passing second and shadows began to spread quickly at her feet. Well aware that she was running out of time, she stepped back a little and scanned the large windows of the main facade. A motionless figure was silhouetted against one of the windows with smoked-glass panes, like a spider in the centre of its web. The girl couldn’t see its face; all she could make out was a female body, but she knew she was being observed. She waved her arms and called out for help. The figure remained immobile until suddenly the light went out. The window was now in complete darkness, but the girl noticed that the two eyes that had been piercing hers were still there, in the shadow, unmoving, shining in the twilight. For the first time fear made her forget the cold and the pain. She pulled the bell rope a third time and when she realised that ringing the bell would get no response she started shouting and banging the door with her fists. She struck the door until her hands bled and she begged for help until her voice broke and her legs could no longer hold her up. Then she collapsed into an icy puddle, closed her eyes and listened to the throbbing of life in her womb. Soon the snow began to cover her face and her body.

  Evening was already spreading like a pool of ink when the door opened, casting a fan of light over the girl. Two figures carrying gas lamps knelt down beside her. One of the men, heavily built and pock-marked, pushed the hair away from her forehead. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. The two men exchanged glances and the second man, who was younger and small, pointed at something shining on the girl’s hand. A ring. He was about to snatch it from her but his companion stopped him.

  They helped her up. The older and stronger of the two took her in his arms and told the other one to run and get help. The younger man agreed reluctantly and disappeared into the dusk. The girl kept her eyes fixed on those of the heavily built man who was carrying her in his arms, murmuring words that wouldn’t form on her cracked lips. Thank you, thank you.

  The man, who had a slight limp, took her to what looked like a coach house next to the factory entrance. Once they were inside, the girl heard other voices and felt various arms holding her and laying her on a wooden table opposite a fire. Slowly, the heat from the flames melted the frozen beads of ice on her hair and face. Two women, both as young as her and wearing maids’ uniforms, wrapped her in a blanket and began to rub her arms and legs. Two hands that smelled of spices brought a glass of hot wine to her lips. The liquid spread through her like a balm.

  As she lay on the table, the girl glanced round the room and realised she was in a kitchen. One of the maids placed a few tea towels under her head and the girl tilted her forehead backwards. From this position she could see the room upside down – the pots, frying pans and utensils hanging against gravity. That is how she saw her come in. The pale, serene face of the lady in white was slowly approaching from the door as if she were walking on the ceiling. The maids stood aside as she went by and the heavily built man looked down fearfully and quickly moved out of the way. The girl heard footsteps and voices leaving the room and sensed she was now alone with the lady in white. She saw her bend over her and felt her warm, sweet breath.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ whispered the lady.

  The lady was studying her quietly with her grey eyes; the back of her hand, the softest skin the girl had ever known, brushed her cheek. It occurred to the girl that the lady had the presence and the manners of a broken angel, fallen from heaven amid forgotten cobwebs. She searched her eyes for protection. The lady smiled at her and stroked her face with infinite tenderness. They remained like that for almost half an hour, almost in silence, until she heard loud voices in the courtyard and the maids returned, together with the younger man and a gentleman wearing a thick coat and carrying a large black doctor’s bag. The doctor stood by her side and proceeded to take her pulse. His eyes observed her nervously. He prodded her belly and sighed. The girl struggled to understand the orders the doctor was giving the maids and the male servants who had gathered round the fire. Only then did she find the strength to recover her voice and ask whether her child would be born in good health. The doctor who, judging from his expression, thought neither of them would live, merely exchanged a look with the lady in white.

  ‘David,’ murmured the girl. ‘He’ll be called David.’ r />
  The lady nodded and kissed the girl on her forehead.

  ‘Now you must be strong,’ whispered the lady, holding her hand firmly.

  Years later I learned that that girl, who was barely seventeen, lay completely silent, without uttering even a whimper, her eyes open and tears falling down her cheeks while the doctor opened her belly with a scalpel and brought a child into the world, a boy who would only be able to remember her through the words of strangers. Time and time again I’ve wondered whether she ever saw the lady in white as she turned her back on her to take the baby away in her arms, cuddling it against her white silk chest while she, the girl, stretched her arms out and begged to be allowed to see her child. I’ve often wondered whether that girl was able to hear the sound of her son crying as he was taken away in the arms of another woman and she was left alone in that room where she lay in a pool of her own blood until they returned to wrap her body, still trembling, in a shroud. I’ve wondered whether she felt how one of the maids struggled with the ring on her left hand, tearing her skin to steal it from her while they dragged her body back into the night, and the two men who had rescued her now loaded it into a cart. I’ve asked myself so many times whether she was still breathing when the horses stopped and the two individuals took the shroud and flung it into the gully that dragged the sewage from a hundred factories towards the tundra of cardboard-and-reed shacks that covered the Bogatell beach.

  I’ve wanted to believe that at that last moment, when the putrid waters spat her into the sea and the shroud that wrapped her unfolded in the current to deliver her body into the darkness of the deep, she knew that the boy she had given birth to would live and would always remember her.

  I never knew her name.

  That girl was my mother.

  A YOUNG LADY FROM BARCELONA