Marina Page 6

  ‘You shouldn’t have bothered, dear Oscar,’ Germán said.

  ‘It’s no bother,’ I replied. ‘It’s freezing cold and we don’t want your spirits to ice over, eh?’

  When we reached the station, Germán sat down in a café while Marina and I went to the ticket office to collect the pre-booked tickets. When it was time to leave, Germán hugged me so tightly I nearly burst into tears. A porter helped him into the train and he left me alone to say goodbye to Marina. The echo of a thousand voices and whistles swirled around the monumental vault. We looked at one another quietly, barely daring to meet each other’s eyes.

  ‘Well . . .’ I said.

  ‘Don’t forget to warm up the milk, because—’

  ‘Kafka hates cold milk, especially after a murder spree, I know. He’ll be in seventh heaven, don’t worry.’

  The stationmaster was about to wave his flag to signal the departure.

  ‘Germán is really proud of you,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t see why.’

  ‘We’re going to miss you.’

  ‘That’s what you think. Go on, off you go.’

  All of a sudden Marina bent over and let her lips touch mine. Before I could even blink she’d climbed into the carriage. I stood there, watching the train move off into the gaping mouth of the mist. When the rumble of the engine faded, I set off towards the exit. As I did so I realised I’d never got round to telling Marina about the strange vision I’d witnessed that stormy night in her house. Some time had passed and I’d decided to forget it. I’d even ended up convincing myself that I’d imagined it all. Just then, as I was walking into the entrance hall, a porter came rushing up to me.

  ‘This . . . Here, I was given this for you.’

  He handed me an ochre-coloured envelope.

  ‘I think you’re mistaken,’ I said.

  ‘No, no. That lady told me to give it to you,’ the porter insisted.

  ‘What lady?’

  The porter turned to point at the covered entrance facing Paseo Colón. Plumes of mist swept across the entrance steps. There was nobody there. The porter simply shrugged and walked away.

  Mystified, I hastened towards the exit and went out into the street just in time to spot her. The lady in black we’d seen in the Sarriá graveyard was climbing into an old-fashioned horse-driven carriage. She turned to look at me for a second. Her face was hidden under a dark veil, like a steel spider’s web. A second later the carriage door closed and the coachman, wrapped in a grey coat that covered him completely, whipped the horses. The carriage set off at great speed through the traffic of Paseo Colón, heading towards the Ramblas, until it was out of sight.

  I was so disconcerted I forgot that I was still holding the envelope the porter had handed me. When I saw it, I opened it. Inside was an old visiting card, with an address written on it:

  MIJAIL KOLVENIK

  Calle Princesa 33, 4th floor, door 2

  I turned the card over. On the back the printer had reproduced the symbol stamped on the nameless grave in the cemetery and on the abandoned greenhouse. A black butterfly with open wings.

  CHAPTER 10

  ON MY WAY TO CALLE PRINCESA I REALISED I WAS starving. I still had a few coins left in my pocket, courtesy of JF’s financial services, so I decided to stop at a bakery opposite the basilica of Santa María del Mar and treat myself to a creamy hot pastry that tasted deliciously sinful. There was a lazy Sunday morning feeling as the aroma of sweet bread filled the air and the church bells rang. Calle Princesa climbed through the old quarter forming a narrow valley of shadows. I walked past old palaces and buildings that seemed as ancient as the city itself until I glimpsed the number 33, barely visible on one of those façades, and stepped into an entrance hall that made me think of a cloister in an abandoned chapel. A set of rusty faded letter boxes hung on a wall of cracked enamel paint. I was trying in vain to find the name Mijail Kolvenik when I heard heavy breathing behind me.

  I turned around with a start and saw the wrinkled face of an old woman. She was sitting in the porter’s lodge and looked like the wax figure of a widow dressed in mourning. A ray of light touched her face. Her eyes were as white as marble. They had no pupils. She was blind.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’ she asked in a broken voice.

  ‘Mijail Kolvenik, ma’am.’

  The empty white eyes blinked a couple of times. The old woman shook her head.

  ‘I’ve been given this address,’ I said. ‘Mijail Kolvenik. Fourth floor, door two . . .’

  The old woman shook her head again and returned to her motionless state. As she did so, I noticed something moving on the table inside the lodge: a black spider was crawling over her wrinkled hands. Her white eyes stared into space. I edged away towards the stairs.

  The gloom inside the building was so thick you could almost cut through it. I could have bet all the money I owed JF that nobody had changed a light bulb in that staircase for at least thirty years. The steps were chipped and slippery. The landings were wells of darkness and silence. A tremulous light peeped through a skylight in the attic where a trapped pigeon was flapping about. The second apartment on the fourth floor had a carved wooden door with a knocker that looked like something out of a railway carriage. I rang the bell a couple of times and heard it echoing inside the flat. A few minutes went by. I rang again. Two more minutes. I began to think that I’d come to a tomb. One of hundreds of ghost buildings that haunted the heart of Barcelona.

  Suddenly the grid in the spyhole slid open. Threads of light cut through the darkness. The voice I heard seemed to be made of sand. A voice that hadn’t spoken in weeks, perhaps months.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Señor Kolvenik? Mijail Kolvenik?’ I asked. ‘Could I speak to you for a moment please?’

  The spyhole slammed shut. Silence. I was about to ring the bell again when the door of the flat opened.

  A figure was silhouetted against the doorway. The sound of a dripping tap in a sink could be heard inside the apartment.

  ‘What do you want, son?’

  ‘Señor Kolvenik?’

  ‘I’m not Kolvenik,’ the voice interjected. ‘My name is Sentís, Benjamín Sentís.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Señor Sentís, but I’ve been given this address and . . .’

  I handed him the visiting card given to me by the porter at the station. A rigid hand grabbed it, and the man, whose face I couldn’t see, examined it in silence for a good while before handing it back to me.

  ‘Mijail Kolvenik hasn’t lived here for years.’

  ‘You know him?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps you could help me?’

  Another long silence.

  ‘Come in,’ Sentís said at last.

  Benjamín Sentís was a hefty man who inhabited a wine-coloured flannel dressing gown. He held an unlit pipe in his mouth and sported one of those moustaches that join up with sideburns, Jules Verne style. The flat stood above the jungle of flat roofs of the old quarter and seemed to float in an ethereal light. The cathedral towers could be seen in the distance and far away rose the mountain of Montjuïc. A piano sat collecting layers of dust, and boxes of old newspapers populated the floor. There was nothing in that house that spoke of the present. Benjamín Sentís lived in the past tense.

  We sat in the room facing the terrace and Sentís had another look at the card.

  ‘Why are you looking for Kolvenik?’ he asked.

  I decided to tell him everything from the start, from our visit to the cemetery to the strange sight of the lady in black in the Estación de Francia. Sentís stared absently as he listened to me, showing no emotion. At the end of my story an uncomfortable silence arose between us. Sentís looked at me carefully. He had wolfish eyes, cold and penetrating.

  ‘Mijail Kolvenik lived in this flat for four years, shortly after he arrived in Barcelona,’ he said. ‘There are still some of his books in the back somewhere. It’s all that’s left of him.’

  ‘Would you happen to have his pres
ent address? Do you know where I could find him?’

  Sentís laughed.

  ‘Try hell.’

  I looked at him without understanding.

  ‘Mijail Kolvenik died in 1948.’

  According to what Benjamín Sentís told me that morning, Mijail Kolvenik had arrived in Barcelona towards the end of 1919. Just twenty, a native of Prague, Kolvenik was fleeing from the ruins left behind by the Great War. He didn’t speak a word of Catalan or Spanish, although he was fluent in French and Germán. He had no money, friends or acquaintances in that difficult and hostile city and spent his first night in a prison cell after being caught sleeping in a doorway to shelter from the cold. In the prison two of his cellmates accused of assault and battery – as well as arson – decided to give him a beating on the grounds that the country was going to the dogs because of filthy foreigners. His three broken ribs, the bruises and the internal injuries would heal over time, but he lost the hearing in his left ear for ever. ‘Permanent nerve damage,’ the doctors diagnosed. An inauspicious beginning. But Mijail Kolvenik always said that what starts badly can only end better. Ten years later he would be one of the richest and most powerful men in the city of Barcelona.

  In the prison sick bay he met the man who, over the years, would become his best friend, a young doctor of English descent called Joan Shelley. Dr Shelley spoke a little Germán and knew from personal experience how it felt to be a foreigner in a strange country. Thanks to him, Kolvenik got a job in a small firm called Velo-Granell Industries after he was discharged from the hospital. Velo-Granell manufactured orthopaedic supplies and artificial limbs. The war with Morocco and the Great War in Europe had created a huge market for such products. Legions of men, butchered for the greater glory and profit margins of bankers, chancellors, generals, stockbrokers and other fathers of the nation, had been maimed and ruined for life in the name of freedom, democracy, the Empire, the race or the flag . . . Take your pick.

  The Velo-Granell workshops were located near the Borne Market. Inside, glass cabinets displaying artificial arms, eyes, legs and joints reminded the visitor of the fragility of the human body. With his modest pay and a good reference from his firm, Mijail Kolvenik found accommodation in a flat on Calle Princesa. An avid reader, in one and a half years Kolvenik learned to speak Catalan and Spanish reasonably well. His talent and ingenuity soon earned him a reputation as one of the key employees at Velo-Granell. Kolvenik had extensive medical, surgical and anatomical knowledge. He designed a revolutionary pneumatic mechanism that enabled the movement of joints in artificial arms and legs. The device reacted to muscular impulses, providing the patient with unprecedented mobility. This invention placed the Velo-Granell firm at the forefront of the industry. And that was just the beginning. Kolvenik’s drawing table was endlessly producing innovations, and it wasn’t long before he was named chief engineer of the design and development workshop.

  Months later, an unfortunate incident put young Kolvenik’s talent to the test. The son and heir of Velo-Granell’s founder suffered a terrible accident in the factory. A hydraulic press like the jaws of a dragon severed both his hands. For weeks Kolvenik worked tirelessly to create new hands made of wood, metal and porcelain, with fingers that responded to the command of muscles and tendons in the forearm. Kolvenik’s solution made use of electric currents from the arm nerves to produce the movements. Four months after the accident the victim began to use mechanical hands that enabled him to pick up objects, light a cigarette or do up his shirt buttons without any help. Everyone agreed that this time Kolvenik had surpassed everything imaginable. Not being very fond of praise and jubilation, Kolvenik stated that this was only the dawn of a new science. To reward him for his work, the founder of Velo-Granell Industries named Kolvenik director general of the firm and offered him a package of shares that virtually turned him into one of the owners – next to the man who had been given new hands thanks to his inventiveness.

  Under Kolvenik’s management, Velo-Granell took on a new direction. It expanded its market and diversified its products. The firm adopted the symbol of a black butterfly with open wings, an icon that was dear to Kolvenik’s heart but whose significance he never fully explained. The plant expanded to launch new mechanisms: articulated limbs, circulatory valves, artificial bone tissue and no end of novel devices. The Tibidabo funfair was peopled with automatons created by Kolvenik as a pastime and testing ground. Velo-Granell exported its products all over Europe, America and Asia. The value of its shares and Kolvenik’s personal fortune shot up, but he refused to leave that modest flat on Calle Princesa. He said there was no need for him to change. He lived alone, led a simple life, and that apartment was quite enough for him and his books.

  The situation was about to change with the arrival of a new piece on the chessboard: Eva Irinova, the star of a highly successful new show in the Teatro Real. The young diva, Russian by birth, was only nineteen. People said that her beauty had driven gentlemen to suicide in Paris, Vienna and other capital cities, once they realised they would never spend another night in her arms. No doubt this was part of the publicity legend orchestrated by some shady stage impresario, but the public will always choose a warmed-up lie over the cold truth. Eva Irinova travelled in the company of two strange characters, the twins Sergei and Tatiana Glazunow. The Glazunow siblings acted as agents and tutors for Eva Irinova. It was rumoured that Sergei and the young diva were lovers and that the fiendish Tatiana slept inside a coffin beneath the stage of the Teatro Real; that Sergei had been one of the assassins of the Romanov dynasty; that Eva was able to speak to the spirits of the dead . . . Again, all kinds of farfetched showbiz gossip only served to increase the fame of the mysterious and beautiful siren who held Barcelona in the palm of her hand.

  It was only a matter of time before Irinova’s tale reached Kolvenik’s ears. Intrigued, he went to the theatre one night to see for himself what was causing such a stir. One evening was enough for Kolvenik to fall under the young woman’s spell. After that day Irinova’s dressing room became, quite literally, a bed of roses. Two months after this revelation Kolvenik decided to hire a box in the theatre. He would sit there spellbound, gazing at the object of his adoration. Needless to say, the matter soon became the talk of the town. One fine day Kolvenik called a meeting with his lawyers and instructed them to make an offer to the impresario Daniel Mestres. He wanted to buy the old theatre and take over the debts weighing it down. His idea was to rebuild it from the foundations and turn it into the greatest stage in Europe. A magnificent theatre equipped with the latest technological advances and dedicated to his beloved Eva Irinova. The theatre managers gave in to his generous proposal. The new project was christened the Gran Teatro Real. The following day, Kolvenik proposed to Eva Irinova in fluent Russian. She accepted.

  After the wedding the couple were planning to move into a dream mansion Kolvenik was having built next to Güell Park – he’d presented a preliminary design for the sumptuous building to the architectural firm Sunyer, Balcells i Baró. People claimed that nobody had ever paid such a huge sum for a private residence in the whole of Barcelona’s history, which was saying something. And yet not everyone was happy with this fairy tale. Kolvenik’s partner at Velo-Granell Industries didn’t approve of his obsession. He was afraid that Kolvenik might make use of some of the company’s funds to finance his feverish project of turning the Teatro Real into the eighth wonder of the modern world. He wasn’t far off the mark. As if this weren’t enough, rumours started to circulate round Barcelona about Kolvenik’s rather unorthodox habits. Doubts arose concerning his past and the image of a self-made man he liked to project. Most of these rumours died before they reached the press, thanks to Velo-Granell’s implacable legal machinery. Money doesn’t buy happiness, Kolvenik used to say, but it buys everything else.

  For their part, Sergei and Tatiana Glazunow, Eva Irinova’s sinister guardians, saw all this as a threat to their future. No room was being built for either of them in the new mansion. Fo
reseeing a problem with the twins, Kolvenik offered them a generous sum to terminate their supposed contract with Irinova. In exchange they had to leave the country and promise never to return or try to get in touch with Eva. Aroused to fury, Sergei flatly refused such a proposition and swore Kolvenik would never get rid of him or his sister.

  That very night, in the small hours before dawn, just as Sergei and Tatiana were leaving a building on Calle Sant Pau, a burst of gunshots fired from a carriage almost ended their lives. The attack was attributed to a group of anarchists. A week later the twins signed the document whereby they undertook to release Eva and disappear for ever. The date for the wedding between Mijail Kolvenik and Eva Irinova was fixed for 24 June 1935. The setting: Barcelona Cathedral.

  The ceremony, which some people compared to the coronation of King Alfonso XIII, took place on a brilliant sunny morning. Crowds filled every corner of the avenue leading to the cathedral, anxious to immerse themselves in the lavishness and splendour of the occasion. Eva Irinova had never looked so dazzling. To the strains of Wagner’s wedding march, played by the orchestra of the Liceo on the cathedral steps, the bride and bridegroom walked down towards the waiting carriage. When they were barely three metres away from the coach drawn by white horses, a figure broke through the police cordon and threw himself on the newlyweds. There were shouts of panic. When he turned round, Kolvenik faced the bloodshot eyes of Sergei Glazunow. Nobody present would ever forget what happened next. Glazunow pulled out a glass bottle and threw the contents in Eva Irinova’s face. Like a curtain of steam, the acid burned through the veil. A shriek seemed to rip the skies open. The crowd of onlookers whirled about in confusion and in a flash the attacker was lost among them.