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kness, we removed our clothes, which smelled of fear and of death. I wanted to remember Miquel, but the fire of those hands on my stomach stole all my shame and my grief. I wanted to lose myself in them, even though I knew that at dawn, exhausted and perhaps overcome by contempt for ourselves, we would be unable to look each other in the eye without wondering what sort of people we had become.
·10·
I WAS WOKEN BY THE PITTER-PATTER OF THE RAIN AT DAYBREAK. THE bed empty, the room bathed in gray light.
I found Julián sitting in front of what had been Miquel’s desk, stroking the keys of his typewriter. He looked up and gave me that lukewarm, distant smile that said he would never be mine. I felt like spitting out the truth to him, like hurting him. It would have been so simple. Reveal to him that Penélope was dead. That he was living a lie. That I was now all he had in the world.
“I should never have returned to Barcelona,” he murmured, shaking his head.
I knelt beside him. “What you are searching for is not here, Julián. Let’s go away. The two of us. Far from here. While there is still time.”
Julián looked at me for a long moment, without blinking. “You know something you haven’t told me, don’t you?” he asked.
I shook my head and swallowed. Julián just nodded.
“Tonight I’m going back there.”
“Julián, please…”
“I must make sure.”
“Then I’ll go with you.”
“No.”
“The last time I stayed here and waited, I lost Miquel. If you go, I go, too.”
“This is nothing to do with you, Nuria. It’s something that concerns only me.”
I wondered whether, in fact, he didn’t realize how much his words hurt me, or whether he just didn’t care.
“That’s what you think,” I said.
He tried to stroke my cheek, but I drew his hand away.
“You should despise me, Nuria. It would bring you luck.”
“Yes, I know.”
We spent the day out, far from the oppressive darkness of the apartment that still smelled of warm sheets and skin. Julián wanted to be by the sea. I went with him to La Barceloneta, and we walked along the almost deserted beach, the shimmering sand seeming to trail off into the summer haze. We sat on the sand, near the shore, the way children or old people do. Julián smiled, saying nothing.
As evening fell, we took a tram near the aquarium and went up Vía Layetana to Paseo de Gracia, then onto Plaza de Lesseps and Avenida de la República Argentina, until we came to the end of the route. Julián gazed silently at the streets, as if he were afraid of losing the city as we traveled through it. Halfway along our journey, he took my hand and kissed it without saying a word. He held it until we got off. An elderly man who accompanied a little girl dressed in white looked at us, smiling, and asked us whether we were engaged. It was dark by the time we walked up Calle Román Macaya toward the Aldayas’ old mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo. A fine rain was falling, giving a silver coat to the thick stone walls. We climbed the property wall at the back, near the tennis courts. The large, rambling house rose into view through the rain. I recognized it immediately. I had come across that house in a thousand different guises in Julián’s books. In The Red House, it was a sinister mansion that was larger inside than out. It slowly changed shape, grew new corridors, galleries, and improbable attics, endless stairs that led nowhere; it illuminated dark rooms that came and went from one day to the next, taking with them the unsuspecting who entered them, never to be seen again. We stopped outside the main door, locked with chains and a padlock the size of a fist. The large windows on the first floor were boarded up with wooden planks that were covered in ivy. The air smelled of weeds and wet earth. The stone, dark and slimy with rain, shone like the skeleton of a huge reptile.
I wanted to ask him how he intended to get past that large oak door, which looked like the door of a basilica or a prison. Julián pulled a jar out of his coat and unscrewed the top. A fetid vapor issued from it, forming a slow, bluish spiral. He held one end of the padlock and poured the acid into the lock. The metal hissed like red-hot iron, enveloped in a cloud of yellow smoke. We waited a few minutes, and then he picked up a cobblestone that lay among the weeds and split the padlock by banging it half a dozen times. Julián then gave the door a kick. It opened slowly, like a tomb, exhaling a thick, damp breath. Beyond the doorway I could sense a velvety darkness. Julián had brought a benzine lighter, which he lit after taking a few steps into the entrance hall. I followed him, leaving the door behind us ajar. Julián walked on a few yards, holding the flame above his head. A carpet of dust lay at our feet, with no footprints but ours. The naked walls took on an amber hue from the flame. There was no furniture, there were no mirrors or lamps. The doors were still on their hinges, but the bronze doorknobs had been pulled out. The mansion was just a skeleton. We stopped at the bottom of the staircase. Julián looked up, his eyes scanning the heights. He turned around for a moment to look at me, and I wanted to smile, but in the half-light we could barely see each other’s eyes. I followed him up the stairs, treading the steps on which Julián had first seen Penélope. I knew where we were heading, and I felt a coldness inside me that had nothing to do with the biting, damp air of that place.
We went up to the third floor, where a narrow corridor led to the south wing of the house. Here the ceilings were much lower and the doors smaller. It was the floor for the servants’ living quarters. The last room, I knew without Julián’s having to tell me, had been Jacinta Coronado’s bedroom. Julián approached it slowly, fearfully. That had been the last place where he’d seen Penélope, where he had made love to a girl barely seventeen years old, who, months later, would bleed to death in that same cell. I wanted to stop him, but Julián had reached the doorway and was looking absently inside. I peered into the room with him. It was just a cubicle stripped of all ornamentation. The marks left where a bed had once stood were still visible beneath the flood of dust that covered the floorboards. A tangle of black stains snaked through the middle of the room. Julián stared at that emptiness for almost a minute, disconcerted. I could see from his look that he hardly recognized the place, that the sight of it seemed to him like a cruel trick. I took his arm and led him back to the stairs.
“There’s nothing here, Julián,” I murmured. “The family sold everything before leaving for Argentina.”
Julián nodded weakly. We walked down the stairs again, and when we reached the ground floor, Julián made his way to the library. The shelves were empty, the fireplace choked with rubble. The walls, a deathly pale hue, flickered in the breath of the flame. Creditors and usurers had managed to remove every last bit of the room, most of which must be lost in the twisted heaps of some junkyard by now.
“I’ve come back for nothing,” Julián mumbled.
Better this way, I thought. I was counting the seconds that separated us from the door. If I managed to get him away from there, we might still have a chance. I let Julián absorb the ruin of that place and purge his memories.
“You had to return and see it again,” I said. “Now you see there’s nothing here. It’s just a large, old, uninhabited house, Julián. Let’s go home.”
He looked at me, pale-faced, and nodded. I took his hand, and we went along the passageway that led to the exit. The chink of outdoor light was only half a dozen yards away. I could smell the weeds and the drizzle in the air. Then I felt I was losing Julián’s hand. I stopped and turned to see him standing motionless, his eyes staring into the darkness.
