“Do it for me.”
He took me by the arm and dragged me into the bookshop. I followed him to the back room and he offered me a chair. He poured two glasses of something that looked thicker than tar and motioned to me to down it in one. He did the same.
“I’ve been glancing through Vidal’s book,” he said.
“This season’s success story,” I said.
“Does he know you wrote it?”
“What does it matter?” I asked.
Sempere looked at me the same way he’d looked at that eight-year-old boy who had come to his house one distant day, with a bruised face and broken teeth.
“Are you all right, Martín?”
“I’m fine.”
Sempere shook his head, muttering to himself, and got up to take something from one of the shelves. It was a copy of my novel. He handed it to me with a pen and smiled.
“Please sign it for me.”
When I’d finished writing something for him, Sempere took the book from my hands and placed it carefully in the glass case behind the counter where he displayed first editions that were not for sale. It was his private shrine.
“You don’t have to do that, Señor Sempere,” I mumbled.
“I’m doing it because I want to and because the occasion demands it. This book is a piece of your heart, Martín. And it is also a piece of my heart, for the small part I played in it. I’ll place you between Le Père Goriot and L’Éducation Sentimentale.”
“That’s a sacrilege.”
“Nonsense. It’s one of the best books I’ve sold in the last ten years, and I’ve sold a lot,” old Sempere said.
Sempere’s kind words could only scratch the surface of the cold, impenetrable calm that was beginning to invade me. I ambled back to my house, in no hurry.
When I walked into the tower house I poured myself a glass of water. As I drank it in the kitchen, in the dark, I began laughing.
…
The following morning I received two courtesy calls. The first one was from Pep, Vidal’s new chauffeur. He was bringing a message from his boss, summoning me to a lunch at La Maison Dorée—doubtless the celebratory lunch he had promised me some time ago. Pep seemed a little stiff and anxious to leave as soon as possible. The air of complicity he’d once had with me had evaporated. He wouldn’t come in, preferring to wait on the landing. Without looking straight at me, he handed me Vidal’s note, and as soon as I told him I would go he left without saying good-bye.
The second visit, half an h
our later, brought my two publishers to my door, accompanied by a forbidding-looking gentleman with piercing eyes, who identified himself as a lawyer. The formidable trio arrived displaying a mixture of mourning and belligerence, leaving me in no doubt as to the purpose of the occasion. I invited them into the gallery, where they proceeded to sit down on the sofa, lined up from left to right in descending order of height.
“May I offer you anything? A small glass of cyanide?”
I was not expecting a smile and I didn’t get one. After a brief preamble from Barrido concerning the terrible losses that the fiasco associated with the failure of The Steps of Heaven was going to cause the publishing house, the lawyer went on to give a brisk exposition that in plain language said that if I didn’t return to my work in the guise of Ignatius B. Samson and hand in a manuscript for the City of the Damned series within a month and a half, they would proceed to sue me for breach of contract, damages, and five or six other legal terms that escaped me because by then I wasn’t paying attention. It was not all bad news. Despite the aggravations caused by my behavior, Barrido and Escobillas had found a pearl of generosity in their hearts to smooth away our differences and establish a new alliance, a friendship, that would benefit both sides.
“If you want, you can buy all the copies of The Steps of Heaven that haven’t been distributed at a special rate of 75 percent of the cover price, since there is clearly no demand for the title and it will be impossible for us to include it in our next delivery,” Escobillas explained.
“Why don’t you give me back my rights? After all, you didn’t pay a penny for the book and you’re not planning on trying to sell a single copy.”
“We can’t do that, dear friend,” Barrido assured me. “Even if no advance was paid out to you personally, the edition has required a huge outlay and the agreement you signed with us was for twenty years, automatically renewable under the same terms if our firm decides to exercise its rights. You have to understand that we are also entitled to something. The author can’t get everything.”
When he had finished his speech I invited the gentlemen to make their way to the exit, either willingly or with the help of a kick—they could choose. Before I slammed the door in their faces, Escobillas was good enough to cast me one of his evil-eyed looks.
“We demand a reply within a week or that will be the end of you,” he muttered.
“In a week you and that idiot partner of yours will be dead,” I replied calmly, without quite knowing why I’d uttered those words.