“It closed fifteen years ago,” he said.
r /> “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. After the fire it never reopened. Anything else?”
I shook my head.
“That will be four céntimos.”
I paid for my drink and left without touching the glass.
The following day I arrived at the newspaper offices before my usual time and went straight to the archives in the basement. With the help of Matías, the person in charge, and going on what the waiter had told me, I began to check through the front pages of The Voice of Industry from fifteen years back. It took me about forty minutes to find the story, just a short item. The fire had started in the early hours of Corpus Christi Day 1903. Six people had died, trapped in the flames: a client, four of the girls on the payroll, and a small child who worked there. The police and firemen believed that the cause of the tragedy was a faulty oil lamp, although the council of a nearby church alluded to divine retribution and the intervention of the Holy Spirit.
When I returned to the pension I lay on my bed and tried in vain to fall asleep. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out the business card from my strange benefactor—the card I was holding when I awoke in Chloé’s bed—and in the dark I reread the words written on the back. “Great expectations.”
5
In my world, expectations—great or small—were rarely fulfilled. Until a few months previously, the only thing I longed for when I went to bed every night was to be able to muster enough courage to speak to Cristina, the daughter of my mentor’s chauffeur, and for the hours that separated me from dawn to pass so that I could return to the newspaper offices. Now, even that refuge had begun to slip away from me. Perhaps if one of my literary efforts was a resounding failure I might be able to recover my colleagues’ affection, I told myself. Perhaps if I wrote something so mediocre and despicable that no reader could get beyond the first paragraph, my youthful sins would be forgiven. Perhaps that was not too high a price to pay to feel at home again. Perhaps.
…
I had arrived at The Voice of Industry many years before, with my father, a tormented, penniless man who, on his return from the war in the Philippines, had found a city that preferred not to recognize him and a wife who had already forgotten him. Two years later she decided to abandon him altogether, leaving him with a broken heart and a son he had never wanted. He did not know what to do with a child. Barely able to read or to write his own name, he had no fixed job. All he had learned during the war was how to kill other men before they killed him—in the name of great and empty-sounding causes that seemed more absurd and repellent the closer he came to the fighting.
When he returned from the war, my father—who looked twenty years older than the man who had left—searched for work in various factories in the Pueblo Nuevo and Sant Martí neighborhoods. The jobs lasted only a few days, and sooner or later I would see him return home, his eyes blazing with resentment. As time went by, for want of anything better, he accepted a post as night watchman at The Voice of Industry. The pay was modest, but the months passed by and for the first time since he came back from the war it seemed he was not getting into trouble. But the peace was short-lived. Soon some of his old comrades in arms, living corpses who had come home maimed in body and soul only to discover that those who had sent them off to die in the name of God and the Fatherland were now spitting in their faces, got him involved in shady affairs that were too much for him and that he never really understood.
My father would often disappear for a couple of days, and when he returned his hands and clothes smelled of gunpowder and his pockets of money. He would retreat to his room and, although he thought I didn’t notice, he would inject himself with whatever he had been able to get. At first he never closed his door, but one day he caught me spying on him and slapped me so hard that he split my lip. He then hugged me until there was no strength left in his arms and lay down, stretched out on the floor with the hypodermic needle still stuck in his skin. I pulled out the needle and covered him with a blanket. After that, he began to lock himself in.
We lived in a small attic suspended over the building site of the new auditorium, the Palau de la Música. It was a cold, narrow place in which wind and humidity seemed to mock the walls. I used to sit on the tiny balcony with my legs dangling out, watching people pass by and gazing at the battlement of weird sculptures and columns that was growing on the other side of the street. Sometimes I felt I could almost touch the building with my fingertips, at other times—most of the time—it seemed as far away as the moon. I was a weak and sickly child, prone to fevers and infections that dragged me to the edge of the grave although, at the last minute, death always relented and went off in search of larger prey. When I fell ill, my father would end up losing his patience and after the second sleepless night would leave me in the care of one of the neighbors and disappear. As time went by I began to suspect that he hoped to find me dead on his return and so free himself of the burden of a child with brittle health who was no use for anything.
More than once I, too, hoped that would happen, but my father always came back and found me alive and kicking, and a bit taller. Mother Nature didn’t hold back: she punished me with her extensive range of germs and miseries but never found a way of successfully finishing the job. Against all prognoses, I survived those first years on the tightrope of a childhood before penicillin. In those days death was not yet anonymous and one could see and smell it everywhere, devouring souls that had not even had time enough to sin.
Even then my only friends were made of paper and ink. At school I had learned to read and write long before the other children. Where my school friends saw notches of ink on incomprehensible pages, I saw light, streets, and people. Words and the mystery of their hidden science fascinated me, and I saw in them a key with which I could unlock a boundless world, a safe haven from that home, those streets, and those troubled days in which even I could sense that only a limited fortune awaited me. My father didn’t like to see books in the house. There was something about them—apart from the letters he could not decipher—that offended him. He used to tell me that as soon as I was ten he would send me off to work and that I’d better get rid of all my scatterbrained ideas if I didn’t want to end up a loser, a nobody. I used to hide my books under the mattress and wait for him to go out or fall asleep so that I could read. Once he caught me reading at night and flew into a rage. He tore the book from my hands and flung it out of the window.
“If I catch you wasting electricity again, reading all this nonsense, you’ll be sorry.”
My father was not a miser and, despite the hardships we suffered, whenever he could he gave me a few coins so that I could buy myself some treats like the other children. He was convinced that I spent them on licorice sticks, sunflower seeds, or sweets, but I would keep them in a coffee tin under the bed, and when I’d collected four or five reales I’d secretly rush out to buy myself a book.
My favorite place in the whole city was the Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. It smelled of old paper and dust and it was my sanctuary, my refuge. The bookseller would let me sit on a chair in a corner and read any book I liked to my heart’s content. He hardly ever allowed me to pay for the books he placed in my hands, but when he wasn’t looking I’d leave the coins I’d managed to collect on the counter before I left. It was only small change—if I’d had to buy a book with that pittance, I would probably have been able to afford only a booklet of cigarette papers. When it was time for me to leave, I would do so dragging my feet, a weight on my soul. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed there forever.
One Christmas Sempere gave me the best gift I have ever received. It was an old volume, read and experienced to the full.
“Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens,” I read on the cover.
I was aware that Sempere knew a few authors who frequented his establishment and, judging by the care with which he handled the volume, I thought that perhaps this Mr. Dickens was one of them.
“A friend of yours?”
“A lifelong friend. And from now on, he’s your friend too.”
That afternoon I took my new friend home, hidden under my clothes so that my father wouldn’t see it. It was a rainy winter, with days as gray as lead, and I read Great Expectations about nine times, partly because I had no other book at hand, partly because I did not think there could be a better one in the whole world and I was beginning to suspect that Mr. Dickens had written it just for me. Soon I was convinced that I didn’t want to do anything else in life but learn to do what Mr. Dickens had done.
One day I was awoken at dawn by my father shaking me. He had come back from work early. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled of spirits. I looked at him in terror as he touched the naked bulb that hung from the ceiling.
“It’s warm.”
He fixed his eyes on mine and threw the bulb angrily against the wall. It burst into a thousand pieces that fell on my face, but I didn’t dare brush them away.
“Where is it?” asked my father, his voice cold and calm.