Fumero smiled wistfully.
‘Your girlfriend is very pretty.’
Navas, the officer posted by the door of the lodge, could feel the cold sweat soaking his clothes. He ignored the shrieks coming from inside. When his colleagues threw him a furtive glance from the factory gates, he shook his head.
Nobody exchanged a single word. Fumero had been in the lodge for about half an hour when finally the door opened behind Navas. He stepped aside and avoided looking directly at the damp marks on the inspector’s black clothes. Fumero walked slowly towards the gates while Navas, after a brief look inside the lodge, closed the door, trying not to vomit. At a signal from Fumero, two of the men came over carrying cans of petrol and doused the walls of the lodge and the surrounding area. They didn’t stay behind to watch it go up in flames.
Fumero was waiting for them sitting in the passenger seat when they returned to the car. They drove off in silence as a column of smoke and flames rose above the ruins of the old factory, leaving a trail of ashes spreading in the wind. Fumero lowered the car window and stretched out his hand into the cold, humid air. He had blood on his fingers. Navas drove with his eyes fixed ahead, but all he could see was the pleading look of that young woman, still alive, before he closed the door. Aware that Fumero was watching him, he gripped the wheel tight to hide his trembling.
From the pavement, a group of ragged children watched the car drive by. One of them, making the shape of a gun with his fingers, pretended to be firing at them. Fumero smiled and replied with the same gesture. Seconds later, the car disappeared into the narrow streets surrounding the jungle of chimneys and warehouses, as if it had never been there.
2
Fermín spent seven days in the hut, delirious. No damp cloth managed to calm his fever; no ointment was able to ease the pain which, they said, was consuming him. The old women of the place, who took it in turns to look after him and give him tonics in the hope of keeping him alive, said that the stranger had a demon inside him, the demon of remorse, and that his soul wanted to flee to the end of the tunnel and rest in a dark void.
On the seventh day, the man whom everyone addressed as Armando and whose authority in the shanty town was second only to God’s went over to the hut and sat down next to the sick man. He examined his wounds, lifted his eyelids with his fingers and read the secrets written in his dilated pupils. The old women who nursed him had gathered in a circle behind Armando, waiting in respectful silence. After a while Armando nodded to himself and left the hut. A couple of young men who were waiting by the door followed him as far as the line of surf where the waves broke on the water’s edge, and listened carefully to his instructions. Armando watched them leave and stayed on, sitting on the wreck of a trawler that had been washed up by the storm and lay there, halfway between the beach and purgatory.
He lit a small cigar, enjoying it in the dawn breeze. While he smoked and considered what he should do, Armando pulled out a page from La Vanguardia he’d been keeping in his pocket for days. There, buried among advertisements for girdles and publicity for the latest shows in the Paralelo district, was a brief news story about the escape of a prisoner from Montjuïc Castle. The item had the stale taste of an official communiqué. The only licence the journalist had allowed himself was a closing remark declaring that never before had anyone succeeded in escaping from that unassailable fortress.
Armando looked up and gazed at the mountain of Montjuïc, rising to the south. The castle, with its crenellated towers outlined in the mist, presided over Barcelona. Armando smiled bitterly. He set fire to the article with the embers from his cigar and watched it turn to ashes in the breeze. As always, newspapers avoided the truth as if their life depended on it, and perhaps with good reason. Everything about that story smelled of half-truths and unspoken details. Among them the claim that nobody had ever been able to escape from Montjuïc Prison. Although in this case, he thought, the news item was probably right, because he, the man they called Armando, only existed in the invisible world of the poor and the untouchables. There are times and places where not to be anyone is more honourable than to be someone.
3
The days dragged. Once a day, Armando stopped by the hut to ask after the dying man. The man’s fever made timid attempts at receding and the tangle of bruises, cuts and wounds covering his body seemed to be slowly healing beneath the ointments. He spent most of the day asleep or murmuring incomprehensible words between sleeplessness and slumber.
‘Will he live?’ Armando sometimes asked.
‘He hasn’t made up his mind yet,’ replied the old woman whom that poor soul had mistaken for his mother.
Days crystallised into weeks and it soon became evident that nobody was going to come and ask after the stranger: nobody asks for what they’d rather ignore. Normally the police and the Civil Guard didn’t enter the Somorrostro. A law of silence made it plain that the city and the world
ended at the gates of the shanty town, and both sides were keen to maintain the invisible frontier. Armando knew that many on the other side secretly or openly prayed for a storm that would obliterate the city of the poor, but until that day came, they all preferred to look elsewhere, with their backs to the sea and to the people who barely survived between the water’s edge and the jungle of factories of Pueblo Nuevo. Even so, Armando had his doubts. The story he divined behind the outsider they had taken in could well lead to a breach of that law of silence.
A few weeks later, a couple of young policemen turned up asking whether anyone had seen a man who looked like the stranger. Armando remained vigilant for days, but when nobody else came by to look for the man he concluded that no one wanted to find him. Perhaps he had died and didn’t even know it.
A month and a half after his arrival, the wounds on his body began to heal. When the man opened his eyes and asked where he was, they helped him sit up to sip a bowl of broth, but they didn’t tell him anything.
‘You must rest.’
‘Am I alive?’ he asked.
Nobody confirmed whether he was or wasn’t. He spent much of the day asleep, or overcome by a weariness that never left him. Every time he closed his eyes and gave himself up to exhaustion, he travelled to the same place. In his dream, which recurred night after night, he scaled the walls of a bottomless mass grave strewn with corpses. When he reached the top and turned to look behind him, he saw the flood of ghostly bodies stirring like an eddy of eels. The dead bodies opened their eyes and climbed the walls, following him. They trailed him over the mountain and returned to the streets of Barcelona, looking for their old dwelling places, knocking on the doors of those they had once loved. Some went in search of their murderers and combed the city, thirsty for revenge, but most of them only wanted to return to their homes, to their beds, and embrace the children, wives and lovers they had left behind. Yet nobody would open the door to them. Nobody would hold their hands or wanted to kiss their lips. The dying man, bathed in sweat, woke up in the dark every night with the deafening cries of the dead in his soul.
A stranger often visited him. He smelled of tobacco and eau de cologne, two substances that were hard to come by in those days. He sat on a chair by his side, looking at him with impenetrable eyes. His hair was black as tar and his features sharp. When he noticed that the patient was awake, he smiled at him.
‘Are you God or the devil?’ the dying man once asked him.
The stranger shrugged and thought about it.
‘A bit of both,’ he answered at last.
‘In principle, I’m an atheist,’ the patient informed him. ‘Although in fact I have a lot of faith.’
‘Like so many. Rest now, my friend. Heaven can wait. And hell is too small for you.’
4
Between visits from the strange gentleman with the jet-black hair, the convalescent would let himself be fed, washed and dressed in clean clothes that proved too big for him. When he was finally able to stand up and take a few steps on his own, they led him down to the edge of the sea where he bathed his feet and felt the Mediterranean light caressing his skin. One day he spent the entire morning watching a group of ragged children with dirty faces playing in the sand, and he thought perhaps he would like to live, at least a little longer. As time went by, memories and anger began rising to the surface, and with them both the wish to return to the city and the fear of doing so.