Marina. Part 17

Our words were left hanging in the air. For a long moment we looked at one another without speaking. I could see Marina's facade crumbling.

'You have every right to hate me,' she said then.

'Hate you? Why should I hate you?'

'I lied to you,' said Marina. 'When you came to return German's watch, I already knew I was ill. I was selfish; I wanted to have a friend . . . and I think we got lost along the way.'

I turned my head to look out of the window.

'No, I don't hate you.'

She pressed my hand again. Marina sat up and embraced me.

'Thank you for being the best friend I've ever had,' she whispered into my ear.

I felt as if I couldn't breathe. I wanted to run away. Marina held me tight and I prayed that she wouldn't notice I was crying. Dr Rojas would take away my pa.s.s.

'If you hate me just a little bit, Dr Rojas won't be annoyed,' she said then. 'I'm sure it's good for my blood cells or something like that.'

'Just a bit, then.'

'Thank you.'

CHAPTER 27.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, GERMaN BLAU became my best friend. As soon as my cla.s.ses were over, at five thirty in the afternoon, I'd run to meet the old painter. We would take a taxi to the hospital and spend the rest of the afternoon with Marina until the nurses threw us out. Our journeys from Plaza Sarria to Avenida Gaudi made me realise that Barcelona can be the saddest city in the world in wintertime. German's stories and his memories became my own.

During the long waits in those desolate hospital corridors German shared confidences with me that he had never shared with anyone but his wife. He spoke to me about his years with his teacher, Salvat, about his marriage and how only Marina's company had enabled him to survive the loss of his wife. He spoke to me about his doubts and fears, of how experience had taught him that all the things he considered certain were only an illusion, that too many lessons were not worth learning. I, too, spoke to him for the first time without holding anything back. I spoke to him about Marina, about my dreams of becoming an architect at a time when I'd stopped believing in the future. I told him of my loneliness and how until I met them I'd felt as if I were drifting aimlessly through life. I told him how much I feared that I would feel the same way again if I lost them. German listened and understood me. He knew that my words were just an attempt at clarifying my own feelings, and he let me talk.

I cherish a special memory of German Blau and the days we shared in his house and in the hospital corridors. We both knew that our only bond was Marina and that under other circ.u.mstances we would never have exchanged a single word. I always thought Marina became who she was thanks to him, and I have no doubt that what little I am is also due to German more than I care to admit. I keep his advice under lock and key in the coffer of my memory, convinced that one day it will serve as an answer to my own fears and doubts.

That month of March it rained almost every day. Marina wrote the story of Kolvenik and Eva Irinova in the book I had given her while dozens of doctors and their a.s.sistants came and went with tests and check-ups, and more tests and more check-ups. It was then I remembered the promise I'd made to Marina in the Vallvidrera funicular and began to work on the cathedral. Her cathedral. I found a book on Chartres Cathedral in the school library and started drawing the pieces for the model I was planning to build. First I cut them out of cardboard. After a thousand attempts which almost convinced me I'd never be able to design even a telephone booth, I asked a carpenter on Calle Margenat to cut out my pieces in sheets of wood.

'What are you building, young man?' he asked me, intrigued. 'A radiator?'

'A cathedral.'

Marina watched with curiosity as I erected her little cathedral on the windowsill. Sometimes she made jokes that kept me from sleeping for days.

'Aren't you in a bit of a hurry, Oscar?' she would ask. 'Anyone would think you're expecting me to die tomorrow.'

My cathedral soon became popular with the other patients in the room and their visitors. Dona Carmen, an eighty-four-year-old lady from Seville who occupied the next bed, would throw me sceptical looks. She had enough strength of character to destroy an army, and a backside the size of a small car. Dona Carmen seemed to rule the hospital staff with a policeman's whistle. She had been a black marketeer, a cabaret singer, a burlesque dancer, a cook, a tobacconist and G.o.d knows what else. She had buried two husbands and three children. Some twenty grandchildren, nephews and other relatives came to visit and worship her. She kept them in line by telling them that sweet talk was for idiots. I always felt that Dona Carmen had been born in the wrong century. Had she been around at the time, Napoleon would never have crossed the Pyrenees. All of us present excepting her diabetes felt the same way.

On the other side of the room was Isabel Llorente, a lady with the airs of a model who spoke in a whisper and looked as if she'd come straight out of the pages of a pre-war fashion magazine. She spent the day doing her make-up, looking at herself in a small mirror and adjusting her wig. Chemotherapy had left her as bald as a snooker ball, but she was convinced that n.o.body knew. I found out that she had been Miss Barcelona in 1934 and the lover of one of the city's mayors. She kept telling us about a romance with an amazing spy who, any moment now, would reappear and rescue her from that horrible place to which she'd been confined. Dona Carmen would roll her eyes every time she heard her. n.o.body ever visited her, and all you had to do was tell her how attractive she looked to keep her smiling for a week. One Thursday afternoon at the end of March we went into the room and found her bed empty. Isabel Llorente had pa.s.sed away that morning without giving her beau time to come and rescue her.

The other patient in the room was Valeria Astor, a nine-year-old girl who was able to breathe thanks to a tracheotomy. She always smiled at me when I walked in. Her mother spent all the hours permitted by her side and, when she wasn't allowed in, she'd sleep in the corridor. Every day she looked a month older. Valeria always asked me whether my friend was a writer, and I'd tell her she was, and a famous one too. Once she enquired I'll never know why whether I was a policeman. Marina would tell her stories she invented as she went along. Valeria had a preference for ghost stories, followed by tales about princesses or about trains, in that order. Dona Carmen would listen to Marina's tales and roar with laughter. Valeria's mother, an emaciated woman, simple to the point of despair, whose name I could never remember, knitted a woollen shawl for Marina in grat.i.tude.

Dr Damian Rojas came by a few times each day. Bit by bit, I grew to like him. I discovered that, years ago, he'd been a pupil at my school and had been on the point of joining the seminary. He had a stunning fiancee called Lulu. Lulu wore a collection of miniskirts and black silk stockings that took my breath away. She would visit him every Sat.u.r.day and would often pop in to say h.e.l.lo and ask us whether her brute of a fiance was behaving himself. I always went bright red when Lulu spoke to me. Marina would tease me and say that if I kept staring at her like that I'd end up with eyes as big as garters. Lulu and Dr Rojas were married in April. When the doctor returned from his brief honeymoon in Minorca a week later, he was as thin as a rake. The nurses only had to look at him to start giggling.

For a few months that was my only world. The school lessons were an interlude that I blanked out. Rojas seemed optimistic about Marina. He said she was young and strong and the treatment was producing good results. German and I couldn't thank him enough. We gave him cigars, ties, books and even a Mont Blanc pen. He would protest, arguing that he was only doing his job, but we both knew that he was putting in many more hours than any other doctor on the floor.

By the end of April Marina had gained a little weight and her colour had improved. We would take short walks down the corridor, and when the cold weather began to emigrate, we'd step out into the hospital cloister for a while. Marina was still writing in the book I'd given her, although she hadn't allowed me to read a single word.

'Where have you got to?' I'd ask her.

'That's a stupid question.'

'Stupid people ask stupid questions. Clever people answer them. Where have you got to?'

She would never say. I guessed that to write down the story we had lived through together had a special significance for her. During one of our walks round the cloister she told me something that gave me goose pimples.

'Promise that if something should happen to me, you'll finish the story.'

'You'll finish it,' I replied. 'And anyhow, you have to dedicate it to me.'

Meanwhile the small wooden cathedral was growing, and although Dona Carmen said it reminded her of the rubbish incinerator in San Adrian del Besos, by then the spire over the vaulted ceiling was clearly visible. German and I started to make plans to take Marina on an excursion to her favourite place the secret beach between Tossa and Sant Feliu de Guixols as soon as she was allowed to leave the hospital. Dr Rojas, always prudent, gave us an approximate date: the middle of May.

During those weeks I learned that one can live off hope and little else.

Dr Rojas was in favour of Marina spending as much time as possible walking about and getting some exercise on the hospital premises.

'It will do her good to dress up a bit,' he said.

Since he'd got married, Rojas had become an expert on female matters, or that's what he thought. One Sat.u.r.day he sent me out with his wife Lulu to buy a silk dressing gown for Marina. It was a present and he paid for it himself. I went along with Lulu to a shop selling women's lingerie in Rambla de Cataluna, next to the Alexandra Cinema. The shop a.s.sistants knew her. I trailed through the shop behind Lulu, watching her size up an endless display of ingenious undergarments that set my pulse racing. This was far more stimulating than chess.

'Will your girlfriend like this?' Lulu would ask me, licking her rouged lips.

I didn't tell her that Marina wasn't my girlfriend. I felt proud that someone thought she was. Besides, the experience of buying women's underwear with Lulu turned out to be so intoxicating that all I did was nod like a fool to everything she said. When I told German he burst out laughing and admitted that he also thought the doctor's wife was a danger to public health, the way she set one's pulse soaring. It was the first time in months I'd seen him laugh.

One Sat.u.r.day morning, while we were getting ready to go to the hospital, German asked me to go up to Marina's room to see if I could find a bottle of her favourite perfume. As I searched in her chest of drawers, I found a folded sheet of paper at the back of a drawer. I opened it and recognised Marina's writing instantly. It was about me. The page was full of crossed-out words and deleted paragraphs. Only these lines had survived: My friend Oscar is one of those princes without a kingdom who wander around hoping you'll kiss them so they won't turn into frogs. He gets everything back to front and that's why I like him. People who think they get everything right do things wrong, and this, coming from a left-handed person, says it all. He looks at me and thinks I don't see him. He imagines I'll evaporate if he touches me and if he doesn't touch me, then he'll evaporate. He's got me on such a high pedestal he doesn't know how to get up there. He thinks my lips are the door to paradise, but doesn't know they're poisoned. I'm such a coward that I don't tell him so as not to lose him. I pretend I don't see him, and that I am, indeed, going to evaporate . . .

My friend Oscar is one of those princes who would be well advised to stay away from fairy tales and the princesses who inhabit them. He doesn't know he's really Prince Charming who must kiss Sleeping Beauty in order to wake her from her eternal sleep, but that's because Oscar doesn't know that fairy tales are lies, although not all lies are fairy tales. Princes aren't charming, and sleeping beauties, however beautiful, never wake from their sleep. He's the best friend I've ever had and if I ever come across Merlin, I'll thank him for having placed him in my path.

I kept the sheet of paper and went down to join German. He had put on a special bow tie and seemed more cheerful than ever. He smiled at me and I smiled back. That day, during the taxi ride, the sun was shining. Barcelona was decked out in her best clothes, enchanting both tourists and clouds for even the clouds paused to stare at her beauty. None of this managed to erase the anxiety those lines had thrust into my mind. It was the first day of May 1980.

CHAPTER 28.

THAT MORNING WE FOUND MARINA'S BED EMPTY, without sheets. There was no trace of the wooden cathedral or of her belongings. When I turned my head German was already rushing out in search of Dr Rojas. I ran after him. We found the doctor in his office, looking as if he hadn't slept.

'She's taken a turn for the worse,' he said succinctly.

He went on to explain that the night before, only a couple of hours after we'd left, Marina had suffered respiratory failure and her heart had stopped beating for thirty-four seconds. They'd managed to resuscitate her and she was now in the intensive care unit, unconscious. Her condition was stable and Rojas expected she would be able to leave the unit within the next twenty-four hours, although he didn't want to give us any false hopes. I noticed that Marina's things, her book, the wooden cathedral and the dressing gown she'd never worn, were on a shelf in the doctor's office.

'May I see my daughter?' asked German.

Rojas himself led us to the intensive care unit. Marina was trapped in a bubble of tubes and steel machines, more monstrous and more real than any of Mijail Kolvenik's inventions. She lay there like a piece of flesh at the mercy of some metal magic. And then I saw the real face of the demon that had tormented Kolvenik and understood his madness.

I remember that German burst into tears and an uncontrollable force pulled me out of there. I ran and ran, out of breath, until I came to noisy streets full of anonymous faces unaware of my pain. Around me was a world that was unconcerned with Marina's fate. A whole universe in which her life was only a drop of water among the waves. I could think of only one place to go.

The old building in the Ramblas was still standing in its pool of darkness. Dr Sh.e.l.ley didn't recognise me when he opened the door. The apartment was full of rubbish and smelled mouldy. The doctor looked at me with wild bulging eyes. I led him to his study and made him sit down near the window. Maria's absence filled the air. It burned us. All the doctor's haughtiness and bad temper had vanished. There was nothing left but an old man, alone and desperate.

'He took her with him,' he said. 'He took her with him . . .'

I waited respectfully for him to calm down. At last he looked up and recognised me. He asked me what I wanted and I told him. He observed me unhurriedly.

'There is no other bottle of Mijail's serum. They were all destroyed. I can't give you what I don't have. But if I had it, I'd be doing you a bad turn. And you'd be making a mistake if you used it on your friend. The same mistake Mijail made . . .'

His words took a while to sink in. We only have ears for what we want to hear, and I didn't want to hear that. Sh.e.l.ley held my gaze without blinking. I suspected that he had recognised my despair and the memories it brought back were frightening. I was surprised at myself when I realised that, had it depended on me, at that very moment I would have taken the same route as Kolvenik. Never again would I judge him.

'The territory of humans is life,' said the doctor. 'Death does not belong to us.'

I felt immensely tired. I wanted to surrender but to what? I turned to leave. Before I left Sh.e.l.ley called me back.

'You were there, weren't you?' he asked.

I nodded.

'Maria died peacefully, Doctor.'

I saw tears in his eyes. He stretched a hand out to me and I shook it.

'Thank you.'

I never saw him again.

At the end of the week Marina recovered consciousness and came out of intensive care. She was moved to a room on the second floor, facing west. She was alone in the room. She no longer wrote in her book and could barely lean over to look at her cathedral almost finished now on the windowsill. Rojas asked for permission to carry out one last series of tests. German agreed. He still had hope. When Rojas gave us the results in his office, his voice cracked. After months of struggling, he went to pieces when faced with the evidence, while German held him up and patted his shoulders.

'There's nothing more I can do . . . There's nothing . . . Forgive me,' cried Damian Rojas.

Two days later we took Marina back to the house in Sarria. The doctors could not help her any further. We said goodbye to Dona Carmen, Rojas and Lulu, who wouldn't stop crying. Little Valeria asked me where we were taking my girlfriend, the famous writer. Would she not tell her any more stories?

'Home. We're taking her home.'

I left the boarding school on a Monday without letting the school know or telling anyone where I was going. It didn't occur to me that they'd miss me. Nor did I care. My place was next to Marina. We set her up in her bedroom. Her cathedral, now finished, kept her company by the window. It was the best building I have ever made. German and I took turns to be by her side around the clock. Rojas had told us she wouldn't suffer. She would fade away slowly, like a flame flickering in the wind.

Marina never looked more beautiful to me than she did during those last days in the old house in Sarria. Her hair had grown back, shinier than before, with silvery highlights. Even her eyes were more luminous. I hardly left her room. I wanted to savour every hour and every minute I had left by her side. We'd spend hours hugging each other without saying a word, without moving. One night, it was Thursday, Marina kissed my lips and whispered in my ear that she loved me and that, whatever happened, she would always love me.

She died the following morning, quietly, just as Rojas had predicted. At daybreak, with the first light of dawn, Marina pressed my hand hard, smiled at her father, and the flame in her eyes went out for ever.

We made the last journey with Marina in the old Tucker. German drove in silence to the beach, just as we'd done months earlier. It was a radiant day. I wanted to believe that the sea she loved so much had dressed up specially to receive her. We parked the car among the trees and went down to the sh.o.r.e to scatter her ashes.

When we returned to the car, German, now a broken man, admitted that he felt incapable of driving back. We abandoned the Tucker among the pine trees. Some fishermen who were driving by were kind enough to take us as far as the railway station. By the time we arrived back in Barcelona, at the Estacion de Francia, seven days had pa.s.sed since my disappearance. To me it felt like seven years.

I hugged German goodbye on the station platform. I still don't know where he went or what became of him. We both knew we wouldn't be able to look into each other's eyes again without seeing Marina in them. I watched as he walked away, a speck vanishing into the canvas of time. Shortly afterwards a plainclothes policeman recognised me and asked me whether my name was Oscar Drai.

EPILOGUE.

THE BARCELONA OF MY YOUTH NO LONGER EXISTS. Its streets and its light are gone for ever and only live on in people's memories. Fifteen years later I returned to the city and revisited the scenes I thought I'd banished from my mind. I discovered that the Sarria mansion had been demolished. The surrounding streets now form part of a motorway, along which, they say, progress travels. The old cemetery is still there, I suppose, lost in the mist. I sat on the bench in the square that I'd shared so often with Marina. In the distance I glimpsed the outline of my old school, but I didn't dare walk up to it. Something told me that if I did, my youth would evaporate for ever. Time doesn't make us wiser, only more cowardly.

For years I've been fleeing without knowing what from. I thought that if I ran further than the horizon, the shadows of the past would move out of my way. I thought that if I put in enough distance, the voices in my mind could be silenced for ever. I returned at last to the secret beach facing the Mediterranean. Beyond it stood the chapel of Sant Elm, always keeping watch from afar. I found the old Tucker belonging to my friend German. Oddly enough it's still there, in its final resting place among the pine trees.

I walked down to the sh.o.r.e and sat on the sand where years ago I had scattered Marina's ashes. The sky had the same luminosity as on that day and I felt her presence sharply. I realised that I could no longer flee, that I no longer wished to do so. I had come back home.

During her last days I promised Marina that, if she couldn't do it, I would finish this story. The book I gave her has been by my side all these years. Her words will be my words. I don't know whether I'll be able to do her justice. Sometimes I doubt my memory and wonder whether I will only be able to remember what never really happened.

Marina, you took all the answers away with you.

About the Author.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon is the author of seven novels including the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel's Game and The Prisoner of Heaven. He is one of the world's most read and best loved writers. His work has been translated into more than forty languages and published around the world, garnering numerous international prizes and reaching millions of readers. He divides his time between Barcelona and Los Angeles.

Also By Carlos Ruiz Zafon.