The Angel's Game (2 page)

…

Shortly before six o’clock in the morning I pulled the last sheet out of the typewriter and sighed, utterly drained. My brain felt like a wasp’s nest. I heard the heavy footsteps of Don Basilio, who had emerged from one of his brief naps and was approaching unhurriedly. I gathered up the pages and handed them to him, not daring to meet his gaze. Don Basilio sat down at the next table and turned on the lamp. His eyes skimmed the text, betraying no emotion. Then he rested his cigar on the end of the table for a moment, glared at me, and read out the first line:

Night falls on the city and the streets carry the scent of gunpowder like the breath of a curse.

Don Basilio looked at me out of the corner of his eye and I hid behind a smile that didn’t leave a single tooth uncovered. Without saying another word, he got up and left with my story in his hands. I saw him walking toward his office and closing the door behind him. I stood there, petrified, not knowing whether to run away or await the death sentence. Ten minutes later—it felt more like ten years to me—the door of the deputy editor’s office opened and the voice of Don Basilio thundered right across the department.

“Martín. In here. Now.”

I dragged myself along as slowly as I could, shrinking a centimeter or two with every step, until I had no alternative but to show my face and look up. Don Basilio, the fearful red pencil in hand, was staring at me icily. I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. He picked up the pages and gave them back to me. I took them and turned to go as
quickly as I could, telling myself that there would always be room for another shoeshine boy in the lobby of Hotel Colón.

“Take this down to the composing room and have them set it,” said the voice behind me.

I turned round, thinking I was the object of some cruel joke. Don Basilio pulled open the drawer of his desk, counted out ten pesetas, and put them on the table.

“This belongs to you. I suggest you buy yourself a better suit with it—I’ve seen you wearing the same one for four years and it’s still about six sizes too big. Why don’t you pay a visit to Señor Pantaleoni at his shop in Calle Escudellers? Tell him I sent you. He’ll look after you.”

“Thank you so much, Don Basilio. That’s what I’ll do.”

“And start thinking about another of these stories for me. I’ll give you a week for the next one. But don’t fall asleep. And let’s see if we can have a lower body count this time—today’s readers like a slushy ending in which the greatness of the human spirit triumphs over adversity, that sort of rubbish.”

“Yes, Don Basilio.”

The deputy editor nodded and held out his hand to me. I shook it.

“Good work, Martín. On Monday I want to see you at the desk that belonged to Junceda. It’s yours now. I’m putting put you on the crime beat.”

“I won’t fail you, Don Basilio.”

“No, you won’t fail me. You’ll just cast me aside sooner or later. And you’ll be right to do so, because you’re not a journalist and you never will be. But you’re not a crime novelist yet, even if you think you are. Stick around for a while and we’ll teach you a thing or two that will always come in handy.”

At that moment, my guard down, I was so overwhelmed by gratitude that I wanted to hug that great bulk of a man. Don Basilio, his fierce mask back in place, gave me a steely look and pointed toward the door.

“No scenes, please. Close the door. And happy Christmas.”

“Happy Christmas.”

…

The following Monday, when I arrived at the editorial room ready to sit at my own desk for the very first time, I found a coarse gray envelope with a ribbon and my name on it in the same recognizable type that I had been typing out for years. I opened it. Inside was a framed copy of my story from the back page of the Sunday edition, with a note saying:

“This is just the beginning. In ten years I’ll be the apprentice and you’ll be the teacher. Your friend and colleague, Pedro Vidal”

M
y literary debut survived its baptism of fire and Don Basilio offered me the opportunity to publish a few more stories in a similar style. Soon the management decided that my meteoric career would have a weekly outlet as long as I continued to do my job in the editorial room for the same salary. Driven by vanity and exhaustion, I spent the days going over my colleagues’ stories and churning out countless reports about local news and lurid horrors, so that later I could spend my nights alone in the office writing a serialized work that I had been toying with in my imagination for a long time. Entitled
The Mysteries of Barcelona
, this byzantine melodrama was a farrago shamelessly indebted to Dumas and Stoker and borrowing from Sue and Féval along the way. I slept about three hours a night and looked like I’d spent those inside a coffin. Vidal, who had never known the kind of hunger that has nothing to do with the stomach though it gnaws at one’s insides, was of the opinion that I was burning up my brain and that, at the rate I was going, I would be celebrating my own funeral before I reached twenty. Don Basilio, who was unmoved by my diligence, had other reservations. He published each of my chapters reluctantly, annoyed by what he considered to be an excess of morbidity and an unfortunate waste of my talent at the service of plots and stories of dubious taste.

The Mysteries of Barcelona
gave birth to a fictional starlet in installments, a heroine I had imagined as one can only imagine a femme fatale
at the ripe age of seventeen. Chloé Permanyer was the dark princess of all vamps. Beyond intelligent, and even more devious, always clad in fine lingerie, she was the lover and evil accomplice of the mysterious Baltasar Morel, king of the underworld, who lived in a subterranean mansion, staffed by automatons and full of macabre relics, reached through secret tunnels buried under the catacombs of the Gothic quarter. Chloé’s favorite way of finishing off her victims was to seduce them with a hypnotic striptease, then kiss them with a poisoned lipstick that entirely paralyzed them so that they died from silent suffocation as she looked into their eyes, having herself drunk an antidote mixed in vintage Dom Pérignon. Chloé and Baltasar had their own code of honor: they killed only the dregs of society, cleansing the world of bullies, swines, fanatics, and morons who, in the name of flags, gods, tongues, races, and other such rubbish, made life unnecessarily miserable for the rest of mankind in order to serve their own greed and meanness. For me, Chloé and Baltasar were rebellious heroes, like all true heroes. For Don Basilio, whose literary tastes were grounded in the Spanish verse of the Golden Age, it was all a monstrous lunacy, but in view of the favorable reception my stories enjoyed and the affection that, despite himself, he felt toward me, he tolerated my extravagances and attributed them to an excess of youthful ardor.

“You have more zeal than good taste, Martín. The disease afflicting you has a name, and that is Grand Guignol: it does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it’s all downhill. You should read the classics, or at least Don Benito Pérez Galdós, to elevate your literary aspirations.”

“But the readers like my stories,” I argued.

“You don’t deserve the credit. That belongs to your rivals: they are so bad and pedantic that they could render a donkey catatonic in less than a paragraph. When are you going to mature and stop munching the forbidden fruit once and for all?”

I would nod, full of contrition, but secretly I caressed those forbidden words
Grand Guignol
, and I told myself that every cause, however frivolous, needed a champion to defend its honor.

…

I was beginning to feel like the most fortunate of creatures when I discovered that some of my colleagues at the paper were annoyed that the junior and official mascot of the editorial room had taken his first steps in the world of letters while their own literary ambitions had languished for years in a gray limbo of misery. The fact that readers were lapping up these modest stories more eagerly than anything else the newspaper had published in the last twenty years only made matters worse. In just a few weeks I saw how the wounded pride of those whom until recently I had considered to be my only family now transformed them into a hostile jury. They stopped greeting me and ignored me, sharpening their malice by aiming phrases full of sarcasm and spite at me behind my back. My inexplicable good fortune was attributed to Pedro Vidal, to the ignorance and stupidity of our readers, and to the widely held national belief that achieving any measure of success in any profession was irrefutable proof of one’s lack of skill or merit.

In light of this unexpected and ominous turn of events, Vidal tried to encourage me, but I was beginning to suspect that my days at the newspaper were numbered.

“Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude—and destroy if possible—those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.”

“Amen,” Don Basilio would agree. “Had you not been born so rich you could have become a priest. Or a revolutionary. With sermons like that even a bishop would fall on his knees and repent.”

“You two can laugh,” I protested. “But the one they can’t stand the sight of is me.”

…

Despite the wide range of enmity and distrust that my efforts were generating, the sad truth was that, even though I gave myself the airs of a popular writer, my salary allowed me only to subsist, to buy more books than I had time to read, and to rent a dingy room in a pension buried in a narrow street near Calle Princesa. The pension was run by a devout Galician woman who answered to the name of Doña Carmen. Doña Carmen demanded discretion and changed the sheets once a month: residents were advised to abstain from succumbing to onanism or getting into bed with dirty clothes. There was no need to forbid the presence of the fair sex in the rooms because there wasn’t a single woman in all Barcelona who would have agreed to enter that miserable hole, even under pain of death. There I learned that one can forget almost everything in life, beginning with bad smells, and that if there was one thing I aspired to, it was not to die in a place like that. In the low hours—which were most hours—I told myself that if anything was going to get me out of there before an outbreak of tuberculosis did the job, it was literature, and if that pricked anyone’s soul, or their balls, they could scratch them with a brick.

On Sundays, when it was time for Mass and Doña Carmen went out for her weekly meeting with the Almighty, the residents took advantage of her absence to gather in the room of the oldest person among us, a poor devil called Heliodoro whose ambition as a young man had been to become a matador but who had ended up as a self-appointed expert and commentator on bullfighting, in charge of the urinals on the sunny side of the Monumental bullring.

“The art of bullfighting is dead,” he would proclaim. “Now it’s just a business for greedy stockbreeders and bullfighters with no soul. The public cannot distinguish between bullfighting for the ignorant masses and an authentic faena only connoisseurs can appreciate.”

“If only you’d been allowed to show your skills as a bullfighter, Don Heliodoro, things would be very different.”

“Truth is, only the useless get to the top in this country.”

“Never better said.”

After Don Heliodoro’s weekly sermon came the fun. Piled together like a load of sausages by the small window of his room, we residents could see and hear, across the interior shaftway, the exertions of Marujita, a neighbor who lived in the next building and was nicknamed Hot Pepper because of her spicy language and the shape of her generous anatomy. Marujita earned her bread scrubbing floors in second-rate establishments, but she devoted her Sundays and feast days to a seminarist boyfriend who took the train down from Manresa and applied himself, body and soul, to the carnal knowledge of sin.

One Sunday, my fellow pension inhabitants were crammed against the window hoping to catch a fleeting sight of Marujita’s titanic buttocks in one of those undulations that pressed them like dough against the tiny windowpane, when the doorbell rang. Since nobody volunteered to go open the door, thereby losing his spot and a good view of the show, I gave up my attempts at joining the audience and went to see who had come. When I opened the door I was confronted with a most unlikely sight inside that miserable frame: Don Pedro Vidal, cloaked in his panache and his Italian silk suit, stood smiling on the landing.

“And there was light,” he said, coming in without waiting for an invitation.

Vidal stopped to look at the sitting room that doubled as dining room and meeting place and gave a sigh of disgust.

“It might be better to go to my room,” I suggested.

I led the way. The jubilant shouts and cheers of my fellow residents in honor of Marujita and her venereal acrobatics bored through the walls.

“What a lively place,” Vidal commented.

“Please come into the presidential suite, Don Pedro,” I invited him.

We went in and I closed the door. After a very brief glance around my room he sat on the only chair and looked at me with little enthusiasm. It wasn’t hard to imagine the impression my modest home had made on him.

“What do you think?”

“Charming. I’m thinking of moving here myself.”

Pedro Vidal lived in Villa Helius, a huge Modernist mansion with three floors and a large tower perched on the slopes that rose up to Pedralbes, at the intersection of Calle Abadesa Olzet and Calle Panamá. The house had been given to him by his father ten years earlier in hope of his settling down and starting a family, an undertaking that Vidal had somewhat delayed. Life had blessed Don Pedro Vidal with many talents, chief among them that of disappointing and offending his father with every gesture he made and every step he took. To see him fraternizing with undesirables like me did not help. I remember that once, when visiting my mentor to deliver some papers from the office, I bumped into the patriarch of the Vidal clan in one of the hallways of Villa Helius. When he saw me, Vidal’s father told me to go and fetch him a glass of soda water and a cloth to clean a stain off his lapel.