The Dream of the City (38 page)

He took a deep breath and smiled sadly at his friends when they asked him what was happening. He took a long sip from his glass of anisette and leaned forward, faltering; he wasn't the type to talk much. Àngel and Manel asked for another round to toast what remained of the evening. Maybe that was the easiest way to distract him from his grief.

The benevolent moon shone down on them as they walked from the café, zigzagging over the filthy streets of a Barcelona that had plunged into the twentieth century with a desperate passion. When Dimas returned home, he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. Between dreams tinged with alcohol and hope, he decided he would do whatever it took to make Laura forgive him. He would no longer just acquiesce.

CHAPTER 40

The next morning, when he opened his eyes, the floor, the walls, the wardrobe in the back, the roof … the entire room was spinning. The last time Dimas had looked at his watch before arriving home, it was three in the morning. His eyelids throbbed as if someone had been beating their knuckles against them all night. He opened his mouth to yawn, and his dry tongue and his rancid, drunken breath made him want to vomit. While he ran to the sink he could feel the pounding in his head that made him long to return to bed. But it was seven already, and he needed to be in Ferran's office in an hour. He washed himself with cold water and let the cold rouse him, then put on a suit and rushed out the door.

When Dimas entered the workshop, he saw Laura talking with one of the workers. He tried not to walk up to her, or look at her or try to get her attention; he already knew that words wouldn't bring her back. He walked straight to Ferran's office. When he opened the door and found Chief Bragado, the hair on his neck stood up; ordinarily, the presence of the police brought complications. As he took off his hat, he looked at the dark circles surrounding Ferran's eyes.

“You know unpunctuality drives me out of my mind,” he reproached him from his seat. Dimas looked at his watch: it was two minutes after eight.

“My apologies.”

Ferran shook his head, visibly unsettled. He looked like he'd been up the whole night. He was wearing a blue pinstriped suit.

“I don't have time for apologies, Navarro. I need you to do your job now,” he said, pointing to the chair in front of the desk.

Dimas squinted his eyes as he sat down, not sure what this was about. His boss was angry and everything pointed to the day being a very long one. Bragado stayed sitting in a corner in the back of the room, beside a shelf full of folders, without uttering a word; he probably knew better what was going on than Dimas. With one arm leaning on the chair, he stroked his stubby chin. His brow seemed permanently furrowed.

“I'm talking about the goddamned Campo del Arpa issue,” Ferran clarified. “I don't understand why you still haven't done anything. The only reason City Hall has decided to delay the work on the Ensanche is the protests, and I don't know if you've heard, but there was another incident in one of the neighborhoods yesterday. This is starting to look like Paris, when the owners were able to stretch out the work and the state got into debt up to its ears. I don't want that.”

Ferran was fearing the type of losses suffered by many builders in Paris owing to delays in city planning that began in the second half of the nineteenth century. But Dimas didn't understand the rush. He had talked with Ferran on Monday in that very same office about the results of his investigations; he had brought him the names of the leaders of the protests so he could decide what to do, and all Ferran had done was fret pointlessly. And now, all of the sudden, he was acting as if the ball was in Dimas's court.

“What is it with you? Is your brain working?” Ferran said aggressively, interrupting Dimas's thoughts.

Every few seconds, he would glance at Bragado for an endorsement of his words. Ferran Jufresa was looking for his approval, as if he wanted to show the policeman he was as powerful as he'd been before the recent troubles. Normally Ferran had been anything but a typical boss with Dimas. He let him come and go and manage his time as he saw fit. The reprimand now didn't go with his character; Ferran normally cared more about the results than how they were achieved. Dimas realized he must have his reasons for being agitated, since the business was not going well, but that morning, with his hangover and the burden of his break with Laura, he wasn't in the mood to cheer anyone up.

“There's nothing for you to understand,” Ferran said. “I told you the best thing would be to scare those people and you come back to me with the names of two imbeciles that I have absolutely no use for. Is that what I pay you for? Our good friend Bragado has looked those two up and believe me, they won't take anything in exchange for their silence. They're not just two pushovers, or am I wrong?”

“No. Those two are hard as nails, and they'll try and bleed you dry.” Bragado's voice shot out like a whistle from his corner.

Dimas could feel him behind him and he didn't like it. He preferred to have everyone in his field of vision, to be sure nothing was going on behind his back that he couldn't see, especially if Bragado was involved. He always had a weird feeling when he was around: the police chief was too sure of himself, too cold and too calm, his every gesture too studied. Everything about him reeked of control, and that made Dimas nervous.

“I'm not City Hall and I'm not the Department of Public Works,” Ferran continued. “If they won't move a finger to pay, why should I? You need to shake them up, Navarro; I want them shitting themselves from fear. There's no other solution. Fear is more powerful than any amount of money.”

Dimas looked down at the tips of his shoes. He hadn't had time to clean them, and they looked soiled and worn out. He felt the jabs of his headache piercing his corneas like tiny, endless needles.

“There's too many of them,” he whispered.

“Excuse me?”

Dimas looked Ferran in the eyes and let the soft morning light heat up his face.

“It's an entire area of the city protesting. How are you going to frighten all those people without someone suspecting something and calling the police?”

“That's not something you need to be worried about at this point,” Esteban Bragado interrupted from his chair.

“Yes, exactly,” Ferran seconded him eagerly. “You do your work and leave the rest for later. All right?”

Dimas resisted making any gesture of agreement. He knew he was provoking his boss, but he wasn't going to be a coward again and obey him like nothing else in the world mattered. He debated between his reason and what his heart was telling him to do. For the first time, his principles triumphed over his willingness to abandon them to climb higher in the world. He knew that he was facing a choice now, Laura or Ferran, temperance or gluttony, solidarity or selfishness and cutthroat materialism. He knew he shouldn't oppose his boss—Ferran didn't pay him to argue—and yet, everything Dimas believed in up to that moment was now gone, drifting away like sand between his fingers, leaving only the deepest-set convictions, those that shone most clearly. Ferran's insistence pulled him from his thoughts.

“All right?” Dimas nodded, unconvinced, and Ferran, slightly relieved, added, “Anything else?”

Dimas breathed deep before responding.

“No.”

He could feel Bragado's triumphant smile boring into the back of his neck.

“Excellent. By the way,” Ferran went on distractedly, “come for me early in the morning tomorrow, at six. We have to pick up some samples from the shop and take them to some important clients.”

He got up and began to look through the documents on the table. After a few seconds, he looked up and hissed, “Now, beat it.”

When Dimas shut the door, he heard Bragado and Ferran resume their conversation from before he'd arrived. His eyes scanned the room, looking for Laura, but he didn't find her. He waved to Àngel in the distance, and Àngel waved back, then pointed to his temple; Dimas nodded, then left without looking back.

On the street he came across a knife grinder bent over the pedal of his wheel. As it spun, a shower of sparks shot out over the road and the wall next to him. The sound of the stone eating into the metal blade was unbearable, as if it were grinding into his very bones.

“He's never been so obtuse, questioning my orders like that,” Ferran complained as he paced around the office.

“Maybe he has motives you don't know about for doing so,” the chief of police said.

“What do you mean?”

Bragado clicked his tongue, as if getting ready to tell a joke.

“Ay, Ferran, how much I still have to teach you. What happens when a man gets whipped?” Ferran's face showed he didn't know what the officer was getting at.

“Women, Ferran, women.”

“Bah!” Ferran waved him off. “I don't care what whore he's shacking up with; there's no reason that should affect me. Maybe he's gotten comfortable. … What do I know? You're right about putting the pressure on him, but beyond that … if he doesn't do what I say, we'll know if I can keep counting on him or if I need to show him the door.”

“That wouldn't be especially wise. He's seen too much. …”

“Then what should I do? Pay some layabout who doesn't even follow my orders?”

“That's a thought,” Bragado conceded, and then he abandoned the sarcastic tone he had employed up to that moment as his gaze turned somber. “If he doesn't play along, we'll have to make him forget.”

Bragado's veiled threat whistled through the air of the office and broke the room into tiny molecules, each of them charged with significance. When the idea shot like a dart into Ferran's mind, each one of those molecules shattered into a thousand pieces. Everything sped up and Ferran realized that if that moment came, neither Bragado nor anyone else would be with him, nobody would listen to him, nobody would accompany him. And he felt alone, terribly alone.

When she managed to leave the workshop at midmorning, Laura walked to the Sagrada Familia and wandered around inside the temple, looking for Gaudí. She climbed the stairs of the chaplain's house to the workshop and saw him in one corner, far from the hubbub in the back where the models were. He was standing up, bent over his simple rustic desk examining what looked like a model. Since his faithful collaborator Francisco Berenguer had died the February before, he no longer shared his office with anyone. Berenguer, like Gaudí a native of Reus, had been his friend and loyal cocreator since 1887. After an attack of uremia, he had died at only forty-eight years of age, leaving Gaudí desolate, in a state of mourning that had moved everyone who attended Berenguer's funeral.

The yellowish light of the gas lamps illuminated the plans and drawings on the walls. A bundle hung from one of the lamps with the same provisions as ever, and a
xubesqui
stove was already lit. The large uncovered windows let the light come in during the white, brightly lit hours, showing the contours of the plaster models of human and animal forms hanging from the drop ceiling with hemp ropes.

Laura walked over slowly. The fight with Dimas the day before had made it barely possible to sleep and she was very tired. She was convinced she had done the right thing, but she went on hoping that nothing that had happened was true, that it was some kind of dreadful nightmare that she might still awaken from. She had never before felt a pain so physical, and she knew there was no cure but time. Secretly, she cursed the encounter with Pau Serra and all the revelations that had come along with it. She asked herself what would have happened if he hadn't come along to dispel her image of Dimas, if there would have been another moment when he would have let down his mask and let her see the deepest, truest part of himself. He could have changed, but Laura didn't know what to believe, and she was too bitter to even consider forgiving him for what he had done.

Soon she emerged from her thoughts and returned to reality. She was distracted and she feared Gaudí would notice her distressed state. Only when she was sculpting or sketching a model did her mind manage to focus on something concrete and leave everything else aside. That day she had shown up early at the workshop, but when she saw Dimas arrive, she knew she couldn't stay there anymore. That was why she had arrived at the Sagrada Familia before her usual time, with the intention to stay there the entire day.

“Master Gaudí.” The architect, wearing his customary black suit, raised his head from the desk and looked up without seeing her. Laura knew that though his blue eyes were pointed at her, his thoughts remained with the model he had been looking at until that moment. “We are about to place some gargoyles on the façade, and they are waiting for you.” Gaudí didn't respond; it seemed he didn't hear her. “Master?”

“Come here,” he finally responded, and he pointed to the model he had in front of him. He gave Laura time to look at it. “Do you see? It's a hyperboloid made of one single sheet. You make it by twisting a hyperbola on its imaginary axis.” Laura nodded, very attentive to the artist's words. “It represents light. And some like this will also go into the temple, on the capitals of the columns. We have to make the interior a forest and the light is important, for the essential quality of a work of art is the harmony that comes from light.”

“It's such a shame that we'll never see this temple finished …” she whispered absently, without looking away from the model.

At times Laura wished she had a window to peek out of to see into the future. She had been witness to developments she would never see through to their end, that would go on although she could no longer remain a spectator, and that made her feel vulnerable. She asked herself what would become of them in a few years, of Dimas, of the Sagrada Familia. The city had changed so much since the turn of the century, and though those changes didn't affect every citizen equally, it was adapting to new times: there was an increasing number of cars on the road, running water and septic services for more and more houses, and electricity was no longer an invention of the devil. … Would Barcelona go on being the same fickle lady it was now?

“It doesn't matter that we won't see it,” the old architect said. “The temple will grow little by little, but that has always happened and is in the nature of everything destined to a long life. The centenary oak trees take years and years before they grow large; winter frost cuts short their development, but then they recover and they go on growing.”

Laura thought this must be a year of frost: not only was the work on the Sagrada Familia progressing slowly as a result of the terrible crisis that had gripped the country, but she herself was also moving forward at a crawl. It was hard for her to admit that the break with Dimas meant so much more than what she was pretending. The disappointment had opened a wound in her, knocking her off balance, upsetting the harmony of light that Gaudí spoke of, which rendered relief, marked contrasts with shadows and revealed complex structures. Laura felt a void inside her and she was disoriented, like a person who had just returned to earth after falling asleep in a balloon that has been blown to who knows where. She longed to weep, but she contained herself.