Alicia rubbed her eyes and looked down again into the shadowy space. Below her lay a fantastically designed citadel made entirely of books. After a while she heard footsteps approaching up one of the staircases of the labyrinth. A man with thinning hair knelt down beside her and examined the wounds covering her body. Holding her in his arms, he took her through tunnels, down stairs, and under bridges until they reached the base of the structure. There he laid her on a bed and saw to her wounds. Holding her tight, he kept her from death’s door while the bombs went on falling furiously. A fiery light filtered through the dome, allowing the child Alicia to gaze at the flickering images of that place, the most marvelous she had ever seen: a basilica made of books hidden in a palace that had never existed, a place she could only return to in dreams. Somewhere like that could only belong to the other side, to the place where her mother, Lucía, waited for her, and where her own soul had remained imprisoned.

At dawn the man with the sparse hair picked her up in his arms again, and together they walked through the streets of Barcelona, streets filled with blood and flames. At last they came to an orphanage. There a doctor covered in ashes looked at them and shook his head, muttering under his breath.

“This doll is broken,” he said, turning his back on them.

And then, as she had so often dreamed, Alicia looked at her own body and recognized it as a scorched wooden puppet, still smoking, its strings cut off and dangling. Nurses with no eyes came off the walls, snatched the doll from the hands of the good Samaritan, and dragged it to a vast hangar. There stood a colossal mountain, made up of bits and pieces of hundreds, even thousands, of dolls like her. The nurses threw her onto the pile and went away, laughing.

4

Alicia was woken by the wintry sun rising above the rooftops. This would be her first and last day of freedom in Barcelona, she thought as she opened her eyes. Vargas would probably show his face there that very evening.

She decided that her first stop of the day would be Gustavo Barceló’s bookshop, which was nearby, on Calle Fernando. Remembering Virgilio’s advice about the bookseller and his soft spot for young women of a suggestive appearance, she decided to dress up for the occasion. When she opened her old wardrobe she found that, in preparation for her arrival, Jesusa had washed and ironed all her clothes and left them smelling of lavender. Alicia brushed her old fighting colors with her fingertips, feeling the texture of the dresses that seemed smart enough for her mission. Then, to celebrate the fact that during her absence a new boiler had been installed in the building, she took a shower that flooded the apartment with steam.

Wrapped up in a towel, she stepped into the dining room, tuning the radio to a station that always played Count Basie music. Any civilization capable of producing that sound surely had a future. Back in her bedroom she threw off the towel and pulled on a pair of seamed stockings she had bought in one of her self-rewarding expeditions to La Perla Gris. She chose a pair of low-heeled shoes that would have earned Leandro’s disapproval and slipped into a black wool dress she had never worn, which showed off her figure perfectly. She made herself up without rushing, caressing her lips with blood-red lipstick. The icing on the cake was her red coat. Then, just as she had done every morning when she lived in Barcelona, she went down to breakfast in the Gran Café.