The Labyrinth of the Spirits III

Ariadna and the Theatre of Shadows

Text and illustrations by Víctor Mataix

Valls keeps turning the pages and stops at the first illustration. It shows the carcass of an old theater in ruins, on whose stage stands a girl dressed in white, a fragile look in her eyes. Even in the candlelight he recognizes her.

“Ariadna . . . ,” he whispers.

He closes his eyes and holds on to the bars of the cell with one hand.

Perhaps hell does exist.

26

A velvet sun was painting the streets with innocence. Alicia strolled through the crowds milling around the center of town as she mulled over a scene she had read in the last pages of Ariadna and the Scarlet Prince. In this scene, Ariadna met with a street vendor who sold masks and dead flowers by the entrance to the city of the dead, the great southern necropolis. She had arrived there in a ghostly tram with no driver or passengers. The tram had a notice on the front that read:

DESTINY

The vendor was blind, but he could hear Ariadna approaching and asked her whether she wanted to buy a mask. The masks he sold in his cart, he explained, were made with the remains of doomed souls who inhabited the cemetery. By wearing them, one could outwit the fates and perhaps survive one more day. Ariadna admitted that she didn’t know what her destiny was, and that she thought she had lost it when she fell into the haunted Barcelona ruled by the Scarlet Prince. The vendor smiled and replied with these words:

Most of us mortals never get to know our real destiny; we’re just trampled by it. By the time we raise our heads and see it moving off down the road, it’s already too late, and we have to walk the rest of the way along the straight and narrow ditch that dreamers call maturity. Hope is no more than the belief that that moment hasn’t yet come, that we might still manage to see our real destiny when it draws near and jump on board before the chance of being ourselves disappears forever, condemning us to live in emptiness, missing what should have been and never was.

Alicia remembered those words as if she had them engraved on her skin. Nothing is more surprising or frightening than what one already knows. That midday, as she placed her hand on the doorknob of the old Sempere & Sons bookshop, she felt the presence of that life still to be lived and wondered whether it wasn’t already too late.

She was greeted by the tinkle of the entrance bell, the perfume emanating from thousands of pages waiting to be read, and a faint luminosity that wove the scene into the texture of dreams. It was all just as she remembered it, from the endless pale wooden shelves to the last speck of dust caught in the beams of light filtering through the shop window. Everything except herself.