“Mataix had the gift of elegance. I’m not referring to his clothes, although he always dressed impeccably, with his three-piece suit and his round wire-rimmed glasses, which lent him a Proustian air, but without the madeleines. No, I mean in his manners, in the way he addressed people and the way he spoke. He was what old-school editors in chief call a rare bird. Besides, he was a generous man, who did favors without being asked and without expecting anything in return. In fact it was he who, shortly afterward, recommended me for a job at La Vanguardia: thanks to him I was able to escape from The Voice of Industry. By then Mataix hardly wrote for the papers anymore. He’d never liked it in the first place, and only did it to bump up his income in times of need. One of the series of novels he wrote for Barrido & Escobillas, The City of Mirrors, was quite popular at the time. I think that between them, he and David Martín kept the whole Barrido & Escobillas team afloat, and they worked incessantly. Martín, in particular, lost what little health and sanity he had left after frying his brains at the typewriter. Mataix, for family reasons, enjoyed a more comfortable situation.”

“He came from a well-to-do family?”

“Not exactly, but he had a stroke of luck—or maybe he didn’t, depending on how you look at it. He inherited the property of an uncle of his, Ernesto, a somewhat eccentric character known as the Sugar Cube Emperor. Mataix was Ernesto’s favorite nephew, or at least the only member of the family he didn’t detest. So, shortly after he got married, Víctor Mataix was able to move into an imposing old house next to the Carretera de las Aguas, on the slopes of Vallvidrera, which his uncle Ernesto had left him, together with some shares in a company of imported goods he’d established when he returned from Cuba.”

“So Uncle Ernesto was a rich colonial?”

“More like the poster boy for them all. He’d left Barcelona aged seventeen without two sticks to rub together, his hand in other people’s pockets. The Civil Guard were on the lookout for him, aiming to break his legs, but he miraculously managed to stow away in a merchant ship en route to Havana.”

“And how did the Americas treat him?”

“Much better than he treated them. When Uncle Ernesto returned to Barcelona on his own ship, dressed in white linen and with a Scandinavian wife thirty years his junior, just acquired by mail order, more than four decades had gone by. In that time, the Sugar Cube Emperor had won and lost fortunes, his own and other people’s, both in the sugar business and in the arms trade. Thanks to a well-stocked battalion of lovers and mistresses, he’d engendered enough bastard children to populate all the Caribbean islands and committed atrocities that, had there been a God on duty and a little justice, would have guaranteed him bed and breakfast in hell for ten thousand years.”