“Ariadna.”

“During the years when they were trying to conceive a child, Susana asked Mataix to begin a new book, different from all the others he’d written until then. A book that would only be for the girl she was dreaming of. Literally. Susanna said she’d seen her in dreams and had spoken to her.”

“Is that the origin of the Labyrinth books?”

“Yes. Mataix started writing the first installment of the series with the adventures of Ariadna in a magical Barcelona. I think he also wrote them for himself, not just for Ariadna. I always thought that the Labyrinth books were, in a way, a warning.”

“About what?”

“About what was coming. You must have been very young then, just a child, but in the years before the war, things already looked very bad. You could smell it. It was in the air . . .”

“There’s a good title for your book.”

Vilajuana smiled.

“Do you think Mataix foresaw what was going to happen?”

“He did, and so did many others. You had to be blind not to see it. He often spoke about it. Once or twice I heard him say that he was thinking of leaving the country, but Susana didn’t want to leave Barcelona. She thought that if they left, she would never get pregnant. And then it was too late.”

“Tell me about David Martín. Did you know him?”

Vilajuana rolled his eyes. “Martín? A little. I came across him on two or three occasions. Mataix introduced me to him one day when we’d arranged to meet in Bar Canaletas. They’d been good friends since they were very young, before Martín got a few screws loose, but Mataix was still very fond of him. To be honest, I thought he was the strangest person I’d met in my entire life.”

“In what sense?”

Vilajuana hesitated a few moments. “David Martín was a brilliant man, probably too brilliant for his own good. But in my modest opinion he was completely unhinged.”

“Unhinged?”

“He was mad. Mad as a hatter.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Call it intuition. Martín heard voices . . . and I don’t mean the voices of the muses.”

“Do you mean he was schizophrenic?”

“Who knows? What I do know is that Mataix was worried about him. Very worried. Mataix was like that—he worried about everyone except himself. It seems that Martín had got himself into God knows what sort of trouble, and after that they hardly saw each other anymore. Martín avoided people.”

“Didn’t he have family who could help him?”

“He didn’t have anyone. And if he did, he always ended up pushing them away. His only connection with the real world was a young girl he’d taken on as an apprentice, someone called Isabella. Mataix thought Isabella was the only person who kept Martín alive, doing her best to protect him from himself. Mataix used to say that the only real demon was Martín’s brain, which was eating him alive.”