“I’ll find her, Doña Leonor. I’ll find her and bring her home.”

The woman shook her head. “He’s dead, isn’t he? My son?”

Fermín remained silent for a few moments.

“I don’t know, Doña Leonor.”

She looked at him angrily and slapped his face. “Liar.”

“Doña Leonor . . .”

“Go,” she moaned.

Fermín stood up and moved away a few steps. Little Alicia watched him from the corridor. He smiled at her, and the girl walked slowly over to him. Then she took his hand and held it tight. He knelt down in front of her. He was about to tell her that he’d been a friend of her mother’s, hoping to come up with some story with which to placate the look of abandonment that had taken hold of her, but at that very instant, while Leonor drowned her tears in her hands, Fermín heard a faraway rumble raining down from the sky. When he looked up toward the window, he noticed that the glass was beginning to tremble.

12

Fermín walked over to the window and drew back the net curtain. He gazed up at the narrow slice of sky trapped between the cornices that framed the narrow street. The rumble was more intense now and sounded much closer. His first thought was that a storm was approaching from the sea, and he imagined black clouds stealing over the docks and tearing down sails and masts as it advanced. But he’d never seen a storm that sounded like metal and fire. The mist broke up into shreds, and when the sky cleared, he saw them. They emerged from the dark like large steel insects, flying in formation. He gulped and turned to look first at Leonor, then at Alicia, who was shaking; the child still held her book in her hands.

“I think we should get out of here,” said Fermín.

Leonor shook her head. “They’ll fly past,” she said almost in a whisper. “Like last night.”

Fermín scanned the skies again and happened to see a group of six or seven planes leaving the formation. He opened the window, and when he put his head out he thought the roar of the engines was coming up the Ramblas. Then there was a high-pitched whistling sound, like a drill piercing its way down from the skies. Alicia stopped her ears with her hands and ran to hide under the table. Leonor stretched out her arms to hold her, but something stopped her. Seconds before the shell hit the building, the screech became so intense that it seemed to come out of the very walls. Fermín thought the noise was going to rupture his eardrums.

And then, silence.

A sudden impact shook the building, as if a train had just dropped from the clouds and was slicing through the roof and every flat as it would through cigarette paper. He saw words being formed by Leonor’s lips, but couldn’t hear them. In just a fraction of a second, dazed by a block of solid noise that froze time, Fermín saw the wall behind Leonor crumble into a white cloud, while a sheet of fire surrounded the chair she was sitting on and swallowed her. The suction from the explosion tore half the pieces of furniture right off the floor, leaving them suspended in the air before they went up in flames. He was hit by a wave of burning air, like flaming gasoline, that hurled him against the window with such force he went straight through the glass and crashed against the metal bars of the balcony. The coat given to him by Captain Arráez smoldered and burned his skin. When he tried to stand up and remove it, he felt the floor shudder under his feet. Seconds later, the central structure of the building collapsed before his eyes in a downpour of debris and embers.