“A bit confused, to tell you the truth. I dreamed that Jesus Christ paid me a visit, and we held a long and profound conversation.”

“What about?”

“Soccer, mostly.”

“That’s because of the sedatives we gave you.”

Fermín nodded with relief. “That’s what I thought when the Lord confessed himself a Real Madrid fan.”

The doctor smiled briefly and mumbled instructions to the nurse.

“How long have I been here?”

“About eight hours.”

“Where’s the child?”

“Baby Jesus?”

“No. The girl who was with me.”

The nurse and the doctor exchanged glances.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, “but there was no girl with you. As far as I know, it was a miracle someone found you, on a roof terrace in the Raval quarter, bleeding to death.”

“And they didn’t bring a girl in with me?”

The doctor lowered his eyes. “Alive? No.”

Fermín tried to sit up. The nurse and the doctor held him down on the stretcher.

“I need to get out of here, Doctor. There’s a defenseless child out there who needs my help.”

The doctor gave the nurse a nod, and she quickly took a bottle from the medicine trolley and began preparing an injection. Fermín shook his head, but the doctor held him firmly. “I’m afraid I can’t let you go yet. I’m going to ask you to be a bit patient. We don’t want things to get worse.”

“Don’t worry, I have more lives than a cat.”

“And less shame than a politician, which is why I’m also going to ask you to stop pinching the nurses’ behinds when they change your bandages. Are we clear?”

Fermín felt the prick of the needle in his right shoulder and the cold spreading through his veins.

“Can you ask again, Doctor, please? Her name is Alicia.”

The doctor loosened his grip and let his prey rest on the stretcher. Fermín’s muscles melted into jelly and his pupils dilated, turning the world into a dissolving watercolor. The faraway voice of the doctor was lost in the echo of his descent. He felt he was falling through cotton-wool clouds, fading into the liquid balm with its promise of a chemical paradise, as the whiteness of the corridor fragmented into a powdery light.

18

Fermín was discharged halfway through the afternoon; the hospital could no longer cope with the numbers of wounded, and whoever wasn’t dying was deemed fit to leave. Armed with a wooden crutch and some new clothes lent to him by a dead man, he managed to climb onto a tram outside the Hospital Clínico and travel back to the streets of the Raval. There he began to walk into cafés, grocers, and any other shops that were still open, asking in a loud voice whether anyone had seen a girl called Alicia. People looked at the wiry, gaunt little man and shook their heads silently, thinking that, like so many others, this poor soul was searching in vain for his dead daughter: one more body among the nine hundred—a hundred of them children—that would be picked up in the streets of Barcelona on that eighteenth day of March in 1938.