When evening fell, Fermín walked all the way down the Ramblas. Trams derailed by the bombs were still lying there, smoldering, with their dead passengers on board. Cafés that just hours earlier had been packed with customers were now ghostly galleries full of bodies. Pavements were awash in blood. None of the people trying to take the wounded away, cover up the dead, or simply flee anywhere or nowhere could remember having seen the girl he was describing.

Even so, Fermín didn’t lose hope, not even when he came across a row of corpses lying on the pavement in front of the opera house, the Gran Teatro del Liceo. None of them looked older than eight or nine.

Fermín knelt down. Next to him, a woman stroked the feet of a boy with a black hole the size of a fist in his chest. “He’s dead,” she said, although Fermín hadn’t asked. “They’re all dead.”

All night long, while the city removed the rubble and the ruins of dozens of buildings went on burning, Fermín walked from door to door through the whole of the Raval quarter, asking for Alicia.

Finally, at dawn, he couldn’t take another step. He collapsed on the stairs outside the Church of Belén, and after a while a local policeman in a bloodstained uniform, his face smudged with cinders, sat down next to him. When the policeman asked him why he was crying, Fermín threw his arms around him. He wanted to die, he told him. Fate had placed the life of a little girl in his care, and he’d betrayed her and hadn’t known how to protect her. If either God or the devil had even a hint of decency left in them, he went on, this fucking world would come to an end tomorrow or the next day, because it didn’t deserve to go on existing.

The policeman, who had been tirelessly pulling out bodies from the rubble for hours, including those of his wife and six-year-old son, listened to him calmly.

“My friend,” he said at last. “Don’t lose hope. If there’s anything I’ve learned from this lousy world, it’s that destiny is always just around the corner. It might look like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor, its three most usual personifications. And if you ever decide to go and find it—remember, destiny doesn’t make house calls—you’ll see that it will grant you a second chance.”

Masked Ball

Madrid
1959

His Excellency

Don Mauricio Valls y Echevarría

and

Doña Elena Sarmiento de Fontalva

cordially invite you to the

Masked Ball

that will take place in the

Palacete Villa Mercedes

of Somosaguas, Madrid

on November 24, 1959

from 7:00 p.m.

R.S.V.P. to the Protocol Service

of the Ministry of National Education

before November 1.

1

The room existed in perpetual darkness. For years the drapes had been drawn, sewn together to prevent any hint of brightness from filtering through. The only source of light grazing the shadows was a copper wall lamp. Its dull ocher-colored halo revealed the outline of a bed crowned by a canopy from which hung a diaphanous veil, behind which Mauricio Valls could perceive his wife Elena’s static figure. It looks like a hearse, Mauricio Valls thought as he peered at her silhouette.