“That’s a lie. Vidal committed suicide.”

“Is that what David Martín told you? It seems that deep down he was a very vindictive man. Valls, Vidal . . . People do crazy things because of jealousy.”

“The person David loved was Isabella.”

“You’ve already told me that. But it doesn’t quite fit in with the information we have. What linked him to Isabella?”

“She’d been his apprentice.”

“I didn’t know novelists had apprentices.”

“Isabella was very stubborn.”

“Is that what Martín told you?”

“David talked about her a lot. It’s what kept him alive.”

“But Isabella had been dead for almost ten years.”

“Sometimes he forgot. That’s why he’d gone back there.”

“To the house in S’Agaró?”

“David had been there before. With her.”

“Do you know when that was?”

“Just before the start of the war. Before he had to flee to France.”

“Is that why he came back to Spain, even though he knew they were looking for him? Because of Isabella?”

“I think so.”

“Tell me about your time there. What did you do?”

“David was already very ill. By the time we got to the house, he could barely tell the difference between reality and what he thought he saw and heard. The house brought back a whole lot of memories. I believe that deep down he went back there to die.”

“So David Martín is dead?”

“What do you think?”

“Tell me the truth. What did you do during those months?”

“Look after him.”

“I thought he was the one who was meant to look after you.”

“David could no longer take care of anyone, much less himself.”

“Ariadna, did you kill David Martín?”

13

“We hadn’t been there a month when David got worse. I’d gone out to get some food. A few peasants came along every morning with a cartful of groceries and set themselves up by the old bathhouse and the restaurant they called La Taberna del Mar. At first it was David who went there, or to the village, to find provisions, but there came a point when he couldn’t leave the house. He suffered from terrible headaches, fever, nausea . . . Almost every night he paced around the house, delirious and talking to himself. He believed Corelli would come and get him.”

“Did you ever see this Corelli?”

“Corelli didn’t exist. I told you. He was someone who lived only in David’s imagination.”

“How can you be sure?”

“The Vidals had built a small wooden jetty that stretched out into the sea from the little cove below the house. David would often go there and sit at the far end, gazing at the sea. That’s where he held his imaginary conversations with Corelli. Sometimes I would walk over to the pier and sit down next to him. David wouldn’t notice that I was there. I heard him talk to Corelli, just as he had done in the car when we fled from Madrid. Then he would wake up from his trance and smile at me. One day it began to rain, and when I took his hand to take him back home, he hugged me, crying, and called me Isabella. From then on he no longer recognized me, and he spent the last two months of his existence convinced that he was living with Isabella.”