3

People live inside their hopes, but the landlord of fate is the devil. The wedding was going to take place in the church of Santa Ana, in the little square just behind the bookshop. The invitations had been sent, the wedding banquet organized, the flowers bought, and the car that was supposed to drive the bride to the church door booked. Every day I told myself I was thrilled, that at last I was going to be happy. I remember one Friday in March, exactly one month before the ceremony, when I was left alone in the bookshop because Juan had had to go to Tiana to deliver an order to an important customer. I heard the tinkle of the doorbell, and when I looked up, I saw him. He’d barely changed.

David Martín was one of those men who don’t grow old, or who only do so inside themselves. Anyone would have joked that he must have made a pact with the devil. Anyone but me, who knew that in the hallucinations of his soul he was convinced that it was so, although his private devil was an imaginary character who lived in the back room of his mind under the name of Andreas Corelli, a Parisian publisher and such a sinister individual he seemed to have emerged from David’s own pen. In his mind, David was convinced that Corelli had hired him to write an accursed book, the founding text of a new faith of fanaticism, anger, and destruction that would set fire to the world forevermore. David carried the burden of that raving fantasy and many others, and believed unquestioningly that his literary demon was hunting him down because he, true to character, hadn’t thought of anything better to do than betray him, break their agreement, and destroy the present-day Malleus Maleficarum at the very last moment, perhaps because the shining kindness of his unbearable apprentice had made him see the light as well as the error of his ways. And that’s where I came in, the great Isabella, an unbeliever who didn’t even believe in lottery tickets, who thought that the perfume of my youthful charms and a time spent without breathing the stuffy air of Barcelona (where, moreover, the police were looking for him) would be enough to cure his madness. As soon as I looked into his eyes, I knew that four years wandering around God knows where hadn’t cured him one iota. The moment he smiled at me and told me he’d missed me, my soul was shattered. I began to cry, and cursed my luck. When he touched my cheek, I knew I was still in love with my very own Dorian Gray, my preferred lunatic, and the only man I had always yearned to have his way with me.

* * *

I can’t remember what words we exchanged. That moment is still a blur in my memory. I think that everything I’d built up in my imagination during the years of his absence collapsed on me in five seconds, and when I managed to crawl out from under the rubble, all I could do was write a hasty note to Juan that I left by the cash register: