I must leave. Forgive me, my love,

Isabella

I knew the police were still looking for David; a month didn’t go by without some member of the force coming by the bookshop to ask whether we’d had any news of the fugitive. I left the bookshop holding on to David’s arm and dragged him to the Estación del Norte. He seemed delighted to have returned to Barcelona and looked at everything with the nostalgia of a dying man and the innocence of a child. I was terrified, and all I could think of was where to hide him. I asked him whether he knew of any place where nobody could find him, and nobody would think of looking.

“The Great Assembly Room in the city hall building,” he said.

“I’m serious, David.”

I was always a woman of bright ideas, and that day I had one of my craziest. David had once told me that his old mentor and friend, Don Pedro Vidal, had a house in a remote corner of the Costa Brava called S’Agaró. At the time the house had served him as a gentleman’s pad, that familiar institution of the Catalan bourgeoisie, a place where well-do-to male members of good society took young ladies, prostitutes, and other candidates for hidden love encounters through which to vent their energetic temperaments without soiling the immaculate marriage bond.

Vidal, who kept various addresses for that purpose in the comfort of Barcelona, had always offered David his hideout by the sea whenever he wished, because he and his cousins only used it during the summer, and even then only for a couple of weeks. The key was always hidden behind a stone on a ledge next to the entrance. With the money I’d taken from the cash register in the bookshop, I bought two tickets to Gerona and from there another two to San Feliu de Guíxols. S’Agaró was just two kilometers farther on, in the bay of San Pol. David didn’t put up any resistance. In the train, he leaned on my shoulder and fell asleep.

“I haven’t slept for years,” he said.

We arrived in San Feliu in the evening, with nothing but the clothes we were wearing. I decided not to take one of the horse carts waiting outside the station, instead making the journey to the villa on foot under cover of darkness. The key was still there. The house had been closed for years. I opened all the windows wide and left them like that until dawn appeared over the sea at the foot of the cliff. David had slept like a baby all night, and when the sun touched his face, he opened his eyes, sat up, and drew close to me. He held me tight, and when I asked him why he’d come back, he said he’d realized that he loved me.

“You have no right to love me,” I said.

After three years of idleness, La Vesubia, who had always been inside me, reappeared. I started to shout at him, venting all the anger, all the sadness, all the longing he had left in me. I assured him that knowing him was the worst thing that had ever happened in my life, that I hated him, that I didn’t want to see him ever again, that I wanted him to stay in that house and rot there forever. David nodded and looked down. I suppose that’s when I kissed him, because I was always the one who had to kiss first, and in a split second I shattered the rest of my life. The priest of my childhood days had been wrong. I hadn’t come to this world to contradict everyone, but to make mistakes. And that morning, in his arms, I made the greatest mistake I could ever have made.