Bea had always detested visiting the city of the dead, where all she saw was a morbid staging of death and a poor attempt at convincing terrified visitors that ancestry and good names persevere even in the hereafter. She deplored the idea that an army of architects, sculptors, and artisans had sold their talents to construct such a sumptuous necropolis and populate it with statues in which the spirits of death leaned over to kiss the foreheads of children born before the days of penicillin, where ghostly damsels were trapped in spells of eternal melancholy, and where inconsolable angels, stretching out over marble tombstones, wept the loss of some rich colonial butcher who had earned both fortune and glory through the slave trade and the bloodstained sugar of the Caribbean islands. In Barcelona, even death dressed up on Sundays. Bea detested that place, but she could never say that to Daniel.

* * *

Little Julián gazed at all that grotesque carnival of earthly vanities with haunted eyes. He pointed at the figures and labyrinthine structures of the mausoleums with a mixture of fear and amazement.

“They’re just statues, Julián,” his mother told him. “They can’t do anything to you, because there isn’t anything here.”

As soon as she’d uttered those words, she was sorry. Daniel didn’t look as if he’d heard them. He’d barely parted his lips since he’d returned home in the early hours without explaining where he’d been. He’d lain down next to her in the bed, without speaking, but hadn’t slept at all.

At daybreak, when Bea asked him what was wrong, Daniel stared at her but said nothing. Then he undressed her angrily. He took her forcibly without looking her in the face, holding down her arms over her head with one hand and brusquely opening her legs with the other.

“Daniel, you’re hurting me. Stop, please. Stop.”

He ignored her protests and charged at her with a fury Bea couldn’t remember, until she freed her hands and stuck her nails into his back. Daniel cried out in pain, and she pushed him to one side with all her strength. As soon as she’d gotten rid of him, Bea jumped out of the bed and covered herself with a dressing gown. She wanted to shout at him, but she withheld her tears. Daniel had curled up into a ball on the bed and was avoiding her eyes.

Bea took a deep breath. “Don’t ever do that again, Daniel. Ever. Have you understood? Look at me and answer.”

He looked up and nodded. Bea locked herself in the bathroom until she heard the door of the apartment close behind Daniel. An hour later, he came back. He’d bought some flowers.

“I don’t want flowers.”

“I thought I’d go and visit my mother,” said Daniel.

Sitting at the table and holding a cup of milk, little Julián observed his parents and noticed that something wasn’t right. You could fool the whole world most of the time, but never Julián, not for a minute, thought Bea.