The Angel's Game Read Free Page B

at joining the chorus and went to see who had come. When I opened the door I was confronted with a most unlikely sight inside that miserable frame: Don Pedro Vidal, cloaked in his panache and his Italian silk suit, stood smiling on the landing.
    ‘And there was light,’ he said, coming in without waiting for an invitation.
    Vidal stopped to look at the sitting room that doubled as dining room and meeting place and gave a sigh of disgust.
    ‘It might be better to go to my room,’ I suggested.
    I led the way. The shouts and cheers of my co-residents in honour of Marujita and her venereal acrobatics bored through the walls with jubilation.
    ‘What a lively place,’ Vidal commented.
    ‘Please come into the presidential suite, Don Pedro,’ I invited him.
    We went in and I closed the door. After a very brief glance around my room he sat on the only chair and looked at me with little enthusiasm. It wasn’t hard to imagine the impression my modest home had made on him.
    ‘What do you think?’
    ‘Charming. I’m thinking of moving here myself.’
    Pedro Vidal lived in Villa Helius, a huge modernist mansion with three floors and a large tower, perched on the slopes that rose up to Pedralbes, at the crossing between Calle Abadesa Olzet and Calle Panamá. The house had been given to him by his father ten years earlier in the hope that he would settle down and start a family, an undertaking which Vidal had somewhat delayed. Life had blessed Don Pedro Vidal with many talents, chief among them that of disappointing and offending his father with every gesture he made and every step he took. To see him fraternising with undesirables like me did not help. I remember that once, when visiting my mentor to deliver some papers from the office, I bumped into the patriarch of the Vidal clan in one of the hallways of Villa Helius. When he saw me, Vidal’s father told me to go and fetch him a glass of tonic water and a cloth to clean a stain off his lapel.
    ‘I think you’re confused, sir. I’m not a servant . . .’
    He gave me a smile that clarified the order of things in the world without any need for words.
    ‘You’re the one who is confused, young lad. You’re a servant, whether you know it or not. What’s your name?’
    ‘David Martín, sir.’
    The patriarch considered my name.
    ‘Take my advice, David Martín. Leave this house and go back to where you belong. You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble, and you’ll save me the trouble too.’
    I never confessed this to Vidal, but I immediately went off to the kitchen in search of tonic water and a rag, and spent a quarter of an hour cleaning the great man’s jacket. The shadow of the clan was a long one, and however much Don Pedro liked to affect a Bohemian air, his whole life was an extension of his family network. Villa Helius was conveniently situated five minutes away from the great paternal mansion that dominated the upper stretch of Avenida Pearson, a cathedral-like jumble of balustrades, staircases and dormer windows that looked out over the whole of Barcelona from a distance, like a child looking at the toys he has thrown away. Every day, an expedition of two servants and a cook left the big house, as the paternal home was known among the Vidal entourage, and went to Villa Helius to clean, shine, iron, cook and cosset my wealthy protector in a nest that comforted him and shielded him from the inconveniences of everyday life. Pedro Vidal moved around the city in a resplendent Hispano-Suiza, piloted by the family chauffeur, Manuel Sagnier, and he had probably never set foot in a tram in his life. The creature of an elite environment and good breeding, Vidal could not comprehend the dismal, faded charm of the cheap Barcelona pensiones of the time.
    ‘Don’t hold back, Don Pedro.’
    ‘This place looks like a dungeon,’ he finally proclaimed. ‘I don’t know how you can live here.’
    ‘With my salary, only just.’
    ‘If necessary, I could pay you whatever you