The Summer of Dead Toys Read Online Free Page B

answer. “We’ll get to the bottom of it, Joana, I promise you,” Savall had assured her. And that was all she wanted, the reason she’d stayed in Barcelona, the city she’d fled and to which she’d returned to attend the funeral of a son whom, to all practical purposes, she didn’t know.
    Now it was a matter of waiting, she told herself as she wandered around the high-ceilinged flat, which had been her grandmother’s and had been closed for years. Ancient—that is old—furniture, covered with sheets that in their day had been white, gave an overall ghostly air. She’d taken them off in the bedroom and dining room, but she knew that on the other side of the long wide corridor other rooms remained full of immobile, off-white shapes. Her steps led her to the balcony where a half-broken green blind was shielding a row of flowerpots containing only dry soil from the sun. She leaned out, and the midday sun made her half-close her eyes. This balcony was the border between two worlds: on one side Astúries, the heart of the barrio of Gràcia, now converted into a pedestrian street where boisterous people dressed in vivid colors—red, green, sky-blue—were walking; on the other, the flat, faded by the years, with walls once an ivory color now appearing grayish. She had only to raise the blind, allow the light to flood the interior, mix the living with the dead. But it wasn’t the time. Not yet. First she had to decide which was the place for her.
    The heat made her return inside and head toward the kitchen in search of something to drink. Although she’d never been religious, she felt at peace in her grandmother’s apartment. It was her private church. In fact, at the age of fifty, it was all she could call her own. Her grandmother had left it to her when she died, against everyone else’s wishes, probably because her mind was confused and she’d forgotten in her later years that Joana had committed the ultimate sin: the one which earned her the unanimous condemnation of her whole family. She took the plastic jug from the fridge and poured herself a glass of water. “Maybe they were right,” she thought, sitting on the Formica chair with the glass in both hands; maybe there was something cruel or even unnatural in her. “Not even animals abandon their babies,” her mother had said to her, unable to control herself. “Leave your husband if you want. But the little one?”
    The little one. Marc. The last time she’d seen him was sleeping in a cradle and now she was seeing him in a box of oak. And on both occasions all she’d felt was an appalling fear at her own lack of emotion. The baby she’d created and given birth to meant as little to her as the young man with very short hair, ridiculously dressed in a black suit, lying on the other side of the mortuary glass.
    “Hey, you came.” She’d recognized the voice at her shoulder instantly, but it took a few seconds for her to dare to turn around.
“Fèlix told me,” she replied, almost as an excuse.
    A tense silence hung in the mortuary, which shortly afterward would unleash a torrent of whispers. She’d come in without anyone paying much attention—another middle-aged woman, dressed discreetly in dark gray—but now she felt everyone’s gaze fixed on her back. Surprise, curiosity, reproach. The sudden leading lady in a funeral that wasn’t hers.
    “Enric.” Another male voice, Fèlix’s, which gave her the required strength to face the man before her, one step too close, invading that space one wishes to keep free.
“I wanted to see him,” she said simply. “I’m going.”
    Enric looked at her with surprise, but moved aside as if inviting her to leave. The same expression she’d read on his face the last time she saw him, six months after leaving, when he came to Paris to ask her to return home. There were more wrinkles around those eyes, but the mix of incredulity and disdain was the same. Both times Joana asked herself how he could look so