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I LEFT ENA'S house in a daze and had the impression that it must be very late. All the street doors were locked, and the sky was pouring a dense shower of stars over the roofs.
For the first time I felt at large and free in the city, not fearing the phantom of time. I'd had a few drinks that evening. So much heat and excitement rose from my body that I didn't feel the cold or even – at moments – the force of gravity under my feet.
I stopped in the middle of Vía Layetana and looked at the tall building where my friend lived on the top floor. No light could be seen through the closed blinds, though when I had left people were still gathered there, and the comfortable rooms inside must have been illuminated. Perhaps Ena's mother had sat at the piano again to sing. A chill ran down my spine when I remembered the ardent voice that seemed to burn as it flowed out, enveloping the owner's wasted body in radiance.
That voice had stirred up all the sediment of sentimentality and run-away romanticism of my eighteen years. After she stopped singing I became restless, longing to escape everything else around me. It seemed impossible that the others could keep smoking and eating snacks. Ena herself, though she had listened to her mother with sombre, absorbed attention, opened up again, laughing and sparkling among her friends, as if the gathering, spontaneously begun late in the afternoon, would never end. Suddenly I had found myself on the street. I'd almost fled, impelled by a restlessness as strong and unspecified as all the others tormenting me at that age.
I didn't know if I needed to walk past silent houses in some sleeping neighbourhood, breathing in the black wind from the sea, or to feel the lights surging from the signs whose coloured bulbs tinted the atmosphere in the centre of the city. I still wasn't sure what would do more to calm the almost agonising thirst for beauty that listening to Ena's mother had left in me. Vía Layetana itself increased my perplexity as it sloped gently down from the Plaza de Urquinaona, where the sky was stained by the red of artificial lights, to the large post office building and the port, bathed in shadows and silvery with starlight above the white flames in the street-lamps.
Gravely, in the wintry air, I heard the eleven o'clock bells joining in a concert that came from the towers of old churches.
Vía Layetana, so broad, large, and new, crossed the heart of the old neighbourhood. Then I knew what I longed for: I wanted to see the Cathedral enveloped in the charm and mystery of the night. Without thinking any more I hurried towards the darkness of the narrow streets that surrounded it. Nothing could calm and astound my imagination like that Gothic city sinking among damp houses built without style in the midst of those venerable stones, but which the years had also covered with a patina of unique charm, as if they had been infected by beauty.
The cold seemed more intense channelled in the twisting streets. And the sky turned into glittering strips between roofs that almost touched. The solitude was overwhelming, as if all the residents of the city had died. An occasional lament of air throbbed in the doorways. Nothing else.
When I reached the apse of the Cathedral, I stared at the dance of lights cast by the street-lamps against its thousands of nooks and corners, making them romantic and shadowy. I heard a harsh rasping, as if someone were attempting to clear his throat in the tangle of alleys. A sinister sound that was approaching, accompanied by echoes. I had a few frightened moments. I saw a tall old man with a poverty-stricken appearance emerge from the blackness. I pressed against the wall. He looked at me suspiciously and kept walking. He had a long white beard that the wind divided in two. My heart began to pound with unusual force and, carried along by the same emotional impulse that was driving me, I ran after him and touched his arm. Then I began to look nervously through my bag, while the old man watched me. I gave him two pesetas. I saw a spark of irony shine in his eyes. He put the coins in his pocket without saying a word and walked away, dragging behind him the hoarse cough that had terrified me. This human contact in the silent concert of the stones calmed my excitement a little. I thought I was behaving like a fool that night, acting without will, like a sheet of paper in the wind. Still, I hurried until I reached the principal façade of the Cathedral, and when I looked up at it I found at last the fulfilment of everything I had longed for.
