The Goldsmith's Secret

by Elia Barceló, David Frye, David Frye

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Science Fiction Romance; Time Travel Romance; Time Travel

Synopsis

4 A.M. End of December . . . Clinton Street, New York. A lonely goldsmith reflects on his life. He decides to return to his home village in Spain, hoping to see again an older woman with whom he had a passionate affair as a teenager. Instead he meets a young woman who captivates him instantly. Their affair feels so natural it evokes an eerie familiarity, as if he were playing a role already played out. The Goldsmith's Secret is a remarkable story of a love trapped between parallel times, by a writer with a gift for the impossible.

Release date: March 31, 2011

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 96

Sample

A possible beginning. It was September, a windy night, foreboding storms. I had nodded off in the empty compartment of the train that was to convey me to Oneira, where I was going to say goodbye to Uncle Eloy – my only remaining relative, the one who taught me my trade, the one who gave me a place in his watch shop when I left Villasanta at the age of twenty, desperate, vowing never to return.

The aisle light spread a faint glow over my face. Its ghostly reflection in the compartment window brought back to my mind a face that had vanished for ever when I left, the face that I had once had as a child, as if the child that I had been back then were simply hiding somewhere inside me, waiting for some slip on my part to emerge from the muddy waters of the past with his happy smile and twinkling eyes. Twenty-five years had passed since I had left Villasanta de la Reina, leaving behind everything that had been my life up to that point, leaving behind school, friends, dances, strolls through the town square. Leaving Celia behind.

I remember that I then recalled, with an intensity that made me sit bolt upright in my seat, frightened by my own memory, the precise instant when I met her: her dark profile in the lobby of the Lys, the tiny pearl in her ear, the white handkerchief with which she dabbed delicately at her eyelashes while leaving the cinema, her quick glance at the girlfriend who reassured her with a smile, saying, “Don’t worry, it doesn’t show at all.” It was as if my heart could not decide, as if it wanted to stop beating altogether and at the same time to run away at a gallop, drawn to that woman, so frail yet so hard, like a film noir actress in her tailored dress and pearl necklace, like a fallen star that had landed in the mud of our local cinema, the floor strewn with sunflower-seed husks and greasy tuna pastry wrappers. It was then that I learned that she was called the black widow. That was what Tony told me, with an elbow in my ribs, as she slipped into the crowd streaming from the late night film.

I left the cinema in a trance, resolved to do whatever it took to see her again, to get her to look at me, to hear her voice. I did not even notice that my friends had dragged me into Negresco’s for a drink before heading home. It was only when we were sitting at the table at the back, under the mirror, that I realized the waiter was standing there and growing impatient. I mumbled, “Coffee with milk,” but after Fabián left, in the space where his dazzlingly white apron had blinded me seconds earlier, I saw her, right in front of me, standing in the middle of the café, staring at me with an expression that I could not decipher, something that oscillated between surprise, joy and terror, something that I would only understand twenty-five years later, when it was too late.

She stood stock-still, just feet from us, gripping the handle of her bag as if her life depended on it. Her girlfriend approached us, fussy and lively, with the ridiculous flirtatiousness of an old maid of forty-something who always gets what she wants. “Kids, hope you don’t mind. There are plenty of empty tables, and we always sit here. Fabián must have forgotten to tell you. You don’t mind, do you? Celia likes this table.”

I stood up right away. I would have crawled off on my knees if she had asked me. My friends, good sorts, were also standing up and making gestures to the bar that they should bring our drinks to the other table. “Old ladies and their fancies, what are you going to do?” Celia did not look like an old lady to me. Her skin was pale, creamy, soft; slight wrinkles around eyes that never looked away from mine, eyes that I thought then were the colour of beer and that only later, after I had become a goldsmith, would I compare to Brazilian topaz, crystallized beams of the setting sun.

Memories bustled and bumped up against my closed eyelids, like a crowd leaving an enormous cinema through a single exit door, pushing, shoving, jostling one another, ceding ground . . .