I still didn’t really know why I was there. Or I did, and I didn’t want to admit it. It was just something I had to do, nothing more. That simple. An impulse despair had given rise to inside me and I had let myself be carried along by. A new command to obey with a fanatic’s blind obedience. Everything else was a sea of doubts, uncertainties and questions. Perhaps I was there because more than a means, I was searching for an end to my novel. Everything had begun here, in this cemetery, and this was where it had to end, closing an enormous circle I had started drawing almost four years earlier. To go back to the origins, the core, the centre. Or else, looking back now, everything had started a whole lot earlier, without me even knowing. Sometimes you had a story inside and didn’t realize. The damn traitor would slowly suck away at you, feeding on everything you read, felt, saw, heard and imagined, everything going on around you. It was like a parasite, a monstrous worm, a leech that grew and grew until you had to throw it out, in case it sucked the very life out of you. That was what had happened to me, and that was why I was there, near the end now, about to vomit it up once and for all. To find the treasure at last, after a sometimes painful process, a sometimes directionless journey I had thought would never end.

I chucked the cigarette butt out of the window and grabbed the bulging folder from the passenger seat. I switched on the reading light and started lazily flicking through the material. It was like coming up against a mirror. I could see myself in every printed sheet, every photocopy, every cutting. Inside was everything I needed, everything I had collected during that period of obsessive work. The spark that had set it all off and put me on the trail: that yellowed newspaper article in which old Edelmiro posed for a photographer while receiving a box with a medal from a smiling man in a uniform. The transcriptions of some of the many interviews he had done – the few that shed a little light on events that had been almost forgotten by some and concealed by others out of a mixture of fear and shame. A sheaf of pages with all the information I had obtained on the Internet, in particular with reference to the Royal Navy’s squadrons in the Atlantic – the Home and Atlantic Fleets – and some of its ships; naval battles from the First World War and German submarines. Dozens and dozens of photocopies of articles from various copies of Galicia Nueva, ‘Vilagarcía’s first daily’, as they liked to call it in those distant years of the last century; old postcards of a town that sadly no longer existed even in the memory of its oldest inhabitants. All the notes from books and articles that talked about Nazi involvement in the Spanish Civil War and Fascist repression in Arousa Bay, which I had borrowed from Vigo Central Library or consulted in the Penzol or Vilagarcía municipal library. And then there was the photo, that print from the family album that showed a past in black and white that had been snatched from me and hidden away. And the most important part of all: the more than 150 sheets with 1.5 line spacing and Garamond font size 12 I had written to date. Remnants of a story lost in the ashen wake of time. A fragmented story I wasn’t sure how to tell and for which I didn’t even have an ending. A story I was uncertain how to take forwards. A story in which my life and the lives of many of its characters were tied up. A story…

I had it all right in front of my nose. I didn’t need any more – certainly not to desecrate a cemetery at the crack of dawn. If I was there, it was because of the whirl of information and history, all those interlinked lives fate had placed in my hands. Because of the mystery they contained, which I hadn’t been able to decipher. Because of everything I had reconstructed, stitch by stitch, like a seamstress, sometimes with the thick thread of truth, others with the thread of supposition, the silken thread of fiction. And also because of shame, that guilty feeling that kept me company. Because of all the deceit, the lies, half-truths, silences, the slab of a consumed and stolen past. Because of all the doors that had closed in my face and I had had to break down. I was there because of Delia, her son, Edelmiro, and all the others… But also because of myself, my grandparents, my mother, my father, my cousin… My family. The past. The present. The future. I owed it to them – they owed it to me.

Slowly, as if afraid they would disintegrate in my fingers, I put all the papers back in the folder, wound up the window, switched off the light and got out of the car. I took a couple of deep breaths, lit another cigarette – the second of the day – and started walking. I left the municipal cemetery and bins full of withered flowers, losses and farewells, behind. I passed in front of a warehouse for repairing lorries, which stank of grease, sulphur and burnt rubber, and took my stand in front of a green gate a little further on, set back from the road. This was my destination, the friendly port that marked my journey’s end. Finally, I had reached my Ithaca.

I looked back at Mount Lobeira. The sky was now completely blue, and the flames lighting it up had gone out as I watched. The large cross was still fixed in the ground, expectant, as if awaiting my decision. The red cross traced on the treasure map I had so longed to lay my hands on. A shiver ran down my spine. I was overwhelmed by emotion, but also by fear, since I didn’t know what would be behind it. I was afraid all there would be in the chest was an anonymous skeleton and I would have no ending for my story. If I couldn’t throw the story out, it would carry on growing inside me until eventually…

I gazed at the wrought-iron gate and the golden letters that said: ‘British Naval Cemetery’. On the stone column to the right, on a small ceramic tile, was the number 62. To the left, painted in black and almost completely faded, the number 16. Above this, a plaque on which was written: ‘Commonwealth War Graves Keyholder – for the keys 43 71 33 Vigo’.

I knew this phone number belonged to the British consulate in Vigo and, if you rang, no one would answer. The consulate had been closed for some time for ‘budgetary reasons’, and Mrs Watford, the consul, had relinquished her diplomatic duties and had yet to be replaced. I had had a pleasant conversation with this woman a couple of months earlier. It had been a brief chat at the door to the consular office on Marqués de Valadares Street. I had bumped into her by chance, as she was turning the key before leaving. She had been in a great hurry, but had still managed to be polite.

‘I’m sorry, I’m in a rush,’ she had apologized.

‘It’ll only take a moment,’ I had replied.

‘It’s just I’m arranging the repatriation of the body of a poor young man from Birmingham.’

‘Was he killed? Here, in Vigo?’ I asked in a state of shock.

‘No, no,’ the charming woman clarified.

‘What happened then?’

‘He was discovered at death’s door, lying in a street on Christmas Eve. Just imagine.’

‘What about his family?’

‘Don’t talk to me about them. Can you believe that, once we’d found them, they refused to take charge of the poor boy’s body?’

‘Really?’

‘That’s right. I understand the boy had run away from home and was living like a tramp, but that’s no reason to be lacking in charity,’ Mrs Watford complained bitterly.

‘We can meet some other day, my business isn’t that urgent,’ I suggested in view of the sad nature of her errand.

‘I’d be grateful. Just give me your number, and I’ll call you.’

She diligently wrote down my name and mobile number in her diary, in a studious girl’s minute handwriting, but never called. The aforementioned ‘budgetary reasons’ got in the way, and we never spoke again.