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“Good. I’ve got a day’s leave next Saturday. Come at this time and I’ll show you the real Barcelona, just like I guided you in the mountains. Remember those days? Before everything went bad? Who knows? We might even find my sister.”

In the evening Elena was better, and she and Andrew and Theo took a taxi to the Liceu Opera House halfway down the Ramblas. The Colón’s resident hairstylist had come to her room in the afternoon and arranged her jet-black hair in an elegant chignon and, to please her husband, she was wearing a diamond necklace that had belonged to his mother. In the refracted light of the chandeliers, the jewels shimmered and sparkled above her simple black dress, drawing admiring eyes to the symmetry of her face, in which the suffering of recent years had created an ethereal look, as if she was not of this world but rather a Madonna in a painting by Murillo or another of the old Spanish masters. Theo had never seen his mother looking more beautiful, but it was a beauty so fine that he felt it could break at any moment, and he wished they had not come.

But Andrew was elated. He passed through the lobby with Elena on his arm, introducing her to his friends. Theo was surprised. His stepfather seemed to know everyone. Standing awkwardly alone with his back to a gilded pillar, Theo watched him talking animatedly to a group of men whose affluence was evident from the oversize jewels pinned or hung on their wives’ haute couture gowns. He didn’t need a guide to know who they were, these merchant princes of the city. They owned the factories and the mills, and Andrew was one of them.

A bell rang overhead, and the audience passed into the horseshoe-shaped theater. It was like nothing Theo had ever seen before. Immense Corinthian columns rose to support a ceiling encrusted with gold and polychrome moldings in which eight circular paintings of Renaissance nymphs in diaphanous robes surrounded a central globe of light, while below, red velvet armchairs matched the thick weave of the carpet. Theo thought it decadent: a baroque extravaganza celebrating the city’s wealth. Alone in the lobby, he’d noticed a memorial tablet on the wall dedicated to twenty patrons killed by an Anarchist bomb thrown from the balcony in 1893, and it didn’t surprise him in the least that the theater should have been an Anarchist target. Sitting beside his mother in Andrew’s sumptuous box, he glanced uneasily upward, wondering whether tonight might see a repeat.

He knew nothing of opera. He’d never seen one or heard one, and he’d gone expecting to be bored. But, to his surprise, he was enthralled from the moment the curtain rose, transporting him back to Seville a hundred years before. The music was alive with melody, and the Romany factory girl Carmen exerted a magnetic attraction not just on the soldiers on the stage but on him too. Spellbound while the orchestra played, he believed she was Maria. There was enough resemblance in her darting eyes and her dancing movement to sustain the illusion, and just like Maria, she insisted on her right to be free. Free to fall in love with Don José and free to throw him over when she met the glamorous young bullfighter Escamillo. Free to do as she liked, regardless of its effect on others. Theo believed in her right to choose, but he also understood José’s terrible pain when he learned of his rejection and, even though he was appalled, he understood why José killed her outside the bullring. He understood how love could lead to that. Death and despair.

In the darkness, he was swept away on a tide of emotion and so felt a shock when the lights came on at the end, destroying the illusion of make believe, and the actors, stepping forward, became themselves as they joined together in a line and took their bow. The audience stood and cheered and, looking around at them, Theo felt an unexpected revulsion replacing the grief he had been experiencing a moment before. They were voyeurs, these rich theatergoers in their evening dress. Bourgeoisie watching the lawless, amoral antics of the working class through their opera glasses before they went home to their hilltop villas built on the backs of those same workers’ hard labor.

The thought made Theo uneasy, a feeling that intensified when he came out of the theater and saw a man watching from the corner of a narrow street less than fifty yards away down the Ramblas. He was standing in the shadows and quickly disappeared from view when he caught Theo’s eye, but the glimpse was enough to make Theo sure it was Carlos, notwithstanding the unlikelihood of meeting someone he knew in this vast city, far away from Andalusia. He couldn’t mistake the daggerlike shape of the face, the pointed beard, the staring intensity in the eyes.

Instinctively, Theo moved to go after him. He had no idea what he wanted to say. “It’s not what you think; this isn’t me; I’m not one of them.” Something like that, perhaps. But he was denied the opportunity. He’d gone only a few steps when he felt a hand on his shoulder and his stepfather called him back.

“You need to stay with us,” he said. “It’s not safe to go in there at night. Or even during the day, for that matter.”

“In where?” asked Theo.

“The Fifth District—all this area to the south,” said Andrew, pointing up and down the side of the Ramblas on which they were standing. “But particularly down here, when you get closer to the port. I’m sorry. I should have told you before.”

“Why? What happens in there?”

“There are criminals, drug dealers ...”

“Anarchists?”

“Yes,” said Andrew, looking closely at his stepson, as if guessing the reason for his question. “Them too. As I’ve said, it’s not safe.”

They had reached Elena, and Theo said nothing more as they got into their taxi and sped back up the Ramblas past the cafés, which were as crowded as in the afternoon but illuminated now by thousands of tiny glittering lights.

Saturday, Theo thought. On Saturday I will see the real Barcelona.

But first he had to leave the city. Early the next morning Andrew drove Elena and Theo down the coast to Sitges. The winding road had been carved out of the cliff, with the Garraf Mountains rising precipitately above and the Mediterranean stretching away below to a distant horizon. Azure blue in the sunlight, ruffled here and there by silvery waves, it was spectacularly beautiful.

Andrew had promised golden sand, and Sitges didn’t disappoint. The beach stretched brown and smooth all the way from their hotel to the picturesque church of Santa Tecla on a headland at the other end, with the clear view interrupted only by small fishing boats pulled up here and there out of the water.

Elena had felt carsick on the corniche, but now she suddenly revived. “It’s perfect,” she said wonderingly. “Oh, Andrew, can’t you stay?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “Not even for a minute. This is your holiday with Theo. I’ll be back at the end of the week.” And with a wave of his hand and a skid of fast-turning tires, he was gone.

Standing in front of the hotel, Theo was shocked to realize that the empty feeling that had suddenly overtaken him was in fact disappointment that his stepfather had left. For years he had blamed Andrew for taking away his mother, but no longer. Irony of ironies, he felt closer to him now than he did to her. It was the last thing he would have expected. At least superficially, they had little in common, separated as they were by age, nationality, and political outlook, but what mattered more was that they shared a willingness to at least try to see each other for who they were. At critical moments in Theo’s life when he had gotten into trouble, Andrew had come to his rescue. He felt supported by his stepfather—loved, even.

Theo knew his mother loved him, too, just as he loved her, but a polarizing dichotomy in the way they each saw the world had pushed them further and further apart, creating barriers between them that he didn’t seem able to overcome. Once upon a time—so long ago that he could hardly remember—they had been close. Mother and son together, speaking Spanish in an English world, gathered with the exiles in the church in Gramercy Park. But while he had grown and gone out into the world, she had stayed behind, clinging to a faith that he could not share. The faith that had given her the justification to consign her first husband to oblivion as if he’d never lived, and which she was now using to defend the terrible injustices in Spanish society that so outraged her son.

As the rift between them had widened, Theo had learned to keep important parts of his life secret from his mother. It was a process that had begun five years earlier in New York when she had practically thrown Coach Eames out of their apartment. The poor man’s efforts to help her son had meant nothing to Elena once she found out he was a Communist. In the blink of an eye, he had gone from being an honored guest to becoming “a devil and a ravenous wolf.” Her words were ridiculous. Anyone could have seen that, except Elena herself, who had never been able to get beyond the fear and hatred of the godless Reds that she had taken with her out of Mexico.

So, afterward, in England and Spain, it was little wonder that Theo never spoke to her of Esmond or Maria. How could he when he knew she would condemn them out of hand? And become sick if he argued with her. His mother’s fragility cemented the separation between them, stifling the possibility of honest communication.

It might have helped if she had been able to relax her determination to look forward and not back, so as to avoid having to deal with experiences that upset her. But New York remained a closed subject because it reminded her of the disgrace, poverty, and sickness that had followed her first husband’s suicide. She needed to forget to survive, and it didn’t seem to matter to her that this meant she and Theo would lose access to their shared past. The good was thrown out with the bad. Spain was where they were now and as far as Elena was concerned, the past was another country that they’d had to leave behind to begin again.

None of this was what Theo wanted. Life was hard and confusing, and he would have liked nothing more than to be able to talk to his mother about the painful problems he was wrestling with, but he knew what would happen if he tried, and so he remained silent.

Elena, for her part, appeared blissfully unaware of his buttoned-up constraint. She acted as if everything was fine between them, and as long as they kept away from difficult subjects, she remained everything a loving mother should be: solicitous for her son’s welfare and happiness, proud of his success at school, and excited by his achievement in getting into Oxford.

She told Theo how delighted she was that they were going to have a holiday together in such a beautiful place. Everything about Sitges pleased her: the hotel with its wide-open views of the sea, as if you could reach out of the windows and touch the water; the stone terrace of the restaurant where they ate their meals and where she forsook her usual temperance to order cocktails with names that made her giggle, and which came in strange, exotic colors and with tiny striped umbrellas that matched the parasols above their table; the palm trees with brightly colored birds singing in their fronds; the beach where she walked out into the sea and then came running back when the waves came in, hanging on to Theo’s arm and splashing his legs and laughing.

It reminded her of her childhood, she said, when her parents took her to Puerto Vallarta for the holidays and she stood beside her father at the end of the pier and watched the pearl divers go out in their tiny boats to where there were dolphins in the Pacific, flying through the sea spray with such a weight of abandon. And sharks, too, lurking in the water, waiting.

Inevitably it was the church that Elena loved the most. Its setting was magical, rising up from the rocks at the end of the beach into weathered walls that glowed like pink quartz in the sunset. At high tide, the waves splashed up onto the stone steps leading to the door.

At Elena’s request, the hotel organized a guide to take them around, and on their last day they spent a very long hour with an octogenarian man who appeared to know the date and provenance of every object in the church, down to and including the candlesticks. He took them through every appalling detail of Santa Tecla’s martyrdom as portrayed on the altarpiece, while Elena listened intently and Theo inwardly groaned, longing to be released out into the sea air and the light.

As was often the case, the visit to the church crystallized his irritation with his mother and, walking back, he told her that the beach reminded him of his childhood, too, even though it didn’t.

“When I went to Coney Island with Dad, we walked on the sand,” he said, turning to look at her, as if he was challenging her with the statement.

And when she would not answer, he went on, refusing to let the subject go. “I don’t care what he did. I think of him every day,” he told her. “Don’t you?”

“I can’t,” she said, shaking her head. “It hurts.”

Theo looked at his mother. He could see that she’d pushed the memory of her first husband aside in the time it took to answer his question and was smiling expectantly now, just as she used to do years before when he was a boy in New York and the whole day was before them, theirs to do with as they pleased. As if nothing had happened—no factory, no suicide, no separation. But it didn’t work. Those things had happened. They were a part of who he was, who he had become. Not to be denied.

She loved him. He could see it written in her luminous dark eyes. He felt their warmth, like a fire on a cold night, and he understood her extraordinary fragility and the precious ephemerality of this moment in time that they had together. He wanted to respond—to tell her that he loved her, too, and that everything was going to be all right. He longed to, but he couldn’t, and there were no words to explain why. Or no words she could understand or accept.

He stopped, feeling like he’d hit something hard, something he could not get beyond. He picked up a stray black stone at his feet and threw it out into the sea, wishing it had been the plaster statue of Santa Tecla that his mother had bought at the back of the church and was carrying in her hand as she walked on in front of him, leaving tiny footprints behind her in the sand.

At night he dreamed that his mother was the saint. It was the same story that the old guide had told them in the church. She was being pursued through caves, and each time the pursuer got close, she prayed to God, who opened up the wall to another dark passageway, providing her with a temporary escape. But he could see the pursuer, too, enveloped in a black cloak, and he knew that it was death.

He woke trembling in the early light and went out into the hall and knocked on his mother’s door, terrified that she would not answer. And when it finally opened, he put out his hands and hugged her close and whispered that he was sorry. She reached up and ran her fingers through his hair and he stood still, looking out over her shoulder through the open windows of her room toward the vast gray sea.