The Angel's Game

At Sempere & Sons, Sempere doesn't initially recognize David because he looks so much healthier. He asks David to read the work of a talented 17-year-old writer named Isabella Gispert who reportedly adores his work.

When David returns home, Grandes is on his front porch. He tells David that Escobillas is dead and that because of how the publishing house is set up, the deaths of its founders nullify all contracts, including David's. Grandes also tells him that the fire started when someone threw petrol all over Barrido and threw a lit match on him.

That night, David begins to read Lux Aeterna. Although his initial reaction to the book is that it is nonsense, he begins to fall under its spell as he reads its strange prayers and mythologies. The text eventually devolves into a series of violent and deeply disturbing images of destruction: "As I turned the pages I had the feeling that, step by step, I was following the map of a sick and broken mind" (216).

The next day, David meets Isabella at a cafe. She begs David to mentor her, offering to work as his assistant for free in return. He tells her to come by his home with her 20 strongest pages.

When David arrives home from the cafe, Isabella is already on his doorstep with pages in hand. David reads her pages and concludes she is talented and passionate but will need to work much harder to become a great writer. He considers allowing Isabella to stay on as his assistant.

Over the next day, David struggles to wrap his head around the connections between Corelli, the fire, the manuscript, and the tower house. He senses a strange smell coming from the room at the end of his entrance corridor. As he opens the door, the stench grows more intense and seems to emanate from a wardrobe against the wall.

That night, David runs into Pedro and Cristina at a restaurant. Tormented by the sight of the now-married couple, David embarks on a colossal bender that ends with him staggering home to find Isabella on his doorstep crying. She says her father threw her out of the house and plans to hunt David down with a shotgun. Isabella helps a barely-coherent David into the house and into his bed, laying beside him and "offering nothing other than her company and her kindness" (239).

The next day, Isabella helps nurse David through his hangover. Despite her kindness, David is wary of letting her into his dark world. Before leaving for a dinner meeting with Corelli, David tells Isabella he wants her gone by the time he returns home.

At dinner at his mansion, Corelli proceeds to lecture about how faith is a survival mechanism deeply rooted in a human biological need to understand that which cannot be explained or has no meaning. When David comments that Corelli's attitude is rather cynical for a man interested in sacred texts, Corelli responds that he is a professional and this is "simply a commercial proposition" (252).

By this point, David begins to worry that Corelli plans to use his text to manipulate people into violence and starting wars. In no uncertain terms, Corelli says that the only reason behind the project that David need concern himself with is the fact that he wants to live: "You'll help me because you want to live and you don't care about the price or the consequences" (255).

That night, from his tower study, David sees Isabella sleeping in an alley. As two men approach her, David runs downstairs and finds Isabella with a knife to her throat and her skirt pulled up. With a giant metal pipe in his hand, he threatens the assailants, who eventually let Isabella go.

The next day, David goes to Isabella's father's store in a rage over him kicking her out and endangering her life. As it turns out, her father, Don Odon, is a sweet man who said nothing about kicking her out nor threatening David with a shotgun. In fact, considering how dangerous Barcelona has become—two laborers were savagely beaten the night before—he's happy that Isabella is staying with a responsible man with gainful and legal employment. David promises to let Isabella stay and to take care of her, at least for a few days.

At the library, David begins his research into religion and mythology in earnest. He comes to a number of conclusions that tie most religions together. The first is that "earthly existence was always perceived as a temporary rite of passage that urged one to a docile acceptance of one's lot and the rules of the tribe" (274). The second is that while the religious doctrines themselves are all fairly innocuous and well-intentioned, the bureaucracy that develops around them leads to belligerence and conquest.

David is summoned to a Sunday meeting with Corelli atop a large exhibition tower. Corelli advises him to stop reading intellectuals and to read the source material itself—specifically, the Bible. "It's my favorite book" (283). They also discuss fables, which Corelli believes "teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches" (285). Finally, Corelli directs David to write the beginning of a story and to deliver it by their next meeting in two or three weeks.

At the tower house, David and Isabella fall into a flirtatious yet somewhat adversarial rhythm. David wants to find Isabella a boyfriend, but Isabella insists she only likes men David's age.

The best place for David to find a good, readable version of the Bible is Gustavo Barcelo's bookshop. Because of Barcelo's connections with publishers across Europe, David also inquired earlier about what he could find out about Corelli. According to Père Coligny, a friend of Barcelo's in Paris, Corelli's publishing house closed down in 1914. Corelli himself is said to have died shortly thereafter from a fatal snakebite. Coligny hates Corelli because he stole one of his authors to write a religious text. In a fit of madness, the author set fire to the manuscript along with himself. Although he knows Corelli is presumed dead, Coligny advises Barcelo to stay away from him.

When David returns, Isabella is in the foul-smelling room at the end of the corridor. There, she finds boxes of letters, documents, and photographs belonging to the house's previous owner, whose name is Diego Marlasca—a man with the same initials as both David and the author of Lux Aeterna. Many of the photographs feature a famous actress from David's youth, Irene Sabino. In one photo, Irene is at ritzy party, and in the background, to David's immense shock and dismay, he can see Corelli standing atop a staircase.