"The Shadow of the Wind" - Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

The SHADOW of the WIND By Carlos Ruiz Zafon Translated by Lucia Graves Copyright 2001 Version 1.0 THE CEMETERY OF FORGOTTEN BOOKS I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper. 'Daniel, you mustn't tell anyone what you're about to see today,' my father warned. 'Not even your friend Tomas. No one.' 'Not even Mummy?' My father sighed, hiding behind the sad smile that followed him like a shadow all through his life. 'Of course you can tell her,' he answered, heavyhearted. 'We keep no secrets from her. You can tell her everything.' Shortly after the Civil War, an outbreak of cholera had taken my mother away. We buried her in Montjuic on my fourth birthday. The only thing I can recall is that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my father whether heaven was crying, he couldn't bring himself to reply. Six years later my mother's absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not yet learned to stifle with words. My father and I lived in a modest apartment on Calle Santa Ana, a stone's throw from the church square. The apartment was directly above the bookshop, a legacy from my grandfather, that specialized in rare collectors' editions and secondhand books - an enchanted bazaar, which my father hoped would one day be mine. I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day. As a child I learned to fall asleep talking to my mother in the darkness of my bedroom, telling her about the day's events, my adventures at school, and the things I had been taught. I couldn't hear her voice or feel her touch, but her radiance and her warmth haunted every corner of our home, and I believed, with the innocence of those who can still count their age on their ten fingers, that if I closed my eyes and spoke to her, she would be able to hear me wherever she was. Sometimes my father would listen to me from the dining room, crying in silence. On that June morning, I woke up screaming at first light. My heart was pounding in my chest as if my very soul was trying to escape. My father hurried into my room and held me in his arms, trying to calm me. 'I can't remember her face. I can't remember Mummy's face,' I muttered, breathless. My father held me tight. 'Don't worry, Daniel. I'll remember for both of us.' We looked at each other in the half-light, searching for words that didn't exist. For the first time, I realized my father was growing old. He stood up and drew the curtains to let in the pale glint of dawn. 'Come, Daniel, get dressed. I want to show you something,' he said. 'Now? At five o'clock in the morning?' 'Some things can only be seen in the shadows,' my father said, flashing a mysterious smile probably borrowed from the pages of one of his worn Alexandre Dumas romances. Night watchmen still lingered in the misty streets when we stepped out of the front door. The lamps along the Ramblas marked out an avenue in the early morning haze as the city awoke, like a watercolour slowly coming to life. When we reached Calle Arco del Teatro, we continued through its arch toward the Raval quarter, entering a vault of blue haze. I followed my father through that narrow lane, more of a scar than a street, until the glimmer of the Ramblas faded behind us. The brightness of dawn filtered down from balconies and cornices in streaks of slanting light that dissolved before touching the ground. At last my father stopped in front of a large door of carved wood, blackened by time and humidity. Before us loomed what to my eyes seemed the carcass of a palace, a place of echoes and shadows. 'Daniel, you mustn't tell anyone what you're about to see today. Not even your friend Tomas. No one.' A smallish man with vulturine features framed by thick grey hair opened the door. His impenetrable aquiline gaze rested on mine. 'Good morning, Isaac. This is my son, Daniel,' my father announced. 'He'll be eleven soon, and one day the shop will be his. It's time he knew this place.' The man called Isaac nodded and invited us in. A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall where a spiralling basilica of shadows was pierced by shafts of light from a high glass dome above us. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive, woven with tunnels, steps, platforms and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked. 'Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.' Scattered among the library's corridors and platforms I could make out about a dozen human figures. Some of them turned to greet me from afar, and I recognized the faces of various colleagues of my father's, fellows of the secondhand-booksellers' guild. To my ten-year-old eyes, they looked like a brotherhood of alchemists in furtive study. My father knelt next to me and, with his eyes fixed on mine, addressed me in the hushed voice he reserved for promises and secrets. 'This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you here has been somebody's best friend. Now they only have us, Daniel. Do you think you'll be able to keep such a secret?' My gaze was lost in the immensity of the place and its sorcery of light. I nodded, and my father smiled. And do you know the best thing about it?' he asked. I shook my head. According to tradition, the first time someone visits this place, he must choose a book, whichever he wants, and adopt it, making sure that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive. It's a very important promise. For life,' explained my father. 'Today it's your turn.' For almost half an hour, I wandered within the winding labyrinth, breathing in the smell of old paper and dust. I let my hand brush across the avenues of exposed spines, musing over what my choice would be. Among the titles faded by age, I could make out words in familiar languages and others I couldn't identify. I roamed through galleries filled with hundreds, thousands of volumes. After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered, while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels. It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny, but at that precise moment, I knew I had already chosen the book I was going to adopt, or that was going to adopt me. It stood out timidly on one corner of a shelf, bound in wine-coloured leather. The gold letters of its title gleamed in the light bleeding from the dome above. I drew near and caressed them with the tips of my fingers, reading to myself. THE SHADOW OF THE WIND JULIAN CARAX I had never heard of the title or the author, but I didn't care. The decision had been taken. I took the book down with great care and leafed through the pages, letting them flutter. Once liberated from its prison on the shelf, it shed a cloud of golden dust. Pleased with my choice, I tucked it under my arm and retraced my steps through the labyrinth, a smile on my lips. Perhaps the bewitching atmosphere of the place had got the better of me, but I felt sure that The Shadow of the Wind had been waiting there for me for years, probably since before I was born. That afternoon, back in the apartment on Calle Santa Ana, I barricaded myself in my room to read the first few lines. Before I knew what was happening, I had fallen right into it. The novel told the story of a man in search of his real father, whom he had never known and whose existence was only revealed to him by his mother on her deathbed. The story of that quest became a ghostly odyssey in which the protagonist struggled to recover his lost youth, and in which the shadow of a cursed love slowly surfaced to haunt him until his dying breath. As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable diminishing replicas of itself inside. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections. The minutes and hours glided by as in a dream. When the cathedral bells tolled midnight, I barely heard them. Under the warm light cast by the reading lamp, I was plunged into a new world of images and sensations peopled by characters who seemed as real to me as my surroundings. Page after page I let the spell of the story and its world take me over, until the breath of dawn touched my window and my tired eyes slid over the last page. I lay in the bluish half-light with the book on my chest and listened to the murmur of the sleeping city. My eyes began to close, but I resisted. I did not want to lose the story's spell or bid farewell to its characters just yet. Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later - no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget - we will return. For me those enchanted pages will always be the ones I found among the passageways of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. DAYS OF ASHES 1945-1949 1 A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept. My first thought on waking was to tell my best friend about the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Tomas Aguilar was a classmate who devoted his free time and his talent to the invention of wonderfully ingenious but bizarre contraptions such as the aerostatic dart or the dynamo spinning top. I pictured us both, equipped with torches and compasses, uncovering the mysteries of those bibliographic catacombs. Who better than Tomas to share my secret? Then, remembering my promise, I decided that circumstances advised me to adopt what in detective novels is termed a different 'modus operandi'. At noon I approached my father to quiz him about the book and about Julian Carax - both of which must be famous, I assumed. My plan was to get my hands on the complete works and read them all by the end of the week. To my surprise, I discovered that my father, a natural-born librarian and a walking lexicon of publishers' catalogues and oddities, had never heard of The Shadow of the Wind or Julian Carax. Intrigued, he examined the printing history on the back of the title page for clues. 'It says here that this copy is part of an edition of two thousand five hundred printed in Barcelona by Cabestany Editores, in June 1936.' 'Do you know the publishing house?' 'It closed down years ago. But, wait, this is not the original. The first edition came out in November of 1935, but was printed in Paris. . .. Published by Galiano & Neuval. Doesn't ring a bell.' 'So is this a translation?' 'It doesn't say so. From what I can see, the text must be the original one.' 'A book in Spanish, first published in France?' 'It's not that unusual, not in times like these,' my father put in. 'Perhaps Barcelo can help us. . . .' Gustavo Barcelo was an old colleague of my father's who now owned a cavernous establishment on Calle Fernando with a commanding position in the city's secondhand-book trade. Perpetually affixed to his mouth was an unlit pipe that impregnated his person with the aroma of a Persian market. He liked to describe himself as the last romantic, and he was not above claiming that a remote line in his ancestry led directly to Lord Byron himself. As if to prove this connection, Barcelo fashioned his wardrobe in the style of a nineteenth-century dandy. His casual attire consisted of a cravat, white patent leather shoes, and a plain glass monocle that, according to malicious gossip, he did not remove even in the intimacy of the lavatory. Flights of fancy aside, the most significant relative in his lineage was his begetter, an industrialist who had become fabulously wealthy by questionable means at the end of the nineteenth century. According to my father, Gustavo Barcelo was, technically speaking, loaded, and his palatial bookshop was more of a passion than a business. He loved books unreservedly, and - although he denied this categorically - if someone stepped into his bookshop and fell in love with a tome he could not afford, Barcelo would lower its price, or even give it away, if he felt that the buyer was a serious reader and not an accidental browser. Barcelo also boasted an elephantine memory allied to a pedantry that matched his demeanour and the sonority of his voice. If anyone knew about odd books, it was he. That afternoon, after closing the shop, my father suggested that we stroll along to the Els Quatre Gats, a cafe on Calle Montsio, where Barcelo and his bibliophile knights of the round table gathered to discuss the finer points of decadent poets, dead languages, and neglected, moth-ridden masterpieces. Els Quatre Gats was just a five-minute walk from our house and one of my favourite haunts. My parents had met there in 1932, and I attributed my one-way ticket into this world in part to the old cafe's charms. Stone dragons guarded a lamplit facade. Inside, voices seemed to echo with shadows of other times. Accountants, dreamers, and would-be geniuses shared tables with the spectres of Pablo Picasso, Isaac Albeniz, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Salvador Dali. There any poor devil could pass for a historical figure for the price of a small coffee. 'Sempere, old man,' proclaimed Barcelo when he saw my father come in. 'Hail the prodigal son. To what do we owe the honour?' 'You owe the honour to my son, Daniel, Don Gustavo. He's just made a discovery.' 'Well, then, pray come and sit down with us, for we must celebrate this ephemeral event,' he announced. 'Ephemeral?' I whispered to my father. 'Barcelo can only express himself in frilly words,' my father whispered back. 'Don't say anything, or he'll get carried away.' The lesser members of the coterie made room for us in their circle, and Barcelo, who enjoyed flaunting his generosity in public, insisted on treating us. 'How old is the lad?' inquired Barcelo, inspecting me out of the corner of his eye. 'Almost eleven,' I announced. Barcelo flashed a sly smile. 'In other words, ten. Don't add on any years, you rascal. Life will see to that without your help.' A few of his chums grumbled in assent. Barcelo signalled to a waiter of such remarkable decreptitude that he looked as if he should be declared a national landmark. 'A cognac for my friend Sempere, from the good bottle, and a cinnamon milkshake for the young one - he's a growing boy. And bring us some bits of ham, but spare us the delicacies you brought us earlier, eh? If we fancy rubber, we'll call for Pirelli tyres.' The waiter nodded and left, dragging his feet. 'I hate to bring up the subject,' Barcelo said, 'but how can there be jobs? In this country nobody ever retires, not even after they're dead. Just look at El Cid. I tell you, we're a hopeless case.' He sucked on his cold pipe, eyes already scanning the book in my hands. Despite his pretentious facade and his verbosity, Barcelo could smell good prey the way a wolf scents blood. 'Let me see,' he said, feigning disinterest. 'What have we here?' I glanced at my father. He nodded approvingly. Without further ado, I handed Barcelo the book. The bookseller greeted it with expert hands. His pianist's fingers quickly explored its texture, consistency, and condition. He located the page with the publication and printer's notices and studied it with Holmesian flair. The rest of us watched in silence, as if awaiting a miracle, or permission to breathe again. 'Carax. Interesting,' he murmured in an inscrutable tone. I held out my hand to recover the book. Barcelo arched his eyebrows but gave it back with an icy smile. 'Where did you find it, young man?' 'It's a secret,' I answered, knowing that my father would be smiling to himself. Barcelo frowned and looked at my father. 'Sempere, my dearest old friend, because it's you and because of the high esteem I hold you in and in honour of the long and profound friendship that unites us like brothers, let's call it at forty duros, end of story.' 'You'll have to discuss that with my son,' my father pointed out. 'The book is his.' Barcelo granted me a wolfish smile. 'What do you say, laddie? Forty duros isn't bad for a first sale. . . . Sempere, this boy of yours will make a name for himself in the business.' The choir cheered his remark. Barcelo gave me a triumphant look and pulled out his leather wallet. He ceremoniously counted out two hundred pesetas, which in those days was quite a fortune, and handed them to me. But I just shook my head. Barcelo scowled. 'Dear boy, greed is most certainly an ugly, not to say mortal, sin. Be sensible. Call me crazy, but I'll raise that to sixty duros, and you can open a retirement fund. At your age you must start thinking of the future.' I shook my head again. Barcelo shot a poisonous look at my father through his monocle. 'Don't look at me,' said my father. 'I'm only here as an escort.' Barcelo sighed and peered at me closely. 'Let's see, junior. What is it you want?' 'What I want is to know who Julian Carax is and where I can find other books he's written.' Barcelo chuckled and pocketed his wallet, reconsidering his adversary. 'Goodness, a scholar. Sempere, what do you feed the boy on?' The bookseller leaned towards me confidentially, and for a second I thought he betrayed a look of respect that had not been there a few moments earlier. 'We'll make a deal,' he said. 'Tomorrow, Sunday, in the afternoon, drop by the Ateneo library and ask for me. Bring your precious find with you so that I can examine it properly, and I'll tell you what I know about Julian Carax. Quid pro quo.' 'Quid pro what?' 'Latin, young man. There's no such thing as a dead language, only dormant minds. Paraphrasing, it means that you can't get something for nothing, but since I like you, I'm going to do you a favour.' The man's oratory could kill flies in midair, but I suspected that if I wanted to find out anything about Julian Carax, I'd be well advised to stay on good terms with him. I proffered my most saintly smile in delight at his Latin outpourings. 'Remember, tomorrow, in the Ateneo,' pronounced the bookseller. 'But bring the book, or there's no deal.' 'Fine.' Our conversation slowly merged into the murmuring of the other members of the coffee set. The discussion turned to some documents found in the basement of El Escorial that hinted at the possibility that Don Miguel de Cervantes had in fact been the nom de plume of a large, hairy lady of letters from Toledo. Barcelo seemed distracted, not tempted to claim a share in the debate. He remained quiet, observing me from his fake monocle with a masked smile. Or perhaps he was only looking at the book I held in my hands. 2 That Sunday, clouds spilled down from the sky and swamped the streets with a hot mist that made the thermometers on the walls perspire. Halfway through the afternoon, the temperature was already grazing the nineties as I set off towards Calle Canuda for my appointment with Barcelo, carrying the book under my arm and with beads of sweat on my forehead. The Ateneo was - and remains - one of the many places in Barcelona where the nineteenth century has not yet been served its eviction notice. A grand stone staircase led up from a palatial courtyard to a ghostly network of passageways and reading rooms. There, inventions such as the telephone, the wristwatch, and haste, seemed futuristic anachronisms. The porter, or perhaps it was a statue in uniform, barely noticed my arrival. I glided up to the first floor, blessing the blades of a fan that swirled above the sleepy readers melting like ice cubes over their books. Don Gustavo's profile was outlined against the windows of a gallery that overlooked the building's interior garden. Despite the almost tropical atmosphere, he sported his customary foppish attire, his monocle shining in the dark like a coin at the bottom of a well. Next to him was a figure swathed in a white alpaca dress who looked to me like an angel. When Barcelo heard the echo of my footsteps, he half closed his eyes and signalled for me to come nearer. 'Daniel, isn't it?' asked the bookseller. 'Did you bring the book?' I nodded on both counts and accepted the chair Barcelo offered me next to him and his mysterious companion. For a while the bookseller only smiled placidly, taking no notice of my presence. I soon abandoned all hope of being introduced to the lady in white, whoever she might be. Barcelo behaved as if she wasn't there and neither of us could see her. I cast a sidelong glance at her, afraid of meeting her eyes, which stared vacantly into the distance. The skin on her face and arms was pale, almost translucent. Her features were sharp, sketched with firm strokes and framed by a black head of hair that shone like damp stone. I guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows. I was trying to catch any sign of a pulse under her swan's neck when I realized that Barcelo was staring at me. 'So are you going to tell me where you found the book?' he asked. 'I would, but I promised my father I would keep the secret,' I explained. 'I see. Sempere and his mysteries,' said Barcelo. 'I think I can guess where. You've hit the jackpot, son. That's what I call finding a needle in a field of lilies. May I have a look?' I handed him the book, and Barcelo took it with infinite care. 'You've read it, I suppose.' 'Yes, sir.' 'I envy you. I've always thought that the best time to read Carax is when one still has a young heart and a blank soul. Did you know that this was the last novel he wrote?' I shook my head. 'Do you know how many copies like this one there are on the market, Daniel?' 'Thousands, I suppose.' 'None,' Barcelo specified. 'Only yours. The rest were burned.' 'Burned?' For an answer Barcelo only smiled enigmatically while he leafed through the book, stroking the paper as if it were a rare silk. The lady in white turned slowly. Her lips formed a timid and trembling smile. Her eyes groped the void, pupils white as marble. I gulped. She was blind. 'You don't know my niece, Clara, do you?' asked Barcelo. I could only shake my head, unable to take my eyes off the woman with the china doll's complexion and white eyes, the saddest eyes I had ever seen. 'Actually, the expert on Julian Carax is Clara, which is why I brought her along,' said Barcelo. In fact I think I'll retire to another room, if you don't mind, to examine this tome while you get to know each other. Is that all right?' I looked at him aghast. The scoundrel gave me a little pat on the back and left with my book under his arm. 'You've impressed him, you know,' said the voice behind me. I turned to discover the faint smile of the bookseller's niece. Her voice was pure crystal, transparent and so fragile I feared that her words would break if I interrupted them. 'My uncle said he offered you a good sum of money for the Carax, but you refused it,' Clara added. 'You have earned his respect.' 'All evidence to the contrary,' I sighed. I noticed that when she smiled, Clara leaned her head slightly to one side and her fingers played with a ring that looked like a wreath of sapphires. 'How old are you?' she asked. 'Almost eleven,' I replied. 'How old are you, Miss Clara?' Clara laughed at my cheeky innocence. 'Almost twice your age, but even so, there's no need to call me Miss Clara.' 'You seem younger, miss,' I remarked, hoping that this would prove a good way out of my indiscretion. 'I'll trust you, then, because I don't know what I look like,' she answered. 'But if I seem younger to you, all the more reason to drop the "miss".' 'Whatever you say, Miss Clara.' I observed her hands spread like wings on her lap, the suggestion of her fragile waist under the alpaca folds, the shape of her shoulders, the extreme paleness of her neck, the line of her lips, which I would have given my soul to stroke with the tip of my fingers. Never before had I had a chance to examine a woman so closely and with such precision, yet without the danger of meeting her eyes. 'What are you looking at?' asked Clara, not without a pinch of malice. 'Your uncle says you're an expert on Julian Carax, miss,' I improvised. My mouth felt dry. 'My uncle would say anything if that bought him a few minutes alone with a book that fascinates him,' explained Clara. 'But you must be wondering how someone who is blind can be a book expert' 'The thought had not crossed my mind.' 'For someone who is almost eleven, you're not a bad liar. Be careful, or you'll end up like my uncle.' Fearful of making yet another faux pas, I decided to remain silent. I just sat gawking at her, imbibing her presence. 'Here, come, get closer,' Clara said. 'Pardon me?' 'Come closer, don't be afraid. I won't bite you.' I left my chair and went over to where she was sitting. The bookseller's niece raised her right hand, trying to find me. Without quite knowing what to do, I, too, stretched out my hand towards her. She took it in her left hand and, without saying anything, offered me her right hand. Instinctively I understood what she was asking me to do, and guided her to my face. Her touch was both firm and delicate. Her fingers ran over my cheeks and cheekbones. I stood there motionless, hardly daring to breathe, while Clara read my features with her hands. While she did, she smiled to herself, and I noticed a slight movement of her lips, like a voiceless murmuring. I felt the brush of her hands on my forehead, on my hair and eyelids. She paused on my lips, following their shape with her forefinger and ring finger. Her fingers smelled of cinnamon. I swallowed, feeling my pulse race, and gave silent thanks that there were no eyewitnesses to my blushing, which could have set a cigar alight even a foot away. 3 That afternoon of mist and drizzle, Clara Barcelo stole my heart, my breath, and my sleep. In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that was to hound me for years. While I stared, enraptured, she explained how she, too, had stumbled on the work of Julian Carax by chance in a village in Provence. Her father, a prominent lawyer linked to the Catalan president's cabinet, had had the foresight to send his wife and daughter to the other side of the border at the start of the Civil War. Some considered his fear exaggerated, and maintained that nothing could possibly happen in Barcelona. In Spain, both the cradle and pinnacle of Christian civilization, barbarism was for anarchists - those people who rode bicycles and wore darned socks -and surely they wouldn't get very far. But Clara's father believed that nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds. He had a good understanding of history and knew that the future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press. For months he wrote a letter to his wife and daughter once a week. At first he did it from his office on Calle Diputacion, but later his letters had no return address. In the end he wrote secretly, from a cell in Montjuic Castle, into which no one saw him go and from which, like countless others, he would never come out. Clara's mother read the letters aloud, barely able to hold back her tears and skipping paragraphs that her daughter sensed without needing to hear them. Later, as her mother slept, Clara would convince her cousin Claudette to reread her father's letters from start to finish. That is how Clara read, with borrowed eyes. Nobody ever saw her shed a tear, not even when the letters from the lawyer stopped coming, not even when news of the war made them all fear the worst. 'My father knew from the start what was going to happen,' Clara explained. 'He stayed close to his friends because he felt it was his duty. What killed him was his loyalty to people who, when their time came, betrayed him. Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.' Clara spoke these words with a hardness that seemed grown out of years of secret brooding. I gladly lost myself in her porcelain gaze and listened to her talk about things that, at the time, I could not possibly understand. She described people, scenes, and objects she had never seen yet rendered them with the detail and precision of a Flemish master. Her words evoked textures and echoes, the colour of voices, the rhythm of footsteps. She explained how, during her years of exile in France, she and her cousin Claudette had shared a private tutor. He was a man in his fifties, a bit of a tippler, who affected literary airs and boasted he could recite Virgil's Aeneid in Latin without an accent. The girls had nicknamed him 'Monsieur Roquefort' by virtue of the peculiar aroma he exuded, despite the baths of eau de cologne in which he marinated his Rabelaisian anatomy. Notwithstanding his peculiarities (notably his firm and militant conviction that blood sausages and other pork delicacies provided a miracle cure for bad circulation and gout), Monsieur Roquefort was a man of refined taste. Since his youth he had travelled to Paris once a month to spice up his cultural savoir faire with the latest literary novelties, visit museums, and, rumour had it, allow himself a night out in the arms of a nymphet he had christened 'Madame Bovary', even though her name was Hortense and she limited her reading to twenty-franc notes. In the course of these educational escapades, Monsieur Roquefort frequently visited a secondhand bookstall positioned outside Notre Dame. It was there, by chance, one afternoon in 1929, that he came across a novel by an unknown author, someone called Julian Carax. Always open to the noveau, Monsieur Roquefort bought the book on a whim. The title seemed suggestive, and he was in the habit of reading something light on his train journey home. The novel was called The Red House, and on the back cover there was a blurred picture of the author, perhaps a photograph or a charcoal sketch. According to the biographical notes, Monsieur Julian Carax was twenty-seven, born with the century in Barcelona and currently living in Paris; he wrote in French and worked at night as a professional pianist in a hostess bar. The blurb, written in the pompous, mouldy style of the age, proclaimed that this was a first work of dazzling courage, the mark of a protean and trailblazing talent, and a milestone for the entire future of European letters. In spite of such solemn claims, the synopsis that followed suggested that the story contained some vaguely sinister elements slowly marinated in saucy melodrama, which, to the eyes of Monsieur Roquefort, was always a plus: after the classics what he most enjoyed were tales of crime, boudoir intrigue, and questionable conduct. The Red House tells the story of a mysterious, tormented individual who breaks into toyshops and museums to steal dolls and puppets. Once they are in his power, he pulls out their eyes and takes them back to his lugubrious abode, a ghostly old conservatory lingering on the misty banks of the Seine. One fateful night he breaks into a sumptuous mansion on Avenue Foch determined to plunder the private collection of dolls belonging to a tycoon who, predictably, had grown insanely rich through devious means during the industrial revolution. As he is about to leave with his loot, our voleur is surprised by the tycoon's daughter, a young lady of Parisian high society named Giselle, exquisitely well read and highly refined but cursed with a morbid nature and naturally doomed to fall madly in love with the intruder. As the meandering saga continues through tumultuous incidents in dimly lit settings, the heroine begins to unravel the mystery that drives the enigmatic protagonist (whose name, of course, is never revealed) to blind the dolls, and as she does so, she discovers a horrible secret about her own father and his collection of china figures. At last the tale sinks into a tragic, darkly perfumed gothic denouement. Monsieur Roquefort had literary pretensions himself and was the owner of a vast collection of letters of rejection signed by every self-respecting Parisian publisher in response to the books of verse and prose he sent them so relentlessly. Thus he was able to identify the novel's publishing house as a second-rate firm, known, if anything, for its books on cookery, sewing, and other handicrafts. The owner of the bookstall told him that when the novel appeared it had merited but two scant reviews from provincial dailies, strategically placed next to the obituary notices. The critics had had a field day writing Carax off in a few lines, advising him not to leave his employment as a pianist, as it was obvious that he was not going to hit the right note in literature. Monsieur Roquefort, whose heart and pocket softened when faced with lost causes, had decided to "invest half a franc on the book by the unknown Carax and at the same time took away an exquisite edition of the great master, Gustave Flaubert, whose unrecognized successor he considered himself to be. The train to Lyons was packed, and Monsieur Roquefort was obliged to share his second-class compartment with a couple of nuns who had given him disapproving looks from the moment they left the Gare d'Austerlitz, mumbling under their breath. Faced with such scrutiny, the teacher decided to extract the novel from his briefcase and barricade himself behind its pages. Much to his surprise, hundreds of miles later, he discovered he had quite forgotten about the sisters, the rocking of the train, and the dark landscape sliding past the windows like a nightmare scene from the Lumiere brothers. He read all night, unaware of the nuns' snoring or of the stations that flashed by in the fog. At daybreak, as he turned the last page, Monsieur Roquefort realized he had tears in his eyes and a heart that was poisoned with envy and amazement. That Monday, Monsieur Roquefort called the publisher in Paris to request information on Julian Carax. After much insistence a telephonist with an asthmatic voice and a virulent disposition replied that Carax had no known address and that, anyhow, he no longer had dealings with the firm. She added that, since its publication, The Red House had sold exactly seventy-seven copies, most of which had presumably been acquired by young ladies of easy virtue and other regulars of the club where the author churned out nocturnes and polanaises for a few coins. The remaining copies had been returned and pulped for printing missals, fines, and lottery tickets. The mysterious author's wretched luck won Monsieur Roquefort's sympathy, and during the following ten years, on each of his visits to Paris, he would scour the secondhand bookshops in search of other works by Julian Carax. He never found a single one. Almost nobody had heard of Carax, and those for whom the name rang a bell knew very little. Some swore he had brought out other books, always with small publishers, and with ridiculous print runs. Those books, if they really existed, were impossible to find. One bookseller claimed he had once had a book by Julian Carax in his hands. It was called The Cathedral Thief, but this was a long time ago, and besides, he wasn't quite sure. At the end of 1935, news reached Monsieur Roquefort that a new novel by Julian Carax, The Shadow of the Wind, had been published by a small firm in Paris. He wrote to the publisher asking whether he could buy a few copies but never got an answer. The following year, in the spring of 1936, his old friend at the bookstall by the Seine asked him whether he was still interested in Carax. Monsieur Roquefort assured him that he never gave up. It was now a question of stubbornness: if the world was determined to bury Carax, he wasn't going to go along with it. His friend then explained that some weeks earlier a rumour about Carax had been doing the rounds. It seemed that at last his fortunes had improved. He was going to marry a lady of good social standing and, after a few years' silence, had published a novel that, for the first time, had earned him a good review in none less than Le Monde. But just when it seemed that the winds were about to change, the bookseller went on, Carax had been involved in a duel in Pere Lachaise cemetery. The circumstances surrounding this event were unclear. All the bookseller knew was that the duel had taken place at dawn on the day Carax was due to be married, and that the bridegroom had never made it to the church. There was an opinion to match every taste: some maintained he had died in the duel and his body had been left abandoned in an unmarked grave; others, more optimistic, preferred to believe that Carax was tangled up in some shady affair that had forced him to abandon his fiancee at the altar, flee from Paris, and return to Barcelona. The nameless grave could never be found, and shortly afterwards a new version of the story begin to circulate: Julian Carax, who had been plagued by misfortune, had died in his native city in the most dire straits. The girls in the brothel where he played the piano had organized a collection to pay for a decent burial, but when the money order reached Barcelona, the body had already been buried in a common grave, along with beggars and people with no name who had turned up floating in the harbour waters or died of cold at the entrance to the subway. If only because he liked to oppose general views, Monsieur Roquefort did not forget Carax. Eleven years after his discovery of The Red House, he decided to lend the novel to his two pupils, hoping, perhaps, that the strange book might encourage them to acquire the reading habit. Clara and Claudette were by then teenagers with hormones coursing through their veins, obsessed by the world winking at them from beyond the windows of the study. Despite the tutor's best efforts, the girls had until then proved immune to the charms of the classics, Aesop's fables, or the immortal verse of Dante Alighieri. Fearing that his contract might be terminated if Clara's mother discovered that he was miseducating two illiterate, featherbrained young women, Monsieur Roquefort presented them with Carax's novel dressed up as a love story, which was, at least, half true. 4 'Never before had I felt trapped, so seduced and caught up in a story,' Clara explained, 'the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. Have you ever kissed a girl, Daniel?' My brain seized up; my mouth turned to sawdust. 'Well, you're still very young. But it's that same feeling, that first-time spark that you never forget. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone, changed my life.' By then I was hopelessly dumbstruck, at the mercy of this creature whose words and charms I had neither means nor desire to resist. I wished that she would never stop speaking, that her voice would wrap itself around me forever, and that her uncle would never return to break the spell of that moment that belonged only to me. 'For years I looked for other books by Julian Carax,' Clara went on. 'I asked in libraries, in bookshops, in schools. Always in vain. No one had ever heard of him or of his books. I couldn't understand it. Later on, Monsieur Roquefort heard a rumour, a strange story about someone who went around libraries and bookshops looking for works by Julian Carax. If he found any, he would buy them, steal them, or get them by some other means, after which, he would immediately set fire to them. Nobody knew who he was or why he did it. Another mystery to add to Carax's own enigma. In time, my mother decided she wanted to return to Spain. She was ill, and Barcelona had always been her home. I was secretly hoping to make some discovery about Carax here, since, after all, Barcelona was the city in which he was born and from which he had disappeared at the start of the war. But even with the help of my uncle, all I could find were dead ends. As for my mother, much the same thing happened with her own search. The Barcelona she encountered on her return was not the place she had left behind. She discovered a city of shadows, one no longer inhabited by my father, although every corner was haunted by his memory. As if all that misery were not enough, she insisted on hiring someone to find out exactly what had happened to him. After months of investigation, all the detective was able to recover was a broken wristwatch and the name of the man who had killed my father in the moat of Montjuic Castle. His name was Fumero, Javier Fumero. We were told that this individual - and he wasn't the only one - had started off as a hired gunman with the FAI anarchist syndicate and had then flirted with the communists and the fascists, tricking them all, selling his services to the highest bidder. After the fall of Barcelona, he had gone over to the winning side and joined the police force. Now he is a famous bemedalled inspector. Nobody remembers my father. Not surprisingly, my mother faded away within a few months. The doctors said it was her heart, and I think that for once they were right. When she died, I went to live with my uncle Gustavo, the sole relative of my mother's left in Barcelona. I adored him, because he always gave me books when he came to visit us. He has been my only family and my best friend through all these years. Even if he seems a little arrogant at times, he has a good heart, bless him. Every night, without fail, even if he's dropping with sleep, he'll read to me for a while.' 'I could read to you, if you like, Miss Clara,' I suggested courteously, instantly regretting my audacity, for I was convinced that, for Clara, my company could only be a nuisance, if not a joke. 'Thanks, Daniel,' she answered. 'I'd love that.' 'Whenever you wish.' She nodded slowly, looking for me with her smile. 'Unfortunately, I no longer have that copy of The Red House,' she said. 'Monsieur Roquefort refused to part with it. I could try to tell you the story, but it would be like describing a cathedral by saying it's a pile of stones ending in a spire.' 'I'm sure you'd tell it much better than that,' I spluttered. Women have an infallible instinct for knowing when a man has fallen madly in love with them, especially when the male in question is both young and a complete dunce. I fulfilled all the requirements for Clara Barcelo to send me packing, but I preferred to think that her blindness afforded me a margin for error and that my crime - my complete and pathetic devotion to a woman twice my age, my intelligence, and my height - would remain in the dark. I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams. When Barcelo returned wearing a feline smile, two hours had passed. To me they had seemed like two minutes. The bookseller handed me the book and winked. 'Have a good look at it, little dumpling. I don't want you coming back to me saying I've switched it, eh?' 'I trust you,' I said. 'Stuff and nonsense. The last man who said that to me (a tourist who was convinced that Hemingway had invented the fabada stew during the San Fermin bull run) bought a copy of Hamlet signed by Shakespeare in ballpoint, imagine that. So keep your eyes peeled. In the book business you can't even trust the index.' It was getting dark when we stepped out into Calle Canuda. A fresh breeze combed the city, and Barcelo removed his coat and put it over Clara's shoulders. Seeing no better opportunity, I tentatively let slip that if they thought it was all right, I could drop by their home the following day to read a few chapters of The Shadow of the Wind to Clara. Barcelo looked at me out of the corner of his eye and gave a hollow laugh. 'Boy, you're getting ahead of yourself!' he muttered, although his tone implied consent. 'Well, if that's not convenient, perhaps another day or . . .' 'It's up to Clara,' said the bookseller. 'We've already got seven cats and two cockatoos. One more creature won't make much difference.' 'I'll see you tomorrow, then, around seven,' concluded Clara. 'Do you know the address?' 5 There was a time, in my childhood, when, perhaps because I had been raised among books and booksellers, I dreamed of becoming a novelist. The root of my literary ambitions, apart from the marvellous simplicity with which one sees things at the age of five, lay in a prodigious piece of craftsmanship and precision that was exhibited in a fountain pen shop on Calle Anselmo Clave, just behind the Military Government building. The object of my devotion, a plush black pen, adorned with heaven knows how many refinements and flourishes, presided over the shop window as if it were the crown jewels. A baroque fantasy magnificently wrought in silver and gold that shone like the lighthouse at Alexandria, the nib was a wonder in its own right. When my father and I went out for a walk, I wouldn't stop pestering him until he took me to see the pen. My father declared that it must be, at the very least, the pen of an emperor. I was secretly convinced that with such a marvel one would be able to write anything, from novels to encyclopaedias, and letters whose supernatural power would surpass any postal limitations. Written with that pen, they would surely reach the most remote corners of the world, even that unknowable place to which my father said my mother had gone and from where she would never return. One day we decided to go into the shop and inquire about the blessed artefact. It turned out to be the queen of all fountain pens, a Montblanc Meisterstuck in a numbered series, that had once belonged, or so the shop attendant assured us, to Victor Hugo himself. From that gold nib, we were informed, had sprung the manuscript of Les Miserables. 'Just as Vichy Catalan water springs from the source at Caldas,' the clerk swore. He told us he had bought it personally from the most serious collector from Paris, and that he had assured himself of the item's authenticity. 'And what is the price of this fountain of marvels, if you don't mind telling me?' my father asked. The very mention of the sum drew the colour from his face, but I had already fallen under its spell. The clerk, who seemed to think we understood physics, began to assail us with incomprehensible gibberish about the alloys of precious metals, enamels from the Far East and a revolutionary theory on pistons and communicating chambers, all of which contributed to the Teutonic science underpinning the glorious stroke of that champion of scrivening technology. I have to say in his favour that, despite the fact that we must have looked like two poor devils, the clerk allowed us to handle the pen as much as we liked, filled it with ink for us, and offered me a piece of parchment so that I could write my name and thus commence my literary career in the footsteps of Victor Hugo. Then, after polishing it with a cloth to restore its shiny splendour, he returned the pen to its throne. 'Perhaps another day,' mumbled my father. Once we were out in the street again, he told me in a subdued voice that we couldn't afford the asking price. The bookshop provided just enough to keep us afloat and send me to a decent school. The great Victor Hugo's Montblanc pen would have to wait. I didn't say anything, but my father must have noticed my disappointment. 'I tell you what we'll do,' he proposed. 'When you're old enough to start writing, we'll come back and buy it.' 'What if someone buys it first?' 'No one is going to take this one, you can be quite sure. And if not, we can ask Don Federico to make us one. That man has the hands of a master.' Don Federico was the local watchmaker, an occasional customer at the bookshop, and probably the most polite and courteous man in the whole of the Northern Hemisphere. His reputation as a craftsman preceded him from the Ribera quarter to the Ninot Market. Another reputation haunted him as well, this one of a less salubrious nature, related to his erotic proclivity for muscular young men from the more virile ranks of the proletariat, and to a certain penchant for dressing up like the music-hall star Estrellita Castro. 'What if Don Federico doesn't have the right tools for the job?' I asked, unaware that to less innocent ears, the phrase might have had a salacious echo. My father arched an eyebrow, fearing perhaps that some foul rumours might have sullied my innocence. 'Don Federico is very knowledgeable about all things German and could make a Volkswagen if he put his mind to it. Besides, I'd like to find out whether fountain pens existed in Victor Hugo's day. There are a lot of con artists about.' My father's zeal for historical fact checking left me cold. I believed obstinately in the pen's illustrious past, even though I didn't think it was such a bad idea for Don Federico to make me a substitute. There would be time enough to reach the heights of Victor Hugo. To my consolation, and true to my father's predictions, the Montblanc pen remained for years in that shop window, which we visited religiously every Saturday morning. 'It's still there,' I would say, astounded. 'It's waiting for you,' my father would say. 'It knows that one day it will be yours and that you'll write a masterpiece with it.' ‘I want to write a letter. To Mummy. So that she doesn't feel lonely.' My father regarded me. 'Your mother isn't lonely, Daniel. She's with God. And with us, even if we can't see her.' This very same theory had been formulated for me in school by Father Vicente, a veteran Jesuit expert at expounding on all the mysteries of the universe - from the gramophone to a toothache -quoting the Gospel According to Matthew. Yet on my father's lips, the words sounded hollow. 'And what does God want her for?' 'I don't know. If one day we see Him, we'll ask Him.' Eventually I discarded the idea of the celestial letter and concluded that, while I was at it, I may as well begin with the masterpiece - that would be more practical. In the absence of the pen, my father lent me a Staedtler pencil, a number two, with which I scribbled in a notebook. Unsurprisingly, my story told of an extraordinary fountain pen, remarkably similar to the one in the shop, though enchanted. To be more precise, the pen was possessed by the tortured soul of its previous owner, a novelist who had died of hunger and cold. When the pen fell into the hands of an apprentice, it insisted on reproducing the author's last work, which he had not been able to finish in his lifetime. I don't remember where I got that idea from, but I never again had another one like it. My attempts to re-create the novel on the pages of my notebook turned out to be disastrous. My syntax was plagued by an anaemic creativity, and my metaphorical flights reminded me of the advertisements for fizzy footbaths that I used to read in tram stops. I blamed the pencil and longed for the pen, which was bound to turn me into a master writer. My father followed my tortuous progress with a mixture of pride and concern, 'How's your story going, Daniel?' 'I don't know. I suppose if I had the pen, everything would be different.' My father told me that sort of reasoning could only have occurred to a budding author. 'Just keep going, and before you've finished your first work, I'll buy it for you.' 'Do you promise?' He always answered with a smile. Luckily for my father, my literary dreams soon dwindled and were minced into mere oratory. What contributed to this was the discovery of mechanical toys and all sorts of tin gadgets you could find in the bric-a-brac stalls of the Encantes Market, at prices that were better suited to our finances. Childhood devotions make unfaithful and fickle lovers, and soon I had eyes only for Meccano and wind-up boats. I stopped asking my father to take me to see Victor Hugo's pen, and he didn't mention it again. That world seemed to have vanished, but for a long time the image I had of my father, which I still preserve today, was that of a thin man wearing an old suit that was too large for him and a secondhand hat he had bought on Calle Condal for seven pesetas, a man who could not afford to buy his son a wretched pen that was useless but seemed to mean everything to him. When I returned from Clara and the Ateneo that night, my father was waiting for me in the dining room, wearing his usual expression of anxiety and defeat. 'I was beginning to think you'd got lost somewhere,' he said. 'Tomas Aguilar phoned. He said you'd arranged to meet. Did you forget?' 'It's Barcelo. When he starts talking there's no stopping him,' I replied, nodding as I spoke. 'I didn't know how to shake him off.' 'He's a good man, but he does go on. You must be hungry. Merceditas brought down some of the soup she made for her mother. That girl is an angel' We sat down at the table to savour Merceditas's offering. She was the daughter of the lady on the third floor, and everyone had her down to become a nun and a saint, although more than once I'd seen her with an able-handed sailor who sometimes walked her back to the shop. She always drowned him with kisses. 'You look pensive tonight,' said my father, trying to make conversation. 'It must be this humidity, it "dilates" the brain. That's what Barcelo says.' 'It must be something else. Is anything worrying you, Daniel?' 'No. Just thinking.' 'What about?' 'The war.' My father nodded gloomily and quietly sipped his soup. He was a very private person, and although he lived in the past, he hardly ever mentioned it. I had grown up convinced that the slow procession of the postwar years, a world of stillness, poverty, and hidden resentment, was as natural as tap water, that the mute sadness that seeped from the walls of the wounded city was the real face of its soul. One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep. That evening in early summer, as I walked back through the sombre, treacherous twilight of Barcelona, I could not blot out Clara's story about her father's disappearance. In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took away mothers, beggars, or ninety-year-old neighbours, like a hellish lottery. But I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for a walk to Ciudadela Park in the morning, and then, in the afternoon, make someone disappear in the dungeons of Montjuic Castle or in a common grave with no name or ceremony. Going over all this in my mind, it occurred to me that perhaps the papier-mache world that I accepted as real was only a stage setting. Much like the arrival of Spanish trains, in those stolen years you never knew when the end of childhood was due. We shared the soup, a broth made from leftovers with bits of bread in it, surrounded by the sticky droning of radio soaps that filtered out through open windows into the church square. 'So tell me. How did things go with Gustavo today?' 'I met his niece, Clara.' 'The blind girl? I hear she's a real beauty.' 'I don't know. I don't notice things like that.' 'You'd better not.' 'I told them I might go to their house tomorrow, after school, to read to her for a while - as she's so lonely. If you'll let me.' My father looked at me askance, as if he were wondering whether he was growing old prematurely or whether I was growing up too quickly. I decided to change the subject, and the only one I could find was the one that was consuming me. 'Is it true that during the war people were taken to Montjuic Castle and were never seen again?' My father finished his spoonful of soup unperturbed and looked closely at me, his brief smile slipping away from his lips. 'Who told you that. Barcelo?' 'No. Tomas Aguilar. He sometimes tells stories at school.' My father nodded slowly. 'When there's a war, things happen that are very hard to explain, Daniel. Often even I don't know what they really mean. Sometimes it's best to leave things alone.' He sighed and sipped his soup with little relish. I watched him without saying a word. 'Before your mother died, she made me promise that I would never talk to you about the war, that I wouldn't let you remember any of what happened.' I didn't know how to answer. My father half closed his eyes, as if he were searching for something in the air - looks, silences, or perhaps my mother - to corroborate what he had just said. 'Sometimes I think I've been wrong to listen to her. I don't know.' 'It doesn't matter, Dad___' 'No, it does matter, Daniel. Nothing is ever the same after a war. And yes, it's true that lots of people who went into that castle never came out.' Our eyes met briefly. After a while my father got up and took refuge in his bedroom. I cleared the plates, placed them in the small marble kitchen sink, and washed them up. When I returned to the sitting room, I turned off the light and sat in my father's old armchair. The breeze from the street made the curtains flutter. I was not sleepy, nor did I feel like trying to sleep. I went over to the balcony and looked out far enough to see the hazy glow shed by the streetlamps in Puerta del Angel. A motionless figure stood in a patch of shadow on the cobbled street. The flickering amber glow of a cigarette was reflected in his eyes. He wore dark clothes, with one hand buried in the pocket of his jacket, the other holding the cigarette that wove a web of blue smoke around his profile. He observed me silently, his face obscured by the street lighting behind him. He remained there for almost a minute smoking nonchalantly, his eyes fixed on mine. Then, when the cathedral bells struck midnight, the figure gave a faint nod of the head, followed, I sensed, by a smile that I could not see. I wanted to return the greeting but was paralysed. The figure turned, and I saw the man walking away, with a slight limp. Any other night I would barely have noticed the presence of that stranger, but as soon as I'd lost sight of him in the mist, I felt a cold sweat on my forehead and found it hard to breathe. I had read an identical description of that scene in The Shadow of the Wind. In the story the protagonist would go out onto the balcony every night at midnight and discover that a stranger was watching him from the shadows, smoking nonchalantly. The stranger's face was always veiled by darkness, and only his eyes could be guessed at in the night, burning like hot coals. The stranger would remain there, his right hand buried in the pocket of his black jacket, and then he would go away, limping. In the scene I had just witnessed, that stranger could have been any person of the night, a figure with no face and no name. In Carax's novel, that figure was the devil. 6 A deep, dreamless sleep and the prospect of seeing Clara again that afternoon persuaded me that the vision had been pure coincidence. Perhaps that unexpected and feverish outbreak of imagination was just a side effect of the growth spurt I'd been waiting for, an event that all the women in the building said would turn me into a man, if not of stature, at least of a certain height. At seven on the dot, dressed in my Sunday best and smelling strongly of the Varon Dandy eau de cologne I had borrowed from my father, I turned up at the house of Gustavo Barcelo ready to make my debut as personal reader and living-room pest. The bookseller and his niece shared a palatial apartment in Plaza Real. A uniformed maid, wearing a white cap and the expressionless look of a soldier, opened the door for me with theatrical servility. 'You must be Master Daniel,' she said. 'I'm Bernarda, at your service.' Bernarda affected a ceremonial tone that could not conceal a Caceres accent thick enough to spread on toast. With pomp and solemnity, she led me through the Barcelo residence. The apartment, which was on the first floor, circled the building and formed a ring of galleries, sitting rooms, and passageways that to me, used as I was to our modest family home on Calle Santa Ana, seemed like a miniature of the Escorial palace. It was obvious that, as well as books, incunabula and all manner of arcane texts, Don Gustavo also collected statues, paintings, and altarpieces, not to mention abundant fauna and flora. I followed Bernarda through a gallery that was full to overflowing with foliage and tropical species. A golden, dusky light filtered through the glass panes of the gallery, and the languid tones from a piano hovered in the air. Bernarda fought her way through the jungle brandishing her docker's arms as if they were machetes. I followed her closely, examining the surroundings and noticing the presence of half a dozen cats and a couple of cockatoos (of a violent colour and encyclopaedic size) which, the maid explained, Barcelo had christened Ortega and Gasset, respectively. Clara was waiting for me in a sitting room on the other side of this forest, overlooking the square. Draped in a diaphanous turquoise-blue cotton dress, the object of my confused desire was playing the piano beneath the weak light from the rose window. Clara played badly, with no sense of rhythm and mistaking half the notes, but to me her serenade was liquid heaven. I saw her sitting up straight at the keyboard, with a half smile and her head tilted to one side, and she seemed like a celestial vision. I was about to clear my throat to indicate my presence, but the whiff of cologne betrayed me. Clara suddenly stopped her playing, and an embarrassed smile lit up her face. 'For a moment I thought you were my uncle,' she said. 'He has forbidden me to play Mompou, because he says that what I do with him is a sacrilege.' The only Mompou I knew was a gaunt priest with a tendency to flatulence who taught us physics and chemistry at school. The association of ideas seemed to me both grotesque and downright improbable. 'Well, I think you play beautifully.' 'No I don't. My uncle is a real music enthusiast, and he's even hired a music teacher to mend my ways - a young composer who shows a lot of promise called Adrian Neri. He's studied in Paris and Vienna. You've got to meet him. He's writing a symphony that is going to premiere with the Barcelona City Orchestra - his uncle sits on the management board. He's a genius.' 'The uncle or the nephew?' 'Don't be wicked, Daniel. I'm sure you'll fall for Adrian.' More likely he'll fall on me like a grand piano plummeting down from the seventh floor, I thought. 'Would you like a snack?' Clara offered. 'Bernarda makes the most breathtaking cinnamon sponge cakes.' We took our afternoon snack like royalty, wolfing down everything the maid put before us. I had no idea about the protocol for this unfamiliar occasion and was not sure how to behave. Clara, who always seemed to know what I was thinking, suggested that I read from The Shadow of the Wind whenever I liked and that I might as well start at the beginning. And so, trying to sound like one of those pompous voices on Radio Nacional that recited patriotic vignettes after the midday Angelus, I threw myself into revisiting the text of the novel. My voice, rather stiff at first, slowly became more relaxed, and soon I forgot myself and was submerged once more into the narrative, discovering cadences and turns of phrase that flowed like musical motifs, riddles made of timbre and pauses I had not noticed during my first reading. New details, strands of images and fantasy appeared between the lines, and new shapes revealed themselves, like the structure of a building looked at from different angles. I read for about an hour, getting through five chapters, until my throat felt dry and half a dozen clocks chimed throughout the apartment, reminding me that it was getting late. I closed the book and observed that Clara was smiling at me calmly. 'It reminds me a bit of The Red House,' she said. 'But this story seems less sombre.' 'Don't you believe it,' I said. 'This is just the beginning. Later on, things get complicated.' 'You have to go, don't you?' Clara asked. 'I'm afraid so. It's not that I want to, but...' 'If you have nothing else to do, you could come back tomorrow,' she suggested. 'But I don't want to take advantage of you. 'Six o'clock?' I offered. 'That way we'll have more time.' That meeting in the music room of the Plaza Real apartment was the first of many more throughout the summer of 1945 and the years to follow. Soon my visits to the Barcelos became almost daily, except for Tuesdays and Thursdays, when Clara had music lessons with Adrian Neri. I spent long hours there, and in time I memorized every room, every passageway, and every plant in Don Gustavo's forest. The Shadow of the Wind lasted us about a fortnight, but we had no trouble in finding successors with which to fill our reading hours. Barcelo owned a fabulous library, and, for want of more Julian Carax titles, we ambled through dozens of minor classics and major bagatelles. Some afternoons we barely read, and spent our time just talking or even going out for a walk around the square or as far as the cathedral. Clara loved to sit and listen to the murmuring of people in the cloister and guess at the echoes of footsteps in the stone alleyways. She would ask me to describe the facades, the people, the cars, the shops, the lampposts and shop windows that we passed on our way. Often she would take my arm and I would guide her through our own private Barcelona, one that only she and I could see. We always ended up in a milk bar on Calle Petritxol, sharing a bowl of whipped cream or a cup of hot chocolate with sponge fingers. Sometimes people would look at us askance, and more than one know-all waiter referred to her as 'your older sister', but I paid no attention to their taunts and insinuations. Other times, I don't know whether out of malice or morbidity, Clara confided in me, telling me far-fetched secrets that I was not sure how to take. One of her favourite topics concerned a stranger, a person who sometimes came up to her when she was alone in the street and spoke to her in a hoarse voice. This mysterious person, who never mentioned his name, asked her questions about Don Gustavo and even about me. Once he had stroked her throat. Such stories tormented me mercilessly. Another time Clara told me she had begged the supposed stranger to let her read his face with her hands. He did not reply, which she took as a yes. When she raised her hands to his face, he stopped her suddenly, but she still managed to feel what she thought was leather. 'As if he wore a leather mask,' she said. 'You're making that up, Clara.' Clara would swear again and again that it was true, and I would give up, tortured by the image of that phantom who found pleasure in caressing her swan-like neck - and heaven knows what else - while all I could do was long for it. Had I paused to reflect, I would have understood that my devotion to Clara brought me no more than suffering. Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most. During that bleak postwar summer, the only thing I feared was the arrival of the new school term, when I would no longer be able to spend all day with Clara. By dint of seeing me so often around the house, Bernarda, whose severe appearance concealed a doting maternal instinct, became fond of me and, in her own manner, decided to adopt me. 'You can tell this boy hasn't got a mother, sir,' she would say to Barcelo. 'I feel so sorry for him, poor little mite.' Bernarda had arrived in Barcelona shortly after the war, fleeing from poverty and from a father who on a good day would beat her up and tell her she was stupid, ugly, and a slut, and on a bad one would corner her in the pigsty, drunk, and fondle her until she sobbed with terror -at which point he'd let her go, calling her prudish and stuck up, like her mother. Barcelo had come across Bernarda by chance when she worked in a vegetable stall in the Borne Market and, following his instinct, had offered her a post in his household. 'Ours will be a brand-new Pygmalion,' he announced. 'You shall be my Eliza and I'll be your Professor Higgins.' Bernarda, whose literary appetite was more than satisfied with the church newsletter, glanced over him. 'I might be poor and ignorant, but I'm decent too,' she said. Barcelo was not exactly George Bernard Shaw, but even if he had not managed to endow his pupil with the eloquence and spirit of a literary lady, his efforts had refined Bernarda and taught her the manners and speech of a provincial maid. She was twenty-eight, but I always thought she carried ten more years on her back, even if they showed only in her eyes. She was a serial churchgoer with an ecstatic devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes. Every morning she went to the eight o'clock service at the Basilica of Santa Maria del Mar, and she confessed no less than three times a week, four in warm weather. Don Gustavo, who was a confirmed agnostic (which Bernarda suspected might be a respiratory condition, like asthma, but afflicting only refined gentlemen), deemed it mathematically impossible that the maid could sin sufficiently to keep up that schedule of confession and contrition. 'You're as good as gold, Bernarda,' he would say indignantly. 'These people who see sin everywhere are sick in their souls and, if you really press me, in their bowels, too. The endemic condition of the Iberian saint is chronic constipation.' Every time she heard such blasphemy, Bernarda would make the sign of the cross five times over. Later, at night, she would say a prayer for the tainted soul of Senor Barcelo, who had a good heart but whose brains had rotted away due to excessive reading, like that fellow Sancho Panza. Very occasionally Bernarda had boyfriends who would beat her, take what little money she had stashed in a savings account, and sooner or later dump her. Every time one of these crises arose, Bernarda would lock herself up in her room for days, where she would cry an ocean and swear she was going to kill herself with rat poison or bleach. After exhausting all his persuasive tricks, Barcelo would get truly frightened and call the locksmith to open the door. Then the family doctor would administer a sedative strong enough to calm a horse. When the poor thing woke up two days later, the bookseller would buy her roses, chocolates, a new dress and would take her to the pictures to see the latest from Cary Grant, who in her book was the handsomest man in recorded history. 'Did you know? They say Cary Grant is queer,' she would murmur, stuffing herself with chocolates. Ts that possible?' 'Rubbish,' Barcelo would swear. 'Dunces and blockheads live in a state of perpetual envy.' 'You do speak well, sir. It shows that you've been to that Sorbet university.' 'The Sorbonne,' he would answer, gently correcting her. It was very difficult not to love Bernarda. Without being asked, she would cook and sew for me. She would mend my clothes and my shoes, comb and cut my hair, buy me vitamins and toothpaste. Once she even gave me a small medal with a glass container full of holy water, which a sister of hers who lived in San Adrian del Besos had brought all the way from Lourdes by bus. Sometimes, while she inspected my head in search of lice and other parasites, she would speak to me in a hushed voice. 'Miss Clara is the most wonderful person in the world, and may God strike me dead if it should ever enter my head to criticize her, but it's not right that you, Master Daniel, should become too obsessed with her, if you know what I mean.' 'Don't worry, Bernarda, we're only friends.' 'That's just what I say.' To illustrate her arguments, Bernarda would then bring up some story she had heard on the radio about a boy who had fallen in love with his teacher and on whom some sort of avenging spell had been cast. It made his hair and his teeth fall out, and his face and hands were covered with some incriminating fungus, a sort of leprosy of lust. 'Lust is a bad thing,' Bernarda would conclude. 'Take it from me.' Despite the jokes he made at my expense, Don Gustavo looked favourably on my devotion to Clara and my eager commitment to be her companion. I attributed his tolerance to the fact that he probably considered me harmless. From time to time, he would still let slip enticing offers to buy the Carax novel from me. He would tell me that he had mentioned the subject to colleagues in the antiquarian book trade, and they all agreed that a Carax could now be worth a fortune, especially in Paris. I always refused his offers, at which he would just smile shrewdly. He had given me a copy of the keys to the apartment so that I could come and go without having to worry about whether he or Bernarda were there to open the door. My father was another story. As the years went by, he had got over his instinctive reluctance to talk about any subject that truly worried him. One of the first consequences of that progress was that he began to show his obvious disapproval of my relationship with Clara. 'You ought to go out with friends your own age, like Tomas Aguilar - you seem to have forgotten him, though he's a splendid boy - and not with a woman who is old enough to be married.' 'What does it matter how old we each are if we're good friends?' What hurt me most was the reference to Tomas, because it was true. I hadn't gone out with him for months, whereas before we had been inseparable. My father looked at me reprovingly. 'Daniel, you don't know anything about women, and this one is playing with you like a cat with a canary.' 'You're the one who doesn't know anything about women,' I would reply, offended. 'And much less about Clara.' Our conversations on the subject rarely went any further than an exchange of reproaches and wounded looks. When I was not at school or with Clara, I devoted my time to helping my father in the bookshop - tidying up the storeroom at the back of the shop, delivering orders, running errands, or even serving regular customers. My father complained that I didn't really put my mind or my heart into the work. I, in turn, replied that I spent my whole life working there and I couldn't see what he could possibly complain about. Many nights, when sleep eluded me, I'd lie awake remembering the intimacy, the small world we had both shared during the years following my mother's death, the years of Victor Hugo's pen and the tin trains. I recalled them as years of peace and sadness, a world that was vanishing and that had begun to evaporate on the dawn when my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Time played on the opposite team. One day my father discovered that I'd given Carax's book to Clara, and he rose in anger. 'You disappoint me, Daniel,' he said. 'When I took you to that secret place, I told you that the book you chose was something special, that you were going to adopt it and had to be responsible for it.' 'I was ten at the time, Father, and that was a child's game.' My father looked at me as if I'd stabbed him. 'And now you're fourteen, and not only are you still a child, you're a child who thinks he's a man. Life is going to deal you some hard knocks, Daniel. And very soon.' In those days I wanted to believe that my father was hurt because I spent so much time with the Barcelos. The bookseller and his niece lived a life of luxury that my father could barely dream of. I thought he resented the fact that Don Gustavo's maid behaved as if she were my own mother, and was offended by my acceptance that someone could take on that role. Sometimes, while I was in the back room wrapping up parcels or preparing an order, I would hear a customer joking with my father. 'What you need is a good woman, Sempere. These days there are plenty of good-looking widows around, in the prime of their life, if you see what I mean. A young lady would sort out your life, my friend, and take twenty years off you. What a good pair of breasts can't do ...' My father never responded to these insinuations, but I found them increasingly sensible. Once, at dinnertime, which had become a battleground of silences and stolen glances, I brought up the subject. I thought that if I were the one to suggest it, it would make things easier. My father was an attractive man, always clean and neat in appearance, and I knew for a fact that more than one lady in the neighbourhood approved of him and would have welcomed more than just his reading suggestions. It's been very easy for you to find a substitute for your mother,' he answered bitterly. 'But for me there is no such person, and I have no interest at all in looking.' As time went by, the hints from my father and from Bernarda, and even Barcelo's intimations, began to make an impression on me. Something inside told me that I was entering a cul-de-sac, that I could not hope for Clara to see anything more in me than a boy ten years her junior. Every day it felt more difficult to be near her, to bear the touch of her hands or to take her by the arm when we went out for a walk. There came a point when her mere proximity translated into an almost physical pain. Nobody was unaware of this fact, least of all Clara. 'Daniel, I think we need to talk,' she would say. ‘I don't think I've behaved very well towards you—' I never let her finish her sentences. I would leave the room with any old excuse and flee, unable to face the possibility that the fantasy world I had built around Clara might be dissolving. I could not know that my troubles had only just begun. AN EMPTY PLATE 1950 7 On my sixteenth birthday, I spawned the most ill-fated idea that had yet occurred to me. Without consulting anybody, I decided to host a birthday party and invite Barcelo, Bernarda, and Clara. In my father's estimation, the whole thing was a recipe for disaster. 'It's my birthday,' I answered sharply. 'I work for you every other day of the year. For once, at least, you could try to please me.' 'Suit yourself.' The preceding months had been the most bewildering in my strange friendship with Clara. I hardly ever read to her anymore. Clara would systematically avoid being left on her own with me. Whenever I called by her apartment, her uncle popped up, pretending to read a newspaper, or else Bernarda would materialize, bustling about in the background and casting sidelong glances. Other times the company would take the form of one or several of Clara's friends. I called them the 'Sisterly Brigade'. Always chaste and modest in appearance, they patrolled the area around Clara with a missal in one hand and a policeman's eye, making it abundantly clear that I was in the way and that my presence embarrassed Clara and the entire world. Worst of all, however, was Neri, the music teacher, whose wretched symphony remained unfinished. He was a smooth talker, a rich kid from the snobby San Gervasio district, who, despite the Mozartian airs he affected, reminded me more of a tango singer, slick with brilliantine. The only talent I recognized in him was a badly concealed mean streak. He would suck up to Don Gustavo with no dignity or decorum, and he flirted with Bernarda in the kitchen, making her laugh with his silly gifts of sugared almonds and his fondness for bottom pinching. In short, I hated his guts. The dislike was mutual. Neri would turn up with his scores and his arrogant manner, regarding me as if I were some undesirable little cabin boy and making all sorts of objections to my presence. 'Don't you have to go and do your homework, son?' 'And you, maestro, don't you have a symphony to finish?' In the end they would all get the better of me and I would depart, crestfallen and defeated, wishing I had Don Gustavo's gift of the gab so that I could put the conceited so-and-so in his place. On my birthday my father went down to the bakery on the corner and bought the finest cake he could find. He set the dinner table silently, bringing out the silver and the best crockery. He lit a few candles and prepared a meal of what he thought were my favourite dishes. We didn't exchange a word all afternoon. In the evening he went into his room, slipped into his best suit, and came out again holding a packet wrapped in shiny cellophane, which he placed on the coffee table in the dining room. My present. He sat at the table, poured himself a glass of white wine, and waited. My invitation specified that dinner would be served at eight-thirty. At nine-thirty we were still waiting. My father glanced at me sadly. Inside, I was boiling with rage. 'You must be pleased with yourself,' I said. 'Isn't this what you wanted?' 'No.' Half an hour later, Bernarda arrived. She bore a funereal expression and a message from Miss Clara, who wished me many happy returns. Unfortunately she would be unable to attend my birthday dinner. Senor Barcelo had been obliged to leave town on business for a few days, and she'd had to change her music lesson with Maestro Neri. Bernarda had come because it was her afternoon off. 'Clara can't come because she has a music lesson?' I asked, astounded. Bernarda looked down. She was almost in tears when she handed me a small parcel containing her present and kissed me on both cheeks. 'If you don't like it, you can exchange it,' she said. I was left alone with my father, staring at the fine crockery, the silver, and the candles that were quietly burning themselves out. 'I'm sorry, Daniel,' said my father. I nodded in silence, shrugging my shoulders. 'Aren't you even going to open your present?' he asked. My only response was to slam the front door as I left the apartment. I rushed furiously down the stairs, my eyes brimming with tears of rage as I stepped outside. The street was freezing, desolate, suffused in an eerie blue radiance. I felt as if my heart had been flayed open. Everything around me trembled. I walked off aimlessly, paying scant attention to a stranger who was observing me from Puerta del Angel. He wore a dark suit, right hand buried in the pocket of his jacket, eyes like wisps of light in the glow of his cigarette. Limping slightly, he began to follow me. I wandered through the streets for an hour or more, until I found myself at the base of the Columbus monument. Crossing over to the port, I sat on the stony steps that descended into the dark waters next to the dock that sheltered the pleasure boats. Someone had chartered a night trip, and I could hear laughter and music wafting across from the procession of lights and reflections in the inner harbour. I remembered the days when my father would take me on that very same boat for a trip to the breakwater point. From there, you could see the cemetery on the slopes of Montjuic, the endless city of the dead. Sometimes I waved, thinking that my mother was still there and could see us going by. My father would also wave. It was years since we had boarded a pleasure boat, although I knew that sometimes he did the trip on his own. 'A good night for remorse, Daniel,' came a voice from the shadows. 'Cigarette?' I jumped up with a start. A hand was offering me a cigarette. 'Who are you?' The stranger moved forward until he was on the very edge of the darkness, his face still concealed. A puff of blue smoke rose from his cigarette. I immediately recognized the black suit and the hand hidden in the jacket pocket. His eyes shone like glass beads. 'A friend,' he said. 'Or that's what I aspire to be. A cigarette?' 'I don't smoke.' 'Good for you. Unfortunately, I have nothing else to offer you, Daniel' He had a rasping, wounded voice. He seemed to drag his words out and they sounded muffled and distant like the old 78s Barcelo collected. 'How do you know my name?' 'I know a lot about you. Your name is the least of it.' 'What else do you know?' 'I could embarrass you, but I don't have the time or the inclination. Just say that I know you have something that interests me. And I'm ready to pay you good money for it.' 'I'm afraid you've mistaken me for someone else.' 'No, I hardly think so. I tend to make other mistakes, but never when it comes to people. How much do you want for it?' 'For what?' 'For The Shadow of the Wind.' 'What makes you think I have it?' 'That's beyond discussion, Daniel. It's just a question of price. I've known you had it for a long time. People talk. I listen.' 'Well, you must have heard wrong. I don't have that book. And if I did, I wouldn't sell it.' 'Your integrity is admirable, especially in these days of sycophants and toadies, but you don't have to pretend with me. Say how much. A thousand duros? Money means nothing to me. You set the price.' 'I've already told you: it's not for sale, and I don't have it,' I replied. 'You've made a mistake, you see.' The stranger remained silent and motionless, enveloped in the blue smoke of a cigarette that never seemed to go out. I realized he didn't smell of tobacco, but of burned paper. Good paper, the sort used for books. 'Perhaps you're the one who's making a mistake now,' he suggested. 'Are you threatening me?' 'Probably.' I gulped. Despite my bravado, the man frightened me. 'May I ask why you are so interested?' 'That's my business.' 'Mine too, if you are threatening me about a book I don't have.' 'I like you, Daniel. You've got guts, and you seem bright. A thousand duros? With that you could buy a huge amount of books. Good books, not that rubbish you guard with such zeal. Come on, a thousand duros and we'll remain friends.' 'You and I are not friends.' 'Yes we are, you just haven't realized it yet. I don't blame you, with so much on your mind. Your friend Clara, for instance. A woman like that .. . anyone could lose his senses.' The mention of Clara's name froze the blood in my veins. 'What do you know about Clara?' 'I dare say I know more than you, and that you'd do best to forget her, although I know you won't. I have been sixteen too. Suddenly a terribly certainty hit me. That man was the anonymous stranger who pestered Clara in the street. He was real. Clara had not lied. The man took a step forward. I moved back. I had never been so frightened in all my life. 'Clara doesn't have the book; you should know that. Don't you ever dare touch her again.' 'I'm not in the least bit interested in your friend, Daniel, and one day you'll share that feeling. What I want is the book. And I'd rather obtain it by fair means, without harming anyone. Do you understand?' Unable to come up with anything better, I decided to lie through my teeth. 'Someone called Adrian Neri has it. A musician. You may have heard of him.' 'Doesn't ring a bell, and that's the worst thing one can say about a musician. Are you sure you haven't invented this Adrian Neri?' 'I wish I had.' 'In that case, since you seem to be so close, maybe you could persuade him to return it to you. These things are easily solved between friends. Or would you rather I asked Clara?' I shook my head. 'I'll speak to Neri, but I don't think he'll give it back to me. Perhaps he doesn't even have it anymore. Anyhow, what do you want the book for? Don't tell me it's to read it.' 'No. I know it by heart.' 'Are you a collector?' 'Something like that.' 'Do you have other books by Carax?' 'I've had them at some point. Julian Carax is my specialty, Daniel. I travel the world in search of his books.' 'And what do you do with them if you don't read them?' The stranger made a stifled, desperate sound. It took me a while to realize that he was laughing. 'The only thing that should be done with them, Daniel,' he answered. He pulled a box of matches out of his pocket. He took one and struck it. The flame showed his face for the first time. My blood froze. He had no nose, lips or eyelids. His face was nothing but a mask of black scarred skin, consumed by fire. It was the same dead skin that Clara had touched. 'Burn them,' he whispered, his voice and his eyes poisoned by hate. A gust of air blew out the match he held in his fingers, and his face was once again hidden in darkness. 'We'll meet again, Daniel. I never forget a face, and I don't think you will either,' he said calmly. 'For your sake, and for the sake of your friend Clara, I hope you make the right decision. Sort this thing out with Neri - a rather pretentious name. I wouldn't trust him an inch.' With that, the stranger turned around and walked off toward the docks, a shape melting into the shadows, cocooned in his hollow laughter. 8 A reef of clouds and lightning raced across the skies from the sea. I should have run to take shelter from the approaching downpour, but the man's words were beginning to sink in. My hands were shaking, and my mind wasn't far behind. I looked up and saw the storm spilling like rivers of blackened blood from the clouds, blotting out the moon and covering the roofs of the city in darkness. I tried to speed up, but I was consumed with fear and walked with leaden feet, chased by the rain. I took refuge under the canopy of a newspaper kiosk, trying to collect my thoughts and decide what to do next. A clap of thunder roared close by, and I felt the ground shake under my feet. A few seconds later, the weak current of the lighting system, which lit up the shapes of buildings and windows, faded away. On the flooding pavements the streetlamps blinked, then went out like candles snuffed by the wind. There wasn't a soul to be seen in the streets, and the darkness of the blackout spread with a fetid smell that rose from the sewers. The night became opaque, impenetrable, as the rain folded the city in its shroud. 'A woman like that . .. anyone could lose his senses.' I started to run up the Ramblas with only one thought in mind: Clara. Bernarda had said Barcelo was away on business. It was her day off, and she usually spent the night with her aunt Reme and her cousins in the nearby town of San Adrian del Besos. That left Clara alone in the cavernous Plaza Real apartment and that faceless, menacing man unleashed in the storm with heaven knows what in mind. As I hurried under the downpour towards Plaza Real, all I could think was that I had placed Clara in danger by giving her Carax's book. By the time I reached the entrance to the square, I was soaked to the bone. I rushed to take shelter under the arches of Calle Fernando. I thought I could see shadowy forms creeping up behind me. Beggars. The front door was closed. I searched my pockets for the keys Barcelo had given me. One of the tramps came up, petitioning me to let him spend the night in the entrance hall. I closed the door before he'd time to finish his sentence. The staircase was a well of darkness. Flashes of lightning bled through the cracks in the front door, lighting up the outline of the steps for a second. I groped my way forward and found the first step by tripping over it. Holding onto the banister, I slowly ascended. Soon the steps gave way to a flat surface, and I realized I had reached the first-floor landing. I felt the marble walls, cold and hostile, and found the reliefs on the oak door and the aluminium doorknobs. After fumbling about for a bit, I managed to insert the key. When the door of the apartment opened, a streak of blue light blinded me for an instant and a gust of warm air graced my skin. Bernarda's room was at the back of the apartment, by the kitchen. I went there first, although I was sure the maid wasn't home. I rapped on the door with my knuckles and, as there was no answer, allowed myself to enter. It was a simple room, with a large bed, a cupboard with tinted mirrors, and a chest of drawers on which Bernarda had placed enough effigies and prints of saints and the Virgin Mary to start a holy order. I closed the door, and when I turned around, my heart almost stopped: a dozen scarlet eyes were advancing towards me from the end of the corridor. Barcelo's cats knew me well and tolerated my presence. They surrounded me, meowing gently. As soon as they realized that my drenched clothes did not give out the desired warmth, they abandoned me with indifference. Clara's room was at the other end of the apartment, next to the library and the music room. The cats' invisible steps followed me through the passageway. In the flickering darkness of the storm, Barcelo's residence seemed vast and sinister, altered from the place I had come to consider my second home. I reached the front of the apartment, where it faced the square. The conservatory opened before me, dense and impassable. I penetrated its jungle of leaves and branches. For a moment it occurred to me that if the faceless stranger had managed to sneak into the apartment, this was where he would probably choose to wait for me. I almost thought I could perceive the smell of burned paper he left in the air around him, but then I realized that what I had detected was only tobacco. A burst of panic needled me. Nobody in the household smoked, and Barcelo's unlit pipe was purely ornamental. When I reached the music room, the glow from a flash of lightning revealed spirals of smoke that drifted in the air like garlands of vapour. Next to the gallery, the piano keyboard displayed its endless grin. I crossed the music room and went over to the library door. It was closed. I opened it and was welcomed by the brightness emanating from the glass-covered balcony that encircled Barcelo's personal library. The walls, lined with packed bookshelves, formed an oval in whose centre stood a reading table and two plush armchairs. I knew that Clara kept Carax's book in a glass cabinet by the arch of the balcony. I crept up to it. My plan, or my lack of it, was to lay my hands on the book, get it out of there, give it to that lunatic and lose sight of him forever. Nobody would notice the book's absence, except me. Julian Carax's book was waiting for me, as it always did, its spine just visible at the end of a shelf. I took it in my hands and pressed it against my chest, as if embracing an old friend I was about to betray. Judas, I thought to myself. I decided to leave the place without making Clara aware of my presence. I would take the book and disappear from Clara Barcelo's life forever. Quietly, I stepped out of the library. The door of her bedroom was just visible at the end of the corridor. I pictured her lying on her bed, asleep. I imagined my fingers stroking her neck, exploring a body I had .conjured up from my fantasies. I turned around, ready to throw away six years of daydreaming, but something halted my step before I reached the music room. A voice whistling behind me, behind a door. A deep voice that whispered and laughed. In Clara's room. I walked slowly up to the door. I put my fingers on the doorknob. They trembled. I had arrived too late. I swallowed hard and opened the door. 9 Clara's naked body lay stretched out on white sheets that shone like washed silk. Maestro Neri's hands slid over her lips, her neck and her breasts. Her white eyes looked up to the ceiling, her eyelids flickering as the music teacher charged at her, entering her body between pale and trembling thighs. The same hands that had read my face six years earlier in the gloom of the Ateneo now clutched the maestro's buttocks that were glistening with sweat, digging her nails into them and guiding him towards her with desperate, animal desire. I couldn't breathe. I must have stayed there, paralysed, watching them for almost half a minute, until Neri's eyes, disbelieving at first, then aflame with anger, became aware of my presence. Still panting, astounded, he stopped. Clara grabbed him, not understanding, rubbing her body against his, licking his neck. 'What's the matter?' she moaned. 'Why are you stopping?' Adrian Neri's eyes burned with rage. 'Nothing,' he murmured. 'I'll be right back.' Neri stood up and threw himself at me, clenching his fists. I didn't even see him coming. I couldn't take my eyes off Clara, wrapped in sweat, breathless, her ribs visible under her skin and her breasts quivering. The music teacher grabbed me by the neck and dragged me out of the bedroom. My feet were barely touching the floor, and however hard I tried, I was unable to escape Neri's grip as he carried me like a bundle through the conservatory. 'I'm going to break your neck, you wretch,' he muttered. He hauled me toward the front door, opened it, and flung me with all his might onto the landing. Carax's book slipped out of my hands. He picked it up and threw it furiously at my face. 'If I ever see you around here again, or if I find out that you've gone up to Clara in the street, I swear I'll give you such a beating you'll end up in hospital - and I don't give a shit how young you are,' he said in a cold voice. 'Understood?' I got up with difficulty. In the struggle Neri had torn my jacket and my pride. 'How did you get in?' I didn't answer. Neri sighed, shaking his head. 'Come on,' he barked barely containing his fury. 'Give me the keys.' 'What keys?' He punched me so hard I collapsed. When I got up, there was blood in my mouth and a ringing in my left ear that bored through my head like a policeman's whistle. I touched my face and felt the cut on my lips burning under my fingers. A bloodstained signet ring shone on the music teacher's finger. 'I said the keys.' 'Piss off,' I spat out. I didn't see the next blow coming. I just felt as if a jackhammer had torn my stomach out. I folded up like a broken puppet, unable to breathe, staggering back against the wall. Neri grabbed me by my hair and rummaged in my pockets until he found the keys. I slid down to the floor, holding my stomach, whimpering with agony and anger. 'Tell Clara that—' He slammed the door in my face, leaving me in complete darkness. I groped around for the book. I found it and slid down the stairs, leaning against the walls, panting. I went outside spitting blood and gasping for breath. The biting cold and the wind tightened around my soaking clothes. The cut on my face was stinging. 'Are you all right?' asked a voice in the shadow. It was the beggar I had refused to help a short time before. Feeling ashamed, I nodded, avoiding his eyes. I started to walk away. 'Wait a minute, at least until the rain eases off,' the beggar suggested. He took me by the arm and led me to a corner under the arches where he kept a bundle of possessions and a bag with old, dirty clothes. 'I have a bit of wine. It's not too bad. Drink a little. It will help you warm up. And disinfect that I took a swig from the bottle he offered me. It tasted of diesel oil laced with vinegar, but its heat calmed my stomach and my nerves. A few drops sprinkled over my wound, and I saw stars in the blackest night of my life. 'Good, eh?' The beggar smiled. 'Go on, have another shot. This stuff can raise a person back from the dead.' 'No thanks. You have some,' I mumbled. The beggar had a long drink. I watched him closely. He looked like some grey government accountant who had been sleeping in the same suit for the last fifteen years. He stretched out his hand, and I shook it. 'Fermin Romero de Torres, currently unemployed. Pleased to meet you.' 'Daniel Sempere, complete idiot. The pleasure is all mine.' 'Don't sell yourself short. On nights like this, everything looks worse than it is. You'd never guess it, but I'm a born optimist. I have no doubt at all that the present regime's days are numbered. All intelligence points towards the Americans invading us any day now and setting Franco up with a peanut stand down in Melilla. Then my position, my reputation, and my lost honour will be restored.' 'What did you work at?' 'Secret service. High espionage,' said Fermin Romero de Torres. 'Suffice it to say that I was President Macia's man in Havana.' I nodded. Another madman. At night Barcelona gathered them in by the handful. And idiots like me, too. 'Listen, that cut doesn't look good. Someone's given you quite a tanning, eh?' I touched my mouth with my fingers. It was still bleeding. 'Woman trouble?' he asked. 'You could have saved yourself the effort. Women in this country - and I've seen a bit of the world - are a sanctimonious, frigid lot. Believe me. I remember a little mullato girl I left behind in Cuba. No comparison, eh? No comparison. The Caribbean female draws up to you with that island swing of hers and whispers "Ay, papito, gimme pleasure, gimme pleasure." And a real man, with blood in his veins . . . well, what can I say?' It seemed to me that Fermin Romero de Torres, or whatever his true name was, longed for lighthearted conversation almost as much as he longed for a hot bath, a plate of stew, and a clean change of clothes. I got him going for a while, as I waited for my pain to subside. It wasn't very difficult, because all the man needed was a nod at the right moment and someone who appeared to be listening. The beggar was about to recount the details of a bizarre plan for kidnapping Franco's wife when I saw that the rain had abated and the storm seemed to be slowly moving away towards the north. 'It's getting late,' I mumbled, standing up. Fermin Romero de Torres nodded with a sad look and helped me get up, pretending to dust down my drenched clothes. 'Some other day, then,' he said in a resigned tone. 'I'm afraid talking is my undoing. Once I start .. . Listen, this business about the kidnapping, it must go no further, understand?' 'Don't worry. I'm as silent as the grave. And thanks for the wine.' I set off towards the Ramblas. I stopped by the entrance to the square and turned to look at the Barcelos apartment. The windows were still in darkness, weeping with rain. I wanted to hate Clara but was unable to. To truly hate is an art one learns with time. I swore to myself that I would never see her again, that I wouldn't mention her name or remember the time I had wasted by her side. For some strange reason, I felt at peace. The anger that had driven me out of my home had gone. I was afraid it would return, and with renewed vigour, the following day. I was afraid that jealousy and shame would slowly consume me once all the pieces of my memory of that night fell into place. But dawn was still a few hours away, and there was one more thing I had to do before I could return home with a clean conscience. Calle Arco del Teatro was there waiting for me. A stream of black water converged in the centre of the narrow street and made its way, like a funeral procession, toward the heart of the Raval quarter. I recognized the old wooden door and the baroque facade to which my father had brought me that morning at dawn, six years before. I went up the steps and took shelter from the rain under the arched doorway. It reeked of urine and rotten wood. More than ever, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books smelled of death. I didn't recall that the door knocker was shaped as a demon's face. I took it by its horns and knocked three times. The cavernous echo dispersed within the building. After a while I knocked again, six knocks this time, each one louder than before, until my fist hurt. A few more minutes went by, and I began to fear that perhaps there was no longer anyone there. I crouched down against the door and took the Carax from the inside of my jacket. I opened it and reread that first sentence that had entranced me years before. That summer it rained every day, and although many said it was God's wrath because the villagers had opened a casino next to the church, I knew it was my fault, and mine alone, for I had learned to lie and my lips still retained the last words spoken by my mother on her deathbed: 'I never loved the man I married but another who, I was told, had been killed in the war; look for him and tell him my last thoughts were for him, for he is your real father.' I smiled, remembering that first night of feverish reading six years earlier. I closed the book and was about to knock one last time, but before my fingers touched the knocker, the large door opened far enough to reveal the profile of the keeper. He was carrying an oil lamp. 'Good evening,' I mumbled. 'Isaac, isn't it?' The keeper observed me without blinking. The glow from the oil lamp sculpted his angular features in amber and scarlet hues, conferring on him a striking likeness to the little demon on the door knocker. 'You're Sempere junior,' he muttered wearily. 'Your memory is excellent.' 'And your sense of timing is lousy. Do you know what time it is?' His sharp eyes had already detected the book under my jacket. Isaac stared at me questioningly. I took the book out and showed it to him. 'Carax,' he said. 'I'd say there are at most ten people in this town who know of him, or who have read this book.' 'Well, one of them is intent on setting fire to it. I can't think of a better hiding place than this.' 'This is a cemetery, not a safe.' 'Exactly. What this book needs is to be buried where nobody can find it.' Isaac glanced suspiciously down the alleyway. He opened the door a few inches and beckoned me to slip inside. The dark, unfathomable vestibule smelled of wax and dampness. An intermittent drip could be heard in the gloom. Isaac gave me the lamp to hold while he put his hand in his coat and pulled out a ring of keys that would have been the envy of any jailer. When, by some imponderable science, he found the right one, he inserted it into a bolt under a glass case full of relays and cogwheels, like a large music box. With a twist of his wrist, the mechanism clicked, and levers and fulcrums slid in an amazing mechanical ballet until the large door was clamped by a circle of steel bars that locked into place in the stone wall. 'The Bank of Spain couldn't do better,' I remarked, impressed. 'It looks like something out of Jules Verne.' 'Kafka,' Isaac corrected, retrieving the oil lamp and starting off towards the depths of the building. 'The day you come to realize that the book business is nothing but an empty plate and you decide you want to learn how to rob a bank, or how to set one up, which is much the same thing, come and see me and I'll teach you a few things about bolts.' I followed him through corridors that I still remembered, flanked with fading frescoes of angels and shadowlike creatures. Isaac held the lamp up high, casting a flickering bubble of red light. He limped slightly, and his frayed flannel coat looked like an undertaker's. It occurred to me that this man, somewhere between Charon and the librarian at Alexandria, seemed to belong in one of Julian Carax's novels. 'Do you know anything about Carax?' I asked. Isaac stopped at the end of a gallery and looked at me with indifference. 'Not much. Only what they told me.' 'Who?' 'Someone who knew him well, or thought so at least.' My heart missed a beat. 'When was that?' 'When I still had use for a comb. You must have been in swaddling clothes. And you don't seem to have come on much, quite frankly. Look at yourself: you're shaking.' 'It's my wet clothes, and it's very cold in here.' 'Is it? Well, next time pray send advance notice of your call, and I'll turn on the fancy central heating system to welcome you, little rosebud. Come on, follow me. My office is over there. There's a stove and something for you to wrap yourself in while we dry your clothes. And some Mercurochrome and peroxide wouldn't go amiss either. You look as if you've just been dropped off by a police van.' 'Don't bother, really.' 'I'm not bothering. I'm doing it for me, not for you. Once you've passed through this door, you play by my rules. This cemetery is for books, not people. You might catch pneumonia, and I don't want to call the morgue. We'll see about the book later. In thirty-eight years, I have yet to see one that can run away.' 'I can't tell you how grateful I am—' 'Then don't. If I've let you in, it's out of respect for your father. Otherwise I would have left you in the street. Now, follow me. If you behave yourself, I might consider telling you what I know of your friend Julian Carax.' Out of the corner of my eye, when he thought I couldn't see him, I noticed that, despite himself, he was smiling mischievously. Isaac clearly seemed to relish the role of sinister watchdog. I also smiled to myself. There was no doubt in my mind as to whom the face on the door knocker belonged. 10 Isaac threw a couple of blankets over my shoulders and offered me a cup of some steaming concoction that smelled of hot chocolate and some sort of alcohol. 'You were saying about Carax. . .' 'There's not much to say. The first person I heard mention Carax was Toni Cabestany, the publisher. I'm talking about twenty years ago, when his firm was still in business. Whenever he returned from one of his scouting trips to London, Paris, or Vienna, Cabestany would drop by and we'd chat for a while. We were both widowers by then, and he would complain that we were now married to the books, I to the old ones and he to his ledgers. We were good friends. On one of his visits, he told me how, for a pittance, he'd just acquired the Spanish rights for the novels of Julian Carax, a young writer from Barcelona who lived in Paris. This must have been in 1928 or 1929. Seems that Carax worked nights as a pianist in some small-time brothel in Pigalle and wrote during the day in a shabby attic in Saint-Germain. Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art. Carax had published a couple of novels in France, which had turned out to be total flops. No one gave him the time of day in Paris, and Cabestany had always liked to buy cheap.' 'So did Carax write in Spanish or in French?' 'Who knows? Probably both. His mother was French, a music teacher, I believe, and he'd lived in Paris since he was about nineteen or twenty. Cabestany told me that his manuscripts arrived in Spanish. Whether they were a translation or the original, he didn't care. His favourite language was money, the rest was neither here nor there. It occurred to Cabestany that perhaps, by a stroke of luck, he might place a few thousand copies in the Spanish market.' 'Did he?' Isaac frowned as he poured me a bit more of his restorative potion. 'I think the one that sold most, The Red House, sold about ninety copies.' 'But he continued to publish Carax's books, even though he was losing money,' I pointed out. 'That's right. Beats me. Cabestany wasn't exactly a romantic. But I suppose everyone has his secrets. .. . Between 1928 and 1936, he published eight of Carax's novels. Anyway, where Cabestany really made his money was in catechisms and a series of cheap sentimental novels starring a provincial heroine called Violeta LaFleur. Those sold like hot cakes. My guess is that he published Carax's novels because it tickled his fancy, or just to contradict Darwin.' 'What happened to Senor Cabestany?' Isaac sighed, looking up. 'Age - the price we all must pay. He became ill and had a few money problems. In 1936 his eldest son took over the firm, but he was the sort who can't even read the size of his underpants. The business collapsed in less than a year. Fortunately, Cabestany never saw what his heirs did with the fruit of his life's work, or what the war did to his country. A stroke saw him off on All Souls' Night, with a Cuban cigar in his lips and a 25-year-old girl on his lap. What a way to go. The son was another breed altogether. Arrogant as only idiots can be. His first grand idea was to try to sell the entire stock of the company backlist, his father's legacy, and turn it into pulp or something like that. A friend, another brat with a house in Caldetas and an Italian sports car, had convinced him that photo romances and Mein Kampf were going to sell like crazy, and, as a result, there would be a huge demand for cellulose. 'Did he really do that?' 'He would have, but he ran out of time. Shortly after he took over the firm, someone turned up at his office and made him a very generous offer. He wanted to buy the whole remaining stock of Julian Carax novels and was offering to pay three times their market value.' 'Say no more. To burn them,' I murmured. Isaac smiled. He looked surprised. 'Actually, yes. And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.' 'Who was that man?' 'Someone called Aubert or Coubert, I can't quite remember.' 'Lain Coubert?' 'Does that sound familiar?' 'It's the name of one of the characters in The Shadow of the Wind, the last of Carax's novels.' Isaac frowned. 'A fictional character?' 'In the novel Lain Coubert is the name used by the devil.' 'A bit theatrical, if you ask me. But whoever he was, at least he had a sense of humour,' Isaac reckoned. With the memory of that night's encounter still fresh in my mind, I could not see the humorous side of it, from any angle, but I saved my opinion for a more auspicious occasion. 'This person, Coubert, or whatever his name is - was his face burned, disfigured?' Isaac looked at me with a smile that betrayed both enjoyment and concern. 'I haven't the foggiest. The person who told me all this never actually got to see him, and only knew because Cabestany's son told his secretary the following day. He didn't mention anything about burned faces. Are you sure you haven't got this out of some radio show?' I threw my head back, as if to make light of the subject. 'How did the matter end? Did the publisher's son sell the books to Coubert?' I asked. 'The senseless dunce tried to be too clever by half. He asked for more money than Coubert was proposing, and Coubert withdrew his offer. A few days later, shortly after midnight, Cabestany's warehouse in Pueblo Nuevo burned down to its foundations. And for free.' I sighed. 'What happened to Carax's books, then? Were they all destroyed?' 'Nearly all. Luckily, when Cabestany's secretary heard about the offer, she had a premonition. On her own initiative, she went to the warehouse and took a copy of each of the Carax titles. She was the one who had corresponded with Carax, and over the years they had formed a friendship of sorts. Her name was Nuria, and I think she was the only person in the publishing house, probably in all of Barcelona, who had read Carax's novels. Nuria has a fondness for lost causes. When she was little, she would take in small animals she picked up in the street. In time she went on to adopt failed authors, maybe because her father wanted to be one and never made it.' 'You seem to know her very well.' Isaac wore his devilish smile. 'More than she thinks I do. She's my daughter.' Silence and doubt gnawed at me. The more I heard of the story, the more confused I felt. 'Apparently, Carax returned to Barcelona in 1936. Some say he died here. Did he have any relatives left here? Someone who might know about him?' Isaac sighed. 'Goodness only knows. Carax's parents had been separated for some time, I believe. The mother had gone off to South America, where she remarried. I don't think he was on speaking terms with his father since he moved to Paris.' 'Why was that?' 'I don't know. People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.' 'Do you know whether Carax's father is still alive?' 'I hope so. He was younger than me, but I go out very little these days and I haven't read the obituary pages for years - acquaintances drop dead like flies, and, quite frankly, it puts the wind up you. By the way, Carax was his mother's surname. The father was called Fortuny. He had a hat shop on Ronda de San Antonio.' 'Is it possible, then, do you think, that when he returned to Barcelona, Carax may have felt tempted to visit your daughter, Nuria, if they were friends, since he wasn't on good terms with his father?' Isaac laughed bitterly. I'm probably the last person who would know. After all, I'm her father. I know that once, in 1932 or 1933, Nuria went to Paris on business for Cabestany, and she stayed in Julian Carax's apartment for a couple of weeks. It was Cabestany who told me. According to my daughter, she stayed in a hotel. She was unmarried at the time, and I had an inkling that Carax was a bit smitten with her. My Nuria is the sort who breaks a man's heart just by walking into a shop.' 'Do you mean they were lovers?' 'You like melodrama, eh? Look, I've never interfered in Nuria's private life, because mine isn't picture perfect either. If you ever have a daughter - a blessing I wouldn't wish on anyone, because it's sod's law that sooner or later she will break your heart - anyhow, as I was saying, if you ever have a daughter, you'll begin, without realizing it, to divide men into two camps: those you suspect are sleeping with her and those you don't. Whoever says that's not true is lying through his teeth. I suspected that Carax was one of the first, so I didn't care whether he was a genius or a poor wretch. To me he was always a scoundrel.' 'Perhaps you were mistaken.' 'Don't be offended, but you're still very young and know as much about women as I do about baking marzipan pastries.' 'No contest there,' I agreed. 'What happened to the books your daughter took from the warehouse?' 'They're here.' 'Here?' 'Where do you think your book came from - the one you found on the day your father brought you to this place?' 'I don't understand.' 'It's very simple. One night, some days after the fire in Cabestany's warehouse, my daughter, Nuria, turned up here. She looked nervous. She said that someone had been following her and she was afraid it was the man called Coubert, who was trying to get hold of the books to destroy them. Nuria said she had come to hide Carax's books. She went into the large hall and hid them in the maze of bookshelves, like buried treasure. I didn't ask her where she'd put them, nor did she tell me. Before she left, she said that as soon as she managed to find Carax, she'd come back for them. It seemed to me that she was still in love with him, but I didn't say anything. I asked her whether she'd seen him recently, whether she'd had any news. She said she hadn't heard from him for months, practically since he'd sent her the final corrections for the manuscript of his last book. I can't say whether she was lying. What I do know is that after that day Nuria didn't hear from Carax again, and those books were left here, gathering dust.' 'Do you think your daughter would be willing to talk to me about all this?' 'Could be, but I don't know whether she'd be able to tell you anything that yours truly hasn't told you already. Remember, all of this happened a long time ago. The truth is that we don't get on as well as I'd like. We see each other once a month. We go out to lunch somewhere close by, and then she's off as quick as she came. I know that a few years ago she married a nice man, a journalist, a bit harebrained, I'd say, one of those people who are always getting into trouble over politics, but with a good heart. They had a civil wedding with no guests. I found out a month later. She has never introduced me to her husband. Miquel, his name is. Or something like that. I don't suppose she's very proud of her father, and I don't blame her. Now she's a changed woman. Imagine, she even learned to knit, and I'm told she no longer dresses like Simone de Beauvoir. One of these days, I'll find out I'm a grandfather. For years she's been working at home as an Italian and French translator. I don't know where she got the talent from, quite frankly. Not from her father, that's for sure. Let me write down her address, though I'm not sure it's a very good idea to say I sent you.' Isaac scribbled something on the corner of an old newspaper and handed me the scrap of paper. 'I'm very grateful. You never know, maybe she'll remember something. . . .' Isaac smiled with some sadness. 'As a child she'd remember everything. Everything. Then children grow up, and you no longer know what they think or what they feel. And that's how it should be, I suppose. Don't tell Nuria what I've told you, will you? What's been said here tonight should go no further.' 'Don't worry. Do you think she still thinks about Carax?' Isaac gave a long sigh and lowered his eyes. 'Heaven knows. I don't know whether she really loved him. These things remain locked inside, and now she's a married woman. When I was your age, I had a girlfriend, Teresita Boadas, her name was - she sewed aprons in the Santamaria textile factory on Calle Comercio. She was sixteen, two years younger than me, and she was the first woman I ever fell for. Don't look at me like that. I know you youngsters think we old people have never fallen in love. Teresita's father had an ice cart in the Borne Market and had been born dumb. You can't imagine how scared I was the day I asked him for his daughter's hand and he spent five long minutes staring at me, without any apparent reaction, holding the ice pick in his hand. I'd been saving up for two years to buy Teresita a wedding ring when she fell ill. Something she'd caught in the workshop, she told me. Six months later she was dead of tuberculosis. I can still remember how the dumb man moaned the day we buried her in the Pueblo Nuevo cemetery.' Isaac fell into a deep silence. I didn't dare breathe. After a while he looked up and smiled. 'I'm speaking of fifty-five years ago, imagine! But if I must be frank, a day doesn't go by without me thinking of her, of the walks we used to take as far as the ruins of the 1888 Universal Exhibition, or of how she would laugh at me when I read her the poems I wrote in the back room of my uncle Leopoldo's grocery shop. I even remember the face of a Gypsy woman who read our fortune on Bogatell beach and told us we'd always be together. In her own way, she was right. What can I say? Well, yes, I think Nuria still remembers that man, even if she doesn't say so. And the truth is, I'll never forgive Carax for that. You're still very young, but I know how much these things hurt. If you want my opinion, Carax was a robber of hearts, and he took my daughter's to the grave, or to hell. I'll only ask you one thing: if you see her and talk to her, let me know how she is. Find out whether she's happy. And whether she's forgiven her father.' Shortly before dawn, with only an oil lamp to light my way, I went back into the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. As I did so, I imagined Isaac's daughter wandering through the dark and endless corridors with exactly the same determination as guided me today: to save the book. I thought I remembered the route I'd followed the first time I visited that place with my father, but soon I realized that the twists and turns of the labyrinth bent the passages into spirals that were impossible to recall. Three times I tried to follow a path I thought I had memorized, and three times the maze returned me to the same point. Isaac waited for me there, a wry smile on his face. 'Do you intend to come back for it one day?' he asked. 'Of course.' 'In that case you might like to cheat a little.' 'Cheat?' 'Young man, you're a bit slow on the uptake, aren't you? Remember the Minotaur.' It took me a few seconds to understand what he was suggesting. Isaac pulled an old penknife out of his pocket and handed it to me. 'Make a mark on every corner, a notch only you will recognize. It's old wood and so full of scratches and grooves that nobody will notice it, unless the person knows what he's looking for. I followed his advice and once more penetrated the heart of the structure. Every time I changed direction, I stopped to mark the shelves with a C and an X on the side of the passage that I was intending to take. Twenty minutes later I had lost myself in the depths of the tower and then, quite by chance, the place where I was going to bury the novel was revealed to me. To my right I noticed a row of volumes on the disentailment of church property penned by the distinguished Jovellanos. To my adolescent eyes, such a camouflage would have dissuaded even the craftiest mind. I took out a few tomes and inspected the second row that was concealed behind those walls of marble prose. Among little clouds of dust, various plays by Moratin and a brand-new Curial e Guelfa stood side by side with Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico Politicus. As a coup de grace, I resolved to confine the Carax book between the 1901 yearbook of judicial minutiae from the civil courts of Gerona and a collection of novels by Juan Valera. In order to make space, I decided to remove and take with me the book of Golden Age poetry that separated them, and in its place I slipped in The Shadow of the Wind. I took my leave of the novel and put the Jovellanos anthology back in its place, walling in the back row. Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot. Dawn was breaking when I returned to the apartment on Calle Santa Ana. Opening the door quietly, I slipped in without switching on the light. From the entrance hall, I could see the dining room at the end of the corridor, the table still decked out for the party. The cake was there, untouched, and the crockery still waited for the meal. I could make out the motionless silhouette of my father in his armchair, as he observed the scene from the window. He was awake and still wearing his best suit. Wreaths of smoke rose lazily from a cigarette he held between his index and ring fingers, as if it were a pen. I hadn't seen my father smoke for years. 'Good morning,' he murmured, putting out the cigarette in an ashtray that was full of half-smoked butts. I looked at him without knowing what to say. The light from behind him concealed his eyes. 'Clara phoned a few times last night, a couple of hours after you left,' he said. 'She sounded very worried. She left a message for you to call her, no matter what time it was.' 'I don't intend to see or speak to Clara again,' I said. My father nodded but didn't reply. I fell into one of the dining-room chairs and stared at the floor. 'Aren't you going to tell me where you've been?' 'Just around.' 'You've given me one hell of a fright.' There was no anger in his voice and hardly any reproach, just tiredness. 'I know. And I'm sorry,' I answered. 'What have you done to your face?' 'I slipped in the rain and fell.' 'That rain must have a good right hook. Put something on it.' 'It's nothing. I don't even notice it,' I lied. 'What I need is to get some sleep. I can barely stand up.' 'At least open your present before you go to bed,' said my father. He pointed to the packet wrapped in cellophane, which he had placed on the coffee table the night before. I hesitated for a moment. My father nodded. I took the packet and felt its weight. I handed it to my father without opening it. 'You'd better return it. I don't deserve any presents.' 'Presents are made for the pleasure of the one who gives them, not for the merits of those who receive them,' said my father. 'Besides, it can't be returned. Open it.' I undid the carefully wrapped package in the dim light of dawn. It contained a shiny carved wooden box, edged with gold rivets. Even before opening it, I was smiling. The sound of the clasp when it unlocked was exquisite, like the ticking of a watch. Inside, the case was lined with dark blue velvet. Victor Hugo's fabulous Montblanc Meisterstuck rested in the centre. It was a dazzling sight. I took it and gazed at it by the light of the balcony. The gold clip of the pen top had an inscription. Daniel Sempere, 1950 I stared at my father, dumbfounded. I don't think I had ever seen him look as happy as he seemed to me at that moment. Without saying anything, he got up from his armchair and held me tight. I felt a lump in my throat and, lost for words, fell utterly silent. TRUE TO CHARACTER 1951-1953 11 That year autumn blanketed Barcelona with fallen leaves that rippled through the streets like silvery scales. The distant memory of the night of my sixteenth birthday had put a damper on my spirits, or perhaps life had decided to grant me a sabbatical from my melodramatic woes so that I could begin to grow up. I was surprised at how little I thought about Clara Barcelo, or Julian Carax, or that faceless cipher who smelled of burned paper and claimed to be a character straight out of a book. By November, I had observed a month of sobriety, a month without going anywhere near Plaza Real to beg a glimpse of Clara through the window. The merit, I must confess, was not altogether mine. Business in the bookshop was picking up, and my father and I had more on our hands than we could juggle. 'At this rate we'll have to hire another person to help us find the orders,' my father remarked. 'What we really need is someone very special, half detective, half poet, someone who won't charge much or be afraid to tackle the impossible.' 'I think I have the right candidate,' I said. I found Fermin Romero de Torres in his usual lodgings below the arches of Calle Fernando. The beggar was putting together the front page of the Monday paper from bits he had rescued from a waste bin. The lead story went on about the greatness of national public works as yet more proof of the glorious progress of the dictatorship's policies. 'Good God! Another dam!' I heard him cry. 'These fascists will turn us all into a race of saints and frogs.' 'Good morning,' I said quietly. 'Do you remember me?' The beggar raised his head, and a wonderful smile suddenly lit up his face. 'Do mine eyes deceive me? How are things with you, my friend? You'll accept a swig of red wine, I hope?' 'It's on me today,' I said. 'Are you hungry?' 'Well, I wouldn't say no to a good plate of seafood, but I'll eat anything that's thrown at me.' On our way to the bookshop, Fermin Romero de Torres filled me in on all manner of escapades he had devised during the last weeks to avoid the Security Services, and in particular one Inspector Fumero, his nemesis, with whom he appeared to have a running battle. 'Fumero?' I asked. That was the name of the soldier who had murdered Clara Barcelo's father in Montjuic Castle at the outbreak of the war. The little man nodded fearfully, turning pale. He looked famished and dirty, and he stank from months of living on the streets. The poor fellow had no idea where I was taking him, and I noticed a certain apprehension, a growing anxiety that he tried to disguise with incessant chatter. When we arrived at the shop, he gave me a troubled look. 'Please come in. This is my father's bookshop. I'd like to introduce you to him.' The beggar hunched himself up, a bundle of grime and nerves. 'No, no, I wouldn't hear of it. I don't look presentable, and this is a classy establishment. I would embarrass you. . . .' My father put his head around the door, glanced at the beggar, and then looked at me out of the corner of his eye. 'Dad, this is Fermin Romero de Torres.' 'At your service,' said the beggar, almost shaking. My father smiled at him calmly and stretched out his hand. The beggar didn't dare take it, mortified by his appearance and the filth that covered his skin. 'Listen, I think it's best if I go away and leave you,' he stammered. My father took him gently by the arm. 'Not at all, my son has told me you're going to have lunch with us.' The beggar looked at us amazed, terrified. 'Why don't you come up to our home and have a nice hot bath?' said my father. 'Afterwards, if that's all right, we could walk down to Can Sole for lunch.' Fermin Romero de Torres mumbled something unintelligible. Still smiling, my father led him towards the front door and practically had to drag him up the stairs to the apartment while I closed the shop. By dint of honeyed words and underhand tactics, we managed to remove his rags and get him into the bath. With nothing on, he looked like a wartime photograph and trembled like a plucked chicken. Deep marks showed on his wrists and ankles, and his trunk and back were covered with terrible scars that were painful to see. My father and I exchanged horrified looks but made no comment. The beggar allowed himself to be washed like a child, frightened and shivering. While I searched for clean clothes, I could hear my father's voice talking to him without pause. I found him a suit that my father no longer wore, an old shirt, and some underwear. From the pile of clothes the beggar had taken off, not even the shoes could be rescued. I chose a pair that my father seldom put on because they were too small for him. Then I wrapped the rags in newspaper, including a pair of trousers that were the colour and consistency of smoked ham, and shoved them in the bin. When I returned to the bathroom, my father was shaving Fermin in the bathtub. Pale and smelling of soap, he looked twenty years younger. From what I could see, the two had already struck up a friendship. It may have been the effects of the bath salts, but Fermin Romero de Torres was on overdrive. 'Believe me, Senor Sempere, if fate hadn't led me into the world of international intrigue, what I would have gone for, what was closest to my heart, was Humanities. As a child I felt the call of poetry and wanted to be a Sophocles or a Virgil, because tragedy and dead languages give me goose pimples. But my father, God rest his soul, was a pigheaded man without much vision. He'd always wanted one of his children to join the Civil Guard, and none of my seven sisters would have qualified for that, despite the facial-hair problem that characterized all the women on my mother's side of the family. On his deathbed my father made me swear that if I didn't succeed in wearing the Civil Guard's three-cornered hat, at least I would become a civil servant and abandon all my literary ambitions. I'm rather old-fashioned, and I believe that a father, however dim-witted, should be obeyed, if you see what I mean. Even so, don't imagine that I set aside all intellectual pursuits during my years of adventure. I've read a great deal, and can recite some of the best fragments of La Divina Commedia from memory.' 'Come on, chief, put these clothes on; your erudition is beyond any doubt,' I said, coming to my father's rescue. When Fermin Romero de Torres came out of the bath, sparkling clean, his eyes beamed with gratitude. My father wrapped him up in a towel, and the beggar laughed from the sheer pleasure of feeling clean fabric brushing his skin. I helped him into his change of clothes, which proved to be about ten sizes too big. My father removed his belt and handed it to me to put around him. 'You look very dashing,' said my father. 'Doesn't he, Daniel?' 'Anyone might mistake you for a film star.' 'Come off it. I'm not what I used to be. I lost my Herculean muscles in prison, and since then . . .' 'Well, I think you look like Charles Boyer, at least in build,' objected my father. 'Which reminds me: I wanted to propose something to you.' 'For you, Senor Sempere, I would kill if I had to. Just say the name, and I'll get rid of the man before he knows what's hit him.' 'It won't come to that. What I wanted to offer you was a job in the bookshop. It consists of looking for rare books for our clients. It's almost like literary archaeology, and it would be just as important for you to know the classics as basic black-market techniques. I can't pay you much at present, but you can eat at our table and, until we find you a good pension, you can stay here with us, in the apartment, if that's all right with you.' The beggar looked at both of us, dumbfounded. 'What do you say?' asked my father. 'Will you join the team?' I thought he was going to say something, but at that moment Fermin Romero de Torres burst into tears. With his first wages, Fermin Romero de Torres bought himself a glamorous hat and a pair of galoshes and insisted on treating me and my father to a dish of bull's tail, which was served on Mondays in a restaurant a couple of blocks away from the Monumental bull ring. My father had found him a room in a pension in Calle Joaquin Costa, where, thanks to the friendship between our neighbour Merceditas and the landlady, we were able to avoid filling in the guest form required by the police, thus removing Fermin Romero de Torres from under the nose of Inspector Fumero and his henchmen. Sometimes I thought about the terrible scars that covered his body and felt tempted to ask him about them, fearing that perhaps Inspector Fumero might have something to do with them. But there was a look in the eyes of that poor man that made me think it was better not to bring up the subject. Perhaps he would tell us one day, when he felt the time was right. Every morning, at seven on the dot, Fermin waited for us by the shop door with a smile on his face, neatly turned out and ready to work an unbroken twelve-hour shift, or even longer. He had discovered a passion for chocolate and Swiss rolls - which did not lessen his enthusiasm for the great names of Greek tragedy - and this meant he had put on a little weight, which was welcome. He shaved like a young swell, combed his hair back with brilliantine, and was growing a pencil moustache to look fashionable. Thirty days after emerging from our bathtub, the ex-beggar was unrecognizable. But despite his spectacular change, where Fermin Romero de Torres had really left us open-mouthed was on the battlefield. His sleuthlike instincts, which I had attributed to delirious fantasies, proved surgically precise. He could solve the strangest requests in a matter of days, even hours. Was there no title he didn't know, no stratagem for obtaining it at a good price that didn't occur to him? He could talk his way into the private libraries of duchesses on Avenida Pearson and horse-riding dilettantes, always adopting fictitious identities, and would depart with the said books as gifts or bought for a pittance. The transformation from beggar into model citizen seemed miraculous, like one of those stories that priests from poor parishes love to tell to illustrate the Lord's infinite mercy - stories that invariably sound too good to be true, like the ads for hair-restorer lotions that were plastered over the trams. Three and a half months after Fermin started work in the bookshop, the telephone in the apartment on Calle Santa Ana woke us up one Sunday at two o'clock in the morning. It was Fermin's landlady. In a voice choked with anxiety, she explained that Senor Romero de Torres had locked himself in his room and was shouting like a madman, banging on the walls and swearing that if anyone dared come in, he would slit his own throat with a broken bottle. 'Don't call the police, please. We'll be right there.' Rushing out, we made our way towards Calle Joaquin Costa. It was a cold night, with an icy wind and tar-black skies. We hurried past the two ancient hospices - Casa de la Misericordia and Casa de Piedad -ignoring the looks and words that came from dark doorways smelling of charcoal. Soon we reached the corner of Calle Ferlandina. Joaquin Costa lay there, a gap in the rows of blackened beehives, blending into the darkness of the Raval quarter. The landlady's eldest son was waiting for us downstairs. 'Have you called the police?' asked my father. 'Not yet,' answered the son. We ran upstairs. The pension was on the second floor, the staircase a spiral of grime scarcely visible in the ochre light shed by naked bulbs that hung limply from a bare wire. Dona Encarna, the ladylady, the widow of a Civil Guard corporal, met us at the door wrapped in a light blue dressing gown, crowned with a matching set of curlers. 'Look here, Senor Sempere, this is a decent house. I have more offers than I can take, and I don't need to put up with this kind of thing,' she said as she guided us through a dark corridor that reeked of ammonia and damp. 'I understand,' mumbled my father. Fermin Romero de Torres's screams could be heard tearing at the walls at the end of the corridor. Several drawn and frightened faces peeped around half-open doors - boarding-house faces fed on watery soup. 'And the rest of you, off to sleep, for fuck's sake! This isn't a variety show at the Molino!' cried Dona Encarna furiously. We stopped in front of the door to Fermin's room. My father rapped gently with his knuckles. 'Fermin? Are you there? It's Sempere.' The howl that pierced the walls chilled me. Even Dona Encarna lost her matronly composure and put her hands on her heart, hidden under the many folds of her ample chest. My father called again. 'Fermin? Come on, open the door.' Fermin howled again, throwing himself against the walls, yelling obscenities at the top of his voice. My father sighed. 'Dona Encarna, do you have a key to this room?' 'Well, of course.' 'Give it to me, please.' Dona Encarna hesitated. The other guests were peering into the corridor again, white with terror. Those shouts must have been heard from the army headquarters. 'And you, Daniel, run and find Dr Baro. He lives very close, in number twelve Riera Alta.' 'Listen, wouldn't it be better to call a priest? He sounds to me as if he's possessed,' suggested Dona Encarna. 'No. A doctor will do fine. Come on, Daniel. Run. And you, please give me that key.' Dr Baro was a sleepless bachelor who spent his nights reading Zola and looking at 3-D pictures of young ladies in racy underwear to relieve his boredom. He was a regular customer at my father's bookshop, and, though he described himself as a second-rate quack, he had a better eye for reaching the right diagnosis than most of the smart doctors with elegant practices in Calle Muntaner. Many of his patients were old whores from the neighbourhood or poor wretches who could barely afford to pay him, but he would see them all the same. I heard him say repeatedly that the world was God's chamber pot and that his sole remaining wish was for Barcelona's football team to win the league, once and for all, so that he could die in peace. He opened the door in his dressing gown, smelling of wine and flaunting an unlit cigarette. 'Daniel?' 'My father sent me. It's an emergency.' When we returned to the pension, we found Dona Encarna sobbing with fear and the other guests turned to the colour of old candle wax. My father was holding Fermin Romero de Torres in his arms in a corner of the room. Fermin was naked, crying and shaking. The room was a wreck, the walls stained with something that could have been either blood or excrement - I couldn't tell. Dr Baro quickly took in the situation and gestured to my father to lay Fermin on the bed. They were helped by Dona Encarna's son, a would-be boxer. Fermin moaned and thrashed about as if some vermin were devouring his insides. 'But for goodness' sake, what's the matter with this poor man? What's wrong with him?' groaned Dona Encarna from the door, shaking her head. The doctor took his pulse, examined his pupils with a torch and, without saying a word, proceeded to prepare an injection from a bottle he carried in his bag. 'Hold him down. This will make him sleep. Daniel, help us.' Between the four of us, we managed to immobilize Fermin, who jerked violently when he felt the stab of the needle in his thigh. His muscles tensed like steel cables, but after a few seconds his eyes clouded over and his body went limp. 'Be careful, that man's not very strong, and anything could kill him,' said Dona Encarna. 'Don't worry. He's only asleep,' said the doctor as he examined the scars that covered Fermin's starved body. I saw him shake his head slowly. 'Bastards,' he mumbled. 'What are these scars from?' I asked. 'Cuts?' Dr Baro shook his head again, without looking up. He found a blanket amid the wreckage and covered his patient with it. 'Burns. This man has been tortured,' he explained. 'These marks are from a soldering iron.' Fermin slept for two days. When he awoke, he could not remember anything; he just thought he'd woken up in a dark cell, that was all. He felt so ashamed of his behaviour that he went down on his knees to beg for Dona Encarna's forgiveness. He swore he would paint the pension for her and, knowing she was very devout, promised she would have ten masses said for her in the Church of Belen. 'What you have to do is get better and not frighten me like that again. I'm too old for that sort of thing.' My father paid for the damages and begged Dona Encarna to give Fermin another chance. She gladly agreed. Most of her guests were dispossessed people who were alone in the world, like her. Once she had got over the fright, she felt an even greater affection for Fermin and made him promise that he would take the tablets Dr Baro had prescribed. 'For you, Dona Encarna, I'd swallow a brick if need be.' In time we all pretended we'd forgotten what had happened, but never again did I take the stories about Inspector Fumero lightly. After that incident we would take Fermin with us almost every Sunday for an afternoon snack at the Novedades Cafe, so as not to leave him on his own. Then we'd walk up to the Femina Cinema, on the corner of Calle Diputacion and Paseo de Gracia. One of the ushers was a friend of my father's, and he would let us sneak in through the fire exit on the ground floor during the newsreel, always when the Generalissimo was in the act of cutting the ribbon to inaugurate some new reservoir, which really got on Fermin's nerves. 'What a disgrace,' he would say indignantly. 'Don't you like the cinema, Fermin?' 'Between you and me, this business of the seventh art leaves me cold. As far as I can see, it's only a way of feeding the mindless and making them even more stupid. Worse than football or bullfights. The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it's much the same.' Fermin's attitude changed radically the day he discovered Carole Lombard. 'What breasts, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what breasts!' he exclaimed in the middle of the film, beside himself. 'Those aren't tits, they're two schooners!' 'Shut up, you degenerate, or I'll call the manager,' muttered a voice straight from the confessional, a few rows behind us. 'People have no shame. What a country of pigs we live in.' 'You'd better lower your voice, Fermin,' I advised him. Fermin Romero de Torres wasn't listening to me. He was lost in the gentle swell of that miraculous bosom, with an enraptured smile and unblinking eyes. Later, walking back along Paseo de Gracia, I noticed that our bibliographic detective was still in a trance. 'I think we're going to have to find you a woman,' I said. 'A woman will brighten up your life, you'll see.' Fermin sighed, his mind still dwelling on charms that seemed to defy the laws of gravity. 'Do you speak from experience, Daniel?' he asked in all innocence. I just smiled, knowing that my father was watching me. After that day Fermin Romero de Torres took to going to the movies every Sunday. My father preferred to stay at home reading, but Fermin would not miss a single double feature. He'd buy a pile of chocolates and sit in row seventeen, where he would devour them while he waited for the appearance of that day's diva. As far as he was concerned, plot was superfluous, and he didn't stop talking until some well-endowed lady filled the screen. 'I've been thinking about what you said the other day, about finding a woman for me,' said Fermin Romero de Torres. 'Perhaps you're right. In the pension there's a new lodger, an ex-seminarist from Seville with plenty of spirit, who brings in some impressive young ladies every now and then. I must say, the race has improved no end. I don't know how the lad manages it, because he's not much to look at; perhaps he renders them senseless with prayers. He's got the room next to mine, so I can hear everything, and, judging by the sound effects, the friar must be a real artist. lust shows what a uniform can do. Tell me, what sort of women do you like, Daniel?' 'I don't know much about them, honestly.' 'Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't have to know how it works to get a shock. Come on, out with it. How do you like them? People might not agree with me, but I think a woman should have a feminine shape, something you can get your hands on. You, on the other hand, look like you might be partial to the skinny type, a point of view I fully respect, don't misunderstand me.' 'Frankly, I don't have much experience with women. None, to be precise.' Fermin Romero de Torres looked at me carefully, intrigued by this revelation. 'I thought that what happened that night, you know, when you were beaten up...' 'If only everything hurt as little as a blow to the face . . .' Fermin seemed to read my mind, and smiled supportively. 'Don't let that upset you, then. With women the best part is the discovery. There's nothing like the first time, nothing. You don't know what life is until you undress a woman the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot, sweet potato on a winter's night.' A few seconds later, Veronica Lake made her grand entrance onto the scene, and Fermin was transported to another plane. Taking advantage of a reel in which Miss Lake was absent, Fermin announced that he was going to pay a visit to the sweet stall in the foyer to replenish his stocks. After months of starvation, my friend had lost all sense of proportion, but, due to his metabolism, he never quite lost that hungry, squalid postwar look. I was left alone, barely following the action on the screen. I would lie if I said I was thinking of Clara. I was thinking only of her body, trembling under the music teacher's charges, glistening with sweat and pleasure. My gaze left the screen, and only then did I notice a spectator who had just come in. I saw his silhouette moving to the centre of the stalls, six rows in front of me. He sat down. Cinemas are full of lonely people, I thought. Like me. I tried to concentrate on picking up the thread of the story. The hero, a cynical but good-hearted detective, was telling a secondary character why women like Veronica Lake were the ruin of all sensible males and why all one could do was love them desperately and perish, betrayed by their double dealings. Fermin Romero de Torres, who was becoming an adept film scholar, called this genre 'the praying mantis paradigm'. According to him, its permutations were nothing but misogynist fantasies for constipated office clerks or pious women shrivelled with boredom who dreamed about turning to a life of vice and unbridled lechery. I smiled as I imagined the asides my friend the critic would have made had he not gone to his meeting with the sweet stall. But the smile froze on my face. The spectator who sat six rows in front of me had turned around and was staring at me. The projector's misty beam bored through the darkness of the hall, a slim cloud of flickering light that revealed only outlines and blots of colour. I recognized Coubert, the faceless man, immediately. His steely look, shining eyes with no eyelids; his smile as he licked his non-existent lips in the dark. I felt cold fingers gripping my heart. Two hundred violins broke out on screen, there were shots, shouts, and the scene dissolved. For a moment the hall plunged into utter darkness, and I could hear only my own heartbeat hammering in my temples. Slowly a new scene glowed on the screen, replacing the darkness of the room with a haze of blue and purple. The man without a face had disappeared. I turned and caught a glimpse of a silhouette walking up the aisle and passing Fermin, who was returning from his gastronomic safari. He moved into the row, took his seat, and handed me a praline chocolate. 'Daniel, you're as white as a nun's buttock. Are you all right?' he asked, giving me a worried look. A mysterious breath of air wafted through the hall. 'It smells odd,' Fermin remarked. 'Like a rancid fart, from a councilman or a lawyer.' 'No. It smells of burned paper.' 'Go on. Have a lemon Sugus sweet - it cures everything.' 'I don't feel like one.' 'Keep it, then, you never know when a Sugus sweet might get you out of a pickle.' I put the sweet in my jacket pocket and drifted through the rest of the film without paying any attention to Veronica Lake or to the victims of her fatal charms. Fermin Romero de Torres was engrossed in the show and the chocolates. When the lights went on at the end of the film, I felt as if I were waking from a bad dream and was tempted to imagine that the man in the stalls had been a mere illusion, a trick of memory. But his brief glance in the dark had been enough to convey his message. He had not forgotten me, or our pact. 12 The first effect of Fermin's arrival soon became apparent: I discovered I had much more free time. When Fermin was not out hunting some exotic volume to satisfy a customer's request, he spent his time organizing stocks in the bookshop, dreaming up marketing strategies, polishing the shop sign and windows till they sparkled, or buffing up the spines of the books with a rag and a bit of alcohol. Given this windfall, I decided to devote my leisure time to a couple of pursuits I had lately put aside: attempting to unravel the Carax mystery and, above all, spending more time with my friend Tomas Aguilar, whom I greatly missed. Tomas was a thoughtful, reserved boy whom other children feared because his vaguely thuggish features gave him a grave and threatening look. He had a wrestler's build, gladiator's shoulders, and a steely, penetrating gaze. We had met many years before in the course of a fistfight, during my first week at the Jesuit school in Calle Caspe. His father had come to pick him up after lessons, accompanied by a conceited girl who turned out to be Tomas's sister. I had the brilliant idea of making some tasteless remark about her, and before I could blink, Tomas had thrown himself on me and showered me with a deluge of blows that left me smarting for a few weeks. Tomas was twice my size, strength, and ferocity. During our schoolyard duel, surrounded by boys who were thirsty for a bloody fight, I lost a tooth but gained an improved sense of proportion. I refused to tell my father or the priests who had inflicted such a thundering beating on me. Neither did I volunteer the fact that the father of my adversary had watched the thumping with an expression of sheer pleasure, joining in the chorus with the other schoolchildren. 'It was my fault,' I said, closing the subject. Three weeks later Tomas came up to me during the break. I was paralysed with fear. He is coming to finish me off, I thought. I began to stammer, but soon I understood that all he wanted to do was apologize for the thrashing, because he knew the fight had been uneven and unfair. 'I'm the one who should say sorry for picking on your sister,' I said. 'I would have done it the other day, but you'd given me such a hammering, I couldn't speak.' Tomas looked down, ashamed of himself. I gazed at that shy and quiet giant who wandered around the classrooms and school corridors like a lost soul. All the other children - me included - were scared stiff of him, and nobody spoke to him or dared look him in the eye. With his head down, almost shaking, he asked me whether I'd like to be his friend. I said I would. He held out his hand, and I shook it. His handshake hurt, but I didn't flinch. That afternoon he invited me to his house for an after-school snack and showed me his collection of strange gadgets made from bits of scrap metal, which he kept in his room. 'I made them,' he explained proudly. I was incapable of understanding how they worked or even what they were supposed to be, but I didn't say a word. I just nodded in admiration. It seemed to me that this oversized, solitary boy had constructed his own tin companions and I was the first person he was introducing them to. It was his secret. I shared mine. I told him about my mother and how much I missed her. When my voice broke, Tomas hugged me, without saying anything. We were ten years old. From that day on, Tomas Aguilar became my best - and I his only - friend. Despite his aggressive looks, Tomas was a peaceful and good-hearted person whose appearance discouraged confrontations. He stammered quite a bit, especially when he spoke to anyone who wasn't his mother, his sister, or me, which was hardly ever. He was fascinated by outlandish inventions and mechanical devices, and I soon discovered that he carried out autopsies on all manner of instruments, from gramophones to adding machines, in order to discover their secrets. When he wasn't with me or working for his father, Tomas spent most of his time secluded in his room, devising incomprehensible contraptions. His intelligence was matched by his lack of practicality. His interest in the real world centred on details such as the synchronization of traffic lights in Gran Via, the mysteries of the illuminated fountains of Montjuic, or the clockwork souls of the automatons at the Tibibdabo amusement park. Every afternoon Tomas worked in his father's office, and sometimes, on his way out, he'd stop by the bookshop. My father always showed an interest in his inventions and gave him manuals on mechanics or biographies of engineers like Eiffel and Edison, whom Tomas idolized. As the years went by, Tomas became very attached to my father and spent ages trying to invent an automatic system with which to file his bibliographic index cards, using parts of an old electric fan. He had been working on the project for four years now, but my father still showed great enthusiasm for its progress, because he didn't want Tomas to lose heart. When I first introduced Tomas to Fermin, I was concerned about how Fermin would react to my friend. 'You must be Daniel's inventor friend. It's a great pleasure to make your acquaintance. Fermin Romero de Torres, bibliographic adviser to the Sempere bookshop, at your service.' 'Tomas Aguilar,' stammered my friend, smiling and shaking Fermin's hand. 'Watch out, my friend, for what you have there isn't a hand, it's a hydraulic press. I need violinist's fingers for my work with the firm.' Tomas let go of his hand and apologized. 'So tell me, where do you stand on Fermat's theorem?' asked Fermin, rubbing his fingers. After that they became engrossed in an unintelligible discussion about arcane mathematics, which was all Greek to me. From that day on, Fermin always addressed him with the formal usted or called him 'doctor', and pretended not to notice the boy's stammer. As a way of repaying Fermin for his infinite patience, Tomas brought him boxes of Swiss chocolates stamped with photographs of impossibly blue lakes, cows parading along Technicolor-green fields and camera-ready cuckoo clocks. 'Your friend Tomas is talented, but he lacks drive and could benefit from a more winning demeanour. It's the only way to get anywhere,' Fermin said to me one day. 'Alas, that's the scientist's mind for you. Just consider Albert Einstein. All those prodigious inventions, and the first one they find a practical application for is the atom bomb - and without his permission. Tomas is going to have a hard time in academic circles with that boxer's face of his. In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.' Driven by a wish to save Tomas from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. 'Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our "ethical behaviour",' he argued. 'It's pure biology.' 'Aren't you exaggerating?' 'Sometimes you're so naive, Daniel.' Tomas had inherited his tough looks from his father, a prosperous property manager with an office in Calle Pelayo, close to the sumptuous El Siglo department store. Senor Aguilar belonged to that race of privileged minds, who are always right. A man of deep convictions, he believed, among other things, that his son was both fainthearted and mentally deficient. To compensate for these shameful traits, he employed all sorts of private tutors in the hope of improving his firstborn. 'I want you to treat my son as if he were an imbecile, do you understand?' I would often hear him say. Teachers tried everything, even pleading, but Tomas addressed them only in Latin, a language he spoke with papal fluency and in which he did not stammer. Sooner or later they all resigned in despair, fearing he might be possessed: he might be spouting demonic instructions in Aramaic at them, for all they knew. Senor Aguilar's only hope was that military service would make a man of his son. Tomas had a sister, Beatriz. I owed our friendship to her, because if I hadn't seen her that afternoon, long ago, holding onto her father's hand, waiting for the classes to end, and hadn't decided to make a joke in very bad taste at her expense, my friend would never have rained all those blows on me and I would never have had the courage to speak to him. Bea Aguilar was the very image of her mother and the apple of her father's eye. Redheaded and exquisitely pale, she always wore very expensive dresses made of silk or pure wool. She had a mannequin's waist and wandered around straight as a rod, playing the role of princess in her own fairy tale. Her eyes were a greeny blue, but she insisted on describing them as 'emerald and sapphire'. Despite her many years as a pupil at the strict Catholic school of the Teresian mothers, or perhaps for that very reason, when her father wasn't looking, Bea drank anise liqueur from a tall glass, wore silk stockings from the elegant shop La Perla Gris, and dolled herself up like the screen goddesses who sent my friend Fermin into a trance. I couldn't stand the sight of her, and she repaid my open hostility with languid looks of disdain and indifference. Bea had a boyfriend who was doing his military service as a lieutenant in Murcia, a slick-haired member of the Falangist Party called Pablo Cascos Buendia. He belonged to an aristocratic family who owned a number of shipyards on the Galician rias and spent half his time on leave thanks to an uncle in the Military Government. Second Lieutenant Cascos Buendia wasted no opportunity to lecture people on the genetic and spiritual superiority of Spanish people and the imminent decline of the Bolshevik empire. 'Marx is dead,' he would say solemnly. 'He died in 1883, to be precise,' I would answer. 'Zip it, bonehead, or I'll kick you all the way to the Rock of Gibraltar.' More than once I had caught Bea smiling to herself at the inanities that her boyfriend came out with. She would raise her eyes and watch me, with a look I couldn't fathom. I would smile back with the feeble civility of enemies held together by an indefinite truce but would look away quickly. I would have died before admitting it, but in my heart of hearts, I was afraid of her. 13 At the beginning of that year, Tomas and Fermin decided to pool their respective brains on a new project that, they predicted, would get us both out of being drafted. Fermin, in particular, did not share Mr Aguilar's enthusiasm for the army experience. 'The only useful thing about military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population,' he would remark. 'And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there's no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church, and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.' Fermin Romero de Torres's anarchist-libertarian leanings were to be shaken one October afternoon when, in a twist of fate, we had a visit from an old friend. My father had gone to Argentona, to price a book collection, and would not be back until the evening. I was left in charge of the counter while Fermin insisted on climbing up a ladder like a tightrope walker to tidy up the books on the top shelf, just inches from the ceiling. Shortly before closing time, when the sun had already set, Bernarda's profile appeared at the shop window. She was dressed in her Thursday clothes - Thursday was her day off - and she waved at me. My heart soared just to see her, and I signalled to her to come in. 'My goodness, how you've grown!' she said from the entrance. 'I would hardly have recognized you . . . why, you're a man now!' She embraced me, shedding a few tears and touching my head, shoulders, and face, as if to make sure I hadn't broken anything during her absence. 'You're really missed in the house, Master Daniel,' she said, with downcast eyes. 'I've missed you, too, Bernarda. Come on, give me a kiss.' She kissed me shyly, and I planted a couple of noisy kisses on each cheek. She laughed. In her eyes I could see she was waiting for me to ask her about Clara, but I had decided not to. 'You're looking very pretty today, and very elegant. How come you've decided to pay us a visit?' 'The truth is, I've been wanting to come for a long time, but you know how things are, we're all busy, and, for all his learning, Senor Barcelo is as demanding as a child. You just have to rise above it and get on with things. But what brings me here today is that, well, tomorrow is my niece's birthday, the one from San Adrian, and I'd like to give her a present. I thought I could get her a good book, with a lot of writing and few pictures, but as I'm such a dimwit and don't understand—' Before I could answer, a whole hardback set of the complete works of Blasco Ibanez plummeted from on high, and the place shook with a ballistic roar. Bernarda and I looked up anxiously. Fermin was sliding down the ladder, like a trapeze artist, a secretive smile lighting up his face, his eyes filled with rapturous lust. 'Bernarda, this is—' 'Fermin Romero de Torres, bibliographic adviser to Sempere and Son, at your service, madam,' Fermin proclaimed, taking Bernarda's hand and kissing it ceremoniously. 'You must be confused, I'm no madam—' 'Marquise, at the very least,' interrupted Fermin. 'I should know. I have stepped out with the finest ladies on Avenida Pearson. Allow me the honour of accompanying you to our classics section for children and young adults, where I notice that by good fortune we have an anthology of the best of Emilio Salgari and his epic tale of Sandokan.' 'Oh dear, I don't know, I'm not sure about the lives of the saints. The girl's father used to be very left wing, you know. 'Say no more, for here I have none other than Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island, a tale of high adventure and great educational content, because of all the science.' 'If you think so. . . .' I followed them quietly, noticing how Fermin was drooling over Bernarda and how she seemed overwhelmed by the attentions showered upon her by the little man with scruffy looks and the tongue of a stallholder. He was devouring her with his eyes as greedily as if she were a piece of chocolate. 'What about you, Master Daniel? What do you think?' 'Fermin Romero de Torres is the resident expert here. You can trust him.' 'Well, then, I'll take the one about the island, if you'd be kind enough to wrap it for me. What do I owe you?' 'It's on the house,' I said. 'No it isn't, I won't hear of it.' 'If you'll allow me, madam, it's on me, Fermin Romero de Torres. You'd make me the happiest man in Barcelona.' Bernarda looked at us both. She was speechless. 'Listen, I'm paying for what I buy, and this is a present I want to give my niece—' 'Well, then, perhaps you'll allow me, in exchange, to invite you to afternoon tea,' Fermin quickly interjected, smoothing down his hair. 'Go on, Bernarda,' I encouraged her. 'You'll enjoy yourself. Look, while I wrap this up, Fermin can go and get his jacket.' Fermin hurried off to the back room to comb his hair, splash on some cologne and put on his jacket. I slipped him a few duros from the till. 'Where shall I take her?' he whispered to me, as nervous as a child. 'I'd take her to Els Quatre Gats,' I said. 'I know for a fact that it's a lucky place for romance.' I handed Bernarda the packet and winked at her. 'What do I owe you then, Master Daniel?' 'I'm not sure. I'll let you know. The book didn't have a price on it, and I have to ask my father,' I lied. I watched them leave arm in arm and disappear down Calle Santa Ana, hoping there was somebody on duty up in heaven who, for once, would grant the couple a lucky break. I hung the closed notice in the shop window. I had just gone into the back room for a moment to look through my father's order book when I heard the tinkle of the doorbell. I thought Fermin must have forgotten something, or perhaps my father was back from his day trip. 'Hello?' A few seconds passed, and no answer came. I continued to leaf through the order book. I heard slow footsteps in the shop. 'Fermin? Father?' No answer. I thought I heard a stifled laugh, and I shut the order book. Perhaps some client had ignored the closed sign. I was about to go and serve whoever it was when I heard the sound of several books falling from the shelves. I swallowed. Grabbing hold of a letter opener, I slowly moved towards the door of the back room. I didn't dare call out a second time. Soon I heard the steps again, walking away. The doorbell sounded, and I felt a draft of air from the street. I peered into the shop. There was no one there. I ran to the front door and double-locked it, then took a deep breath, feeling ridiculous and cowardly. I was returning to the back room when I noticed a piece of paper on the counter. As I got closer, I realized it was a photograph, an old studio picture of the sort that were printed on thick cardboard. The edges were burned, and the smoky image seemed to have charcoal finger marks over it. I examined it under the lamp. The photograph showed a young couple smiling at the camera. The man didn't look much older than seventeen or eighteen, with light-coloured hair and delicate, aristocratic features. The woman may have been a bit younger, one or two years at the most. She had pale skin and a finely chiselled face framed by short black hair. She looked drunk with happiness. The man had his arm round her waist, and she seemed to be whispering something to him in a teasing way. The image conveyed a warmth that drew a smile from me, as if I had recognized two old friends in those strangers. Behind them I could make out an ornate shop window, full of old-fashioned hats. I concentrated on the couple. From their clothes I could guess that the picture was at least twenty-five or thirty years old. It was an image full of light and hope, rich with the promise that only exists in the eyes of the young. Fire had destroyed almost all of the area surrounding the photograph, but you could still discern a stern face behind the old-style counter, a suggestion of a ghostly figure behind the letters engraved on the glass. Sons of ANTONIO FORTUNY Established in 1888 82 The night I returned to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Isaac had told me that Carax used his mother's surname, not his father's, which was Fortuny. Carax's father had a hat shop in Ronda de San Antonio. I looked again at the portrait of that couple and knew for sure that the young man was Julian Carax, smiling at me from the past, unable to see the flames that were closing in on him. CITY OF SHADOWS 1954 14 The following morning Fermin came to work borne on the wings of Cupid, smiling and whistling boleros. In any other circumstances, I would have inquired about his outing with Bernarda, but that day I was not in the mood for his poetic outbursts. My father had arranged to have an order of books delivered to Professor Javier Velazquez at eleven o'clock in his study at the university. The very mention of the professor made Fermin wince, so I offered to take the books myself. 'That sorry specimen is nothing but a corrupt pedant. A fascist buttock-polisher,' Fermin declared, raising his fist and striking the pose he reserved for his avenging moods. 'He uses the pitiful excuse of his professorship to seduce women. I swear he would even have it off with Gertrude Stein, given the chance.' 'Calm down, Fermin. Velazquez pays well, always in advance, and besides, he recommends us to everyone,' my father said. 'That's money stained with the blood of innocent virgins,' Fermin protested. 'For the life of God, I hereby swear that I have never lain with an underage woman, and not for lack of inclination or opportunities. Bear in mind that what you see today is but a shadow of my former self, but there was a time when I cut as dashing a figure as they come. Yet even then, just to be on the safe side, or if I sensed that a girl might be overly flighty, I would not proceed without seeing some form of identification or, failing that, a written paternal authorization. One has to maintain certain moral standards.' My father rolled his eyes. 'It's pointless arguing with you, Fermin.' 'Well, if I'm right, I'm right.' Sensing a debate brewing, I picked up the parcel, which I had prepared the night before - a couple of Rilkes and an apocryphal essay attributed to a disciple of Darwin claiming that Spaniards came from a more evolved simian ancestor than their French neighbours. As the door closed behind me, Fermin and my father were deep in argument about ethics. It was a magnificent day; the skies were electric blue and a crystal breeze carried the cool scent of autumn and the sea. I will always prefer Barcelona in October. It is when the spirit of the city seems to stroll most proudly through the streets, and you feel all the wiser after drinking water from the old fountain of Canaletas - which, for once, does not taste of chlorine. I was walking along briskly, dodging bootblacks, pen pushers returning from their midmorning coffee, lottery vendors, and a whole ballet of street sweepers who seemed intent on polishing the streets, using their brooms like paintbrushes, unhurriedly and with a pointillist's strokes. Barcelona was already beginning to fill up with cars in those days, and when I reached the traffic lights at the crossing with Calle Balmes, I noticed a brigade of grey office clerks in grey raincoats staring hungrily at a blood red Studebaker sedan as they would ogle a music-hall siren in a negligee. I went on up Balmes toward Gran Via, negotiating traffic lights, cars, and even motorcycles with sidecars. In a shop window, I saw a Philips poster announcing the arrival of a new messiah, the TV set. Some predicted that this peculiar contraption was going to change our lives forever and turn us all into creatures of the future, like the Americans. Fermin Romero de Torres, always up to date on state-of-the-art technology, had already prophesied a grimmer outcome. 'Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own. Humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say - it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.' Professor Velazquez's office was on the second floor of the Literature Faculty, in Plaza Universidad, at the end of a gallery paved with hypnotic chessboard tiling and awash in powdery light that spilled down onto the southern cloister. I found the professor at the door of a lecture room, pretending to be listening to a female student while considering her spectacular figure. She wore a dark red suit that drew attention to her waistline and revealed classically proportioned calves covered in fine silk stockings. Professor Velazquez enjoyed a reputation as a Don Juan; there were those who considered that the sentimental education of a respectable young lady was never complete without a proverbial weekend in some small hotel on the Sitges promenade, reciting Alexandrines tete-a-tete with the distinguished academic. My commercial instincts advised me against interrupting his conversation, so I decided to kill time by undressing the pupil in my mind. Perhaps the brisk walk had raised my spirits, or perhaps it was just my age, not to mention the fact that I spent more time among muses that were trapped in the pages of old books than in the company of girls of flesh and bone - who always seemed to me beings of a far lower order than Clara Barcelo. Whatever the reason, as I catalogued each and every detail of her enticing and exquisitely clad anatomy -which I could see only from the back, but which in my mind I had already visualized in its full glory - I felt a vaguely wolfish shiver run down my spine. 'Why, here's Daniel,' cried Professor Velazquez. 'Thank goodness it's you, not that madman who came last time, the one with the name like a bullfighter. He seemed drunk to me, or certifiable. He had the nerve to ask me whether I knew the etymology of the word "prick", in a sarcastic tone that was quite out of place.' 'It's just that the doctor has put him on some strong medication. Something to do with his liver.' 'No doubt because he's smashed all day,' said Velazquez. 'If I were you, I'd call the police. I bet you he has a file. And God, how his feet stank - there are lots of shitty leftists on the loose who haven't seen a bathtub since the Republic fell.' I was about to come up with some other plausible excuse for Fermin when the student who had been talking to Professor Velazquez turned around, and it was as if the world had stopped spinning. I saw her smile at me, and my ears went up in flames. 'Hello, Daniel,' said Beatriz Aguilar. I nodded at her, tongue-tied. I realized I'd been drooling over my best friend's sister, Bea. The one woman I was completely terrified of. 'Oh, so you know each other?' asked Velazquez, intrigued. 'Daniel is an old friend of the family,' Bea explained. 'And the only one who ever had the courage to tell me to my face that I'm stuck up and vain.' Velazquez looked at me with astonishment. 'That was years ago,' I explained. 'And I didn't mean it.' 'Well, I'm still waiting for an apology.' Velazquez laughed heartily and took the parcel from my hands. 'I think I'm in the way here,' he said, opening it. 'Ah, wonderful. Listen, Daniel, tell your father I'm looking for a book called Moorslayer: Early Reminiscences of the Generalissimo in the Moroccan War by Francisco Franco Bahamonde, with a prologue and notes by Peman.' 'Consider it done. We'll let you know in a couple of weeks.' 'I'll take your word for it, and now I'll be off. Thirty-two blank minds await me.' Professor Velazquez winked at me and disappeared into the lecture room. I didn't know where to look. 'Listen, Bea, about that insult, I promise I—' 'I was only teasing you, Daniel. I know that was childish nonsense, and besides, Tomas gave you a good enough beating.' 'It still hurts.' Bea's smile looked like a peace offering, or at least an offer of a truce. 'Besides, you were right, I'm a bit stuck up and sometimes a little vain,' she said. 'You don't like me much, do you, Daniel?' The question took me completely by surprise. Disarmed, I realized how easily you can lose all animosity towards someone you've deemed your enemy as soon as that person stops behaving as such. 'No, that's not true.' 'Tomas says it's not that you don't like me, it's that you can't stand my father and you make me pay for it, because you don't dare face up to him. I don't blame you. No one dares cross my father.' I felt the blood drain from my cheeks, but after a few seconds I found myself smiling and nodding. 'Anyone would say Tomas knows me better than I know myself.' 'I wouldn't put it past him. My brother knows us all inside out, only he never says anything. But if he ever decides to open his mouth, the whole world will collapse. He's very fond of you, you know.' I raised my shoulders and looked down. 'He's always talking about you, and about your father and the bookshop, and this friend you have working with you. Tomas says he's a genius waiting to be discovered. Sometimes it's as if he considers you his real family, instead of the one he has at home.' My eyes met hers: hard, frank, fearless. I did not know what to say, so I just smiled. I felt she was ensnaring me with her honesty, and I looked down at the courtyard. 'I didn't know you studied here.' 'It's my first year.' 'Literature?' 'My father thinks science is not for the weaker sex.' 'Of course. Too many numbers.' 'I don't care, because what I like is reading. Besides, you meet interesting people here.' 'Like Professor Velazquez?' Bea gave me a wry smile. ‘I might be in my first year, but I know enough to see them coming, Daniel. Especially men of his sort.' I wondered what sort I was. 'Besides, Professor Velazquez is a good friend of my father's. They both belong to the Society for the Protection and Promotion of Spanish Operetta.' I tried to look impressed. 'A noble calling. And how's your boyfriend, Lieutenant Cascos Buendia?' Her smile left her. 'Pablo will be here on leave in three weeks.' 'You must be happy.' 'Very. He's a great guy, though I can imagine what you must think of him.' I doubt it, I thought. Bea watched me, looking slightly tense. I was about to change the subject, but my tongue got ahead of me. Tomas says you're getting married and you're going off to live in El Ferrol.' She nodded without blinking. 'As soon as Pablo finishes his military service.' 'You must be feeling impatient,' I said, sensing a spiteful note in my voice, an insolent tone that came from God knows where. 'I don't mind, really. His family has property out there, a couple of shipyards, and Pablo is going to be in charge of one of them. He has a great talent for leadership.' 'It shows.' Bea forced a smile. 'Besides, I've seen quite enough of Barcelona, after all these years. . ..' Her eyes looked tired and sad. 'I hear El Ferrol is a fascinating place. Full of life. And the seafood is supposed to be fabulous, especially the spider crabs.' Bea sighed, shaking her head. She looked as if she wanted to cry with anger but was too proud. Instead she laughed calmly. 'After ten years you still enjoy insulting me, don't you, Daniel? Go on, then, don't hold back. It's my fault for thinking that perhaps we could be friends, or pretend to be, but I suppose I'm not as good as my brother. I'm sorry I've wasted your time.' She turned around and started walking down the corridor that led to the library. I saw her move away along the black and white tiles, her shadow cutting through the curtains of light that fell from the gallery windows. 'Bea, wait.' I cursed myself and ran after her. I stopped her halfway down the corridor, grabbing her by the arm. She threw me a burning look. 'I'm sorry. But you're wrong: it's not your fault, it's mine. I'm the one who isn't as good as your brother. And if I've insulted you, it's because I'm jealous of that idiot boyfriend of yours and because I'm angry to think that someone like you would follow him to El Ferrol. It might as well be the Congo.' 'Daniel 'You're wrong about me, because we can be friends if you let me try, now that you know how worthless I am. And you're wrong about Barcelona, too, because you may think you've seen everything, but I can guarantee that's not true. If you'll allow me, I can prove it to you.' I saw a smile light up and a slow, silent tear fall down her cheek. 'You'd better be right,' she said. 'Because if you're not, I'll tell my brother, and he'll pull your head off like a stopper.' I held out my hand to her. 'That sounds fair. Friends?' She offered me hers.. 'What time do your classes finish on Friday?' I asked. She hesitated for a moment. 'At five.' 'I'll be waiting for you in the cloister at five o'clock sharp. And before dark I'll prove to you that there's something in Barcelona you haven't seen yet, and that you can't go off to El Ferrol with that idiot. I don't believe you love him. If you go, the memory of this city will pursue you and you'll die of sadness.' 'You seem very sure of yourself, Daniel.' I, who was never even sure what the time was, nodded with the conviction of the ignorant. I stood there watching her walk away down that endless corridor until her silhouette blended with the darkness. I asked myself what on earth I had done. The Fortuny hat shop, or what was left of it, languished at the foot of a narrow, miserable-looking building blackened by soot in Ronda de San Antonio next to Plaza de Goya. You could still read the letters engraved on the filthy window, and a sign in the shape of a bowler hat still hung above the shop front, promising designs made to measure and the latest novelties from Paris. The door was secured with a padlock that had seen at least a decade of undisturbed service. I pressed my forehead against the glass, trying to peek into the murky interior. 'If you've come about the rental, you're late,' spat a voice behind my back. 'The manager has already left.' The woman who was speaking to me must have been about sixty and wore the national costume of all pious widows. A couple of rollers stuck out under the pink scarf that covered her hair, and her padded slippers matched her flesh-coloured knee-high stockings. I assumed she was the caretaker of the building. 'Is the shop for rent?' Isn't that why you've come?' 'Not really, but you never know, I might be interested.' The caretaker frowned, debating whether to grant me the benefit of the doubt. I slipped on my trademark angelic smile. 'How long has the shop been closed?' 'For a good twelve years, since the old man died.' 'Senor Fortuny? Did you know him?' 'I've been here for forty-eight years, young man.' 'So perhaps you also knew Senor Fortuny's son.' 'Julian? Well, of course.' I took the burned photograph out of my pocket and showed it to her. 'Do you think you'd be able to tell me whether the young man in the photograph is Julian Carax?' The caretaker looked at me rather suspiciously. She took the photograph and stared at it. 'Do you recognize him?' 'Carax was his mother's maiden name,' the caretaker explained in a disapproving tone. 'This is Julian, yes. I remember him being very fair, but here, in the photograph, his hair looks darker.' 'Could you tell me who the girl is?' 'And who is asking?' 'I'm sorry, my name is Daniel Sempere. I'm trying to find out about Senor Carax, about Julian.' 'Julian went to Paris, 'round about 1918 or 1919. His father wanted to shove him in the army, you see. I think the mother took him with her so that he could escape from all that, poor kid. Senor Fortuny was left alone, in the attic apartment.' 'Do you know when Julian returned to Barcelona?' The caretaker looked at me but didn't speak for a while. 'Don't you know? Julian died that same year in Paris.' 'Excuse me?' 'I said Julian passed away. In Paris. Soon after he got there. He would have done better joining the army.' 'May I ask you how you know that?' 'How do you think? Because his father told me.' I nodded slowly. 'I see. Did he say what he died of?' 'Quite frankly, the old man never gave me any details. Once, not long after Julian left, a letter arrived for him, and when I mentioned it to his father, he told me his son had died and if anything else came for him, I should throw it away. Why are you looking at me like that?' 'Senor Fortuny lied to you. Julian didn't die in 1919.' 'Say that again?' 'Julian lived in Paris until at least 1935, and then he returned to Barcelona.' The caretaker's face lit up. 'So Julian is here, in Barcelona? Where?' I nodded again, hoping she would be encouraged to tell me more. 'Holy Mary . . . what wonderful news. Well, if he's still alive, that is. He was such a sweet child, a bit strange and given to daydreaming, that's true, but there was something about him that won you over. He wouldn't have been much good as a soldier, you could tell that a mile off. My Isabelita really liked him. Imagine, for a while I even thought they'd end up getting married. Kid stuff. . . . May I see that photograph again?' I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth. 'It's strange, you know, it's as if he were here right now . . . and that mean old bastard saying he was dead. I must say, I wonder why God sends some people into this world. And what happened to Julian in Paris? I'm sure he got rich. I always thought Julian would be wealthy one day.' 'Not exactly. He became a writer.' 'He wrote stories?' 'Something like that.' 'For the radio? Oh, how lovely. Well, it doesn't surprise me, you know. As a child he used to tell stories to the local kids. In the summer sometimes my Isabelita and her cousins would go up to the roof terrace at night and listen to him. They said he never told the same story twice. But it's true that they were all about dead people and ghosts. As I say, he was a bit of an odd child. Although, with a father like that, the odd thing was that he wasn't completely nuts. I'm not surprised that his wife left him in the end, because he was a nasty piece of work. Listen: I never meddle in people's affairs, everything's fine by me, but that man wasn't a good person. In a block of apartments nothing's secret in the end. He beat her, you know? You always heard screams coming from their apartment, and more than once the police had to come round. I can understand that sometimes a husband has to beat his wife to get her to respect him, I'm not saying they shouldn't; there's a lot of tarts about, and young girls are not brought up the way they used to be. But this one, well, he liked to beat her for the hell of it, if you see what I mean. The only friend that poor woman had was a young girl, Vicenteta, who lived in 4-2. Sometimes the poor woman would take shelter in Vicenteta's apartment, to get away from her husband's beatings. And she told her things....' 'What sort of things?' The caretaker took on a confidential manner, raising an eyebrow and glancing sideways right and left. 'Like the boy wasn't the hatter's.' 'Julian? Do you mean to say Julian wasn't Fortuny's son?' 'That's what the Frenchwoman told Vicenteta, I don't know whether it was out of spite or heaven knows why. The girl told me years later, when they didn't live here anymore.' 'So who was Julian's real father?' 'The Frenchwoman never said. Perhaps she didn't even know. You know what foreigners are like.' 'And do you think that's why her husband beat her?' 'Goodness knows. Three times they had to take her to hospital. Three times. And the swine had the nerve to tell everyone that she was the one to blame, that she was a drunk and was always falling about the house from drinking so much. But I don't believe that. He quarrelled with all the neighbours. Once he even went to the police to report my late husband, God rest his soul, for stealing from his shop. As far as he was concerned, anyone from the south was a layabout and a thief, the Pig-' 'Did you say you recognized the girl who is next to Julian in the photograph?' The caretaker concentrated on the image once again. 'Never seen her before. Very pretty.' 'From the picture it looks like they were a couple,' I suggested, trying to jog her memory. She handed it back to me, shaking her head. 'I don't know anything about photographs. As far as I know, Julian never had a girlfriend, but I imagine that if he did, he wouldn't have told me. It was hard enough finding out that my Isabelita had got involved with that fellow. . . . You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.' 'Do you remember his friends, anyone special who came round here?' The caretaker shrugged her shoulders. 'Well, it was such a long time ago. Besides, in the last years Julian was hardly ever here, you see. He'd made a friend at school, a boy from a very good family, the Aldayas -now, that's saying something. Nobody talks about them now, but in those days it was like mentioning the royal family. Lots of money. I know because sometimes they would send a car to fetch Julian. You should have seen that car. Not even Franco would have one like it. With a chauffeur, and all shiny. My Paco, who knew about cars, told me it was a rolsroi, or something like that. Fit for an emperor.' 'Do you remember the friend's first name?' 'Listen, with a surname like Aldaya, there's no need for first names. I also remember another boy, a bit of a scatterbrain, called Miquel. I think he was also a classmate. But don't ask me for his surname or what he looked like.' We seemed to have reached a dead end, and I feared that the caretaker would start losing interest. I decided to follow a hunch. 'Is anyone living in the Fortuny apartment now?' 'No. The old man died without leaving a will, and his wife, as far as I know, is still in Buenos Aires and didn't even come back for the funeral. Can't blame her.' 'Why Buenos Aires?' 'Because she couldn't find anywhere further away, I guess. She left everything in the hands of a lawyer, a very strange man. I've never seen him, but my daughter Isabelita, who lives on the fifth floor, right underneath, says that sometimes, since he has the key, he comes at night and spends hours walking around the apartment and then leaves. Once she said that she could even hear what sounded like women's high heels. What can I say. . . ?' 'Maybe they were stilts,' I suggested. She looked at me blankly. Obviously this was a serious subject for the caretaker. 'And nobody else has visited the apartment in all these years?' 'Once this very creepy individual came along, one of those people who never stop smiling, a giggler, but you could see him coming a mile off. He said he was in the Crime Squad. He wanted to see the apartment.' 'Did he say why?' The caretaker shook her head. 'Do you remember his name?' 'Inspector something or other. I didn't even believe he was a policeman. The whole thing stank, do you know what I mean? It smelled of something personal. I sent him packing and told him I didn't have the keys to the apartment and if he wanted anything, he should call the lawyer. He said he'd come back, but I haven't seem him round here again. Good riddance.' 'You wouldn't by any chance have the name and address of the lawyer, would you?' 'You should ask the manager of this building, Senor Molins. His office is quite close, number twenty-eight, Floridablanca, first floor. Tell him I sent you - Senora Aurora, at your service.' 'I'm very grateful. So, tell me, Dona Aurora, is the Fortuny apartment empty, then?' 'No, not empty, because nobody has taken anything from it in all the years since the old man died. Sometimes it even smells. I'd say there are rats in the apartment, mark my words.' 'Do you think it would be possible to have a look? We might find something that tells us what really happened to Julian. 'Oh no, I couldn't do that. You must talk to Senor Molins, he's the one in charge.' I smiled at her mischievously. 'But you must have a master key, I imagine. Even if you told that man you didn't . . . Don't tell me you're not dying to see what's in there.' Dona Aurora looked at me out of the corner of her eye. 'You're a devil.' The door gave way like a tombstone, with a sudden groan, exhaling dank, foul-smelling air. I pushed the front door inwards, discovering a corridor that sank into darkness. The place was stuffy and reeked of damp. Spiralling threads of grime and dust hung from the ceiling like white hair. The broken floor tiles were covered by what looked like a layer of ash. I also noticed what appeared to be footprints making their way into the apartment. 'Holy Mother of God!' mumbled the caretaker. 'There's more shit here than on the floor of a henhouse.' 'If you'd rather, I'll go in on my own,' I said. 'That's exactly what you'd like. Come on, you go ahead, I'll follow.' We closed the door behind us and waited by the entrance for a moment until our eyes became accustomed to the dark. I could hear the nervous breathing of the caretaker and noticed the sour smell of her sweat. I felt like a tomb robber whose soul is poisoned by greed and desire. 'Hey, what's that noise?' asked the caretaker in an anxious tone. Something fluttered in the dark, disturbed by our presence. I thought I glimpsed a pale shape flickering about at the end of the corridor. 'Pigeons,' I said. 'They must have got in through a broken window and made a nest here.' 'Those ugly birds give me the creeps,' said the caretaker. 'And they shit like there's no tomorrow.' 'Relax, Dona Aurora, they only attack when they're hungry.' We ventured in a few steps till we reached the end of the corridor, where a dining room opened onto the balcony. Just visible was a shabby table covered with a tattered tablecloth that looked more like a shroud. Four chairs held a wake, together with a couple of grimy glass cabinets that guarded the crockery: an assortment of glasses and a tea set. In a corner stood the old upright piano that had belonged to Carax's mother. The keys were dark with dirt, and the joins could hardly be seen under the film of dust. An armchair with a long, threadbare cover was slowly disintegrating next to the balcony. Beside it was a coffee table on which rested a pair of reading glasses and a Bible bound in pale leather and edged with gold, of the sort that used to be given as presents for a child's first communion. It still had its bookmark, a piece of scarlet string. 'Look, that chair is where the old man was found dead. The doctor said he'd been there for two days. How sad to go like that, like a dog, all alone. Not that he didn't have it coming, but even so . . .' I went up to the chair where Fortuny had died. Next to the Bible was a small box containing black-and-white photographs, old studio portraits. I knelt down to examine them, almost afraid to touch them. I felt as if I was profaning the memories of a poor old man, but my curiosity got the better of me. The first print showed a young couple with a boy who could not have been more than four years old. I recognized him by his eyes. 'Look, there they are. Senor Fortuny as a young man, and her . . .' 'Didn't Julian have any brothers or sisters?' The caretaker shrugged her shoulders and let out a sigh. 'I heard rumours that she miscarried once because of the beatings her husband gave her, but I don't know. People love to gossip, don't they? But not me. All I know is that once Julian told the other kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake. My Isabelita had nightmares for a whole month. That child could be really morbid at times.' I glanced at the kitchen. There was a broken pane in a small window overlooking an inner courtyard, and you could hear the nervous and hostile flapping of the pigeons' wings on the other side. 'Do all the apartments have the same layout?' I asked. 'The ones that look onto the street do. But this one is an attic, so it's a bit different. There's the kitchen and a laundry room that overlooks the inner yard. Down this corridor there are three bedrooms, and a bathroom at the end. Properly decorated, they can look very nice, believe me. This one is similar to my Isabella's apartment - but of course right now it looks like a tomb.' 'Do you know which room Julian's was?' 'The first door is the master bedroom. The second is a smaller room. It was probably that one, I'd say.' I went down the corridor. The paint on the walls was falling off in shreds. At the end of the passage, the bathroom door was ajar. A face seemed to stare at me from the mirror. It could have been mine, or perhaps the face of the sister who lived there. As I got closer, it withdrew into darkness. I tried to open the second door. 'It's locked,' I said. The caretaker looked at me in astonishment. 'These doors don't have locks,' she said. 'This one does.' 'Then the old man must have had it put in, because all the other apartments I looked down and noticed that the footprints in the dust led up to the locked door. 'Someone's been in this room,' I said. 'Recently.' 'Don't scare me,' said the caretaker. I went up to the other door. It didn't have a lock. It opened with a rusty groan when I touched it. In the middle stood an old four-poster bed, unmade. The sheets had turned yellowish, like winding sheets, and a crucifix presided over the bed. The room also contained a chest of drawers with a small mirror on it, a basin, a pitcher, and a chair. A cupboard, its door ajar, stood against the wall. I went around the bed to a bedside table with a glass top, under which lay photographs of ancestors, funeral cards, and lottery tickets. On the table were a carved wooden music box and a pocket watch, frozen forever at twenty past five. I tried to wind up the music box, but the melody got stuck after six notes. When I opened the drawer of the bedside table, I found an empty spectacle case, a nail clipper, a hip flask, and a medal of the Virgin of Lourdes. Nothing else. 'There must be a key to that room somewhere,' I said. 'The manager must have it. Look, I think it's best we leave.' Suddenly I looked down at the music box. I lifted the cover and there, blocking the mechanism, I found a gold key. I took it out, and the music box resumed its tinkling melody. I recognized a tune by Ravel. 'This must be the key.' I smiled at the caretaker. 'Listen, if the room was locked, there must be a reason. Even if it's just out of respect for the memory of—' 'If you'd rather, you can wait for me down in your apartment, Dona Aurora.' 'You're a devil. Go on. Open up if you must.' A breath of cold air whistled through the hole in the lock, licking at my fingers while I inserted the key. The lock that Senor Fortuny had fitted in the door of his son's unoccupied room was three times the size of the one on the front door. Dona Aurora looked at me apprehensively, as if we were about to open a Pandora's box. 'Is this room at the front of the house?' I asked. The caretaker shook her head. 'It has a small window, for ventilation. It looks out over the yard.' I pushed the door inward. An impenetrable well of darkness opened up before us, the meagre light from behind barely scratching at the shadows. The window overlooking the yard was covered with pages of yellowed newspaper. I tore them off, and a needle of hazy light bored through the darkness. 'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,' murmured the caretaker. The room was infested with crucifixes. They hung from the ceiling, dangling from the ends of strings, and they covered the walls, hooked on nails. There were dozens of them. You could sense them in every corner, carved with a knife on the wooden furniture, scratched on the floor tiles, painted red on the mirrors. The footprints that had led us to the doorway could now be traced on the dust around the naked bed, just a skeleton of wires and worm-eaten wood. At one end of the room, under the window, stood a closed roll top desk, crowned by a trio of metal crucifixes. I opened it with care. There was no dust in the joins of the wooden slats, from which I inferred that the desk had been opened quite recently. It had six drawers. The locks had been forced open. I inspected them one by one. Empty. I knelt down by the desk and fingered the scratches that covered the wood, imagining Julian Carax's hands making those doodles, hieroglyphics whose meaning had been obscured by time. In the desk, I noticed a pile of notebooks and a vase filled with pencils and pens. I took one of the notebooks and glanced at it. Drawings and single words. Mathematical exercises. Unconnected phrases, quotes from books. Unfinished poems. All the notebooks looked the same. Some drawings were repeated page after page, with slight variations. I was struck by the figure of a man who seemed to be made of flames. Another might have been an angel or a reptile coiled around a cross. Rough sketches hinted at a fantastic rambling house, woven with towers and cathedral-like arches. The strokes were confident and showed a certain ability. Young Carax appeared to be a draftsman of some promise, but none of the drawings were more than rough sketches. I was about to put the last notebook back in its place without looking at it when something slipped out from its pages and fell at my feet. It was a photograph in which I recognized the same girl who appeared in the other picture - the one taken at the foot of that building. The girl posed in a luxurious garden, and beyond the treetops, just visible, was the shape of the house I had seen sketched in the drawings of the adolescent Carax. I recognized it immediately. It was the villa called The White Friar, on Avenida del Tibidabo. On the back of the photograph was an inscription that simply said: Penelope, who loves you I put it in my pocket, closed the desk, and smiled at the caretaker. 'Seen enough?' she asked, anxious to leave the place. 'Almost,' I replied. 'Before, you said that soon after Julian left for Paris, a letter came for him, but his father told you to throw it away. The caretaker hesitated for a moment, and then she nodded. 'I put the letter in the drawer of the cabinet in the entrance hall, in case the Frenchwoman should come back one day. It must still be there.' We went down to the cabinet and opened the top drawer. An ochre-coloured envelope lay on top of a collection of stopped watches, buttons, and coins that had ceased being legal tender twenty years ago. I picked up the envelope and examined it. 'Did you read it?' 'What do you take me for?' 'I meant no offence. It would have been quite natural, under the circumstances, if you thought that Julian was dead. . . .' The caretaker shrugged, looked down, and started walking towards the door. I took advantage of that moment to put the letter in the inside pocket of my jacket. 'Look, I don't want you to get the wrong impression,' said the caretaker. 'Of course not. What did the letter say?' 'It was a love letter. Like the stories on the radio, only sadder, you know, because it sounded as if it were really true. Believe me, I felt like crying when I read it.' 'You're all heart, Dona Aurora.' 'And you're a devil.' That same afternoon, after saying goodbye to Dona Aurora and promising that I would keep her up to date with my investigations on Julian Carax, I went along to see the manager of the apartment block. Senor Molins had seen better days and now mouldered away in a filthy first-floor office on Calle Floridablanca. Still, Molins was a cheerful and self-satisfied individual. His mouth was glued to a half-smoked cigar that seemed to grow out of his moustache. It was hard to tell whether he was asleep or awake, because he breathed like most people snore. His hair was greasy and flattened over his forehead, and he had mischievous piggy eyes. His suit wouldn't have fetched more than ten pesetas in the Encantes Flea Market, but he made up for it with a gaudy tie of tropical colours. Judging by the appearance of the office, not much was managed anymore, except the bugs and cobwebs of a forgotten Barcelona. 'We're in the middle of refurbishment,' he said apologetically. To break the ice, I let drop Dona Aurora's name as if I were referring to some old friend of the family. 'When she was young, she was a real looker,' was Molins's comment. 'With age she's gone on the heavier side, but then I'm not what I used to be either. You may not believe this, but when I was your age, I was an Adonis. Girls would go on their knees to beg for a quickie, or to have my babies. Alas, the twentieth century is nothing but shit. What can I do for you, young man?' I presented him with a more or less plausible story about a supposed distant relationship with the Fortunys. After five minutes' chatter, Molins dragged himself to his filing cabinet and gave me the address of the lawyer who dealt with anything related to Sophie Carax, Julian's mother. 'Let me see . . . Jose Maria Requejo. Fifty-nine, Calle Leon XIII. But we send the mail twice a year to a PO box in the main post office on Via Layetana.' 'Do you know Senor Requejo?' 'I've spoken to his secretary occasionally on the telephone. The fact is that any business with him is done by post, and my secretary deals with that. And today she's at the hairdresser's. Lawyers don't have time for face-to-face dealings anymore. There are no gentlemen left in the profession.' There didn't seem to be any reliable addresses left either. A quick glance at the street guide on the manager's desk confirmed what I suspected: the address of the supposed lawyer, Senor Requejo, didn't exist. I told Mr Molins, who took the news in as if it were a joke. 'Well, I'll be damned!' he said laughing. 'What did I say? Crooks.' The manager lay back in his chair and made another of his snoring noises. 'Would you happen to have the number of that PO Box?' 'According to the index card it's 2837, although I can't read my secretary's numbers. As I'm sure you know, women are no good at maths. What they're good for is—' 'May I see the card?' 'Sure. Help yourself.' He handed me the index card, and I looked at it. The numbers were perfectly legible. The PO box was 2321. It horrified me to think of the accounting that must have gone on in that office. 'Did you have much contact with Senor Fortuny during his lifetime?' I asked. 'So so. Quite the ascetic type. I remember that when I found out that the Frenchwoman had left him, I invited him to go whoring with a few mates of mine, nearby, in a fabulous establishment I know next to the La Paloma dance hall. Just to cheer him up, eh? That's all. And you know what? He would not talk to me, even greet me in the street anymore, as if I were invisible. What do you make of that?' 'I'm in shock. What else can you tell me about the Fortuny family? Do you remember them well?' 'Those were different times,' he murmured nostalgically. 'The fact is that I already knew Grandfather Fortuny, the one who started the hat shop. About the son, there isn't much to tell. Now, the wife, she was spectacular. What a woman. And decent too. Despite all the rumours and the gossip 'Like the one about Julian's not being Fortuny's legitimate son?' 'And where did you hear that?' 'As I said, I'm part of the family. Everything gets out.' 'None of that was ever proved.' 'But it was talked about,' I said encouragingly. 'People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.' 'And what did people say?' 'Don't you feel like a little glass of rum? It's Cuban, like all the good stuff that kills you.' 'No thanks, but I'll keep you company. In the meantime, you can tell me .. .' Antoni Fortuny, whom everyone called the hatter, met Sophie Carax in 1899 by the steps of Barcelona Cathedral. He was returning from making a vow to St Eustace -for of all the saints, St Eustace was considered the most diligent and the least fussy when it came to granting miracles to do with love. Antoni Fortuny, who was already over thirty and a confirmed bachelor, was looking for a wife, and wanted her right away. Sophie was a French girl who lived in a boarding-house for young ladies in Calle Riera Alta and gave private music and piano lessons to the offspring of the most privileged families in Barcelona. She had no family or capital to rely on, only her youth and what musical education she had received from her father - the pianist at a Nimes theatre - before he died of tuberculosis in 1886. Antoni Fortuny, on the contrary, was a man on the road to prosperity. He had recently inherited his father's business, a hat shop of some repute in Ronda de San Antonio, where he had learned the trade that he dreamed one day of teaching his own son. He found Sophie Carax fragile, beautiful, young, docile, and fertile. St Eustace had obliged. After four months of insistent courting, Sophie accepted Antoni s marriage proposal. Senor Molins, who had been a friend of Fortuny the elder, warned Antoni that he was marrying a stranger. He said that Sophie seemed like a nice girl, but perhaps this marriage was a bit too convenient for her, and he should wait a year at least. . . Antoni Fortuny replied that he already knew everything he needed to know about his future wife. The rest did not interest him. They were married at the Basilica del Pino and spent their three-day honeymoon in a spa in the nearby seaside resort of Mongat. The morning before they left, the hatter asked Senor Molins, in confidence, to be initiated into the mysteries of the bedroom. Molins sarcastically told him to ask his wife. The newlyweds returned to Barcelona after only two days. The neighbours said Sophie was crying when she came into the building. Years later Vicenteta swore that Sophie had told her the following: that the hatter had not laid a finger on her and that when she had tried to seduce him, he had called her a whore and told her he was disgusted by the obscenity of what she was proposing. Six months later Sophie announced to her husband that she was with child. By another man. Antoni Fortuny had seen his own father hit his mother on countless occasions and did what he thought was the right thing to do. He stopped only when he feared that one more blow would kill her. Despite the beating, Sophie refused to reveal the identity of the child's father. Applying his own logic to the matter, Antoni Fortuny decided that it must be the devil, for that child was the child of sin, and sin had only one father: the Evil One. Convinced in this manner that sin had sneaked into his home and also between his wife's thighs, the hatter took to hanging crucifixes everywhere: on the walls, on the doors of all the rooms, and on the ceiling. When Sophie discovered him scattering crosses in the bedroom to which she had been confined, she grew afraid and, with tears in her eyes, asked him whether he had gone mad. Blind with rage, he turned around and hit her. A whore like the rest,' he spat as he threw her out onto the landing, after flaying her with blows from his belt. The following day, when Antoni Fortuny opened the door of his apartment to go down to the hat shop, Sophie was still there, covered in dried blood and shivering with cold. The doctors never managed to fix the fractures on her right hand completely. Sophie Carax would never be able to play the piano again, but she would give birth to a boy, whom she would name Julian after the father she had lost when she was still too young - as happens with all good things in life. Fortuny considered throwing her out of his home but thought the scandal would not be good for business. Nobody would buy hats from a man known to be a cuckold - the two didn't go together. From then on, Sophie was assigned a dark, cold room at the back of the apartment. It was there she gave birth to her son with the help of two neighbours. Antoni did not return home until three days later. 'This is the son God has given you,' Sophie announced. If you want to punish anyone, punish me, but not an innocent creature. The boy needs a home and a father. My sins are not his. I beg you to take pity on us.' The first months were difficult for both of them. Antoni Fortuny had downgraded his wife to the rank of servant. They no longer shared a bed or table and rarely exchanged any words except to resolve some domestic matter. Once a month, usually coinciding with the full moon, Antoni Fortuny showed up in Sophie's bedroom at dawn and, without a word, charged at his former wife with vigour but little skill. Making the most of these rare and aggressive moments of intimacy, Sophie tried to win him over by whispering words of love and caressing him. But the hatter was not a man for frivolities, and the eagerness of desire evaporated in a matter of minutes, or even seconds. These assaults brought no children. After a few years, Antoni Fortuny stopped visiting Sophie's chamber for good and took up the habit of reading the Gospels until the small hours, seeking in them a solace for his torment. With the help of the Gospels, the hatter made an effort to kindle some affection for the child with deep eyes who loved making a joke of everything and inventing shadows where there were none. Despite his efforts, Antoni Fortuny was unable to feel as if little Julian were his flesh and blood, nor did he recognize any aspect of himself in him. The boy, for his part, did not seem very interested either in hats or in the teachings of the catechism. During the Christmas season he would amuse himself by changing the positions of the small figures in the Nativity scene and devising plots in which Baby Jesus had been kidnapped by the three magi from the East who had wicked intentions. He soon became obsessed with drawing angels with wolf's teeth and inventing stories about hooded spirits that came out of walls and ate people's ideas while they slept. In time the hatter lost all hope of being able to set this boy on the right path. The child was not a Fortuny and never would be. Julian maintained that he was bored in school and came home with his notebooks full of drawings of monstrous beings, winged serpents, and buildings that were alive, walked, and devoured the unsuspecting. By then it was quite clear that fantasy and invention interested him far more than the daily reality around him. Of all the disappointments amassed during his lifetime, none hurt Antoni Fortuny more than that son whom the devil had sent to mock him. At the age of ten, Julian announced that he wanted to be a painter, like Velazquez. He dreamed of embarking on canvases that the great master had been unable to paint during his life because, Julian argued, he'd been obliged to paint so many time-consuming portraits of mentally retarded royals. To make matters worse, Sophie, perhaps to relieve her loneliness and remember her father, decided to give him piano lessons. Julian, who loved music, art, and all matters that were not considered practical in the world of men, soon learned the rudiments of harmony and concluded that he preferred to invent his own compositions rather than follow the music-book scores. At that time Antoni Fortuny still suspected that part of the boy's mental deficiencies were due to his diet, which was far too influenced by his mother's French cooking. It was a well-known fact that the richness of buttery foods led to moral ruin and confusion of the intellect. He forbade Sophie to cook with butter ever again. The results were not entirely as he had anticipated. At twelve Julian began to lose his feverish interest in painting and in Velazquez, but the hatter's initial hopes did not last long. Julian was abandoning his canvas dreams for a far more pernicious vice. He had discovered the library in Calle del Carmen and devoted any time he was allowed off from the hat shop to visiting the sanctuary of books and devouring volumes of fiction, poetry, and history. The day before his thirteenth birthday, he announced that he wanted to be someone called Robert Louis Stevenson, evidently a foreigner. The hatter remarked that with luck he'd become a quarry worker. At that point he became convinced that his son was nothing hut an idiot. At night Antoni Fortuny often writhed in his bed with anger and frustration, unable to get any sleep. At the bottom of his heart, he loved that child, he told himself. And although she didn't deserve it, he also loved the slut who had betrayed him from the very first day. He loved her with all his soul, but in his own way, which was the correct way. All he asked God was to show him how the three of them could be happy, preferably also in his own way. He begged the Lord to send him a signal, a whisper, a crumb of His presence. God, in His infinite wisdom, and perhaps overwhelmed by the avalanche of requests from so many tormented souls, did not answer. While Antoni Fortuny was engulfed by remorse and suspicion, on the other side of the wall, Sophie slowly faded away, her life shipwrecked on a sea of disappointment, isolation, and guilt. She did not love the man she served, but she felt she belonged to him, and the possibility of leaving him and taking his son with her to some other place seemed inconceivable. She remembered Julian's real father with bitterness, and eventually grew to hate him and everything he stood for. In her desperation she began to shout back at Antoni Fortuny. Insults and sharp recriminations flew round the apartment like knives, stabbing anyone who dared get in their way, usually Julian. Later the hatter never remembered exactly why he had beaten his wife. He remembered only the anger and the shame. He would then swear to himself that this would never happen again, that, if necessary, he would give himself up to the authorities and get himself locked up in prison. Antoni Fortuny was sure that, with God's help, he would end up being a better man than his own father. But sooner or later, his fists would once more meet Sophie's tender flesh, and in time Fortuny felt that if he could not possess her as a husband, he would do so as a tyrant. In this manner, secretly, the Fortuny family let the years go by, silencing their hearts and their souls to the point where, from so much keeping quiet, they forgot the words with which to express their real feelings and the family became strangers living under the same roof like so many other families in the vast city. It was past two-thirty when I returned to the bookshop. As I walked in, Fermin gave me a sarcastic look from the top of a ladder, where he was polishing up a collection of the Episodios Nacionales by the famous Don Benito. 'Who is this I see before me? We thought you must have set off to the New World by now, Daniel' 'I got delayed on the way. Where's my father?' 'Since you didn't turn up, he went off to deliver the rest of the orders. He asked me to tell you that this afternoon he is going to Tiana to value a private library belonging to a widow. Your father's a wolf in sheep's clothing. He said not to wait for him to close the shop.' 'Was he annoyed?' Fermin shook his head, coming down the stepladder with feline nimbleness. 'Not at all. Your father is a saint. Besides, he was very happy to see you're dating a young lady.' 'What?' Fermin winked at me and smacked his lips. 'Oh, you little devil, you were hiding your light under a bushel! And what a girl, eh? Good enough to stop traffic. And such class. You can tell she's been to good schools, although she has fire in her eyes. ... If Bernarda hadn't stolen my heart, and I haven't told you all about our outing yet - there were sparks coming out of those eyes, I tell you, sparks, it was like a bonfire on Midsummer's Night—' 'Fermin,' I interrupted. 'What the hell are you talking about?' 'About your fiancee.' 'I don't have a fiancee, Fermin.' 'Well, these days you young people call them anything, sugar pie, or—' 'Fermin, will you please rewind? What are you talking about?' Fermin Romero de Torres looked at me disconcertedly. 'Let me see. This afternoon, about an hour or an hour and a half ago, a gorgeous young lady came by and asked for you. Your father and yours truly were on the premises, and I can assure you, without a shadow of doubt, that the girl was no apparition. I could even describe her smell. Lavender, only sweeter. Like a little sugar bun just out of the oven.' 'Did little sugar bun say she was my fiancee, by any chance?' 'Well, not in so many words, but she gave a sort of quick smile, if you see what I mean, and said that she would see you on Friday afternoon. All we did was put two and two together.' 'Bea . . .' I mumbled. 'Ergo, she exists,' said Fermin with relief. 'Yes, but she's not my girlfriend.' 'Well, I don't know what you're waiting for, then.' 'She's Tomas Aguilar's sister.' 'Your friend the inventor?' I nodded. 'All the more reason. Even if she were the pope's niece, she's a bombshell. If I were you, I'd be on the ready.' 'Bea already has a fiance. A lieutenant doing his military service.' Fermin sighed with irritation. 'Ah, the army, blight and refuge for the basest simian instincts. All the better, because this way you can cheat on him without feeling guilty.' 'You're delirious, Fermin. Bea's getting married when the lieutenant finishes his service.' Fermin gave me a sneaky smile. 'Funny you should say that, because I have a feeling she's not. I don't think this pumpkin is going to be tying the knot anytime soon.' 'What do you know?' 'About women and other worldly matters, considerably more than you. As Freud tells us, women want the opposite of what they think or say they want, which, when you consider it, is not so bad, because men, as is more than evident, respond, contrariwise, to the dictates of their genital and digestive organs.' 'Stop lecturing me, Fermin, I can see where this is heading. If you have anything to say, just say it.' 'Right, then, in a nutshell: this one hasn't a single bone of obedient-little-wife material in her heavenly body.' 'Hasn't she? Then what kind of bone does your expertise detect?' Fermin came closer, adopting a confidential tone. 'The passionate kind,' he said, raising his eyebrows with an air of mystery. 'And you can be sure I mean that as a compliment.' As usual, Fermin was right. Feeling defeated, I decided that attack was the best form of defence. 'Speaking of passion, tell me about Bernarda. Was there or was there not a kiss?' 'Don't insult me, Daniel. Let me remind you that you are talking to a professional in the art of seduction, and this business of kissing is for amateurs and little old men in slippers. Real women are won over bit by bit. It's all a question of psychology, like a good faena in the bullring.' 'In other words, she gave you the brush-off.' 'The woman is yet to be born who is capable of giving Fermin Romero de Torres the brush-off. The trouble is that man, going back to Freud - and excuse the metaphor - heats up like a light bulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand - and this is pure science - heats up like an iron, slowly, over a low heat, like a tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her. Like the steel furnaces in Vizcaya.' I weighed up Fermin's thermodynamic theories. 'Is that what you're doing with Bernarda? Heating up the iron?' Fermin winked at me. 'That woman is a volcano on the point of eruption, with a libido of igneous magma yet the heart of an angel,' he said, licking his lips. 'If I had to establish a true parallel, she reminds me of my succulent mulatto girl in Havana, who was very devout and always worshipped her saints. But since, deep down, I'm an old-fashioned gent who doesn't like to take advantage of women, I contented myself with a chaste kiss on the cheek. I'm not in a hurry, you see? All good things must wait. There are yokels out there who think that if they touch a woman's behind and she doesn't complain, they've hooked her. Amateurs. The female heart is a labyrinth of subtleties, too challenging for the uncouth mind of the male racketeer. If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is to win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping which steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.' I clapped solemnly at this discourse. 'You're a poet, Fermin.' 'No, I'm with Ortega and I'm a pragmatist. Poetry lies, in its adorable wicked way, and what I say is truer than a slice of bread and tomato. That's just what the master said: show me a Don Juan and I'll show you a loser in disguise. What I aim for is permanence, durability. Bear witness that I will make Bernarda, if not an honest woman, because that she already is, at least a happy one.' I smiled as I nodded. His enthusiasm was contagious, and his diction beyond improvement. 'Take good care of her, Fermin. Do it for me. Bernarda has a heart of gold, and she has already suffered too many disappointments.' 'Do you think I can't see that? It's written all over her, like a stamp from the society of war widows. Trust me: I wrote the book on taking no shit from everybody and his mother. I'm going to make this woman blissfully happy even if it's the last thing I ever do in this world.' 'Do I have your word?' He stretched out his hand with the composure of a Knight Templar. I shook it. 'Yes, the word of Fermin Romero de Torres.' Business in the shop was slow that afternoon, with barely a couple of browsers. In view of the situation, I suggested Fermin take the rest of the day off. 'Go on, go and find Bernarda and take her to the cinema or go window shopping with her in Calle Puertaferrissa, walking arm in arm, she loves that.' Fermin did not hesitate to take me up on my offer and rushed off to smarten himself up in the back room, where he always kept a change of clothes and all kinds of eau de colognes and ointments in a toilet bag that would have been the envy of Veronica Lake. When he emerged, he looked like a film star, only five stone lighter. He wore a suit that had belonged to my father and a felt hat that was a couple of sizes too large, a problem he solved by placing balls of newspaper under the crown. 'By the way, Fermin. Before you go ... I wanted to ask you a favour.' 'Say no more. You give the order. I'm already on to it.' 'I'm going to ask you to keep this between us, OK? Not a word to my father.' He beamed. 'Ah, you rascal Something to do with that girl, eh?' 'No. This is a matter of high intrigue. Your department.' 'Well, I also know a lot about girls. I'm telling you this because if you ever have a technical query, you know who to ask. Privacy assured. I'm like a doctor when it comes to such matters. No need to be prudish.' 'I'll bear that in mind. Right now what I would like to know is who owns a PO box in the main post office on Via Layetana. Number 2321. And, if possible, who collects the mail that goes there. Do you think you'll be able to lend me a hand?' Fermin wrote down the number with a ballpoint on his instep, under his sock. 'Piece of cake. All official institutions find me irresistible. Give me a few days and I'll have a full report ready for you.' 'We agreed not to say a word of this to my father?' 'Don't worry. I'll be as quiet as the Sphinx.' 'I'm very grateful. Now, go on, off with you, and have a good time.' I said goodbye with a military salute and watched him leave looking as debonair as a cock on his way to the henhouse. He couldn't have been gone for more than five minutes when I heard the tinkle of the doorbell and lifted my head from the columns of numbers and crossings-out. A man had just come in, hidden behind a grey raincoat and a felt hat. He sported a pencil moustache and had glassy blue eyes. He smiled like a salesman, a forced smile. I was sorry Fermin was not there, because he was an expert at seeing off travellers selling camphor and other such rubbish whenever they slipped into the bookshop. The visitor offered me his greasy grin, casually picking up a book from a pile that stood by the entrance waiting to be sorted and priced. Everything about him communicated disdain for all he saw. You're not even going to sell me a 'good afternoon', I thought. 'A lot of words, eh?' he said. 'It's a book; they usually have quite a few words. Anything I can do for you, sir?' The man put the book back on the pile, nodding indifferently and ignoring my question. ‘I say reading is for people who have a lot of time and nothing to do. Like women. Those of us who have to work don't have time for make-believe. We're too busy earning a living. Don't you agree?' 'It's an opinion. Were you looking for anything in particular?' 'It's not an opinion. It's a fact. That's what's wrong with this country: people don't want to work. There're a lot of layabouts around. Don't you agree?' 'I don't know, sir. Perhaps. Here, as you can see, we only sell books.' The man came up to the counter, his eyes darting around the shop, settling occasionally on mine. His appearance and manner seemed vaguely familiar, though I couldn't say why. Something about him reminded me of one of those figures from old-fashioned playing cards or the sort used by fortune-tellers, a print straight from the pages of an incunabulum: his presence was both funereal and incandescent, like a curse dressed in its Sunday best. 'If you'll tell me what I can do for you 'It's really me who was coming to do you a service. Are you the owner of this establishment?' 'No. The owner is my father.' 'And the name is?' 'My name or my father's?' The man proffered a sarcastic smile. A giggler, I thought. 'I take it that the sign saying Sempere and Son applies to both of you, then?' 'That's very perceptive of you. May I ask the reason for your visit, if you are not interested in a book?' 'The reason for my visit, a courtesy call if you like, is to warn you. It has come to my attention that you're doing business with undesirable characters, in particular inverts and criminals.' I stared at him in astonishment. 'Excuse me?' The man fixed me with his eyes. 'I'm talking about queers and thieves. Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about.' 'I'm afraid I haven't the faintest idea, nor am I remotely interested in listening to you any longer.' The man nodded in an unfriendly and truculent manner. 'You'll just have to endure me, then. I suppose you're aware of citizen Federico Flavia's activities.' 'Don Federico is the local watchmaker, an excellent person. I very much doubt that he's a criminal.' ‘I was talking about queers. I have proof that this old queen frequents your shop, I imagine to buy little romantic novels and pornography.' 'And may I ask you what business this is of yours?' His answer was to pull out his wallet and place it open on the counter. I recognized a grimy police ID with his picture on it, looking a bit younger. I read up to where it said 'Chief Inspector Francisco Javier Fumero'. 'Speak to me with respect, boy, or you and your father will be in deep trouble for selling communist rubbish. Do you hear?' I wanted to reply, but the words had frozen on my lips. 'Still, this queer isn't what brought me here today. Sooner or later he'll end up in the police station, like all the rest of his persuasion, and I'll make sure he's given a lesson. What worries me is that, according to my information, you're employing a common thief, an undesirable of the worst sort.' 'I don't know who you're talking about, Inspector.' Fumero gave his servile, sticky giggle. 'God only knows what name he's using now. Years ago he called himself Wilfredo Camagiiey, the Mambo King, and said he was an expert in voodoo, dance teacher to the Bourbon royal heir and Mata Hari's lover. Other times, he takes the names of ambassadors, variety artists, or bullfighters. We've lost count by now.' 'I'm afraid I'm unable to help you. I don't know anyone called Wilfredo Camagiiey.' 'I'm sure you don't, but you know who I'm referring to, don't you?' 'No.' Fumero laughed again, that forced, affected laugh that seemed to sum him up like the blurb on a book jacket. 'You like to make things difficult, don't you? Look, I've come here as a friend, to warn you that whoever takes on someone as undesirable as this one ends up with his fingers scorched, yet you're treating me like a liar.' 'Not at all. I appreciate your visit and your warning, but I can assure you that there hasn't—' 'Don't give me that crap, because if I damn well feel like it, I'll beat the shit out of you and lock you up in the slammer, is that clear? But today I'm in a good mood, so I'm going to leave you with just a warning. It's up to you to choose your company. If you like queers and thieves, you must be a bit of both yourself. Things have to be clear where I'm concerned. Either you're with me or you're against me. That's life. That simple. So what's it going to be?' I didn't say anything. Fumero nodded, letting go another giggle. 'Very good, Senor Sempere. It's your call. Not a very good beginning for us. If you want problems, you'll get them. Life isn't like a novel, you know. In life you have to take sides. And it's clear which side you've chosen. The side taken by idiots, the losing side.' 'I'm going to ask you to leave, please.' He walked off toward the door, followed by his sibylline laugh. 'We'll meet again. And tell your friend that Inspector Fumero is keeping an eye on him and sends him his best regards.' The call from the inspector and the echo of his words ruined my afternoon. After a quarter of an hour of running to and fro behind the counter, my stomach tightening into a knot, I decided to close the bookshop before the usual time and go out for a walk. I wandered about aimlessly, unable to rid my mind of the insinuations and threats made by that sinister thug. I wondered whether I should alert my father and Fermin about the visit, but I imagined that would have been precisely Fumero's intention: to sow doubt, anguish, fear and uncertainty among us. I decided not to play his game. On the other hand, his suggestions about Fermin's past alarmed me. I felt ashamed of myself on discovering that, for a moment, I had given credit to the policeman's words. In the end, after much consideration, I decided to banish the entire episode to the back of my mind. On my way home, I passed the watchmaker's shop. Don Federico greeted me from behind the counter, beckoning me to come in. The watchmaker was an affable, cheerful character who never forgot anyone's birthday, the sort of person you could always go to with a dilemma, knowing that he would find a solution. I couldn't help shivering at the thought that he was on Inspector Fumero's blacklist, and wondered whether I should warn him, although I could not imagine how, without getting caught up in matters that were none of my business. Feeling more confused than ever, I went into his shop and smiled at him. 'How are you, Daniel? What's that face for?' 'Bad day,' I said. 'How's everything, Don Federico?' 'Smooth as silk. They don't make watches like they used to anymore, so I've got plenty of work. If things go on like this, I'm going to have to hire an assistant. Your friend, the inventor, would he be interested? He must be good at this sort of thing.' It didn't take much to imagine what Tomas's reactionary father would think of his son accepting a job in the establishment of the neighbourhood's official fairy queen. 'I'll let him know.' 'By the way, Daniel, I've got the alarm clock your father brought round two weeks ago. I don't know what he did to it, but he'd be better off buying a new one than having it fixed.' I remembered that sometimes, on suffocating summer nights, my father would sleep out on the balcony. 'It probably fell onto the street,' I said. 'That explains it. Ask him to let me know what to do about it. I can get a Radiant for him at a very good price. Look, take this one with you if you like, and let him try it out. If he likes it, he can pay for it later. If not, just bring it back.' 'Thank you very much, Don Federico.' The watchmaker began to wrap up the monstrosity in question. 'The latest technology,' he said with pleasure. 'By the way, I loved the book Fermin sold me the other day. It was by this fellow Graham Greene. That Fermin was a tremendous hire.' I nodded. 'Yes, he's worth twice his weight in gold.' 'I've noticed he never wears a watch. Tell him to come by the shop and we'll sort something out.' 'I will. Thank you, Don Federico.' When he handed me the alarm clock, the watchmaker observed me closely and arched his eyebrows. 'Are you sure there's nothing the matter, Daniel? Just a bad day?' I nodded again and smiled. 'There's nothing the matter, Don Federico. Take care.' 'You too, Daniel.' When I got home, I found my father asleep on the sofa, the newspaper on his chest. I left the alarm clock on the table with a note saying 'Don Federico says dump the old one' and slipped quietly into my room. I lay down on my bed in the dark and fell asleep thinking about the inspector, Fermin, and the watchmaker. When I woke up again, it was already two o'clock in the morning. I peered into the corridor and saw that my father had retired to his bedroom with the new alarm clock. The apartment was full of shadows, and the world seemed a gloomier and more sinister place than it had been only the night before. I realized that, in fact, I had never quite believed that Inspector Fumero existed. I went into the kitchen, poured myself a glass of cold milk, and wondered whether Fermin would be all right in his pension. On my way back to the room, I tried to banish the image of the policeman from my mind. I tried to get back to sleep but realized that it was impossible. I turned on the light and decided to examine the envelope addressed to Julian Carax that I had stolen from Dona Aurora that morning and which was still in the pocket of my jacket. I placed it on my desk, under the beam of the reading lamp. It was a parchment like envelope, with yellowing serrated borders and clayish to the touch. The postmark, just a shadow, said '18 October 1919'. The wax seal had come unstuck, probably thanks to Dona Aurora's good offices. In its place was a reddish stain, like a trace of lipstick that kissed the fold of the envelope on which the return address was written. Penelope Aldaya Avenida del Tibidabo, 32, Barcelona I opened the envelope and pulled out the letter, an ochre-coloured sheet neatly folded in two. The handwriting, in blue ink, glided nervously across the page, paling slowly until it regained intensity every few words. Everything on that page spoke of another time: the strokes that depended on the ink-pot, the words scratched on the thick paper by the tip of the nib, the rugged feel of the paper. I spread the letter out on the desk and read it, breathless. Dear Julian: This morning I found out through Jorge that you did in fact leave Barcelona to go in pursuit of your dreams. I always feared that those dreams would never allow you to be mine, or anyone else's. I would have liked to see you one last time, to be able to look into your eyes and tell you things that I don't know how to say in a letter. Nothing came out the way we had planned. I know you too well, and I know you won't write to me, that you won't even send me your address, that you will want to be another person. I know you will hate me for not having been there as I had promised. That you will think I failed you. That I didn't have the courage. I have imagined you so many times, alone on that train, convinced that I had betrayed you. Many times I tried to find you through Miquel, but he told me that you didn't want to have anything more to do with me. What lies did they tell you, Julian? What did they say about me? Why did you believe them? Now I know I have already lost you. I have lost everything. Even so, I can't let you go forever and allow you to forget me without letting you know that I don't bear you any grudge, that I knew it from the start, I knew that I was going to lose you and that you would never see in me what I see in you. I want you to know that I loved you from the very first day and that I still love you, now more than ever, even if you don't want me to. I am writing to you in secret, without anyone knowing. Jorge has sworn that if he sees you again, he'll kill you. I'm not allowed to go out of the house anymore, I can't even look out of the window. I don't think they'll ever forgive me. Someone I trust has promised to post this letter to you. I won't mention the name so as not to compromise the person in question. I don't know whether my words will reach you. But if they do, and should you decide to return to fetch me here, I know you will find the way to do it. As I write, I imagine you in that train, full of dreams and with your soul broken by betrayal, fleeing from us all and from yourself. There are so many things I cannot tell you, Julian. Things we never knew and it's better you should never know. All I wish is for you to be happy, Julian, that everything you aspire to achieve may come true and that, although you may forget me in the course of time, one day you may finally understand how much I loved you. Always, Penelope 17 The words of Penelope Aldaya, which I read and reread that night until I knew them by heart, brushed aside all the bitterness Inspector Fumero's visit had left in me. At dawn, after spending the night wide awake, engrossed in that letter and the voice I sensed behind the words, I left the house. I dressed quietly and left a note for my father on the hall cabinet saying I had a few errands to run and would be back in the bookshop by nine-thirty. When I stepped out of the main door the puddles left in the street by the night's drizzle reflected the bluish shadows of early morning. I buttoned up my jacket and set off briskly toward Plaza de Cataluna. The stairs up from the subway station gave off a swirl of warm air. At the ticket office of the Ferrocarriles Catalanes, I bought a third-class fare to Tibidabo station. I made the journey in a carriage full of office workers, maids and day labourers carrying sandwiches the size of bricks wrapped in newspaper. Taking refuge in the darkness of the tunnels, I rested my head against the window, while the train journeyed through the bowels of the city to the foot of Mount Tibidabo, which presides over Barcelona. When I re-emerged into the streets, it seemed as if I were discovering another place. Dawn was breaking, and a purple blade of light cut through the clouds, spraying its hue over the fronts of mansions and the stately homes that bordered Avenida del Tibidabo. A blue tram was crawling lazily uphill in the mist. I ran after it and managed to clamber onto the back platform, as the conductor looked on disapprovingly. The wooden carriage was almost empty. Two friars and a lady in mourning with ashen skin swayed, half asleep, to the rocking of the carriage. 'I'm only going as far as number thirty-two,' I told the conductor, offering him my best smile. 'I don't care if you're going to Cape Horn,' he replied with indifference. 'Even Christ's soldiers here have paid for their tickets. Either you fork out or you walk out. And I'm not charging you for the rhyme.' Clad in sandals and the austere brown sackcloth cloaks of the Franciscan order, the friars nodded, showing their two pink tickets to prove the conductor's point. 'I'll get off, then,' I said. 'Because I haven't any small change.' 'As you wish. But wait for the next stop. I don't want any accidents on my shift.' The tram climbed almost at walking pace, hugging the shade of the trees and peeping over the walls and gardens of castle like mansions that I imagined filled with statues, fountains, stables, and secret chapels. I looked out from one side of the platform and noticed the White Friar villa silhouetted between the trees. As the train approached the corner with Calle Roman Macaya, it slowed down until it almost came to a halt. The driver rang his bell and the conductor threw me a sharp look. 'Go on, smartie. Off you get, number thirty-two is just there.' I got off and heard the clattering of the blue tram as it disappeared into the mist. The Aldaya residence was on the opposite side of the street, guarded by a large wrought-iron gate woven with ivy and dead leaves. Set into the iron bars, barely visible, was a small door that was firmly locked. Above the gate, knotted into the shape of black iron snakes, was the number 32. I tried to peer into the property from there but could only make out the angles and arches of a dark tower. A trail of rust bled from the keyhole in the door. I knelt down and tried to get a better view of the courtyard from that position. All I could see was a tangle of weeds and the outline of what seemed to be a fountain or a pond from which an outstretched hand emerged, pointing up to the sky. It took me a few moments to realize that it was a stone hand and that there were other limbs and shapes I could not quite make out submerged in the fountain. Further away, veiled by the weeds, I caught sight of a marble staircase, broken and covered in rubble and fallen leaves. The glory and fortune of the Aldayas had faded a long time ago. The place was a graveyard. I walked back a few steps and then turned the corner to have a look at the south wing of the house. From here you could get a better view of one of the mansion's towers. At that moment I noticed a human figure at the edge of my vision, an emaciated man in blue overalls, who brandished a large broom with which he was attacking the dead leaves on the pavement. He regarded me with some suspicion, and I imagined he must be the caretaker of one of the neighbouring properties. I smiled as only someone who has spent many hours behind a counter can do. 'Good morning,' I intoned cordially. 'Do you know whether the Aldayas' house has been closed for long?' He stared at me as if I had inquired about the sex of angels. The little man touched his chin with yellowed fingers that betrayed a weakness for cheap unfiltered Celtas cigarettes. I regretted not having a packet on me with which to win him over. I rummaged in the pocket of my jacket to see what offering I could come up with. 'At least twenty or twenty-five years, and let's hope it continues that way,' said the caretaker in that flat, resigned tone of people who have been beaten into servility. 'Have you been here long?' The man nodded. 'Yours truly has been employed here with the Miravells since 1920.' 'You wouldn't have any idea what happened to the Aldaya family, would you?' 'Well, as you know, they lost everything at the time of the Republic,' he said. 'He who makes trouble . . . What little I know I've heard at the Miravells' - they used to be friends of the Aldayas. I think the eldest son, Jorge, went abroad, to Argentina. It seems they had factories there. Very rich people. They always fall on their feet. You wouldn't have a cigarette, by any chance?' 'I'm sorry, but I can offer you a Sugus sweet - it's a known fact that they have as much nicotine in them as a Montecristo cigar, and bucket loads of vitamins.' The caretaker frowned in disbelief, but he accepted. I offered him the lemon Sugus sweet Fermin had given me an eternity ago, which I'd found in my pocket, hidden in a fold of the lining. I hoped it would not be rancid. 'It's good,' ruled the caretaker, sucking at the rubbery sweet. 'You're chewing the pride of the national sweet industry. The Generalissimo swallows them by the handful, like sugared almonds. Tell me, did you ever hear any mention of the Aldayas' daughter, Penelope?' The caretaker leaned on his broom, in the manner of Rodin's Thinker. 'I think you must be mistaken. The Aldayas didn't have any daughters. They were all boys.' 'Are you sure? I know that a young girl called Penelope Aldaya lived in this house around the year 1919. She was probably Jorge's sister.' 'That might be, but as I said, I've only been here since 1920.' 'What about the property? Who owns it now?' 'As far as I know, it's still for sale, though they were talking about knocking it down to build a school. That's the best thing they could do, frankly. Tear it down to its foundations.' 'What makes you say that?' The caretaker gave me a guarded look. When he smiled, I noticed he was missing at least four upper teeth. 'Those people, the Aldayas. They were a shady lot, if you listen to what people say.' 'I'm afraid I don't. What do people say about them?' 'You know. The noises and all that. Personally, I don't believe in that kind of thing, don't get me wrong, but they say that more than one person has soiled his pants in there.' 'Don't tell me the house is haunted,' I said, suppressing a smile. 'You can laugh. But where there's smoke 'Have you seen anything?' 'Not exactly, no. But I've heard.' 'Heard? What?' 'Well, one night, years ago, when I accompanied Master Joanet. Only because he insisted, you know? I didn't want to have anything to do with that place. ... As I was saying, I heard something strange there. A sort of sobbing.' The caretaker produced his own version of the noise to which he was referring. It sounded like someone with consumption humming a litany of folk songs. 'It must have been the wind,' I suggested. 'It must have, but I was scared shitless. Hey, you wouldn't have another one of those sweets, would you?' 'How about a throat lozenge? They tone you up after a sweet.' 'Come on, then,' agreed the caretaker, putting out his hand to collect it. I gave him the whole box. The strong taste of liquorice seemed to loosen his tongue. He began the extraordinary tale of the Aldaya mansion. 'Between you and me, it's some story. Once, Joanet, Senor Miravell's son, a huge guy, twice your size (he's in the national handball team, that should give you some idea) . . . Anyhow, some friends of young Joanet had heard stories about the Aldaya house, and they roped him in. And he roped me in, asking me to go with him - all that bragging, and he didn't dare go on his own. Rich kids, what do you expect? He was determined to go in there at night, to show off in front of his girlfriend, and he nearly pissed himself. I mean, now you're looking at it in the daylight, but at night the place looks quite different. Anyway, Joanet says he went up to the second floor (I refused to go in, of course - it can't be legal, even if the house had been abandoned for at least ten years), and he says there was something there. He thought he heard a sort of voice in one of the rooms, but when he tried to go in, the door shut in his face. What do you think of that?' 'I think it was a draught,' I said. 'Or something else,' the caretaker pointed out, lowering his voice. 'The other day it was on the radio: the universe is full of mysteries. Imagine, they think they've found the Holy Shroud, the real one, bang in downtown Toledo. It had been sewn to a cinema screen, to hide it from the Muslims. Apparently they wanted to use it so they could say Jesus Christ was a black man. What do you make of that?' 'I'm speechless.' 'Exactly. Mysteries galore. They should knock that building down and throw lime over the ground.' I thanked him for the information and was about to turn down the avenue when I looked up and saw Tibidabo Mountain awakening behind the gauzy clouds. Suddenly I felt like taking the funicular up the hill to visit the old amusement park crowning its top and wander among its merry-go-rounds and the eerie automaton halls, but I had promised to be back in the bookshop on time. As I returned to the station, I pictured Julian Carax walking down that same road, gazing at those same solemn facades that had hardly changed since then, perhaps even waiting to board the blue tram that tiptoed up to heaven. When I reached the foot of the avenue, I took out the photograph of Penelope Aldaya smiling in the courtyard of the family mansion. Her eyes spoke of an untroubled soul and the promise of the future. 'Penelope, who loves you.' I imagined Julian Carax at my age, holding that image in his hands, perhaps under the shade of the same tree that now sheltered me. I could almost see him smiling confidently, contemplating a future as wide and luminous as that avenue, and for a moment I thought there were no more ghosts there than those of absence and loss, and that the light that smiled on me was borrowed light, only real as long as I could hold it in my eyes, second by second. 18 When I got back home, I realized that Fermin or my father had already opened the bookshop. I went up to the apartment for a moment to have a quick bite. My father had left some toast and jam and a Thermos flask of strong coffee on the dining-room table for me. I polished it all off and was down again in ten minutes, reborn. I entered the bookshop through the door in the back room that adjoined the entrance hall of the building and went straight to my cupboard. I put on the blue apron I usually wore to protect my clothes from the dust on boxes and shelves. At the bottom of the cupboard, I kept an old tin biscuit box, a treasure chest of sorts. There I stored a menagerie of useless bits of rubbish that I couldn't bring myself to throw away: watches and fountain pens damaged beyond repair, old coins, marbles, wartime bullet cases I'd found in Laberinto Park and fading postcards of Barcelona from the turn of the century. Still floating among all those bits and pieces was the old scrap of newspaper on which Isaac Montfort had written down his daughter Nuria's address, the night I went to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books to hide The Shadow of the Wind. I examined it in the dusty light that filtered between shelves and piled-up boxes, then closed the tin box and put the address in my wallet. Having resolved to occupy both mind and hands with the most trivial job I could find, I walked into the shop. 'Good morning,' I announced. Fermin was classifying the contents of various parcels that had arrived from a collector in Salamanca, and my father was struggling to decipher a German catalogue of Lutheran apocrypha. 'And may God grant us an even better afternoon,' sang Fermin - a veiled reference, no doubt, to my meeting with Bea. I didn't grant him the pleasure of an answer. Instead I turned to the inevitable monthly chore of getting the account book up to date, checking receipts and order forms, collections and payments. The sound of the radio orchestrated our serene monotony, treating us to a selection of hit songs by celebrated crooner Antonio Machin, who was quite fashionable at the time. Caribbean rhythms tended to get on my father's nerves, but he tolerated the tropical soundscape because the tunes reminded Fermin of his beloved Cuba. The scene was repeated every week: my father pretended not to hear, and Fermin would abandon himself to a vague wiggling in time to the danzdn, punctuating the commercial breaks with anecdotes about his adventures in Havana. The shop door was ajar, and a sweet aroma of fresh bread and coffee wafted through, lifting our spirits. After a while our neighbour Merceditas, who was on her way back from doing her shopping in Boqueria Market, stopped by the shop window and peered round the door. 'Good morning, Senor Sempere,' she sang. My father blushed and smiled at her. I had the feeling that he liked Merceditas, but his monkish manners confined him to an impregnable silence. Fermin ogled her out of the corner of his eye, keeping the tempo with his gentle hip swaying and licking his lips as if a Swiss roll had just walked in through the door. Merceditas opened a paper bag and gave us three shiny apples. I imagined she still fancied the idea of working in the bookshop and made little effort to hide her dislike for Fermin, the usurper. 'Aren't they beautiful? I saw them and said to myself, These are for the Semperes,' she said in an affected tone. 'I know you intellectuals like apples, like that Isaac with his gravity thing, you know.' 'Isaac Newton, pumpkin,' Fermin specified. Merceditas looked angrily at him. 'Hello, Mr Smarty-pants. You can be grateful that I've brought one for you, too, and not a sour grapefruit, which is what you deserve.' 'But, woman, coming from your nubile hands, this offering, this fleshy fruit of original sin, ignites my—' 'Fermin, please,' interrupted my father. 'Yes, Senor Sempere,' said Fermin obediently, beating a retreat. Merceditas was on the point of shooting something back at Fermin when we heard an uproar in the street. We all fell silent, listening expectantly. We could hear indignant cries outside, followed by a surge of murmuring. Merceditas carefully put her head round the door. We saw a number of shopkeepers walk by looking uncomfortable and swearing under their breath. Soon Don Anacleto Olmo appeared - a resident of our block and unofficial spokesman for the Royal Academy of Language in the neighbourhood. Don Anacleto was a secondary-school teacher with a degree in Spanish literature and a handful of other Humanities, and he shared an apartment on the first floor with seven cats. When he was not teaching, he moonlighted as a blurb writer for a prestigious publishing firm, and it was rumoured that he also composed erotic verse that he published under the saucy alias of 'Humberto Peacock'. While among friends Don Anacleto was an unassuming, genial fellow, in public he felt obliged to act the part of declamatory poet, and the affected purple prose of his speech had won him the nickname of 'the Victorian'. That morning the teacher's face was pink with distress, and his hands, in which he held his ivory cane, were almost shaking. All four of us stared at him. 'Don Anacleto, what's the matter?' asked my father. 'Franco has died, please say he has,' prompted Fermin. 'Shut up, you beast,' Merceditas cut in. 'Let the doctor talk.' Don Anacleto took a deep breath, regained his composure, and, with his customary majesty, unfolded his account of what had happened. 'Dear friends, life is the stuff of drama, and even the noblest of the Lord's creatures can taste the bitterness of destiny's capricious and obstinate ways. Last night, in the small hours, while the city enjoyed the well-deserved sleep of all hardworking people, Don Federico Flavia i Pujades, a well-loved neighbour who has so greatly contributed to this community's enrichment and solace in his role as watchmaker, only three doors down from this bookshop, was arrested by the State Police.' I felt my heart sink. 'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!' remarked Merceditas. Fermin puffed with disappointment, for it was clear that the dictator remained in perfect health. Well on his way now, Don Anacleto took a deep breath and prepared to go on: 'According to a reliable account revealed to me by sources close to Police Headquarters, last night, shortly after midnight, two bemedalled undercover members of the Crime Squad caught Don Federico clad in the lush, licentious costume of a diva and singing risque variety songs on the stage of some dive in Calle Escudillers, where he was allegedly entertaining an audience mostly made up of cerebrally deficient members of the public. These godforsaken creatures, who had eloped that same afternoon from the sheltering premises of a hospice belonging to a religious order, had pulled down their trousers in the frenzy of the show and were dancing about with no restraint, clapping their hands, with their privates in full view, and drooling.' Merceditas made the sign of the cross, alarmed by the salacious turn events were taking. 'On learning of what had transpired, the pious mothers of some of those poor souls made a formal complaint on the grounds of public scandal and affront to the most basic code of morality. The press, that nefarious vulture that feeds on misfortune and dishonour, did not take long to pick up the scent of carrion. Thanks to the wretched offices of a professional informer, not forty minutes had elapsed since the arrival of the two members of the police when Kiko Calabuig appeared on the scene. Calabuig, ace reporter for the muckraking daily El Caso, was determined to uncover whatever deplorable vignettes were necessary and to leave no shady stone unturned in order to spice up his lurid report in time for today's edition. Needless to say, the spectacle that took place in those premises is described with tabloid viciousness as horrifying and Dantesque, in twenty-four-point headlines.' 'This can't be right,' said my father. 'I thought Don Federico had learned his lesson.' Don Anacleto gave a priestly nod. 'Yes, but don't forget the old sayings: "The leopard cannot change his spots," and "Man cannot live by bromide alone. . . ." And you still haven't heard the worst.' 'Then, please, sire, could you get to the frigging point? Because with all this metaphorical spin and flourish, I'm beginning to feel a fiery bowel movement at the gates,' Fermin protested. 'Pay no attention to this animal. I love the way you speak. It's like the voice on the newsreel, Dr Anacleto,' interposed Merceditas. 'Thank you, child, but I'm only a humble teacher. So, back to what I was saying, without further delay, preambles or frills. It seems that the watchmaker, who at the time of his arrest was going by the nom de guerre of "Lady of the Curls", had already been arrested under similar circumstances on a couple of occasions - which were registered in the annals of crime by the guardians of law and order.' 'Criminals with a badge, you mean,' Fermin spat out. 'I don't get involved in politics. But I can tell you that, after knocking poor Don Federico off the stage with a well-aimed bottle, the two officers led him to the police station in Via Layetana. With a bit of luck, and under different circumstances, things would just have ended up with some joke cracking and perhaps a couple of slaps in the face and other minor humiliations, but, by great misfortune, it so happened that the noted Inspector Fumero was on duty last night.' 'Fumero,' muttered Fermin. The very mention of his nemesis made him shudder. 'The one and only. As I was saying, the champion of urban safety, who had just returned from a triumphant raid on an illegal betting and beetle-racing establishment on Calle Vigatans, was informed about what had happened by the anguished mother of one of the missing boys and the alleged mastermind behind the escapade, Pepet Guardiola. At that the famous inspector, who, it appears, had knocked back some twelve double shots of brandy since suppertime, decided to intervene in the matter. After examining the aggravating factors at hand, Fumero proceeded to inform the sergeant on duty that so much faggotry (and I cite the word in its starkest literal sense, despite the presence of a young lady, for its documentary relevance to the events in question) required a lesson, and that what the watchmaker - that is to say, our Don Federico Flavia i Pujades - needed, for his own good and that of the immortal souls of the Mongoloid children, whose presence was incidental but a deciding factor in the case, was to spend the night in a common cell, down in the lower basement of the institution, in the company of a select group of thugs. As you probably know, this cell is famous in the criminal world for its inhospitable and precarious sanitary conditions, and the inclusion of an ordinary citizen in the list of guests is always cause for celebration, for it adds spice and novelty to the monotony of prison life.' Having reached this point, Don Anacleto proceeded to sketch a brief but endearing portrait of the victim, whom, of course, we all knew well. 'I don't need to remind you that Senor Flavia i Pujades has been blessed with a fragile and delicate personality, all goodness of heart and Christian charity. If a fly finds its way into his shop, instead of smashing it with a slipper, he'll open the door and windows wide so that the insect, one of God's creatures, is swept back by the draught into the ecosystem. I know that Don Federico is a man of faith, always very devout and involved in parish activities, but all his life he has had to live with a hidden compulsion, which, on very rare occasions, has got the better of him, sending him off into the streets dolled up as a tart. His ability to mend anything from wristwatches to sewing machines is legendary, and as a person he is well loved by every one of us who knew him and frequented his establishment, even by those who did not approve of his occasional night escapades sporting a wig, a comb and a flamenco dress.' 'You speak of him as if he were dead,' ventured Fermin with dismay. 'Not dead, thank God.' I heaved a sigh of relief. Don Federico lived with his deaf octogenarian mother, known in the neighbourhood as 'La Pepita', who was famous for letting off hurricane-force wind capable of stunning the sparrows on her balcony and sending them spiralling down to the ground. 'Little did Pepita imagine that her Federico,' continued the schoolteacher, 'had spent the night in a filthy cell, where a whole band of pimps and roughnecks had handled him like a party whore, only to give him the beating of his life when they had tired of his lean flesh, while the rest of the inmates sang in chorus, "Pansy, pansy, eat shit you old dandy!"' A deadly silence came over us. Merceditas sobbed. Fermin tried to comfort her with a tender embrace, but she jumped to one side. 19 'Imagine the scene,' Don Anacleto concluded. The epilogue to the story did nothing to raise our hopes. Halfway through the morning, a grey police van had dumped Don Federico on his doorstep. He was covered in blood, his dress was in shreds, and he had lost his wig and his collection of fine costume jewellery. He had been urinated on, and his face was full of cuts and bruises. The baker's son had discovered him huddled in the doorframe, shaking and crying like a baby. 'It's not fair, no, sir,' argued Merceditas, positioned by the door of the bookshop, far from Fermin's wandering hands. 'Poor thing, he has a heart of gold, and he always minds his own business. So he likes dressing up as a Gypsy and singing in front of people? Who cares? People are evil.' 'Not evil,' Fermin objected. 'Moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn't stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like an animal, convinced that he's doing good, that he's always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around fucking up, if you'll excuse the French, anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin colour, creed, language, nationality or, as in the case of Don Federico, his leisure pursuits. What the world really needs are more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.' 'Don't talk nonsense. What we need is a bit more Christian charity and less spitefulness. We're a disgraceful lot,' Merceditas cut in. 'Everybody goes to mass, but nobody pays attention to the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ.' 'Merceditas, let's not mention the missal industry. That's part of the problem, not the solution.' 'There goes the atheist again. And what has the clergy ever done to you, may I ask?' 'Come on, don't quarrel now,' interrupted my father. 'And you, Fermin, go and see about Don Federico, find out whether he needs anything, whether he wants someone to go to the chemist's for him or have something bought at the market.' 'Yes, Senor Sempere. Right away. Oratory is my undoing, as you know.' 'Your undoing is the shamelessness and the irreverence you carry around with you,' said Merceditas. 'Blasphemer. You ought to have your soul cleaned out with hydrochloric acid.' 'Look here, Merceditas, because I know you're a good person (though a bit narrow-minded and as ignorant as a brick), and because right now we're facing a social emergency, in the face of which one must prioritize one's efforts, I will refrain from clarifying a few cardinal points for you—' 'Fermin!' cried my father. Fermin closed his mouth and rushed out of the shop. Merceditas watched him with disapproval. 'That man is going to get you into trouble one of these days, mark my words. He's an anarchist, a Mason, or a Jew at the very least. With that great big nose of his—' 'Pay no attention to him. He likes to be contradictory.' Merceditas looked annoyed and shook her head. 'Well, I'll leave you now. Some of us have more than one job to do, and time is short. Good morning.' We all nodded politely and watched her walk away, straight-backed, taking it out on the street with her high heels. My father drew a deep breath, as if wanting to inhale the peace that had just been recovered. Don Anacleto sagged next to him, having finally descended from his flights of rhetoric. His face was pale, and a sad autumnal look had flooded his eyes. 'This country has gone to the dogs,' he said. 'Come now, Don Anacleto, cheer up. Things have always been like this, here and everywhere else. The trouble is, there are some low moments, and when those strike close to home, everything looks blacker. You'll see how Don Federico overcomes this. He's stronger than we all think.' The teacher was mumbling under his breath. 'It's like the tide, you see?' he said, beside himself. 'The savagery, I mean. It goes away, and you feel safe, but it always returns, it always returns . .. and it chokes us. I see it every day at school. My God .. . Apes, that's what we get in the classrooms. Darwin was a dreamer, I can assure you. No evolution or anything of the sort. For every one who can reason, I have to battle with nine orang-utans.' We could only nod meekly. Don Anacleto raised a hand to say goodbye and left, his head bowed. He looked five years older than when he came in. My father sighed. We glanced at each other briefly, not knowing what to say. I wondered whether I should tell him about Inspector Fumero's visit to the bookshop. This has been a warning, I thought. A caution. Fumero had used poor Don Federico as a telegram. 'Is anything the matter, Daniel? You're pale.' I sighed and looked down. I started to tell him about the incident with Inspector Fumero the other day and his threats. My father listened, containing the anger that the burning in his eyes betrayed. 'It's my fault,' I said. I should have said something...’ My father shook his head. 'No. You couldn't have known, Daniel.' 'But—' 'Don't even think about it. And not a word to Fermin. God knows how he would react if he knew the man was after him again.' 'But we have to do something.' 'Make sure he doesn't get into trouble.' I nodded, not very convinced, and began to continue the work Fermin had started while my father returned to his correspondence. Between paragraphs my father would look over at me. I pretended not to notice. 'How did it go with Professor Velazquez yesterday? Everything all right?' he asked, eager to change the subject. 'Yes. He was pleased with the books. He mentioned that he was looking for a book of Franco's letters.' 'The Moorslayer book. But it's apocryphal ... a joke by Madariaga. What did you say to him?' 'That we were on the case and would give him some news in two weeks' time at the latest.' 'Well done. We'll put Fermin on the case and charge Velazquez a fortune.' I nodded. We continued going through the motions of our routine. My father was still looking at me. Here we go, I thought. 'Yesterday a very pleasant girl came by the shop. Fermin says she's Tomas Aguilar's sister?' 'Yes.' My father nodded, considering the coincidence with an expression of mild surprise. He granted me a moment's peace before he charged at me again, this time adopting the look of someone who has just remembered something. 'By the way, Daniel, we're not going to be very busy today, and, well, maybe you'd like to take some time off to do your own thing. Besides, I think you've been working too hard lately.' 'I'm fine, thanks.' 'I was even considering leaving Fermin here and going along to the Liceo Opera House with Barcelo. This afternoon they're performing Tannhauser, and he's invited me, as he has a few seats reserved in the stalls.' My father pretended to be reading his letters. He was a dreadful actor. 'Since when have you liked Wagner?' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Never look a gift horse in the mouth... . Besides, with Barcelo it makes no difference what it is, because he spends the whole show commenting on the performance and criticizing the wardrobe and the tempo. He often asks after you. Perhaps you should go around to see him at the shop one day.' 'One of these days.' 'Right, then, if you agree, let's leave Fermin in charge today and we'll go out and enjoy ourselves a bit. It's about time. And if you need any money 'Dad. Bea is not my girlfriend.' 'Who said anything about girlfriends? That's settled, then. It's up to you. If you need any money, take it from the till, but leave a note so Fermin doesn't get a fright when he closes at the end of the day.' Having said that, he feigned absentmindedness and wandered into the back room, smiling from ear to ear. I looked at my watch. It was ten-thirty in the morning. I had arranged to meet Bea at five in the university cloister, and, to my dismay, the day was turning out to be longer than The Brothers Karamazov. Fermin soon returned from the watchmaker's home and informed us that a commando team of local women had set up a permanent guard to attend to poor Don Federico, whom the doctor had diagnosed as having three broken ribs, a large number of bruises, and an uncommonly severe rectal tear. 'Did you have to buy anything?' asked my father. 'They had enough medicines and ointments to open a pharmacy, so I took the liberty of buying him some flowers, a bottle of cologne, and three jars of peach juice - Don Federico's favourite.' 'You did the right thing. Let me know what I owe you,' said my father. 'And how did you find him?' 'Beaten to a pulp, quite frankly. Just to see him huddled up in his bed like a ball of wool, moaning that he wanted to die, made me want to kill someone, believe me. I feel like showing up at the offices of the Crime Squad and bumping off half a dozen of those pricks with a blunderbuss, beginning with that stinking ball of pus, Fumero.' 'Fermin, let's have some peace and quiet. I strictly forbid you to do anything of the sort.' 'Whatever you say, Senor Sempere.' 'And how has Pepita taken it?' 'With exemplary courage. The neighbours have doped her with shots of brandy, and when I saw her, she had collapsed onto the sofa and was snoring like a boar and letting off farts that bored bullet-holes through the upholstery.' 'True to character. Fermin, I'm going to ask you to look after the shop today; I'm going round to Don Federico's for a while. Later I've arranged to meet Barcelo. And Daniel has things to do.' I raised my eyes just in time to catch Fermin and my father exchanging meaningful looks. 'What a couple of matchmakers,' I said. They were still laughing at me when I walked out through the door. A cold, piercing breeze swept the streets, scattering strips of mist in its path. The steely sun snatched copper reflections from the roofs and belfries of the Gothic quarter. There were still some hours to go until my appointment with Bea in the university cloister, so I decided to try my luck and call on Nuria Monfort, hoping she was still living at the address provided by her father sometime ago. Plaza de San Felipe Neri is like a small breathing space in the maze of streets that crisscross the Gothic quarter, hidden behind the old Roman walls. The holes left by machine-gun fire during the war pockmark the church walls. That morning a group of children played soldiers, oblivious to the memory of the stones. A young woman, her hair streaked with silver, watched them from the bench where she sat with an open book on her lap and an absent smile. The address showed that Nuria Monfort lived in a building by the entrance to the square. The year of its construction was still visible on the blackened stone arch that crowned the front door: 1801. Once I was in the hallway, there was just enough light to make out the shadowy chamber from which a staircase twisted upwards in an erratic spiral. I inspected the beehive of brass letterboxes. The names of the tenants appeared on pieces of yellowed card inserted in slots, as was common in those days. Miquel Moliner I Nuria Monfort 3-°-2.a I went up slowly, almost fearing that the building would collapse if I were to tread firmly on those tiny doll's-house steps. There were two doors on every landing, with no number or sign. When I reached the third floor, I chose one at random and rapped on it with my knuckles. The staircase smelled of damp, of old stone, and of clay. I rapped a few times but got no answer. I decided to try my luck with the other door. I knocked with my fist three times. Inside the apartment I could hear a radio blaring the pious daily broadcast, Moments for Reflection with Father Martin Calzado. The door was opened by a woman in a padded turquoise-blue checked dressing gown, slippers, and a helmet of curlers. In that dim light, she looked like a deep-sea diver. Behind her the velvety voice of Father Martin Calzado was devoting some words to the sponsors of the programme, a brand of beauty products called Aurorin, much favoured by pilgrims to the sanctuary of Lourdes and with miraculous properties when it came to pustules and warts. 'Good afternoon. I'm looking for Senora Monfort.' 'Nurieta? You've got the wrong door, young man. It's the one opposite.' 'I'm so sorry. It's just that I knocked and there was no answer.' 'You're not a debt collector, are you?' asked the neighbour suddenly, suspicious from experience. 'No. Senora Monfort's father sent me.' 'Ah, all right. Nurieta must be down below, reading. Didn't you see her when you came up?' When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I saw that the woman with the silvery hair and the book in her hands was still fixed on her bench in the square. I observed her carefully. Nuria Monfort was a beautiful woman, with the sort of features that graced fashion magazines or studio portraits, but a woman whose youth seemed to be ebbing away in the sadness of her eyes. There was something of her father in her slightness of build. I imagined she must be in her early forties, judging from the grey hair and the lines that aged her face. In a soft light, she would have seemed ten years younger. 'Senora Monfort?' She looked at me as though waking up from a trance, without seeing me. 'My name is Daniel. Your father gave me your address sometime ago. He said you might be able to talk to me about Julian Carax.' When she heard those words, her dreamy look left her. I had a feeling that mentioning her father had not been a good idea. 'What is it you want?' she asked suspiciously. I felt that if I didn't gain her trust at that very moment, I would have blown my one chance. The only card I could play was to tell the truth. 'Please let me explain. Eight years ago, almost by chance, I found a novel by Julian Carax in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. You had hidden it there to save it from being destroyed by a man who calls himself Lain Coubert,' I said. She stared at me, without moving, as if she were afraid that the world around her was going to fall apart. 'I'll only take a few minutes of your time,' I added. 'I promise.' She nodded, with a look of resignation. 'How's my father?' she asked, avoiding my eyes. 'He's well. He's aged a little. And he misses you a lot.' Nuria Monfort let out a sigh I couldn't decipher. 'You'd better come up to the apartment. I don't want to talk about this in the street.' 20 Nuria Montford lived adrift in shadows. A narrow corridor led to a dining room that also served as kitchen, library, and office. On the way, I noticed a modest bedroom, with no windows. That was all, other than a tiny bathroom with no shower or tub out of which all kinds of odours emanated, from smells of cooking from the bar below to a musty stench of pipes and drains that dated from the turn of the century. The entire apartment was sunk in perpetual gloom, like a block of darkness propped up between peeling walls. It smelled of black tobacco, cold, and absence. Nuria Monfort observed me while I pretended not to notice the precarious condition of her home. 'I go down to the street because there's hardly any light in the apartment,' she said. 'My husband has promised to give me a reading lamp when he comes back.' 'Is your husband away?' 'Miquel is in prison.' 'I'm sorry, I didn't know. . . .' 'You couldn't have known. I'm not ashamed of telling you, because he isn't a criminal. This last time they took him away for printing leaflets for the metalworkers' union. That was two years ago. The neighbours think he's in America, travelling. My father doesn't know either, and I wouldn't like him to find out.' 'Don't worry. He won't find out through me,' I said. A tense silence wove itself around us, and I imagined she was considering whether I was a spy sent by Isaac. 'It must be hard to run a house on your own,' I said stupidly, just to fill the void. 'It's not easy. I get what money I can from translations, but with a husband in prison, that's not nearly enough. The lawyers have bled me dry, and I'm up to my neck in debt. Translating is almost as badly paid as writing.' She looked at me as if she was expecting an answer. I just smiled meekly. 'You translate books?' 'Not anymore. Now I've started to translate forms, contracts and customs documents - that pays much better. You only get a pittance for translating literature, though a bit more than for writing it, it's true. The residents' association has already tried to throw me out a couple of times. The least of their worries is that I'm behind with the maintenance fees. You can imagine, a woman who speaks foreign languages and wears trousers. . . . More than one neighbour has accused me of running a house of ill repute. I should be so lucky. . . .' I hoped the darkness would hide my blushing. 'I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. I'm embarrassing you.' 'It's my fault. I asked.' She laughed nervously. She seemed surrounded by a burning aura of loneliness. 'You remind me a bit of Julian,' she said suddenly. 'The way you look, and your gestures. He used to do what you are doing now. He would stare at you without saying a word, and you wouldn't know what he was thinking, and so, like an idiot, you'd tell him things it would have been better to keep to yourself. . . . Can I offer you anything? A cup of coffee maybe?' 'Nothing, thanks. I don't want to trouble you.' 'It's no trouble. I was about to make one for myself.' Something told me that that cup of coffee was all she was having for lunch. I refused again and watched her walk over to a corner of the dining room where there was a small electric stove. 'Make yourself comfortable,' she said, her back to me. I looked around and asked myself how. Nuria Monfort's office consisted of a desk that took up the corner next to the balcony, an Underwood typewriter with an oil lamp beside it, and a shelf full of dictionaries and manuals. There were no family photos, but the wall by the desk was covered with postcards, all of them pictures of a bridge I remembered seeing somewhere but couldn't pinpoint; perhaps Paris or Rome. Beneath this display the desk betrayed an almost obsessive neatness and order. The pencils were sharpened and perfectly lined up. The papers and folders were arranged and placed in three symmetrical rows. When I turned around, I realized that Nuria Montfort was gazing at me from the entrance to the corridor. She regarded me in silence, the way one looks at strangers in the street or in the subway. She lit a cigarette and stayed where she was, her face masked by spirals of blue smoke. I suddenly thought that, despite herself, Nuria Montfort exuded a certain air of the femme fatale, like those women in the movies who dazzled Fermin when they materialized out of the mist of a Berlin station, enveloped in halos of light, the sort of beautiful women whose own appearance bored them. 'There's not much to tell,' she began. ‘I met Julian over twenty years ago, in Paris. At that time I was working for Cabestany, the publishing house. Senor Cabestany had acquired the rights to Julian's novels for peanuts. At first I worked in the accounts department, but when Cabestany found out that I spoke French, Italian, and a little German, he moved me to the purchasing department, and I became his personal secretary. One of my jobs was to correspond with foreign authors and publishers with whom our firm had business, and that's how I came into contact with Julian Carax.' 'Your father told me you two were good friends.' 'My father probably told you we had a fling, or something along those lines, right? According to him, I run after anything in trousers, like a bitch on heat.' That woman's frankness and her brazen manner left me speechless. I took too long to come up with an acceptable reply. By then Nuria Montfort was smiling to herself and shaking her head. 'Pay no attention to him. My father got that idea from a trip to Paris I once had to make, back in 1933, to resolve some matters between Senor Cabestany and Gallimard. I spent a week in the city and stayed in Julian's apartment for the simple reason that Cabestany preferred to save on hotel expenses. Very romantic, as you can see. Until then my relationship with Julian Carax had been conducted strictly by letter, normally dealing with copyright, proofs, or editorial matters. What I knew about him, or imagined, had come from reading the manuscripts he sent us.' 'Did he tell you anything about his life in Paris?' 'No. Julian didn't like talking about his books or about himself. I didn't think he was happy in Paris. Though he gave the impression that he was one of those people who cannot be happy anywhere. The truth is, I never got to know him well. He wouldn't let you. He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people. Senor Cabestany thought he was shy and perhaps a bit crazy, but I got the feeling that Julian was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julian lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.' 'You say this as if you envied him.' 'There are worse prisons than words, Daniel.' I nodded, not quite sure what she meant. 'Did Julian ever talk about those memories, about his years in Barcelona?' 'Very little. During the week I stayed with him in Paris, he told me a bit about his family. His mother was French, a music teacher. His father had a hat shop or something like that. I know he was a very religious man, and very strict.' 'Did Julian explain to you what sort of a relationship he had with him?' 'I know they didn't get on at all. It was something that went back a long time. In fact, the reason Julian went to Paris was to avoid being put into the army by his father. His mother had promised him she would take him as far away as possible from that man, rather than let that happen.' 'But "that" man was his father, after all' Nuria Monfort smiled. It was just a hint of a smile, and her eyes shone weary and sad. 'Even if he was, he never behaved like one, and Julian never considered him as such. Once he confessed to me that before getting married, his mother had had an affair with a stranger whose name she never revealed to him. That man was Julian's real father.' 'It sounds like the beginning of The Shadow of the Wind. Do you think he told you the truth?' Nuria Monfort nodded. 'Julian told me he had grown up watching how the hatter - that's what he called him - insulted and beat his mother. Then he would go into Julian's room and tell him he was the son of sin, that he had inherited his mother's weak and despicable character and would be miserable all his life, a failure at whatever he tried to do. . . .' 'Did Julian feel resentful towards his father?' 'Time is a great healer. I never felt that Julian hated him. Perhaps that would have been better. I got the impression that he lost all respect for the hatter as a result of all those scenes. Julian spoke about it as if it didn't matter to him, as if it were part of a past he had left behind, but these things are never forgotten. The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.' I wondered whether she was talking from experience, and the image of my friend Tomas Aguilar came to my mind once more, listening stoically to the diatribes of his haughty father. 'How old was Julian when his father started speaking to him like that?' 'About eight or ten, I imagine.' I sighed. 'As soon as he was old enough to join the army, his mother took him to Paris. I don't think they even said goodbye. The hatter could never accept that his family had abandoned him.' 'Did you ever hear Julian mention a girl called Penelope?' 'Penelope? I don't think so. I'd remember.' 'She was a girlfriend of his, from the time when he still lived in Barcelona.' I pulled out the photograph of Carax and Penelope Aldaya and handed it to her. I noticed how a smile lit up her face when she saw an adolescent Julian Carax. Nostalgia and loss were consuming her. 'He looks so young here. ... Is this the Penelope you mentioned?' I nodded. 'Very good-looking. Julian always managed to be surrounded by pretty women.' Like you, I thought. 'Do you know whether he had lots. . . ?' That smile again, at my expense. 'Girlfriends? Lovers? I don't know. To tell you the truth, I never heard him speak about any woman in his life. Once, just to needle him, I asked him. You must know that he earned his living playing the piano in a hostess bar. I asked him whether he wasn't tempted, surrounded all day by beautiful women of easy virtue. He didn't find the joke funny. He replied that he had no right to love anyone, that he deserved to be alone.' 'Did he say why?' 'Julian never said why.' 'Even so, in the end, shortly before returning to Barcelona in 1936, Julian Carax was going to get married.' 'So they say.' 'Do you doubt it?' She looked sceptical as she shrugged her shoulders. 'As I said, in all the years we knew one another, Julian never mentioned any woman in particular, and even less one he was going to marry. The story about his supposed marriage reached me later. Neuval, Carax's last publisher, told Cabestany that the fiancee was a woman twenty years older than Julian, a rich widow in poor health. According to Neuval, she had been more or less supporting him for years. The doctors gave her six months to live, a year at the most. Neuval said she wanted to marry Julian so that he could inherit from her.' 'But the marriage ceremony never took place.' 'If there ever was such a plan, or such a widow.' 'From what I know, Carax was involved in a duel, on the dawn of the very day he was due to be married. Do you know who with, or why?' 'Neuval supposed it was someone connected to the widow. A greedy distant relative who didn't want to see the inheritance fall into the hands of some upstart. Neuval mostly published penny dreadfuls, and I think the genre had gone to his head.' 'I can see you don't really believe the story of the wedding and the duel.' 'No. I never believed it.' 'What do you think happened, then? Why did Carax return to Barcelona?' She smiled sadly. 'I've been asking myself the same question for seventeen years.' Nuria Monfort lit another cigarette. She offered me one. I was tempted to accept but refused. 'But you must have some theory?' I suggested. 'All I know is that in the summer of 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the war, an employee at the municipal morgue phoned our firm to say they had received the body of Julian Carax three days earlier. They'd found him dead in an alleyway of the Raval quarter, dressed in rags and with a bullet through his heart. He had a book on him, a copy of The Shadow of the Wind, and his passport. The stamp showed he'd crossed the French border a month before. Where he had been during that time, nobody knew. The police contacted his father, but he refused to take responsibility for the body, alleging that he didn't have a son. After two days without anyone claiming the corpse, he was buried in a common grave in Montjuic Cemetery. I couldn't even take him flowers, because nobody could tell me where he'd been buried. It was the employee at the morgue, who had kept the book found in Julian's jacket, who had the idea of phoning Cabestany's publishing house a couple of days later. That is how I found out what had happened. I couldn't understand it. If Julian had anyone left in Barcelona to whom he could turn, it was me or, at a pinch, Cabestany. We were his only friends, but he never told us he'd returned. We only knew he'd come back to Barcelona after he died. . . .' 'Were you able to find out anything else after getting the news?' 'No. Those were the first months of the war, and Julian was not the only one to disappear without a trace. Nobody talks about it anymore, but there are lots of nameless graves, like Julian's. Asking was like banging your head against a brick wall. With the help of Senor Cabestany, who by then was very ill, I made a complaint to the police and pulled all the strings I could. All I got out of it was a visit from a young inspector, an arrogant, sinister sort, who told me it would be a good idea not to ask any more questions and to concentrate my efforts on having a more positive attitude, because the country was in full cry, on a crusade. Those were his words. His name was Fumero, that's all I remember. It seems that now he's quite an important man. He's often mentioned in the papers. Maybe you've heard of him.' I swallowed. 'Vaguely.' 'I heard nothing more about Julian until someone got in touch with the publishers and said he was interested in acquiring all the copies of Carax's novels that were left in the warehouse.' 'Lain Coubert.' Nuria Monfort nodded. 'Have you any idea who that man was?' 'I have an inkling, but I'm not sure. In March 1936 - I remember the date because at the time we were preparing The Shadow of the Wind for press - someone called the publishers to ask for his address. He said he was an old friend and he wanted to visit Julian in Paris. Give him a surprise. They put him onto me, and I said I wasn't authorized to give out that information.' 'Did he say who he was?' 'Someone called Jorge.' 'Jorge Aldaya?' 'It might have been. Julian had mentioned him on more than one occasion. I think they had been at San Gabriel's school together, and sometimes Julian referred to him as if he'd been his best friend.' 'Did you know that Jorge Aldaya was Penelope's brother?' Nuria Monfort frowned. She looked disconcerted. 'Did you give Aldaya Julian's address in Paris?' 'No. He made me feel uneasy.' 'What did he say?' 'He laughed at me, he said he'd find him some other way, and hung up.' Something seemed to be gnawing at her. I began to suspect where the conversation was taking us. 'But you heard from him again, didn't you?' She nodded nervously. 'As I was telling you, shortly after Julian's disappearance that man turned up at Cabestany's firm. By then Cabestany could no longer work, and his eldest son had taken charge of the business. The visitor, Lain Coubert, offered to buy all the remaining stock of Julian's novels. I thought the whole thing was a joke in poor taste. Lain Coubert was a character in The Shadow of the Wind.' 'The devil' Nuria Monfort nodded again. 'Did you actually see Lain Coubert?' She shook her head and lit her third cigarette. 'No. But I heard part of the conversation with the son in Senor Cabestany's office.' She left the sentence in the air, as if she were afraid of finishing it or wasn't sure how to. The cigarette trembled in her fingers. 'His voice,' she said. 'It was the same voice as the man who phoned saying he was Jorge Aldaya. Cabestany's son, the arrogant idiot, tried to ask for more money. Coubert - or whoever he was - said he had to think about the offer. That very night Cabestany's warehouse in Pueblo Nuevo went up in flames, and Julian's books went with it.' 'Except for the ones you rescued and hid in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.' 'That's right.' 'Have you any idea why anyone would have wanted to burn all of Julian Carax's books?' 'Why are books burned? Through stupidity, ignorance, hatred . . . goodness only knows.' 'Why do you think?' I insisted. 'Julian lived in his books. The body that ended up in the morgue was only a part of him. His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all of his characters were himself.' 'So if somebody wanted to destroy him, he'd have to destroy those stories and those characters, isn't that right?' The dispirited smile returned, a tired gesture of defeat. 'You remind me of Julian,' she said. 'Before he lost his faith.' 'His faith in what?' 'In everything.' She came up to me in the half-light and took my hand. She stroked my palm in silence, as if she wanted to read the lines on my skin. My hand was shaking under her touch. I caught myself tracing the shape of her body under those old, borrowed clothes. I wanted to touch her and feel her pulse burning under her skin. Our eyes had met, and I felt sure that she knew what I was thinking. I sensed that she was lonelier than ever. I raised my eyes and met her serene, open gaze. 'Julian died alone, convinced that nobody would remember him or his books and that his life had meant nothing,' she said. 'He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.' I was filled by an almost painful desire to kiss this woman, an eagerness such as I had never experienced before, not even when I conjured up the ghost of Clara Barcelo. She read my thoughts. 'It's getting late for you, Daniel,' she murmured. One part of me wanted to stay, to lose myself in this strange intimacy, to hear her say again how my gestures and my silences reminded her of Julian Carax. 'Yes,' I mumbled. She nodded but said nothing, and then escorted me to the door. The corridor seemed endless. She opened the door for me, and I went out onto the landing. 'If you see my father, tell him I'm well. Lie to him.' I said goodbye to her in a low voice, thanking her for her time and holding out my hand politely. Nuria Monfort ignored my formal gesture. She placed her hands on my arms, leaned forward, and kissed me on the cheek. We gazed at one another, and this time I searched her lips, almost trembling. It seemed to me that they parted a little, and that her fingers were reaching for my face. At the last moment, Nuria Monfort moved away and looked down. 'I think it's best if you leave, Daniel,' she whispered. I thought she was about to cry, but before I could say anything, she closed the door. I was left on the landing, sensing her presence on the other side of the door, motionless, asking myself what had happened in there. At the other end of the landing, the neighbour's spy-hole was blinking. I waved at her and attacked the stairs. When I reached the street, I could still feel Nuria Monfort's face, her voice, and her smell, deep in my soul. I carried the trace of her lips, of her breath on my skin through streets full of faceless people escaping from offices and shops. When I turned into Calle Canuda, an icy wind hit me, cutting through the bustle. I welcomed the cold air on my face and walked up towards the university. After crossing the Ramblas, I made my way towards Calle Tallers and disappeared into its narrow canyon of shadows, feeling that I was still trapped in that dark, gloomy dining room where I now imagined Nuria Monfort sitting alone, silently tidying up her pencils, her folders, and her memories, her eyes poisoned with tears. 21 Dusk fell almost surreptitiously, with a cold breeze and a mantle of purple light that slid between the gaps in the streets. I quickened my pace, and twenty minutes later the front of the university emerged like an ochre ship anchored in the night. In his lodge the porter of the Literature department perused the words of the nation's most influential by-lines in the afternoon edition of the sports pages. There seemed to be hardly any students left in the premises. The echo of my footsteps followed me through the corridors and galleries that led to the cloister, where the glow of two yellowish lights barely disturbed the shadows. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps Bea had tricked me, that she'd arranged to meet me there at that untimely hour as some sort of revenge. The leaves on the orange trees in the cloister shimmered like silver tears, and the sound of the fountain echoed through the arches. I looked carefully around the courtyard, contemplating disappointment or maybe a certain cowardly sense of relief. There she was, sitting on one of the benches, her silhouette outlined against the fountain, her eyes looking up towards the vaults of the cloister. I stopped at the entrance to gaze at her, and for a moment I was reminded of Nuria Monfort daydreaming on her bench in the square. I noticed she didn't have her folder or her books with her, and I suspected she hadn't had any classes that afternoon. Perhaps she'd come here just to meet me. I swallowed hard and walked into the cloister. The sound of my footsteps gave me away and Bea looked up, with a smile of surprise, as if my presence there were just a coincidence. 'I thought you weren't coming,' said Bea. 'That's just what I thought,' I replied. She remained seated, upright, her knees tight together and her hands on her lap. I asked myself how I could feel so detached from her and at the same time read every little detail of her lips. 'I've come because I want to prove to you that you were wrong about what you said the other day, Daniel. I'm going to marry Pablo, and I don't care what you show me tonight. I'm going to El Ferrol as soon as he's finished his military service.' I looked at her as if I'd just had the rug pulled out from under my feet. I realized I'd spent two days walking on air, and now my whole world was collapsing. 'And there I was, thinking you'd come because you felt like seeing me.' I managed a weak smile. I noticed her blushing self-consciously. 'I was only joking,' I lied. 'What I was serious about was my promise to show you a face of the city that you don't yet know. At least that will give you cause to remember me, or Barcelona, whenever you go.' There was a touch of sadness in Bea's smile, and she avoided my eyes. 'I nearly went to the cinema, you know. So as not to see you today,' she said. 'Why?' Bea looked at me but said nothing. She shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyes as if she were trying to catch words that were escaping from her. 'Because I was afraid that perhaps you were right,' she said at last. I sighed. We were shielded by the evening light and that despondent silence that brings strangers together, and I felt brave enough to say anything that came into my head, even though it might be for the last time. 'Do you love him, or don't you?' A smile came and went. 'It's none of your business.' 'That's true,' I said. 'It's only your business.' She gave me a cold look. 'And what does it matter to you?' 'It's none of your business,' I said. She didn't smile. Her lips trembled. 'People who know me know I'm very fond of Pablo. My family and—' 'But I'm almost a stranger,' I interrupted. 'And I would like to hear it from you.' 'Hear what?' 'That you really love him. That you're not marrying him to get away from home, to put distance between yourself and Barcelona and your family, to go somewhere where they can't hurt you. That you're leaving and not running away.' Her eyes shone with angry tears. 'You have no right to say that to me, Daniel. You don't know me.' 'Tell me I'm mistaken and I'll leave. Do you love him?' We looked at one another for a long while, without saying a word. 'I don't know,' she murmured at last. 'I don't know.' 'Someone once said that the moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever,' I said. Bea looked for the irony in my expression. 'Who said that?' 'Someone called Julian Carax.' 'A friend of yours?' I caught myself nodding. 'Sort of.' 'You're going to have to introduce him to me.' 'Tonight, if you like.' We left the university under a bruised sky and wandered aimlessly, just getting used to walking side by side. We took shelter in the only subject we had in common, her brother, Tomas. Bea spoke about him as if he were a virtual stranger, someone she loved but barely knew. She avoided my eyes and smiled nervously. I felt that she regretted what she had said to me in the university cloister, that the words still hurt and were still gnawing at her. 'Listen, what I said to you before,' she said suddenly, 'you won't mention a word to Tomas, will you?' 'Of course not. I won't tell anyone.' She laughed nervously. 'I don't know what came over me. Don't be offended, but sometimes it's easier to talk to a stranger than someone you know. Why is that?' I shrugged. 'Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as they wish us to be.' 'Is that also from your friend Carax?' 'No, I just made it up to impress you.' 'And how do you see me?' 'As a mystery.' 'That's the strangest compliment anyone has ever paid me.' 'It's not a compliment. It's a threat.' 'What do you mean?' 'Mysteries must be solved, one must find out what they hide.' 'You might be disappointed when you see what's inside.' 'I might be surprised. And you, too.' 'Tomas never told me you had so much cheek.' 'That's because what little I have, I've reserved entirely for you.' 'Why?' Because I'm afraid of you, I thought. We sought refuge in a small cafe next to the Poliorama Theatre. Withdrawing to a table by the window, we asked for some serrano ham sandwiches and a couple of white coffees, to warm up. Soon thereafter the manager, a scrawny fellow with the face of an imp, came up to the table with an attentive expression. 'Did you folks ask for the 'am sandwiches?' We nodded. 'Sorry to 'ave to announce, on behalf of the management 'ere, that there's not a scrap of 'am left. I can offer black, white, or mixed butifarra, meatballs, or chistorra. Top of the line, extra fresh. I also 'ave pickled sardines, if you folks can't consume meat products for reasons of religious conscience. It being Friday. . .' 'I'll be fine with a white coffee, really,' said Bea. I was starving. 'What if you bring two servings of spicy potatoes and some bread, too?' 'Right away, sir. And please, pardon the shortness of supplies. Usually I tend to 'ave everything, even Bolshevik caviar. But s'after-noon, it being the European Cup semi-final, we've had a lot of customers. Great game.' The manager walked away ceremoniously. Bea watched him with amusement. 'Where's that accent from? Jaen?' 'Much closer: Santa Coloma de Gramanet,' I specified. 'You don't often take the subway, do you?' 'My father says the subway is full of riffraff and that if you're on your own, the Gypsies feel you up.' I was about to say something but decided to keep my mouth shut. Bea laughed. As soon as the coffees and the food arrived, I fell on it all with no pretence at refinement. Bea didn't eat anything. With her hands spread around the steaming cup, she watched me with half a smile, caught somewhere between curiosity and amazement. 'So what is it you're going to show me today?' 'A number of things. In fact, what I'm going to show you is part of a story. Didn't you tell me the other day that what you like to do is read?' Bea nodded, arching her eyebrows. 'Well, this is a story about books.' 'About books?' 'About accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.' 'You sound like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel.' 'That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story. As real as the fact that this bread they served us is at least three days old. And, like all true stories, it begins and ends in a cemetery, although not the sort of cemetery you imagine.' She smiled the way children smile when they've been promised a riddle or a magic trick. 'I'm all ears.' I gulped down the last of my coffee and looked at her for a few moments without saying anything. I thought about how much I wanted to lose myself in those evasive eyes. I thought about the loneliness that would take hold of me that night when I said goodbye to her, once I had run out of tricks or stories to make her stay with me any longer. I thought about how little I had to offer her and how much I wanted from her. 'I can hear your brains clanking, Daniel. What are you planning?' I began my story with that distant dawn when I awoke and could not remember my mother's face, and I didn't stop until I paused to recall the world of shadows I had sensed that very morning in the home of Nuria Monfort. Bea listened quietly, making no judgment, drawing no conclusions. I told her about my first visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and about the night I spent reading The Shadow of the Wind. I told her about my meeting with the faceless man and about the letter signed by Penelope Aldaya that I always carried with me without knowing why. I spoke about how I had never kissed Clara Barcelo, or anyone, and of how my hands had trembled when I felt the touch of Nuria Monfort's lips on my skin, only a few hours before. I told her how, until that moment, I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger. 'Don't say anything,' whispered Bea. 'Just take me to that place.' It was pitch dark when we stopped by the front door of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, in the gloom of Calle Arco del Teatro. I lifted the devil-head knocker and knocked three times. While we waited, sheltering under the arch of the entrance, the cold wind smelled of charcoal. I met Bea's eyes, so close to mine. She was smiling. Soon we heard light footsteps approaching the door, and then the tired voice of the keeper. 'Who's there?' asked Isaac. 'It's Daniel Sempere, Isaac' I thought I could hear him swearing under his breath. There followed the thousand squeaks and groans from the intricate system of locks. Finally the door yielded an inch or two, revealing the vulturine face of Isaac Monfort lit by candlelight. When he saw me, the keeper sighed and rolled his eyes. 'Stupid of me. I don't know why I ask,' he said. 'Who else could it be at this time of night?' Isaac was clothed in what seemed like a strange crossbreed of dressing gown, bathrobe, and Russian army coat. The padded slippers perfectly matched a checked wool cap, rather like a professor's cap, complete with tassel. 'I hope I didn't get you out of bed,' I said. 'Not at all. I'd only just started saying my prayers. . . .' He looked at Bea as if he'd just seen a pack of dynamite sticks alight at his feet. 'For your own good, I hope this isn't what it looks like,' he threatened. 'Isaac, this is my friend Beatriz, and with your permission I'd like to show her this place. Don't worry, she's completely trustworthy.' 'Sempere, I've known toddlers with more common sense than you.' 'It would only be for a moment.' Isaac let out a snort of defeat and examined Bea carefully, like a suspicious policeman. 'Do you realize you're in the company of an idiot?' he asked. Bea smiled politely. 'I'm beginning to come to terms with it.' 'Sublime innocence! Do you know the rules?' Bea nodded. Isaac mumbled under his breath and let us in, scanning the shadows of the street, as usual. ‘I visited your daughter, Nuria,' I mentioned casually. 'She's well. Working hard, but well. She sends you her love.' 'Yes, and poisoned darts. You're not much good at making things up, Sempere. But I appreciate the effort. Come on in.' Once inside, Isaac handed me the candle and proceeded to lock the door. 'When you've finished, you know where to find me.' Under the mantle of darkness, we could only just make out the spectral forms of the book maze. The candle projected its bubble of light at our feet. Bea paused, astonished, at the entrance to the labyrinth. I smiled, recognizing in her face the same expression my father must have seen in mine years before. We entered the tunnels and galleries of the maze; they creaked under our footsteps. The marks I had made during my last incursion were still there. 'Come on, I want to show you something,' I said. More than once I lost my own trail and we had to go backwards in search of the last sign. Bea watched me with a mixture of alarm and fascination. My inner compass told me we were caught in a knot of spirals that rose slowly towards the very heart of the labyrinth. At last I managed to retrace my steps through the tangle of corridors and tunnels until I entered a narrow passage that felt like a gangway stretching out into the gloom, I knelt down by the last shelf and looked for my old friend hidden behind the row of dust-covered volumes - the layer of dust shining like frost in the candlelight. I took the book and handed it to Bea. 'Let me introduce you to Julian Carax.' 'The Shadow of the Wind,' Bea read, stroking the faded letters on the cover. 'Can I take it with me?' she asked. 'You can take any book but this one.' 'But that's not fair. After all the things you've told me, this is precisely the one I want.

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