'And you have no idea where she was or who she was with?'
'He's already told you he doesn't, Fermin,' I intervened, anxious to change the subject.
'Nor your father?' insisted Fermin who was thoroughly enjoying himself.
'No. But he's sworn he'll find out, and break the guy's legs and his face as soon as he knows who it is.'
I felt myself going deathly pale. Fermin offered me a cup of his concoction without asking. I drank it down in one gulp. It tasted like tepid diesel fuel. Tomas watched me but said nothing - a dark, impenetrable look.
'Did you hear that?' Fermin suddenly said. 'Sounded like a drum roll for a somersault.'
'No.'
'Yours truly's rumblings. Look, I'm suddenly terribly hungry. ... Do you mind if I leave you two alone and run up to the baker's to grab myself a bun? Not to mention the new shop assistant who's just arrived from Reus: she looks so tasty you could eat her. She's called Maria Virtudes, but despite her name the girl is pure vice. . . . That way I'll leave you two to talk in peace, eh?'
In ten seconds Fermin had done a disappearing act, off for his snack and his meeting with the young woman. Tomas and I were left alone, enveloped in a silence as weighty as the Swiss franc. After several minutes I could bear it no longer.
'Tomas,' I began, my mouth dry. 'Last night your sister was with me.'
He stared at me without even blinking. I swallowed hard. 'Say something,' I said.
'You're not right in the head.'
A minute went by, muffled sounds coming in from the street. Tomas held his coffee, which he had not touched.
'Are you serious?' he asked.
'I've only seen her once.'
'That's not an answer.'
'Do you mind?'
He shrugged his shoulders. 'You'd better be sure you know what you're doing. Would you stop seeing her just because I asked you to?'
'Yes,' I lied. 'But don't ask me to.'
Tomas looked down. 'You don't know Bea,' he murmured.
I didn't reply. We let another few minutes go by without saying a word, looking at the grey figures who were scanning the shop window, praying that one of them would decide to come in and rescue us from that poisonous silence. After a while Tomas abandoned his cup on the counter and made his way to the door.
'You're leaving already?'
He nodded.
'Shall we meet up tomorrow for a while?' I said. 'We could go to the cinema, with Fermin, like before.'
He stopped by the door. 'I'll only tell you once, Daniel. Don't hurt my sister.'
On his way out, he passed Fermin, who was returning laden with a bag full of steaming-hot buns. Fermin saw him go off into the dusk, shaking his head. He left the buns on the counter and offered me an ensaimada just out of the oven. I declined. I wouldn't even have been able to swallow an aspirin.
'He'll get over it, Daniel. You'll see. These things are common between friends.'
'I don't know,' I mumbled.
24.
Fermin and I met on Sunday at seven-thirty in the morning at the Canaletas Cafe. Fermin treated me to a coffee and brioches whose texture, even with butter spread on them, bore a resemblance to pumice stone. We were served by a waiter who sported a fascist badge on his lapel and a pencil moustache. He didn't stop humming to himself, and when we asked him the reason for his excellent mood, he explained that he'd become a father the day before. We congratulated him, and he insisted on giving us each a cigar to smoke during the day, in honour of his firstborn. We said we would. Fermin kept looking at him out of the corner of his eye, frowning, and I suspected he was plotting something.
Over breakfast Fermin kicked off the day's investigations with a general outline of the mystery.
'It all begins with the sincere friendship between two boys, Julian Carax and Jorge Aldaya, classmates since early childhood, like Don Tomas and yourself. For years all is well. Inseparable friends with a whole life before them, the works. And yet at some point a conflict arises that ruins this friendship. To paraphrase the drawing-room dramatists, the conflict bears a woman's name: Penelope. Very Homeric. Do you follow me?'
The only thing that came to my mind was the last sentence spoken by Tomas the previous evening in the bookshop: 'Don't hurt my sister.' I felt nauseous.
'In 1919, Julian Carax sets off for Paris, Odysseus-fashion,' Fermin continued. 'The letter, signed by Penelope, which he never receives, establishes that by then the young woman has been incarcerated in her own house, a prisoner of her family for reasons that are unclear, and that the friendship between Aldaya and Carax has ended. Moreover, according to Penelope, her brother, Jorge, has sworn that if he ever sees his old friend Julian again, he'll kill him. Grim words indeed. One doesn't have to be Pasteur to deduce that this conflict is a direct consequence of the relationship between Penelope and Carax.'
A cold sweat covered my forehead. I could feel the coffee and the few mouthfuls of brioche I'd swallowed rising up my throat.
'All the same, we must assume that Carax never gets to know what happened to Penelope, because the letter doesn't reach him. He vanishes from sight into the mists of Paris, where he will lead a ghostly existence between his job as a pianist in a variety club and his disastrous career as a remarkably unsuccessful novelist. These years in Paris are a puzzle. All that remains of them today is a forgotten literary work that has virtually disappeared. We know that at some point he decides to marry a mysterious rich lady who is twice his age. The nature of such a marriage, if we are to go by what the witnesses say, seems more an act of charity or friendship on behalf of an ailing lady than a love match. Whichever way you look at it, this patron of the arts, fearing for the financial future of her protege, decides to leave him her fortune and bid farewell to this world with a roll in the hay to further her noble cause. Parisians are like that.'
'Perhaps it was a genuine love,' I suggested, in a tiny voice.
'Hey, Daniel, are you all right? You're looking very pale, and you're perspiring terribly.'
'I'm fine,' I lied.
'As I was saying. Love is a lot like pork: there's loin steak and there's bologna. Each has its own place and function. Carax had declared that he didn't feel worthy of any love, and indeed, as far as we know, no romances were recorded during his years in Paris. Of course, working in a brothel, perhaps his basic urges were satisfied by fraternizing with the employees, as if it were a perk of the job, so to speak. But this is pure speculation. Let us return to the moment when the marriage between Carax and his protectress is announced. That is when Jorge Aldaya reappears on the map of this murky business. We know he makes contact with Carax's publisher in Barcelona to find out the whereabouts of the novelist. Shortly afterwards, on the morning of his wedding day, Julian Carax fights a duel with an unknown person in Pere Lachaise cemetery, and disappears. The wedding never takes place. From then on, everything becomes confused.'
Fermin allowed for a dramatic pause, giving me his conspiratorial look. 'Supposedly Carax crosses the border and, with yet another show of his proverbial sense of timing, returns to Barcelona in 1936 at the very outbreak of the Civil War. His activities and whereabouts in Barcelona during these weeks are hazy. We suppose he stays in the city for about a month and that during this time he doesn't contact any of his acquaintances. Neither his father nor his friend Nuria Monfort. Then he is found dead in the street, struck down by a bullet. It is not long before a sinister character makes his appearance on the scene. He calls himself Lain Coubert - a name he borrows from the last novel by Julian Carax and who, to cap it all, is none other than the Prince of Darkness. The supposed Lucifer states that he is prepared to obliterate what little is left of Carax and destroy his books forever. To round off the melodrama, he appears as a faceless man, disfigured by fire. A rogue from a Gothic operetta in whom, just to confuse matters more, Nuria Monfort believes she recognizes the voice of Jorge Aldaya.'
'Let me remind you that Nuria Monfort lied to me,' I said.
'True. But even if Nuria Monfort lied to you, she might have done it more by omission and perhaps to disassociate herself from the facts. There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite. Listen, are you sure you're all right? Your face is the colour of goat's cheese.'
I shook my head and dashed to the toilet.
I threw up my breakfast, my dinner, and a good amount of the anger I was carrying with me. I washed my face with freezing water from the sink and looked at my reflection in the blurry mirror on which someone had scrawled shithead fascists with a wax crayon. When I got back to the table, I realized that Fermin was at the bar, paying the bill and discussing football with the waiter who had served us.
'Better?' he asked.
I nodded.
'That was a drop in your blood pressure,' said Fermin. 'Here. Have a Sugus sweet, they cure everything.'
On the way out of the cafe, Fermin insisted that we should take a taxi as far as San Gabriel's school and leave the subway for another day, arguing that the morning was as bright as a political mural and that tunnels were for rats.
'A taxi up to Sarria will cost a fortune,' I protested.
'The ride's on the Cretins' Savings Bank,' Fermin put in quickly. 'The proud patriot back there gave me the wrong change, and we're in business. And you're not up to travelling underground.'
Equipped with our ill-gotten funds, we positioned ourselves on a corner at the foot of Rambla de Cataluna and waited for a cab. We had to let a few go by, because Fermin stated that, since he so rarely travelled by car, he wanted to get into a Studebaker at the very least. It took us a quarter of an hour to find a vehicle to his liking, which Fermin hailed by waving his arms about like a windmill. Fermin insisted on travelling in the front seat, and this gave him the chance to get involved in a discussion with the driver about Joseph Stalin, who was the driver's idol and spiritual guide.
'There have been three great figures this century: La Pasionaria; bullfighter extraordinaire Monolete; and Joseph Stalin,' the taxi driver proclaimed, getting ready to unload upon us a life of the saintly comrade.
I was riding comfortably in the back seat, paying little attention to the tedious speech, with the window open and enjoying the fresh air. Delighted to be driving around in a Studebaker, Fermin encouraged the cabdriver's chatter, occasionally punctuating his emotive biography of the Soviet leader with matters of doubtful historic interest.
'I've heard he's been suffering badly from prostate trouble ever since he swallowed the pip of a loquat, and now he can only pee if someone hums "The Internationale" for him,' he put in.
'Fascist propaganda,' the taxi driver explained, more devout than ever. 'The comrade pisses like a bull. The Volga might envy such a flow.'
This high-level political debate accompanied us as we made our way along Via Augusta towards the hills. Day was breaking, with a fresh breeze, and the sky was an intense blue. When we reached Calle Ganduxer, the driver turned right, and we began the slow ascent toward Paseo de la Bonanova.
San Gabriel's school, its redbrick facade dotted with dagger-shaped windows, stood in the middle of a grove, at the top of a narrow, winding street that led up from the boulevard. The whole structure, crowned by arches and towers, peered over a group of plane trees like some Gothic cathedral. We got out of the taxi and entered a leafy garden strewn with fountains that were adorned with mould-covered angels. Here and there cobbled paths meandered between the trees. On our way to the main door, Fermin gave me the background on the institution.
'Even though it may look like Rasputin's mausoleum to you, San Gabriel's school was, in its day, one of the most prestigious and exclusive institutions in Barcelona. During the Republic it went downhill because the nouveaux riches of the time, the new industrialists and bankers to whose children it had for years refused access because their surnames smelled too new, decided to create their own schools, where they would be treated with due reverence and where they, in turn, could refuse access to the sons of others. Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood. In this world a surname is less durable than a sugared almond. In its heyday - say, between 1880 and 1930, more or less - San Gabriel's school took in the flower of old, established families with bulging wallets. The Aldayas and company came to this sinister establishment as boarders, to fraternize with their equals, go to mass, and learn their history in order to be able to repeat it ad nauseam.'
'But Julian Carax wasn't really one of them,' I observed.
'Sometimes these illustrious institutions offer a scholarship or two for the sons of the gardener or the shoeshine man, just to show their magnanimity and Christian charity,' Fermin proffered. 'The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich. That is the poison with which capitalism blinds the-'
'Please don't get carried away with social doctrine, Fermin. If one of these priests hears you, they'll kick us out of here.' I realized that a couple of padres were watching us with a mixture of curiosity and concern from the top of the steps that led up to the front door of the school. I wondered whether they'd heard any of our conversation.
One of them moved forward with a courteous smile, his hands crossed over his chest like a bishop. He must have been in his early fifties, and his lean build and sparse hair lent him the air of a bird of prey. He had a penetrating gaze and gave off an aroma of fresh eau de cologne and mothballs.
'Good morning. I'm Father Fernando Ramos,' he announced. 'How can I help you?'
Fermin held out his hand. The priest examined it briefly before shaking it, giving us an icy smile.
'Fermin Romero de Torres, bibliographic adviser to Sempere and Son. It is an enormous pleasure to greet Your Most Devout Excellency. Here, at my side, my collaborator and friend, Daniel, a young man of promise and much-recognized Christian qualities.'
Father Fernando observed us without blinking. I wanted the earth to swallow me.
'The pleasure is all mine, Senor Romero de Torres,' he replied amicably. 'May I ask what brings such a formidable duo to our humble institution?5 I decided to intervene before Fermin made some other outrageous comment and we had to make a quick exit. 'Father Fernando, we're trying to locate two former alumni of San Gabriel's: Jorge Aldaya and Julian Carax.'
Father Fernando pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. 'Julian died over fifteen years ago, and Aldaya went off to Argentina,' he said dryly.
'Did you know them?' asked Fermin.
The priest's sharp gaze rested on each of us before he answered. 'We were classmates. May I ask what your interest is in this matter?'
I was wondering how to answer the question, but Fermin beat me to it. 'You see, it so happens that we have in our possession a number of articles that belong or belonged - for on this particular the legal interpretation leads to confusion - to the two persons in question.'
'And what is the nature of these articles, if you don't mind my asking?'
'I beg Your Grace to accept our silence, for God knows there are abundant reasons for conscience and secrecy that have nothing to do with the unquestioning faith Your Excellency merits, as does the order which you represent with such measure of gallantry and piety,' Fermin spewed out at great speed.
Father Fernando appeared to be almost in shock. I decided to take up the conversation again before Fermin had time to get his breath back.
'The articles Senor Romero de Torres is referring to are of a personal nature, mementos and objects of purely sentimental value. What we would like to ask you, Father, if this isn't too much trouble, is to tell us what you remember about Julian and Aldaya from your days as schoolboys.'
Father Fernando was still looking at us suspiciously. It became obvious to me that the explanations we'd given him were not enough to justify our interest and earn us his collaboration. I threw a look of desperation at Fermin, begging him to find some cunning argument with which to win over the priest.
'Do you know that you look a bit like Julian when he was young?' asked Father Fernando suddenly.
Fermin's eyes lit up. Here he goes, I thought. All our luck rests on this card.
'Very shrewd of you, Your Reverence,' proclaimed Fermin, feigning surprise. 'Your uncanny insight has unmasked us. You'll end up as a cardinal at least, or even a pope.'
'What are you talking about?'
'Isn't it obvious and patent, Your Lordship?'
'Quite frankly, no.'
'Can we count on the secrecy of the confessional?'
'This is a garden, not a confessional.'
'It will be enough if you grant us your ecclesiastic discretion.'
'You have it.'
Fermin heaved a deep sigh and looked at me with a melancholy expression. 'Daniel, we can't go on lying to this saintly soldier of Christ.'
'Of course not. . .' I corroborated, completely lost.
Fermin went up to the priest and murmured in a confidential tone, 'Father, we have most solid grounds to suspect that our friend Daniel here is none other than the secret son of the deceased Julian Carax. Hence our interest in reconstructing the past and recovering the memory of an illustrious person, whom the Fates tore away from the side of a poor child.'
Father Fernando fixed his astounded eyes on me. 'Is this true?'
I nodded. Fermin patted my back, his face full of sorrow.
'Look at him, poor lad, searching for a father lost in the mist of memory. What could be sadder than this? Tell me, Your Most Saintly Grace.'
'Have you any proof to support your assertions?'
Fermin grabbed my chin and offered up my face as payment. 'What further proof would the clergyman require than this little face, silent, irrefutable witness of the paternal fact in question?'
The priest seemed to hesitate.