Barcelo waited ceremoniously for Bernarda to retire. He helped himself to seven lumps of sugar and began to stir the coffee with the spoon, his catlike smile discernible behind dark clouds of Dutch tobacco.
'As you see, I run my house with a firm hand.'
'Yes, you're certainly a tough one, Don Gustavo.'
'And you're a smooth talker. Tell me, Daniel, now that nobody can hear us. Why isn't it a good idea to report what has happened to the police?'
'Because they already know.'
'You mean ...?'
I nodded.
'What kind of trouble are you two in, if you don't mind my asking?'
I sighed.
'Anything I can help with?'
I looked up. Barcelo smiled at me without malice, for once putting his irony aside.
'Does this, by any chance, have anything to do with that book by Carax you didn't want to sell me when you should have?'
The question caught me totally by surprise.
'I could help you,' he offered. 'I have a surplus of what you both lack: money and common sense.'
'Believe me, Don Gustavo, I've already got too many people involved in this business.'
'One more won't make much difference, then. Come on, confide in me. Imagine that I'm your confessor.'
'I haven't been to confession for years.'
'It shows on your face.'
33.
Gustavo Barcelo had a way of listening that seemed both contemplative and Solomonic, like a doctor or a pope. He observed me with his hands joined under his chin and his elbows on his desk, as if in prayer. His eyes were wide open, and he nodded here and there, as if he could detect symptoms in the flow of my narrative and was composing his own diagnosis. Every time I paused, the bookseller raised his eyebrows inquisitively and beckoned with his right hand for me to continue unravelling my jumbled story, which seemed to amuse him enormously. Every now and then, he would raise a hand and take notes, or would stare into space as if he wanted to consider the implications of what I was telling him. More often than not, he would lick his lips and smile ironically, a gesture I attributed either to my ingenuity or to the foolishness of my conjectures.
'Listen, if you think this is nonsense, I'll shut up.'
'On the contrary. Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.'
'Who said that? Seneca?'
'No. Braulio Recolons - he runs a pork butcher's on Calle Avignon and has a great talent for both making sausages and composing witty aphorisms. Please continue. You were telling me about this lively girl. . .'
'Bea. And that is my business and has nothing to do with anything else.'
Barcelo tried to keep his laughter to himself. I was about to continue the story of my adventures when Dr Soldevila poked his head round the door of the study, looking tired and out of breath.
'Please excuse me. I'm leaving now. The patient is well, and, for lack of a better expression, he's full of beans. That gentleman will outlive us all. He's even saying that the sedatives have gone to his head and given him a high. He refuses to rest and insists that he must have a word with Daniel about matters he did not wish to explain to me, claiming that he doesn't believe in the Hippocratic, or hypocritical, oath as he calls it.'
'We'll go and see him right away. And please forgive poor Fermin. He's obviously still in shock.'
'Perhaps, but I wouldn't rule out shamelessness. He keeps pinching the nurse's bottom and reciting rhyming couplets in praise of her firm and shapely thighs.'
We escorted the doctor and his nurse to the door and thanked them effusively for their good offices. When we went into the bedroom, we discovered that Bernarda had challenged Barcelo's orders after all, and was lying on the bed next to Fermin. The fright, the brandy, and the exhaustion had finally sent her to sleep. Covered in bandages, dressings, and slings, Fermin held her tenderly, stroking her hair. His face carried a bruise that it hurt to look at, and from it emerged his large, unharmed nose, two ears like sails, and the eyes of a dispirited mouse. His toothless smile, through lips covered in cuts, was triumphant, and he greeted us with his right hand raised in the sign of victory.
'How are you feeling, Fermin?' I asked.
'Twenty years younger,' he said in a low voice, so as not to wake Bernarda.
'Stop pretending, damn it. You look like shit, Fermin. You scared me to death. Are you sure you're all right? Isn't your head spinning? Aren't you hearing voices?'
'Now you mention it, sometimes I thought I could hear a discordant and arrhythmic murmur, as if a macaque was trying to play the piano.'
Barcelo frowned. Clara went on tinkling on the piano in the distance.
'Don't worry, Daniel. I've survived worse sticks and stones. That Fumero can't even kick a bad habit.'
'So the person who sculpted you a new face is none other than Inspector Fumero,' said Barcelo. 'I see you two move in the highest circles.'
'I hadn't got to that part of the story,' I said.
Fermin looked at me in alarm.
'It's all right, Fermin. Daniel is filling me in about this little play that you two are taking part in. I must admit, it's all very interesting. What about you, Fermin, how are you on confessions? I warn you, I spent two years in a seminary.'
'I would have said at least three, Don Gustavo.'
'Some things get lost along the way. Shame, for a start. This is the first time you've visited my house, and already you end up in bed with the maid.'
'Look at her, poor little thing, my angel. You must understand that my intentions are honest, Don Gustavo.'
'Your intentions are your own business, and Barnarda's. She's quite old enough. Now, let's be frank. What kind of charade are you two involved in?'
'What have you told him, Daniel?'
'We got to act two: enter the femme fatale,' Barcelo explained.
'Nuria Monfort?' Fermin .asked.
Barcelo smacked his lips with delight. 'But is there more than one? This sounds like The Abduction from the Seraglio.'
'Please lower your voice. My fiancee is present.'
'Don't worry, your fiancee has half a bottle of brandy in her veins. The trumpets of doom wouldn't wake her. Go on, ask Daniel to tell me the rest. Three heads are better than two, especially if the third one is mine.'
Fermin attempted to shrug his shoulders under dressings and slings. 'I'm not against it, Daniel. It's your call.'
Having resigned myself to taking Don Gustavo on board, I continued with my narrative until I reached the point when Fumero and his men came upon us on Calle Moncada a few hours earlier. When the story reached an end, Barcelo got up and began pacing up and down the room. Fermin and I observed him cautiously while Bernarda snored like a baby calf.
'Little angel,' whispered Fermin, entranced.
'A few things have caught my attention,' the bookseller said at last. 'Evidently Inspector Fumero is in this up to his neck, although how and why is something that escapes me. On the one hand, there's this woman-'
'Nuria Monfort.'
'Then there's the business of Julian Carax's return to Barcelona and his murder in the streets of the city - after a month in which nobody knows anything about him. It's obvious that the woman is lying through her teeth.'
'That's what I've been saying from the start,' said Fermin, casting a glance at me. 'Trouble is, some of us suffer from an excess of juvenile ardour and a poor grasp of the situation.'
'Look who's talking: St John of the Cross.'
'That's enough. Let's calm down and stick to the facts. There's one thing in Daniel's narrative that seemed very strange to me, even stranger than the rest of it. It has nothing to do with the gothic spin of this whole saga, but with an essential and apparently banal detail,' Barcelo said.
'Dazzle us, Don Gustavo.'
'Well, here it is: this business about Carax's father refusing to identify Carax's body, claiming that he didn't have a son. That seems very odd to me. Almost unnatural. No father in the world would do that. Never mind the bad blood there might have been between them. Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we see only what is. good, or what we want to see.'
'What a great quote, Don Gustavo,' Fermin said. 'Do you mind if I add it to my repertoire?'
'But there are always exceptions,' I objected. 'From what we know, Senor Fortuny was rather peculiar.'
'Everything we know about him is third hand gossip,' said Barcelo. 'When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he's a saint or they're not telling the whole story.'
'The trouble is, you've taken a shining to the hatter just because he's a dimwit,' said Fermin.
'With all due respect to the profession, when the description of a rogue is based solely on the caretaker's statement, my first instinct is not to trust it.'
'But that means we can't be sure of anything. Everything we know is, as you say, third-, or even fourth-hand. Caretakers or otherwise.'
'Never trust he who trusts everyone,' Barcelo added.
'What an evening you're having, Don Gustavo,' Fermin applauded. 'Pearls of wisdom offered in abundance. Would that I had your crystalline insight-'
'The only crystalline thing in all this is that you need my help -logistical and probably monetary as well - if you're hoping to bring this pantomime to a conclusion before Inspector Fumero reserves a suite for you in San Sebas Prison. Fermin, I assume you're with me?'
'I'll follow Daniel's orders.'
'Daniel, what do you say?'
'You two are doing all the talking. What do you propose, Don Gustavo?'
'This is my plan: as soon as Fermin has recovered, you, Daniel, pay a casual visit to Nuria Monfort and put your cards on the table. You let her see that you know she's lied to you and that she's hiding something, a lot or a little - that remains to be seen.'
'What for?'
'To see how she reacts. She won't say anything to you, of course. Or she'll lie to you again. The important thing is to thrust the banderilla into her - forgive the bullfighting image - to see where the bull will lead us or, should I say, the young heifer. And that's where you come in, Fermin. While Daniel is in action, you position yourself discreetly where you can keep watch on the suspect and wait for her to take the bait. Once she's done that, you follow her.'
'You're assuming she'll go somewhere,' I protested.
'O ye of little faith! She will. Sooner or later. And something tells me that in this case it will be sooner rather than later. It's the basis of female psychology.'
'And in the meantime, what are you planning to do, Dr Freud?' I asked.
'That's my business. You'll know in good time. And you'll thank me for it.'
I looked for reassurance in Fermin's eyes, but the poor man had slowly been falling asleep, hugging Bernarda, while Barcelo was drawing up his triumphant plan. Fermin's head was tilted to one side, and dribble was leaking onto his chest from the edge of a beatific smile. Bernarda was snoring loudly.
'I do hope this one proves good,' Barcelo murmured.
'Fermin is a great person,' I said.
'He must be, because I don't think he can have won her over with his looks. Come on, let's go.'
We turned out the light and left the room quietly, closing the door and leaving the two lovers in the hands of sleep. I thought I could see the first glimmer of daybreak through the gallery windows at the end of the corridor.
'Suppose I say no,' I said in a low voice. 'Suppose I tell you to forget this.'
Barcelo smiled. 'Too late, Daniel. You should have sold me that book years ago, when you had the chance.'
Day was dawning when I reached home, dragging myself in that absurd loaned suit through damp streets that shone with a scarlet hue. I found my father asleep in his dining-room armchair, with a blanket over his legs and his favourite book open in his lap - a copy of Voltaire's Candide, which he reread a couple of times a year, the only times I heard him laugh heartily. I observed him: his hair was grey, thinning, and the skin on his face had begun to sag around his cheekbones. I looked at that man whom I had once imagined almost invincible; he now seemed fragile, defeated without knowing it. Perhaps we were both defeated. I leaned over to cover him with the blanket he had been promising to give away to charity for years, and I kissed his forehead, as if by doing so I could protect him from the invisible threads that kept him away from me, from that tiny apartment, and from my memories. As if I believed that with that kiss I could deceive time and convince it to pass us by, to return some other day, some other life.
34.
I spent nearly all morning daydreaming in the back room, conjuring up images of Bea. I visualized her naked skin under my hands, and it seemed to me that I could almost taste her sweet breath. I caught myself remembering with maplike precision every contour of her body, the glistening of my saliva on her lips and on that line of fair hair, so fair it was almost transparent, that ran down her belly and that my friend Fermin, in his improvised lectures on carnal logistics, liked to call 'the little road to Jerez'.
I looked at my watch for the umpteenth time and realized to my horror that there were still a few hours to go before I could see, and touch, Bea. I tried to sort out the month's invoices, but the rustle of the sheets of paper reminded me of the sound of underwear slipping down the pale hips and thighs of Dona Beatriz Aguilar, sister of my childhood friend.
'Daniel, you've got your head in the clouds. Is anything worrying you? Is it Fermin?' my father asked.
I nodded, ashamed of myself. My best friend had lost a few ribs to save my skin a few hours earlier, and all I could think of was the fastening of a bra.
'Speak of the devil. . .'