'Excuse me. I don't know whether it's listening to the rain all day, but suddenly it seems there's something of an emergency building down there, and when nature calls 'But of course,' I said, making way for him. 'It's all yours.'
'Much obliged.'
The policeman, who, in the light of the bare bulb, reminded me of a small weasel, looked me up and down. His rat like eyes paused on the missal I held in my hands.
'If I don't have something to read, I just can't go,' I explained.
'It's the same for me. And people say Spaniards don't read. May I borrow it?'
'On top of the cistern, you'll find the latest Critics' Prize,' I said, cutting him short. 'It's infallible.'
I walked away without losing my composure and joined my father, who was pouring me a cup of white coffee.
'What's he doing here?' I asked.
'He swore on his mother's grave that he was on the verge of wetting himself. What was I supposed to do?'
'Leave him in the street and let him warm up that way?'
My father frowned.
'If you don't mind, I'm going up to the apartment.'
'Of course I don't mind. And put on some dry clothes. You're going to catch your death.'
The apartment was cold and silent. I went into my bedroom and peeped out of the window. The second sentinel was still there, by the door of the Church of Santa Ana. I took off my soaking clothes and put on some thick pyjamas and a dressing gown that had belonged to my grandfather. I lay down on the bed without bothering to turn on the light and abandoned myself to the darkness and the sound of the rain on the windowpanes. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up the image of Bea, her touch and smell. The night before I hadn't slept at all, and soon I was overcome by exhaustion. In my dreams the hooded figure of Death rode over Barcelona, a ghostly apparition that hovered above the towers and roofs, trailing black ropes that held hundreds of small white coffins. The coffins left behind them their own trail of black flowers, on whose petals, written in blood, was the name Nuria Monfort.
I awoke at the break of a grey dawn. The windows were steamed up. I dressed for the cold weather and put on some calf-length boots, then went out into the corridor and groped my way through the apartment. I slipped out through the door and went down to the street. The newsstands in the Ramblas were already lighting up in the distance. I steered a course towards the one that was anchored at the mouth of Calle Tallers and bought the first edition of the day's paper, which still smelled of warm ink. I rushed through the pages until I found the obituary section. Nuria Monfort's name lay under a printed cross, and I couldn't bring myself to look at it. I walked away with the newspaper folded under my arm. The funeral was that afternoon, in Montjuic Cemetery. After walking round the block, I returned home. My father was still asleep, so I went back into my room. I sat at my desk and took the Meisterstuck pen out of its case, then took a blank sheet of paper and hoped the nib would guide me. In my hands the pen had nothing to say. In vain I tried to conjure up the words I wanted to offer Nuria Monfort, but I was incapable of writing or feeling anything except the terror of her absence, of knowing she was lost, wrenched away. I knew that one day she would return to me, in the months or years to come, and that I would always relive her memory in the touch of a stranger, in the recollection of images that no longer belonged to me.
43.
Shortly before three o'clock, I got on a bus in Paseo de Colon that would take me to the cemetery on Montjuic. Through the window I could see the forest of masts and fluttering pennants in the docks. The bus, which was almost empty, circled Montjuic mountain and started up the road to the eastern gates of the boundless cemetery. I was the last passenger to get off.
'What time does the last bus leave?' I asked the driver.
'At half past four.'
The driver left me by the cemetery gates. An avenue of cypress trees rose in the mist. Even from there, at the foot of the mountain, you could already begin to see the vast city of the dead that scaled the slope to the very top: avenues of tombs, walks lined with gravestones and alleyways of mausoleums, towers crowned by fiery angels and whole forests of sepulchres that seemed to grow into one another. The city of the dead was a vast abyss guarded by an army of rotting stone statues sinking into the mud. J took a deep breath and entered the labyrinth. My mother lay buried only a hundred yards from the path along which I walked. With every step I took, I could feel the cold, the emptiness, and the fury of that place; the horror of its silence, of the faces trapped in old photographs abandoned to the company of candles and dead flowers. After a while I caught the distant glimpse of gas lamps around a grave, the shapes of half a dozen people lined up against an ashen sky. I quickened my pace and stopped where I could hear the words of the priest.
The coffin, an unpolished pine box, rested on the mud. Two gravediggers guarded it, leaning on spades. I scanned those present. Old Isaac, the keeper of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, had not attended his daughter's funeral. I recognized the neighbour who lived opposite. She shook her head, sobbing, while a man stroked her back with a resigned air. Her husband, I imagined. Next to them was a woman of about forty, dressed in grey and carrying a bunch of flowers. She cried quietly, looking away from the grave with tight lips. I had never seen her before. Separated from the group, clad in a dark raincoat and holding his hat behind his back, was the policeman who had saved my life the day before. Palacios. He raised his eyes and observed me for a few seconds without blinking. The blind, senseless words of the priest were all that separated us from the terrible silence. I stared at the mud-splattered coffin. I imagined Nuria lying inside it, and I didn't realize I was crying until the woman in grey came up to me and offered me one of the flowers from her bunch. I remained there until the group had dispersed. At a sign from the priest, the gravediggers got ready to do their work. I kept the flower in my coat pocket and walked away, unable to express my final farewell.
It was beginning to get dark by the time I reached the cemetery gates, and I assumed I'd missed the last bus. I was about to start a long walk, under the shadow of the necropolis, following the road that skirted the port back to Barcelona. A black car was parked about twenty yards ahead of me, its lights on. Inside, a figure smoked a cigarette. As I drew near, Palacios opened the passenger door.
'Get in. I'll take you home. You won't find any buses or taxis around here at this time of day.'
I hesitated for a moment. 'I'd rather walk.'
'Don't be silly. Get in.'
He spoke in the steely tone of someone used to giving orders and being obeyed instantly. 'Please,' he added.
I got into the car, and the policeman started the engine.
'Enrique Palacios,' he said, holding his hand out to me.
I didn't shake it. 'If you leave me in Colon, that's fine.'
The car sped off. We joined the traffic on the main road and travelled a good stretch without uttering a single word.
'I want you to know I'm very sorry about Senora Monfort.'
Coming from him, the words seemed obscene, an insult.
'I'm grateful to you for saving my life the other day, but I must tell you I don't give a shit what you feel, Senor Enrique Palacios.'
'I'm not what you think, Daniel. I'd like to help you.'
'If you expect me to tell you where Fermin is, you can leave me right here.'
'I don't give a damn where your friend is. I'm not on duty now.'
I didn't reply.
'You don't trust me, and I don't blame you. But at least listen to me. This has already gone too far. There was no reason why this woman should have died. I beg you to let this matter drop and put this man, Carax, out of your mind forever.'
'You speak as if I'm in control of what's happening. I'm only a spectator. The whole show has been staged by you and your boss.'
'I'm tired of funerals, Daniel. I don't want to have to go to yours.'
'All the better, because you're not invited.'
'I'm serious.'
'Me, too. Please stop and let me out'
'We'll be in Colon in two minutes.'
'I don't care. This car smells of death, like you. Let me out.'
Palacios slowed down and stopped on the hard shoulder. I got out of the car and banged the door shut, eluding Palacios's eyes. I waited for him to leave, but the police officer didn't seem to be going anywhere. I turned around and saw him lowering the car window. I thought I read honesty, even pain, in his face, but I refused to believe it.
'Nuria Monfort died in my arms, Daniel,' he said. 'I think her last words were a message for you.'
'What did she say?' I asked, my voice gripped by an icy cold. 'Did she mention my name?'
'She was delirious, but I think she was referring to you. At one point she said there were worse prisons than words. Then, before she died, she asked me to tell you to let her go.'
I looked at him without understanding. 'To let who go?'
'Someone called Penelope. I imagined she must be your girlfriend.'
Palacios looked down and set off into the twilight. I remained there, staring disconcerted at the lights of the car as they disappeared into the blue-and-red dusk. Then I walked on towards Paseo de Colon, repeating to myself those last words of Nuria Monfort but finding no meaning to them. When I reached the square called Portal de la Paz, I stopped next to the pleasure boats to gaze at the port. I sat on the steps that disappeared into the murky water, in the same place where, on a night that was now in the distant past, I had met Lain Coubert, the man without a face.
'There are worse prisons than words,' I murmured.
Only then did I understand that the message from Nuria Monfort was not meant for me. I wasn't the one who had to let Penelope go. Her last words hadn't been for a stranger, but for a man she had loved in silence for twenty years: Julian Carax.
44.
Night was falling when I reached Plaza de San Felipe Neri. The bench on which I had first caught sight of Nuria Monfort stood at the foot of a streetlamp, empty and tattooed by penknives with the names of lovers, with insults and promises. I looked up to the windows of Nuria Monfort's home on the third floor and noticed a dim, flickering copper light. A candle.
I entered the cavernous foyer and groped my way up the stairs. My hands shook when I reached the third-floor landing. A sliver of reddish light shone from beneath the frame of the half-open door. I placed my hand on the doorknob and remained there motionless, listening. I thought I heard a whisper, a choked voice coming from within. For a moment I thought that if I opened that door, I'd find her waiting for me on the other side, smoking by the balcony, her legs tucked under her, leaning against the wall, anchored in the same place I'd left her. Gently, fearing I might disturb her, I opened the door and went into the apartment. In the dining room, the balcony curtains swayed in the breeze. A figure was sitting by the window, completely still, holding a burning candle in its hands. I couldn't make out the face, but a bright pearl slid down its cheek, shining like fresh resin, then falling onto the figure's lap. Isaac Monfort turned, his face streaked with tears.
'I didn't see you this afternoon at the funeral,' I said.
He shook his head, drying his tears with the back of his lapel.
'Nuria wasn't there,' he murmured after a while. 'The dead never go to their own funeral.'
He looked around him, as if his daughter was in that very room, sitting next to us in the dark, listening to us.
'Do you know that I've never been inside this house before?' he asked. 'Whenever we met, it was always Nuria who came to me. "It's easier for you, Father," she would say. "Why go up all those stairs?" I'd always say to her, "All right, if you don't want to invite me, I won't come," and she'd answer, "I don't need to invite you to my home, Father. Only strangers need an invitation. You can come whenever you like." In over fifteen years, I didn't go to see her once. I always told her she'd chosen a bad neighbourhood. Not enough light. An old building. She would just nod in agreement. Like when I used to tell her she'd chosen a bad life. Not much future. A husband without a job. It's funny how we judge others and don't realize the extent of our own disdain until the ones we love are no longer there, until they are taken from us. They're taken from us because they've never really belonged to us . . .'
The old man's voice, deprived of its usual irony, faltered and seemed almost as weary as he looked.
'Nuria loved you very much, Isaac. Don't doubt that for an instant. And I know she also felt loved by you,' I said.
Old Isaac shook his head again. He smiled, but his silent tears did not stop falling. 'Perhaps she loved me, in her own way, as I loved her, in mine. But we didn't know one another. Perhaps because I never allowed her to know me, or I never took any steps towards getting to know her. We spent our lives like two strangers who see each other every single day and greet one another out of politeness. And I think she probably died without forgiving me.'
'Isaac, I can assure you-'
'Daniel, you're young and you try hard, but even though I've had a bit to drink and I don't know what I'm saying, you still haven't learned to lie enough to fool an old man whose heart has been broken by misfortune.'
I looked down.
'The police say that the man who killed her is a friend of yours,' Isaac ventured.
'The police are lying.'
Isaac assented. 'I know.'
'I can assure you-'
'There's no need, Daniel. I know you're telling the truth,' said Isaac, pulling an envelope from his coat pocket.
'The afternoon before she died, Nuria came to see me, as she used to do years ago. I remember we used to go and eat in a cafe in Calle Guardia, where I would take her when she was a child. We always talked about books, about old books. She would sometimes tell me things about her work, trifles, the sort of things you tell a stranger on a bus. . . . Once she told me she was sorry she'd been a disappointment to me. I asked her where she'd got that ridiculous idea. "From your eyes, Father, from your eyes," she said. Not once did it occur to me that perhaps I'd been an even greater disappointment to her. Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.'
'Isaac, with all due respect, you've been drinking like a fish, and you don't know what you're saying.'
'Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man. I know enough to understand that my own daughter never trusted me. She trusted you more, Daniel, and she'd only met you a couple of times.'
'I can assure you you're wrong.'
'The last afternoon we saw each other, she brought me this envelope. She was restless, worried about something that she didn't want to talk about. She asked me to keep the envelope and, should anything happen to her, to give it to you.'
'Should anything happen?'
'Those were her words. She looked so distressed that I suggested we go together to the police, that, whatever the problem, we'd find a solution. Then she said that the police station was the last place she could go to for help. I begged her to let me know what was going on, but she said she had to leave and made me promise that I'd give you this envelope if she didn't come back for it within a couple of days. She asked me not to open it.'
Isaac handed me the envelope. It was open. 'I lied to her, as usual,' he said.
I examined the envelope. It contained a wad of handwritten sheets of paper. 'Have you read them?' I asked.
The old man nodded slowly.
'What do they say?'
The old man looked up. His lips were trembling. He seemed to have aged a hundred years since the last time I'd seen him.
'It's the story you were looking for, Daniel. The story of a woman I never knew, even though she bore my name and my blood. Now it belongs to you.'
I put the envelope into my coat pocket.
'I'm going to ask you to leave me alone here, with her, if you don't mind. A while ago, as I was reading those pages, it seemed to me that I could almost see her again. However hard I try, I can only remember her the way she was as a little girl. She was very quiet then, you know. She looked at everything pensively, and never laughed. What she liked best were stories, and I don't think any child has ever learned to read so young. She used to say she wanted to be an author and write encyclopaedias and treatises on history and philosophy. Her mother said it was all my fault. She said that Nuria adored me and because she thought her father loved only books, she wanted to write books to make her father love her.'
'Isaac, I don't think it's a good idea for you to be on your own tonight. Why don't you come home with me? Spend the night with us, and that way you can keep my father company.'
Isaac shook his head again. 'I have things to do, Daniel. You go home and read those pages. They belong to you.'
The old man looked away, and I took a few steps towards the door. I was in the doorway when Isaac's voice called to me, barely a whisper.
'Daniel?'
'Yes?'
'Take great care.'