I wanted to ask Julian how he intended to get past that large oak door, which looked like the door of a basilica or a prison. Julian pulled a jar out from his coat and unscrewed the top. A fetid vapour issued from it, forming a slow, bluish spiral. He held one end of the padlock and poured the acid into the lock. The metal hissed like red-hot iron, enveloped in a cloud of yellow smoke. We waited a few minutes, and then he picked up a cobblestone that lay among the weeds and split the padlock by banging it half a dozen times. Julian then gave the door a kick. It opened slowly, like a tomb, exhaling a thick, damp breath. Beyond the doorway I could sense a velvety darkness. Julian had brought a benzine lighter, which he lit after taking a few steps into the entrance hall. I followed him, leaving the door behind us ajar. Julian walked on a few yards, holding the flame above his head. A carpet of dust lay at our feet, with no footprints but ours. The naked walls took on an amber hue from the flame. There was no furniture, no mirrors, or lamps. The doors were still on their hinges, but the bronze doorknobs had been pulled out. The mansion was just a skeleton. We stopped at the bottom of the staircase. Julian looked up, his eyes scanning the heights. He turned around for a moment to look at me, and I wanted to smile, but in the half-light we could barely see each other's eyes. I followed him up the stairs, treading the steps on which Julian had first seen Penelope. I knew where we were heading, and I felt a coldness inside me that had nothing to do with the biting, damp air of that place.
We went up to the third floor, where a narrow corridor led to the south wing of the house. Here the ceilings were much lower and the doors smaller. It was the floor for the servants' living quarters. The last room, I knew without Julian having to tell me, had been Jacinta Coronado's bedroom. Julian approached it slowly, fearfully. That had been the last place he'd seen Penelope, where he had made love to a girl barely seventeen years old, and who, months later, would bleed to death in that same cell. I wanted to stop him, but Julian had reached the doorway and was looking absently inside. I peered into the room with him. It was just a cubicle stripped of all ornamentation. The marks where a bed had once stood were still visible beneath the flood of dust that covered the floorboards. A tangle of black stains snaked across the middle of the room. Julian stared at the emptiness for almost a minute, disconcerted. I could see from his look that he hardly recognized the place, that the sight of it seemed like a cruel trick. I took his arm and led him back to the stairs.
'There's nothing here, Julian,' I murmured. 'The family sold everything before leaving for Argentina.'
Julian nodded weakly. We walked down the stairs again, and when we reached the ground floor, Julian made his way to the library. The shelves were empty, the fireplace choked with rubble. The walls, a deathly pale, flickered in the breath of the flame. Creditors and usurers had managed to remove every last bit of it, most of which must be lost in the twisted heaps of some junkyard by now.
'I've come back for nothing,' Julian mumbled.
Better this way, I thought. I was counting the seconds that separated us from the door. If I managed to get him away from there, we might still have a chance. I let Julian absorb the ruin of that place, purging his memories.
'You had to return and see it again,' I said. 'Now you know there's nothing here. It's just a large old, uninhabited house, Julian. Let's go home.'
He looked at me, pale-faced, and nodded. I took his hand, and we went along the passageway that led to the exit. The chink of outdoor light was only half a dozen yards away. I could smell the weeds and the drizzle in the air. Then I felt I was losing Julian's hand. I stopped and turned to see him standing motionless, his eyes staring into the darkness.
'What is it, Julian?'
He didn't reply. He was gazing, mesmerized, at the mouth of a narrow corridor that led towards the kitchen area. I walked over to him and looked into the shadows. The door at the end of the corridor was bricked up, a wall of red bricks laid roughly with mortar that bled out of the corners. I couldn't quite understand what it meant, but I felt an icy cold that took my breath away. Julian was slowly getting closer. All the other doors in the corridor - in the whole house - were open, their locks and doorknobs gone. All except this one.
'Julian, please, let's go. . . .'
The impact of his fist on the brick wall drew a hollow echo on the other side. I thought I saw his hands trembling when he placed the lighter on the floor and gestured for me to move back a few steps.
'Julian ...'
The first kick brought down a rain of red dust. Julian charged again. I thought I could hear his bones breaking, but Julian was unperturbed. He banged against the wall again and again, with the rage of a prisoner forcing his way out to freedom. His fists and his arms were bleeding when the first brick broke and fell onto the other side. In the dark, with bloodstained fingers, Julian struggled to enlarge the gap. He panted, exhausted, possessed by a fury of which I would never have thought him capable. One by one, he loosened the bricks and the wall came down. Julian stopped, covered in a cold sweat, his hands flayed. He picked up the lighter and placed it on the edge of one of the bricks. A wooden door, carved with angel motifs, rose up on the other side. Julian stroked the wooden reliefs, as if he were reading a hieroglyph. The door yielded to the pressure of his hands.
A glutinous darkness came at us from the other side. A little further back, the form of a staircase could be discerned. Black stone steps descended until they were lost in shadows. Julian turned for a moment, and I met his eyes. I saw fear and despair in them, as if he could sense what lay beyond. I shook my head, begging him without speaking not to go down. He turned back, dejected, and plunged into the gloom. I looked through the brick frame and saw him lurching down the steps. The flame flickered, now just a breath of transparent blue.
'Julian?'
All I got was silence. I could see Julian's shadow, motionless at the bottom of the stairs. I went through the brick hole and walked down the steps. The room was rectangular, with marble walls. It exuded an intense, penetrating chill. The two tombstones were covered with a veil of cobwebs that fell apart like rotten silk with the flame from the lighter. The white marble was scored with black tears of dampness that looked like blood dripping out of the clefts left by the engraver's chisel. They lay side by side, like maledictions, chained together.
PENELOPE ALDAYA DAVID ALDAYA.
1902-1919 1919.
11.
I have often paused to think about that moment of silence and tried to imagine what Julian must have felt when he discovered that the woman he had been waiting seventeen years for was dead, their child gone with her, and that the life he had dreamed about, the very breath of it, had never existed. Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice it. In Julian's case that certainty came to him in a matter of seconds. For a moment I thought he was going to rush up the stairs and flee from that accursed place, and that I would never see him again. Perhaps it would have been better that way.
I remember that the flame from the lighter slowly went out, and I lost sight of his silhouette. My hands searched for him in the shadows and I found him trembling, speechless. He could barely stand, and he dragged himself into a corner. I hugged him and kissed his forehead. He didn't move. I felt his face with my fingers, but there were no tears. I thought that perhaps, unconsciously, he had known it all those years, that perhaps the encounter was necessary for him to face the truth and set himself free. We had reached the end of the road. Julian would now understand that nothing held him in Barcelona any longer and that we could leave, go far away. I wanted to believe that our luck was about to change and that Penelope had finally forgiven us.
I looked for the lighter on the floor and lit it again. Julian was staring vacantly, indifferent to the blue flame. I held his face in my hands and forced him to look at me. I found lifeless, empty eyes, consumed by anger and loss. I felt the venom of hatred spreading slowly through his veins, and I could read his thoughts. He hated me for having deceived him. He hated Miquel for having wished to give him a life that now felt like an open wound. But above all he hated the man who had caused this calamity, this trail of death and misery: himself. He hated those filthy books to which he had devoted his life and about which nobody cared. He hated every stolen second.
He looked at me without blinking, the way one looks at a stranger or some foreign object. I kept shaking my head, slowly, my hands searching his hands. Suddenly he moved away, roughly, and stood up. I tried to grab his arm, but he pushed me against the wall. I saw him go silently up the stairs, a man I no longer knew. Julian Carax was dead. By the time I stepped out into the garden, there was no trace of him. I climbed the wall and jumped down onto the other side. The desolate streets seemed to bleed in the rain. I shouted out his name, walking down the middle of the deserted avenue. Nobody answered my call. It was almost four in the morning when I got home. The apartment was full of smoke and the stench of burned paper. Julian had been there. I ran to open the windows. I found a small case on my desk with the pen I had bought for him years ago in Paris, the fountain pen I had paid a fortune for on the pretence it once had belonged to Victor Hugo. The smoke was oozing from the central-heating boiler. I opened the hatch and saw that Julian had thrown copies of his novels into it. I could just about read the titles on the leather spines; the rest had turned to cinders. I looked on my bookshelves: all of his books were gone.
Hours later, when I went to the publishing house in the middle of the morning, Alvaro Cabestany called me into his office. His father hardly ever came by anymore; the doctors said his days were numbered - as was my time at the firm. Cabestany's son informed me that a gentleman called Lain Coubert had turned up early that morning, saying he was interested in acquiring our entire stock of Julian Carax's novels. The publisher's son told him we had a warehouse full of them in the Pueblo Nuevo district, but as there was such a demand for them, he insisted on a higher price than Coubert was offering. Coubert had not taken the bait and had marched out. Now Alvaro Cabestany wanted me to find this person called Lain Coubert and accept his offer. I told the fool that Lain Coubert didn't exist; he was a character in one of Carax's novels. That he wasn't in the least interested in buying his books; he only wanted to know where we stored them. Old Senor Cabestany was in the habit of keeping a copy of every book published by his firm in his office library, even the works of Julian Carax. I slipped into the room, unnoticed, and took them.
That evening I visited my father in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and hid them where nobody, especially Julian, would ever find them. Night had fallen when I left the building. I wandered off down the Ramblas and from there to La Barceloneta, where I made for the beach, looking for the spot where I had gazed at the sea with Julian. The pyre of flames from the Pueblo Nuevo warehouse was visible in the distance, its amber trail spilling out over the sea and spirals of smoke rising to the sky like serpents of light. When the fire-fighters managed to extinguish the flames shortly before daybreak, there was nothing left, just the brick-and-metal skeleton that held up the vault. There I found Lluis Carbo, who had been the night watchman for ten years. He stared in disbelief at the smouldering ruins. His eyebrows and the hairs on his arm were singed, and his skin shone like wet bronze. It was he who told me that the blaze had started shortly after midnight and had devoured tens of thousands of books, until dawn came and he was faced with a river of ashes. Lluis still held a handful of books he had managed to save, some of Verdaguer's collected poems and two volumes of the History of the French Revolution. That was all that had survived. Various members of the union had arrived to help the fire-fighters. One of them told me the fire-fighters found a burned body among the debris. At first they had assumed that the man was dead, but then one of them noticed he was still breathing, and they had taken him to the nearby Hospital del Mar.
I recognized him by his eyes. The fire had eaten away his skin, his hands, and his hair. The flames had torn off his clothes, and his whole body was a raw wound that oozed beneath his bandages. They had confined him to a room on his own at the end of a corridor, with a view of the beach, and had numbed him with morphine while they waited for him to die. I wanted to hold his hand, but one of the nurses warned me that there was almost no flesh under the bandages. The fire had cut away his eyelids. The nurse who found me collapsed on the floor, crying, asked me whether I knew who he was. I said I did: he was my husband. When a priest appeared to administer the last rites over him, I frightened him off with my screams. Three days later Julian was still alive. The doctors said it was a miracle, that his will to live gave him a strength no medicine could offer. They were wrong. It was not a will to live. It was hatred. A week later, when they saw that this death-bitten body refused to expire, he was officially admitted under the name of Miquel Moliner. He would remain there for eleven months. Always in silence, with burning eyes, without rest.
I went to the hospital every day. Soon the nurses began to treat me less formally and invited me to lunch with them in their hall. They were all women who were on their own, strong women waiting for their men to return from the front. Some did. They taught me how to clean Julian's wounds, how to change his bandages, how to change the sheets and make a bed with an inert body lying on it. They also taught me to lose all hope of ever seeing the man who had once been held by those bones. Three months later we removed his face bandages. Julian was a skull. He had no lips or cheeks. It was a featureless face, the charred remains of a doll. His eye sockets had become larger and now dominated his face. The nurses would not admit it to me, but they were revolted by his appearance, almost afraid. The doctors had told me that, as the wounds healed, a sort of purplish, reptile like skin would slowly form. Nobody dared to comment on his mental state. Everyone assumed that Julian - Miquel - had lost his mind in the blaze, and that he had survived thanks to the obsessive care of a wife who stood firm where so many others would have fled in terror. I looked into his eyes and knew that Julian was still in there, alive, tormenting himself, waiting.
He had lost his lips, but the doctors thought that the vocal cords had not suffered permanent damage and that the burns on his tongue and larynx had healed months earlier. They assumed that Julian didn't say anything because his mind was gone. One afternoon, six months after the fire, when he and I were alone in the room, I bent over him and kissed him on the brow. .
'I love you,' I said.
A bitter, harsh sound emerged from the doglike grimace that was now his mouth. His eyes were red with tears. I wanted to dry them with a handkerchief, but he repeated that sound.
'Leave me,' he said.
'Leave me.'
Two months after the warehouse fire, the publishing firm had gone bankrupt. Old Cabestany, who died that year, had predicted that his son would manage to ruin the company within six months. An unrepentant optimist to the last. I tried to find work with another publisher, but the war did away with everything. They all said that hostilities would soon cease and things would improve. But there were still two years of war ahead, and worse was yet to come. One year after the fire, the doctors told me that they had done all that could be done in a hospital. The situation was difficult, and they needed the room. They recommended that Julian be taken to a sanatorium like the Hospice of Santa Lucia, but I refused. In October 1937 I took him home. He hadn't uttered a single word since that 'Leave me'.
Every day I told him that I loved him. I set him up in the armchair by the window, wrapped in blankets. I fed him with fruit juices, toast, and milk - when there was any to be found. Every day I read to him for a couple of hours. Balzac, Zola, Dickens . .. His body was beginning to fill out and soon after returning home, he began to move his hands and arms. He tilted his neck. Sometimes, when I got back, I found the blankets on the floor, and objects that had been knocked over. One day I found him crawling on the floor. Then, a year and a half after the fire, I woke up in the middle of a stormy night and found that someone was sitting on the bed stroking my hair. I smiled at him, hiding my tears.
He had managed to find one of my mirrors, although I'd hidden them all. In a broken voice, he told me he'd been transformed into one of his fictional monsters, into Lain Coubert. I wanted to kiss him, to show him that his appearance didn't disgust me, but he wouldn't let me. He would hardly allow me to touch him. Day by day he was getting his strength back. He would prowl around the house while I went out in search of something to eat. The savings Miquel had left me kept us afloat, but soon I had to begin selling jewellery and old possessions. When there was no other alternative, I took the Victor Hugo pen I had bought in Paris and went out to sell it to the highest bidder. I found a shop behind the Military Government buildings where they took in that sort of merchandise. The manager did not seem impressed by my solemn oath that the pen had belonged to Victor Hugo, but he admitted it was a marvellous piece of its kind and agreed to pay me as much as he could, bearing in mind these were times of great hardship.
When I told Julian that I'd sold it, I was afraid he would fly into a rage. All he said was that I'd done the right thing, that he'd never deserved it. One day, one of the many when I'd gone out to look for work, I returned to find that Julian wasn't there. He didn't come back until daybreak. When I asked him where he'd been, he just emptied the pockets of his coat (which had belonged to Miquel) and left a fistful of money on the table. From then on he began to go out almost every night. In the dark, concealed under a hat and scarf, with gloves and a raincoat, he was just one more shadow. He never told me where he went, and he almost always brought back money or jewellery. He slept in the mornings, sitting upright in his armchair, with his eyes open. Once I found a penknife in one of his pockets. It was a double-edged knife, with an automatic spring. The blade was marked with dark stains.
It was then that I began to hear stories in town about some individual who was going around at night, smashing bookshop windows and burning books. Other times the strange vandal would slip into a library or a collector's study. He always took two or three volumes, which he would then burn. In February 1938 I went to a secondhand bookshop to ask whether it was possible to find any books by Julian Carax on the market. The manager said it wasn't: someone had been making them disappear. He had owned a couple himself and had sold them to a very strange person, a man who hid his face and whose voice he could barely understand.
'Until recently there were a few copies left in private collections, here and in France, but a lot of collectors are beginning to get rid of them. They're frightened,' he said, 'and I don't blame them.'
More and more, Julian would vanish for whole days at a time. Soon his absences lasted a week. He always left and returned at night, and he always brought back money. He never gave any explanations, or if he did, they were meaningless. He told me he'd been in France: Paris, Lyons, Nice. Occasionally letters arrived from France addressed to Lain Coubert. They were always from secondhand booksellers, or from collectors. Someone had located a lost copy of Julian Carax's works. Like a wolf, he would disappear for a few days, then return.
It was during one of those absences that I came across Fortuny, the hatter, wandering about in the cathedral cloister, lost in his thoughts. He still remembered me from the day I'd gone with Miquel to inquire after Julian, two years before. He took me to a corner and told me confidentially that he knew that Julian was alive, somewhere, but he suspected that his son wasn't able to get in touch with us for some reason he couldn't quite figure out. 'Something to do with that cruel man Fumero.' I told him that I felt the same. Wartime was turning out to be very profitable for Fumero. His loyalties shifted from month to month, from the anarchists to the communists, and from them to whoever came his way. He was called a spy, a henchman, a hero, a murderer, a conspirator, a schemer, a saviour, a devil. Little did it matter. They all feared him. They all wanted him on their side. Perhaps because he was so busy with the intrigues of wartime Barcelona, Fumero seemed to have forgotten Julian. Probably, like the hatter, he imagined that Julian had already escaped and was out of his reach.
Senor Fortuny asked me whether I was an old friend of his son's, and I said I was. He asked me to tell him about Julian, about the man he'd become, because, he sadly admitted, he didn't really know him. 'Life separated us, you know?' He told me he'd been to all the bookshops in Barcelona in search of Julian's novels, but they were unobtainable. Someone had told him that a madman was looking for them in every corner of the city and then burning them. Fortuny was convinced that the culprit was Fumero. I didn't contradict him. Whether through pity or spite, I lied as best I could. I told him I thought that Julian had returned to Paris, that he was well, that I knew for a fact he was very fond of Fortuny the hatter, that he would come back to see him as soon as circumstances permitted. 'It's this war,' he complained, 'it just rots everything.' Before we said goodbye, he insisted on giving me his address and that of his ex-wife, Sophie, with whom he was back in touch after many years of 'misunderstandings'. Sophie now lived in Bogota with a prestigious doctor, he said. She ran her own music school and often wrote asking after Julian.
'It's the only thing that brings us together now, you see. Memories. We make so many mistakes in life, young lady, but we only realize this when old age creeps up on us. Tell me, are you religious?'
I took my leave, promising to keep him and Sophie informed if I ever had any news from Julian.
'Nothing would make his mother happier than to hear how he is. You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense,' the hatter concluded sadly. 'That's why you live longer.'
Despite the fact that I'd heard so many appalling stories about him, I couldn't help feeling sorry for the poor old man. He had little else to do in life but wait for the return of his son. He seemed to live in the hope of recovering lost time, through some miracle of the saints, whom he visited with great devotion at their chapels in the cathedral. I had become used to picturing him as an ogre, a despicable and resentful human being, but all I could see before me was a kind man, blind to reality, confused like everybody else. Perhaps because he reminded me of my own father, who hid from everyone, including himself, in that refuge of books and shadows, or because the hatter and I were also linked by the hope of recovering Julian, I felt a growing affection for him and became his only friend. Unbeknownst to Julian, I often called on him at the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio. The hatter no longer worked in his shop downstairs.
'I don't have the hands, or the sight, or the customers . . .' he would say.
He waited for me almost every Thursday and offered me coffee, biscuits, and pastries that he scarcely touched. He spent hours reminiscing about Julian's childhood, about how they worked together in the hat shop, and he would show me photographs. He would take me to Julian's room, which he kept as immaculate as a museum, and bring out old notebooks and everyday objects without ever realizing that he'd already shown them to me before, that he'd told me all those stories on a previous visit. He seemed to be reconstructing a past that had never existed. One of those Thursdays, as I walked up the stairs, I ran into a doctor who had just been to see Fortuny. I asked him how the hatter was, and he looked at me strangely.
'Are you a relative?'
I told him I was the closest the poor man had to one. The doctor then told me that Fortuny was very ill, that it was just a matter of months.
'What's wrong with him?'
'I could tell you it's his heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.'
The hatter was pleased to see me and confessed that he didn't trust that doctor. Doctors are just second-rate witches, he said. All his life the hatter had been a man of profound religious beliefs, and old age had only reinforced them. He saw the hand of the devil everywhere. The devil, he said, clouds the mind and destroys mankind.
'Just look at this war, or look at me. Of course, I'm old now and weak, but as a young man I was rotten, a coward.'
It was the devil who had taken Julian away from him, he added.
'God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil. . . .'
And so we passed the afternoon, nibbling on stale sponge fingers and discussing theology.
I once told Julian that if he wanted to see his father again before he died, he'd better hurry up. It turned out that he, too, had been visiting the hatter, without his knowing: from afar, at dusk, sitting at the other end of a square, watching him grow old. Julian said he would rather the old man took with him the image of the son he had created in his mind during those years than the person he had become.
'You keep that one for me,' I said, instantly regretting my words.
He didn't reply, but for a moment it seemed as if he could think clearly again and was fully aware of the hell into which we had descended.
The doctor's prognosis did not take long to come true. Senor Fortuny didn't live to see the end of the war. He was found sitting in his armchair, looking at old photographs of Sophie and Julian.
The last days of the war were the prelude to an inferno. The city had lived through the combat from afar, like a wound that throbs dully, with months of skirmishes and battles, bombardments and hunger. The spectacle of murders, fights, and conspiracies had been corroding the city's heart for years, but even so, many wanted to believe that the war was still something distant, a storm that would pass them by. If anything, the wait made the inevitable even worse. When the storm broke, there was no compassion.
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all remain silent and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a nightmare that will pass. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what really happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour everything they left behind.
By then Julian hardly had any books left to burn. His father's death, about which we never spoke, had turned him into an invalid. The anger and hatred that had at first possessed him were spent. We lived on rumours, secluded. We heard that Fumero had betrayed all the people who had helped him advance during the war and was now in the service of the victors. It was said that he was personally executing his main allies in the cells of Montjuic Castle - his preferred method a pistol shot to the mouth. The heavy mantle of collective forgetfulness seemed to descend around us the day the weapons went quiet. In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who has lived to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell. The weeks that followed the fall of Barcelona were indescribable. More blood was shed during those days than during the combat, but secretly, stealthily. When peace finally came, it was the sort of peace that haunts prisons and cemeteries, a shroud of silence and shame that rots the soul. There were no guiltless hands or innocent looks. Those of us who were there, all without exception, will take the secret with us to the grave.
A faint patina of normality was being restored, but by now Julian and I were living in abject poverty. We had spent all the savings and the booty from Lain Coubert's nightly escapades, and there was nothing left in the house to sell. I looked desperately for work as a translator, typist, or cleaner, but it seemed that my past association with Cabestany had marked me out as undesirable. People were suspicious. A government employee in a shiny new suit, with brilliantined hair and a pencil moustache - one of the hundreds who seemed to crawl out of the woodwork during those months - hinted that an attractive girl like me shouldn't have to resort to such mundane jobs. Our neighbours accepted my story that I was taking care of my poor husband, Miquel, who had become an invalid and was disfigured as a result of the war. They would bring us offerings of milk, cheese, or bread, sometimes even salted fish or sausages that had been sent to them by relatives in the country. After months of hardship, convinced that it would take a long time to find a job, I decided on a strategy borrowed from one of Julian's novels.
I wrote to Julian's mother in Bogota, adopting the name of a fictitious new lawyer whom the deceased Senor Fortuny had consulted in his last days, when he was trying to put his affairs in order. I informed her that, as the hatter had died without having made a will, his estate, which included the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio and the shop situated in the same building, was now theoretically the property of her son Julian who, it was believed, was living in exile in France. Since the death duties had not been satisfied, and since she lived abroad, the lawyer (whom I christened Jose Maria Requejo in memory of the first boy who had kissed me in school) asked her for authorization to start the necessary proceedings and carry out the transfer of the properties to the name of her son, whom he intended to contact through the Spanish embassy in Paris. In the meantime he was assuming the transitory and temporary ownership of the said properties, as well as a certain level of financial compensation. He also asked her to get in touch with the manager of the building and instruct him to send all the documents, together with payment for the property expenses, to Senor Requejo's office, in whose name I opened a PO box with a fake address - that of an old, disused garage two blocks away from the ruins of the Aldaya mansion. I was hoping that, blinded by the possibility of being able to help Julian and getting back in contact with him, Sophie would not stop to question all that legal gibberish and would agree to help us, especially in view of her prosperous situation in far-off Colombia.
A couple of months later, the manager of the building began to receive a monthly money order to cover the expenses of the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio and the fees of Jose Maria Requejo's law firm, which he proceeded to send as an open cheque to PO Box 2321 in Barcelona, just as Sophie Carax had requested him to do. The manager, I noticed, retained an unauthorized percentage every month, but I preferred not to say anything. That way he wetted his beak and did not question such a convenient arrangement. With the money that remained, Julian and I had enough to survive. Terrible, bleak years went by, during which I managed to find occasional work as a translator. By then nobody remembered Cabestany, and people began to forgive and forget, putting aside old rivalries and grievances. But I lived under the perpetual threat that Fumero might decide to begin rummaging in the past again. Sometimes I convinced myself that it wouldn't happen, that he must have given Julian up for dead by now or forgotten him. Fumero wasn't the thug he was years ago. Now he had graduated into a public figure, an ambitious member of the fascist regime, who couldn't afford the luxury of hunting Julian Carax's ghost. Other times I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding, covered in sweat, thinking that the police were hammering on my door. I feared that some of the neighbours might begin to be suspicious of that ailing husband of mine who never left the house -who sometimes cried or banged the walls like a madman - and that they might report us to the police. I was afraid that Julian might escape again, that he might decide to go out hunting for his books once more. Distracted by so much fear, I forgot that I was growing old, that life was passing me by, and that I had sacrificed my youth to love a man who was now almost a phantom.
But the years went by in peace. Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station. Meanwhile, the scars from the war were, of necessity, healing. I found some work in a couple of publishing firms and spent most of the day out of the house. I had lovers with no name, desperate faces I came across in cinemas or in the metro, with whom I would share my loneliness. Then, absurdly, I'd be consumed by guilt, and when I saw Julian again, I always felt like crying and would swear to myself that I would never betray him again, as if I owed him something. On buses or in the street, I caught myself looking at women who were younger than me holding small children by the hand. They seemed happy, or at peace, as if those helpless little beings could fill all the emptiness in the world. Then I would remember the days when, fantasizing, I had imagined myself as one of those women, with a child in my arms, Julian's child. And then I would think about the war and about the fact that those who waged it had also been children once.
I had started to believe that the world had forgotten us when someone turned up one day at our house. He looked young, barely a boy, a novice who blushed when he looked me in the eye. He asked after Miquel Moliner, and said he was updating some file at the School of Journalism. He told me that Senor Moliner might be the beneficiary of a monthly pension, but if he were to apply for it, he would first have to update a number of details. I told him that Senor Moliner hadn't been living there since the start of the war, that he'd gone abroad. He said he was very sorry and went away leering. He had the face of a young informer, and I knew that I had to get Julian out of my apartment that night, without fail. By now he had almost shrivelled up completely. He was as docile as a child, and his whole life revolved around the evenings we spent together, listening to music on the radio, as he held my hand and stroked it in silence.
When night fell, I took the keys of the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio, which the manager of the building had sent to a nonexistent Senor Requejo, and accompanied Julian back to the home where he had grown up. I set him up in his room and promised him I'd return the following day, reminding him to be very careful.
'Fumero is looking for you again,' I said.
He made a vague gesture with his head, as if he couldn't remember who Fumero was, or no longer cared. Several weeks passed in that way. I always went to the apartment at night, after midnight. I asked Julian what he'd done during the day, and he looked at me, without understanding. We would spend the night together, holding each other, and I would leave at daybreak, promising to return as soon as I could. When I left, I always locked the door of the apartment. Julian didn't have a copy of the key. I preferred to keep him there like a prisoner rather than risk his life.
Nobody else came round to ask after Miquel, but I made sure the rumour got about in the neighbourhood that my husband was in France. I wrote a couple of letters to the Spanish consulate in Paris saying that I knew that the Spanish citizen Julian Carax was in the city and asking for their assistance in finding him. I imagined that sooner or later the letters would reach the right hands. I took all the precautions, but I knew it was only a question of time. People like Fumero never stop hating.
The apartment in Ronda de San Antonio was on the top floor. I discovered that there was a door to the roof terrace at the top of the staircase. The roof terraces of the whole block formed a network of enclosures separated from one another by walls just a yard high, where residents went to hang out their laundry. It didn't take me long to locate a building at the other end of the block, with its front door on Calle Joaquin Costa, to whose roof terrace I could gain access and therefore reach the Ronda de San Antonio building without anyone seeing me go in or come out of the property. I once got a letter from the building manager telling me that neighbours had heard sounds coming from the Fortuny apartment. I answered in Requejo's name stating that occasionally a member of the firm had gone to the apartment to look for papers or documents and there was no cause for alarm, even if the sounds were heard at night. I added a comment implying that among gentlemen - accountants and lawyers - a secret bachelor pad was no small treasure. The manager, showing professional understanding, answered that I need not worry in the least, that he completely understood the situation.
During those years, playing the role of Senor Requejo was my only source of entertainment. Once a month I went to visit my father at the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. He never showed any interest in meeting my invisible husband, and I never offered to introduce him. We would skirt around the subject in our conversations like expert mariners dodging reefs near the water's surface. Occasionally he asked me whether I needed any help, whether there was anything he could do. On Saturdays, at dawn, I sometimes took Julian to look at the sea. We would go up to the roof, cross over to the adjoining building and then step out into Calle Joaquin Costa. From there we made our way down towards the port through the narrow streets of the Raval quarter. We never encountered anyone. People were afraid of Julian, even from a distance. At times we went as far as the breakwater. Julian liked to sit on the rocks, facing the city. We could spend hours like that, hardly speaking. Some afternoons we'd slip into a cinema, when the show had already started. In the dark nobody noticed Julian. As the months went by, I learned to confuse routine with normality and in time I came to believe that my arrangement was perfect. What a fool I was.
12.
Nineteen forty-five, a year of ashes. Only six years had elapsed since the end of the Civil War, and although its bruises were still being felt, almost nobody spoke about it openly. Now people talked about the other war, the world war, that had polluted the entire globe with a stench of corpses that would never go away. Those were years of want and misery, strangely blessed by the sort of peace that the dumb and the disabled inspire in us - halfway between pity and revulsion. At last, after years of searching in vain for work as a translator, I found a job as a copy-editor in a publishing house run by a businessman of the new breed - Pedro Sanmarti. Sanmarti had built his company with the fortune belonging to his father-in-law, who had then been promptly dispatched to a nursing home on the shores of Lake Banolas while Sanmarti awaited a letter containing his death certificate. The businessman liked to court young ladies half his age by presenting himself as the self-made man, an image much in vogue at the time. He spoke broken English with a thick accent, convinced that it was the language of the future, and he finished his sentences with 'Okay'.
Sanmarti's firm (which he had named Endymion because he thought it sounded impressive and was likely to sell books) published catechisms, manuals on etiquette, and various series of moralizing novels whose protagonists were either young nuns involved in humorous capers, Red Cross workers, or civil servants who were happy and morally sound. We also published a comic-book series about soldiers called Brave Commando - a roaring success among young boys in need of heroes. I made a good friend in the firm, Sanmarti's secretary, a war widow called Mercedes Pietro, with whom I soon felt a great affinity. Mercedes and I had a lot in common: we were two women adrift, surrounded by men who were either dead or hiding from the world. Mercedes had a seven-year-old son who suffered from muscular dystrophy, whom she cared for as best she could. She was only thirty-two, but the lines on her face spoke of a life of hardship. All those years Mercedes was the only person to whom I felt tempted to tell everything.
It was she who told me that Sanmarti was a great friend of the increasingly renowned and decorated Inspector Javier Fumero. They both belonged to a clique of individuals that had risen from the ruins of the war to spread its tentacles throughout the city, a new power elite.
One day Fumero turned up at the publishing firm. He was coming to visit his friend Sanmarti, with whom he'd arranged to have lunch. Under some pretext or other, I hid in filing room until they had both left. When I returned to my desk, Mercedes threw me a look; nothing needed to be said. From then on, every time Fumero made an appearance in the offices of the publisher, she would warn me so that I could hide.
Not a day passed without Sanmarti trying to take me out to dinner, to the theatre or the cinema, using any excuse. I always replied that my husband was waiting for me at home and that surely his wife must be anxious, as it was getting late. Senora Sanmarti fell well below the Bugatti on the list of her husband's favourite items. Indeed, she was close to losing her role in the marriage charade altogether, now that her father's fortune had passed into Sanmarti's hands. Mercedes had already warned me: Sanmarti, whose powers of concentration were limited, hankered after young, undisclosed flesh and concentrated his inane womanizing on any new arrivals - which, at the moment, meant me. He would resort to all manner of ploys: 'They tell me your husband, this Senor Moliner, is a writer. . . . Perhaps he would be interested in writing a book about my friend Fumero. I have the title: Fumero, the Scourge of Crime. What do you think, Nurieta?'
'I'm very grateful, Senor Sanmarti, but Miquel is busy writing a novel at the moment, and I don't think he would be able to.'
Sanmarti would burst out laughing.
'A novel? Goodness, Nurieta . . . the novel is dead and buried. A friend of mine from New York was telling me only the other day. Americans are inventing something called television which will be like the cinema, only in your own home. There'll be no more need for books, or churches, or anything. Tell your husband to forget about novels. If at least he were well known, if he were a football player or a bullfighter .. . Look, how about getting into the Bugatti and going to eat a paella in Castelldefels so we can discuss all this? Come on, woman, you've got to make an effort. . . You know I'd like to help you. And your nice husband, too. You know only too well that in this country, without the right kind of friends, there's no getting anywhere.'
I began to dress like a pious widow or one of those women who seem to confuse sunlight with mortal sin. I went to work with my hair drawn back into a bun and no makeup. Despite my tactics, Sanmarti continued to shower me with lascivious remarks accompanied by his oily, putrid smile. It was a smile full of disdain, typical of those self-important imbeciles who hang like stuffed sausages from the top of all corporate ladders. I had two or three interviews for prospective jobs elsewhere, but sooner or later I would always come up against another version of Sanmarti. His type grew like a plague of fungi, thriving on the dung on which companies are built. One of them took the trouble to phone Sanmarti and tell him that Nuria Monfort was looking for work behind his back. Sanmarti summoned me to his office, wounded by my ingratitude. He put his hand on my cheek and tried to stroke it. His fingers smelled of tobacco and stale sweat. I went deathly pale.
'Come on, if you're not happy, all you have to do is tell me. What can I do to improve your work conditions? You know how much I appreciate you, and it hurts me to hear that you want to leave us. How about going out to dinner, you and me, to make up?'
I removed his hand from my face, unable to go on hiding the repugnance it caused me.
'You disappoint me, Nuria. I have to admit that you don't seem to be a team player, that you don't appear to believe in this company's business objectives anymore.'
Mercedes had already warned me that sooner or later something like this would happen. A few days afterwards, Sanmarti, whose grammar was no better than an ape's, started returning all the manuscripts that I corrected, alleging that they were full of errors. Practically every day I stayed on in the office until ten or eleven at night, endlessly redoing pages and pages with Sanmarti's crossings-out and comments.
'Too many verbs in the past tense. It sounds dead, lifeless. . . . The infinitive should not be used after a semicolon. Everyone knows that.'
Some nights Sanmarti would also stay late, secluded in his study. Mercedes tried to be there, but more than once he sent her home. Then, when we were left alone, he would come out of his office and wander over to my desk.
'You work too hard, Nuria. Work isn't everything. You need to enjoy yourself too. And you're still young. But youth passes, you know, and we don't always know how to make the most of it.'