He would sit on the edge of my table and stare at me. Sometimes he would stand behind me and remain there a couple of minutes. I could feel his foul breath on my hair. Other times he placed his hands on my shoulders.
'You're tense. Relax.'
I trembled, I wanted to scream or run away and never return to that office, but I needed the job and its miserly pay. One night Sanmarti started on his routine massage and then he began to fondle me.
'One of these days you're going to make me lose my head,' he moaned.
I leaped up, breaking free from his grasp, and ran towards the exit, grabbing my coat and bag. Behind me, Sanmarti laughed. At the bottom of the staircase, I ran straight into a dark figure.
'What a pleasant surprise, Senora Moliner Inspector Fumero gave me one of his snakelike smiles. 'Don't tell me you're working for my good friend Sanmarti! Lucky girl He's at the top of his game, just like me. So tell me, how's your husband?'
I knew that my time was up. The following day, a rumour spread round the office that Nuria Monfort was a dyke - since she remained immune to Don Pedro Sanmartfs charms and his garlic breath - and that she was involved with Mercedes Pietro. More than one promising young man in the company swore that on a number of occasions he had seen that 'couple of sluts' kissing in the filing room. That afternoon, on her way out, Mercedes asked me whether she could have a quick word with me. She could barely bring herself to look at me. We went to the corner cafe without exchanging a single word. There Mercedes told me what Sanmarti had told her: that he didn't approve of our friendship, that the police had supplied him with a report on me, detailing my suspected communist past.
'I can't afford to lose this job, Nuria. I need it to take care of my son.'
She broke down crying, burning with shame and humiliation.
'Don't worry, Mercedes. I understand,' I said.
'This man, Fumero, he's after you, Nuria. I don't know what he has against you, but it shows in his face.' 'I know.'
The following Monday, when I arrived at work, I found a skinny man with greased-back hair sitting at my desk. He introduced himself as Salvador Benades, the new copy-editor.
'And who are you?'
Not a single person in the office dared look at me or speak to me while I collected my things. On my way down the stairs, Mercedes ran after me and handed me an envelope with a wad of banknotes and some coins.
'Nearly everyone has contributed whatever they could. Take it, please. Not for your sake, for ours.'
That night I went to the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio. Julian was waiting for me as usual, sitting in the dark. He'd written a poem for me, he said. It was the first thing he'd written in nine years. I wanted to read it, but I broke down in his arms. I told him everything, because I couldn't hold back any longer. Julian listened to me without speaking, holding me and stroking my hair. It was the first time in years that I felt I could lean on him. I wanted to kiss him because I was sick with loneliness, but Julian had no lips or skin to offer me. I fell asleep in his arms, curled up on the bed in his room, a child's bunk. When I woke up, Julian wasn't there. At dawn I heard his footsteps on the roof terrace and pretended I was still asleep. Later that morning I heard the news on the radio without realizing its significance. A body had been found sitting on a bench on Pasco del Borne. The dead man had his hands crossed over his lap and was staring at the basilica of Santa Maria del Mar. A flock of pigeons pecking at his eyes caught the attention of a local resident, who alerted the police. The corpse had had its neck broken. Senora Sanmarti identified it as her husband, Pedro Sanmarti Monegal. When the father-in-law of the deceased heard the news in his Banolas nursing home, he gave thanks to heaven and told himself he could now die in peace.
13.
Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires. For years I had wanted to believe that Julian was still the man I had fallen in love with, or what was left of him. I had wanted to believe that we could manage to keep going with sporadic bursts of misery and hope. I had wanted to believe that Lain Coubert had died and returned to the pages of a book. We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.
Sanmarti's murder opened my eyes. I realized that Lain Coubert was still alive, residing within Julian's burned body and feeding on his memory. He had found out how to get in and out of the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio through a window that gave onto the inner courtyard, without having to force open the door I locked every time I left him there. I discovered that Lain Coubert had been roaming through the city and visiting the old Aldaya mansion. I discovered that in his madness he had returned to the crypt and had broken the tombstones, that he had taken out the coffins of Penelope and his son. What have you done, Julian?
The police were waiting for me when I returned home, to interrogate me about the death of Sanmarti, the publisher. They took me to their headquarters where, after five hours of waiting in a dark office, Fumero arrived, dressed in black, and offered me a cigarette.
'You and I could be friends, Senora Moliner. My men tell me your husband isn't home.'
'My husband left me. I don't know where he is.'
He knocked me off the chair with a brutal slap in the face. I crawled into a corner, seized by fear. I didn't dare look up. Fumero knelt beside me and grabbed me by my hair.
'Try to understand this, you fucking whore: I'm going to find him, and when I do, I'll kill you both. You first, so he can see you with your guts hanging out. And then him, once I've told him that the other tart he sent to the grave was his sister.'
'He'll kill you first, you son of a bitch.'
Fumero spat in my face and let me go. I thought he was going to beat me up, but then I heard his steps as he walked away down the corridor. I rose to my feet, trembling, and wiped the blood off my face. I could smell that man's hand on my skin, but this time I recognized the stench of fear.
They kept me in that room, in the dark and with no water, for six hours. Night had fallen when they let me out. It was raining hard and the streets shimmered with steam. When I got home, I found a sea of debris. Fumero's men had been there. Among the fallen furniture and the drawers and bookshelves thrown on the floor, I found my clothes all torn to shreds and Miquel's books destroyed. On my bed I found a pile of faeces and on the wall, written in excrement, I read the word WHORE.
I ran to the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio, making a thousand detours to ensure that none of Fumero's henchmen had followed me to the door in Calle Joaquin Costa. I crossed the roof terraces - they were flooded with the rain - and saw that the front door of the apartment was still locked. I went in cautiously, but the echo of my footsteps told me it was empty. Julian was not there. I waited for him, sitting in the dark dining room, listening to the storm, until dawn. When the morning mist licked the balcony shutters, I went up to the roof terrace and gazed at the city, crushed under a leaden sky. I knew that Julian would not return there. I had lost him forever.
I saw him again two months later. I had gone into a cinema at night, alone, feeling incapable of returning to my cold, empty apartment. Halfway through the film, some stupid romance between a Romanian princess eager for adventure and a handsome American reporter with perfect hair, a man sat down next to me. It wasn't the first time. In those days cinemas were crawling with anonymous men who reeked of loneliness, urine, and eau de cologne, wielding their sweaty, trembling hands like tongues of dead flesh. I was about to get up and warn the usher when I recognized Julian's wrinkled profile. He gripped my hand tightly, and we remained like that, looking at the screen without seeing it.
'Did you kill Sanmarti?' I murmured.
'Does anyone miss him?'
We spoke in whispers, under the attentive gaze of the solitary men who were dotted around the stalls, green with envy at the apparent success of their shadowy rival. I asked him where he'd been hiding, but he didn't reply.
'There's another copy of The Shadow of the Wind,' he murmured. 'Here, in Barcelona.'
'You're wrong, Julian. You destroyed them all.'
'All but one. It seems that someone more clever than I hid it in a place where I would never be able to find it. You.'
That's how I first came to hear about you. Some bigmouthed bookseller called Gustavo Barcelo had been boasting to a group of collectors about having located a copy of The Shadow of the Wind. The world of rare books is like an echo chamber. In less than two months, Barcelo was receiving offers for the book from collectors in London, Paris, and Rome. Julian's mysterious flight from Paris after a bloody duel and his rumoured death in the Spanish Civil War had conferred on his works an undreamed-of market value. The black legend of a faceless individual who searched for them in every bookshop, library, and private collection and then burned them only added to the interest and the price. 'We have the circus in our blood,' Barcelo would say.
Julian, who continued to pursue the shadow of his own words, soon picked up the rumour. This is how he learned that Gustavo Barcelo didn't have the book: apparently the copy belonged to a boy who had discovered it by chance and who, fascinated by the novel and its mysterious author, refused to sell it and guarded it as his most precious possession. That boy was you, Daniel.
'For heaven's sake, Julian, don't tell me you're going to harm a child ...' I whispered, not quite sure of his intentions.
Julian then told me that all the books he'd stolen and destroyed had been snatched from people who felt nothing for them, from people who just did business with them or kept them as curiosities. Because you refused to sell the book at any price and tried to rescue Carax from the recesses of the past, you awoke a strange sympathy in him, and even respect. Unbeknownst to you, Julian observed you and studied you.
'Perhaps, if he ever discovers who I am and what I am, he, too, will decide to burn the book.'
Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
'Who is this boy?'
'His name is Daniel. He's the son of a bookseller whose shop Miquel used to frequent in Calle Santa Ana. He lives with his father in an apartment above the shop. He lost his mother when he was very young.'
'You sound as if you were speaking about yourself.'
'Perhaps. This boy reminds me of myself.'
'Leave him alone, Julian. He's only a child. His only crime has been to admire you.'
'That's not a crime, it's a misconception. But he'll get over it. Perhaps then he'll return the book to me. When he stops admiring me and begins to understand me.'
A minute before the end of the film, Julian stood up and left. For months we saw each other like that, in the dark, in cinemas or alleyways, at midnight. Julian always found me. I felt his silent presence without seeing him and was always vigilant. Sometimes he mentioned you. Every time I heard him talk about you, I sensed a rare tenderness in his voice that confused him, a tenderness that, for years now, I had thought lost. I found out that he'd returned to the Aldaya mansion and that he now lived there, halfway between a ghost and a beggar, watching over Penelope's remains and those of their son. It was the only place that he still felt was his. There are worse prisons than words.
I went there once a month to make sure he was all right, or at least alive. I would jump over the tumbled-down wall at the back of the property, that couldn't be seen from the street. Sometimes I'd find him there, other times Julian had disappeared. I left food for him, money, books. ... I would wait for him for hours, until it got dark. A few times I began to explore the rambling old house. That is how I discovered that he'd destroyed the tombstones in the crypt and taken out the coffins. I no longer thought Julian was mad, nor did I view that desecration as a monstrous act, just a tragic one. When I did find him there we would speak for hours, sitting by the fire. Julian confessed that he had tried to write again but was unable to. He vaguely remembered his books as if they were the work of some other person that he'd happened to read. The pain of his attempts to write was visible. I discovered that he burned the pages he had written feverishly while I was not there. Once, taking advantage of his absence, I rescued a pile of them from the ashes. They spoke about you. Julian had once told me that a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise. For some time now, Julian had been wondering whether he'd gone out of his mind. Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist on convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality? Julian observed you, watched you grow, and wondered who you were. He wondered whether your presence was perhaps a miracle, a pardon he had to win by teaching you not to make the same mistakes he'd made. More than once I asked myself whether Julian hadn't reached the conclusion that you, in that twisted logic of his universe, had become the son he had lost, a blank page on which to restart a story that he could not invent but could remember.
Those years in the old mansion went by, and Julian became increasingly watchful of you, of your progress. He talked to me about your friends, about a woman called Clara with whom you had fallen in love, about your father, a man he admired and esteemed, about your friend Fermin, and about a girl in whom he wanted to see another Penelope - your Bea. He spoke about you as if you were his son. You were both looking for one another, Daniel. He wanted to believe that your innocence would save him from himself. He had stopped chasing his books, stopped wanting to destroy them. He was learning to see the world again through your eyes, to recover the boy he had once been, in you. The day you came to my apartment for the first time, I felt I already knew you. I feigned distrust so I could hide the fear you inspired in me. I was afraid of you, of what you might discover. I was afraid of listening to Julian and starting to believe, as he did, that we were all bound together in a strange chain of destiny, afraid of recognizing in you the Julian I had lost. I knew that you and your friends were investigating our past, that sooner or later you would discover the truth, but I hoped that it would be in due course, when you were able to understand its meaning. And I knew that sooner or later you and Julian would meet. That was my mistake. Because someone else knew it, someone who sensed that, in time, you would lead him to Julian: Fumero.
I only understood what was happening when there was no turning back, but I never lost hope that you might lose the trail, that you might forget about us, or that life - yours and not ours - might take you far away, to safety. Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either. Hope is cruel, and has no conscience. For a long time, Fumero has been watching me. He knows I'll fall, sooner or later. He's in no hurry. He lives to avenge himself. Without vengeance, without anger, he would melt away. Fumero knows that you and your friends will take him to Julian. He knows that after almost fifteen years, I have no more strength or resources. He has watched me die for years, and he's only waiting for the moment when he will deal me the final blow. I have never doubted that I will die by his hand. Now I know the moment is drawing near. I will give these pages to my father, asking him to make sure they reach you if anything should happen to me. I pray to that God who never crossed my path that you will never have to read them, but I sense that my fate, despite my wishes and my vain hopes, is to hand you this story. Yours, despite your youth and your innocence, is to set it free.
When you read these words, this prison of memories, it will mean that I will no longer be able to say goodbye to you as I would have wished, that I will not be able to ask you to forgive us, especially Julian, and to take care of him when I am no longer there to do so. I know I cannot ask anything of you, but I can ask you to save yourself. Perhaps so many pages have managed to convince me that whatever happens, I will always have a friend in you, that you are my only hope, my only real hope. Of all the things that Julian wrote, the one I have always felt closest to my heart is that as long as we are remembered, we remain alive. As so often happened to me with Julian, years before meeting him, I feel that I know you and that if I can trust in anyone, that someone is you. Remember me, Daniel, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.
Nuria Monfort
THE SHADOW OF THE WIND 1955.
1.
Day was breaking when I finished reading Nuria Monfort's manuscript. That was my story. Our story. In Carax's lost footsteps, I now recognized my own, irretrievable. I stood, devoured by anxiety, and began to pace up and down the room. All my reservations, my suspicions and fears, seemed insignificant; I was overwhelmed by exhaustion, remorse, and dread, but I felt incapable of remaining there, hiding from the trail left by my actions. I slung on my coat, thrust the folded manuscript into the inside pocket, and ran down the stairs. As I stepped out of the front door, it had started to snow, and the sky was melting into slow tears of light that seemed to lie on my breath before fading away. I ran up to Plaza de Cataluna. It was almost deserted but in the centre of the square stood the lonely figure of an old man, with long white hair and clad in a wonderful grey overcoat. King of the dawn, he raised his eyes to heaven and tried in vain to catch the snowflakes with his gloves, laughing to himself. As I walked past him, he looked at me and smiled gravely. His eyes were the colour of gold, like magic coins at the bottom of a fountain.
'Good luck,' I thought I heard him say.
I tried to cling to that blessing and quickened my step, praying that it would not be too late and that Bea, the Bea of my story, would still be waiting for me.
My throat was burning with the cold when, panting after the run, I reached the building where the Aguilars lived. The snow was beginning to settle. I had the good fortune of finding Don Saturno Molleda stationed at the entrance. Don Saturno was the caretaker of the building and (from what Bea had told me) a secret surrealist poet. He had come out to watch the spectacle of the snow, broom in hand, wrapped in at least three scarves and wearing combat boots.
'It's God's dandruff,' he said, marvelling, offering the snow a preview of his unpublished verse.
'I'm going up to the Aguilar's apartment,' I announced.
'We all know that the early bird catches the worm, but you're trying to catch an elephant, young man.'
'It's an emergency. They're expecting me.'
'Ego te absolvo,' he recited, blessing me.
I ran up the stairs. As I ascended, I weighed up my options with some caution. If I was lucky, one of the maids would open the door, and I was ready to break through her blockade without bothering about the niceties. However, if the fates didn't favour me, perhaps Bea's father would open the door, given the hour. I wanted to think that in the intimacy of his home, he would not be armed, at least not before breakfast. I paused for a few moments to recover my breath before knocking and tried to conjure up words that never came. Little did it matter. I struck the door hard with the knocker three times. Fifteen seconds later I repeated the operation, and went on doing this, ignoring the cold sweat that covered my brow and the beating of my heart. When the door opened, I was still holding the knocker in my hand.
'What do you want?'
The eyes of my old friend Tomas, cold with anger, bored through me.
'I've come to see Bea. You can smash my face in if you feel like it, but I'm not leaving without speaking to her.'
Tomas observed me with a fixed stare. I wondered whether he was going to cleave me in two there and then. I swallowed hard.
'My sister isn't here.'
'Tomas . . .'
'Bea's gone.'
There was despondency and pain in his voice, which he was barely able to disguise as wrath.
'She's gone? Where?'
'I was hoping you would know.'
'Me?'
Ignoring Tomas's closed fists and the threatening expression on his face, I slipped into the apartment.
'Bea?' I shouted. 'Bea, it's me, Daniel___'
I stopped halfway along the corridor. The apartment threw back the echo of my voice. Neither Senor Aguilar nor his wife nor the servants appeared in response to my cries.
'There's no one here. I've told you,' said Tomas behind me. 'Now get out and don't come back. My father has sworn he'll kill you, and I'm not going to be the one to stop him.'
'For God's sake, Tomas. Tell me where your sister is.'
He looked at me as if he wasn't sure whether to spit at me or ignore me.
'Bea has left home, Daniel. My parents have been looking everywhere for her, desperately, for two days, and so have the police.'
'But. . .'
'The other night, when she came back after seeing you, my father was waiting for her. He slapped her so much he made her mouth bleed. But don't worry, she refused to give him your name. You don't deserve her.'
'Tomas.. .'
'Shut up. The following day my parents took her to the doctor.'
'What for? Is Bea ill?'
'She's ill because of you, you idiot. My sister is pregnant. Don't tell me you didn't know.'
I felt my lips quivering. An intense cold spread through my body, my voice stolen, my eyes fixed. I dragged myself toward the front door, but Tomas grabbed me by the arm and threw me against the wall.
'What have you done to her?'
'Tomas, I....'