Bernarda had said Barcelo was away on business. It was her day off, and she usually spent the night with her aunt Reme and her cousins in the nearby town of San Adrian del Besos. That left Clara alone in the cavernous Plaza Real apartment and that faceless, menacing man unleashed in the storm with heaven knows what in mind. As I hurried under the downpour towards Plaza Real, all I could think was that I had placed Clara in danger by giving her Carax's book. By the time I reached the entrance to the square, I was soaked to the bone. I rushed to take shelter under the arches of Calle Fernando. I thought I could see shadowy forms creeping up behind me. Beggars. The front door was closed. I searched my pockets for the keys Barcelo had given me. One of the tramps came up, petitioning me to let him spend the night in the entrance hall. I closed the door before he'd time to finish his sentence.
The staircase was a well of darkness. Flashes of lightning bled through the cracks in the front door, lighting up the outline of the steps for a second. I groped my way forward and found the first step by tripping over it. Holding onto the banister, I slowly ascended. Soon the steps gave way to a flat surface, and I realized I had reached the first-floor landing. I felt the marble walls, cold and hostile, and found the reliefs on the oak door and the aluminium doorknobs. After fumbling about for a bit, I managed to insert the key. When the door of the apartment opened, a streak of blue light blinded me for an instant and a gust of warm air graced my skin. Bernarda's room was at the back of the apartment, by the kitchen. I went there first, although I was sure the maid wasn't home. I rapped on the door with my knuckles and, as there was no answer, allowed myself to enter. It was a simple room, with a large bed, a cupboard with tinted mirrors, and a chest of drawers on which Bernarda had placed enough effigies and prints of saints and the Virgin Mary to start a holy order. I closed the door, and when I turned around, my heart almost stopped: a dozen scarlet eyes were advancing towards me from the end of the corridor. Barcelo's cats knew me well and tolerated my presence. They surrounded me, meowing gently. As soon as they realized that my drenched clothes did not give out the desired warmth, they abandoned me with indifference.
Clara's room was at the other end of the apartment, next to the library and the music room. The cats' invisible steps followed me through the passageway. In the flickering darkness of the storm, Barcelo's residence seemed vast and sinister, altered from the place I had come to consider my second home. I reached the front of the apartment, where it faced the square. The conservatory opened before me, dense and impassable. I penetrated its jungle of leaves and branches. For a moment it occurred to me that if the faceless stranger had managed to sneak into the apartment, this was where he would probably choose to wait for me. I almost thought I could perceive the smell of burned paper he left in the air around him, but then I realized that what I had detected was only tobacco. A burst of panic needled me. Nobody in the household smoked, and Barcelo's unlit pipe was purely ornamental.
When I reached the music room, the glow from a flash of lightning revealed spirals of smoke that drifted in the air like garlands of vapour. Next to the gallery, the piano keyboard displayed its endless grin. I crossed the music room and went over to the library door. It was closed. I opened it and was welcomed by the brightness emanating from the glass-covered balcony that encircled Barcelo's personal library. The walls, lined with packed bookshelves, formed an oval in whose centre stood a reading table and two plush armchairs. I knew that Clara kept Carax's book in a glass cabinet by the arch of the balcony. I crept up to it. My plan, or my lack of it, was to lay my hands on the book, get it out of there, give it to that lunatic and lose sight of him forever. Nobody would notice the book's absence, except me.
Julian Carax's book was waiting for me, as it always did, its spine just visible at the end of a shelf. I took it in my hands and pressed it against my chest, as if embracing an old friend I was about to betray. Judas, I thought to myself. I decided to leave the place without making Clara aware of my presence. I would take the book and disappear from Clara Barcelo's life forever. Quietly, I stepped out of the library. The door of her bedroom was just visible at the end of the corridor. I pictured her lying on her bed, asleep. I imagined my fingers stroking her neck, exploring a body I had .conjured up from my fantasies. I turned around, ready to throw away six years of daydreaming, but something halted my step before I reached the music room. A voice whistling behind me, behind a door. A deep voice that whispered and laughed. In Clara's room. I walked slowly up to the door. I put my fingers on the doorknob. They trembled. I had arrived too late. I swallowed hard and opened the door.
9.
Clara's naked body lay stretched out on white sheets that shone like washed silk. Maestro Neri's hands slid over her lips, her neck and her breasts. Her white eyes looked up to the ceiling, her eyelids flickering as the music teacher charged at her, entering her body between pale and trembling thighs. The same hands that had read my face six years earlier in the gloom of the Ateneo now clutched the maestro's buttocks that were glistening with sweat, digging her nails into them and guiding him towards her with desperate, animal desire. I couldn't breathe. I must have stayed there, paralysed, watching them for almost half a minute, until Neri's eyes, disbelieving at first, then aflame with anger, became aware of my presence. Still panting, astounded, he stopped. Clara grabbed him, not understanding, rubbing her body against his, licking his neck.
'What's the matter?' she moaned. 'Why are you stopping?' Adrian Neri's eyes burned with rage. 'Nothing,' he murmured. 'I'll be right back.'
Neri stood up and threw himself at me, clenching his fists. I didn't even see him coming. I couldn't take my eyes off Clara, wrapped in sweat, breathless, her ribs visible under her skin and her breasts quivering. The music teacher grabbed me by the neck and dragged me out of the bedroom. My feet were barely touching the floor, and however hard I tried, I was unable to escape Neri's grip as he carried me like a bundle through the conservatory.
'I'm going to break your neck, you wretch,' he muttered.
He hauled me toward the front door, opened it, and flung me with all his might onto the landing. Carax's book slipped out of my hands. He picked it up and threw it furiously at my face.
'If I ever see you around here again, or if I find out that you've gone up to Clara in the street, I swear I'll give you such a beating you'll end up in hospital - and I don't give a shit how young you are,' he said in a cold voice. 'Understood?'
I got up with difficulty. In the struggle Neri had torn my jacket and my pride.
'How did you get in?'
I didn't answer. Neri sighed, shaking his head. 'Come on,' he barked barely containing his fury. 'Give me the keys.'
'What keys?'
He punched me so hard I collapsed. When I got up, there was blood in my mouth and a ringing in my left ear that bored through my head like a policeman's whistle. I touched my face and felt the cut on my lips burning under my fingers. A bloodstained signet ring shone on the music teacher's finger.
'I said the keys.'
'Piss off,' I spat out.
I didn't see the next blow coming. I just felt as if a jackhammer had torn my stomach out. I folded up like a broken puppet, unable to breathe, staggering back against the wall. Neri grabbed me by my hair and rummaged in my pockets until he found the keys. I slid down to the floor, holding my stomach, whimpering with agony and anger.
'Tell Clara that-'
He slammed the door in my face, leaving me in complete darkness. I groped around for the book. I found it and slid down the stairs, leaning against the walls, panting. I went outside spitting blood and gasping for breath. The biting cold and the wind tightened around my soaking clothes. The cut on my face was stinging.
'Are you all right?' asked a voice in the shadow.
It was the beggar I had refused to help a short time before. Feeling ashamed, I nodded, avoiding his eyes. I started to walk away.
'Wait a minute, at least until the rain eases off,' the beggar suggested.
He took me by the arm and led me to a corner under the arches where he kept a bundle of possessions and a bag with old, dirty clothes.
'I have a bit of wine. It's not too bad. Drink a little. It will help you warm up. And disinfect that I took a swig from the bottle he offered me. It tasted of diesel oil laced with vinegar, but its heat calmed my stomach and my nerves. A few drops sprinkled over my wound, and I saw stars in the blackest night of my life.
'Good, eh?' The beggar smiled. 'Go on, have another shot. This stuff can raise a person back from the dead.'
'No thanks. You have some,' I mumbled.
The beggar had a long drink. I watched him closely. He looked like some grey government accountant who had been sleeping in the same suit for the last fifteen years. He stretched out his hand, and I shook it.
'Fermin Romero de Torres, currently unemployed. Pleased to meet you.'
'Daniel Sempere, complete idiot. The pleasure is all mine.'
'Don't sell yourself short. On nights like this, everything looks worse than it is. You'd never guess it, but I'm a born optimist. I have no doubt at all that the present regime's days are numbered. All intelligence points towards the Americans invading us any day now and setting Franco up with a peanut stand down in Melilla. Then my position, my reputation, and my lost honour will be restored.'
'What did you work at?'
'Secret service. High espionage,' said Fermin Romero de Torres. 'Suffice it to say that I was President Macia's man in Havana.'
I nodded. Another madman. At night Barcelona gathered them in by the handful. And idiots like me, too.
'Listen, that cut doesn't look good. Someone's given you quite a tanning, eh?'
I touched my mouth with my fingers. It was still bleeding.
'Woman trouble?' he asked. 'You could have saved yourself the effort. Women in this country - and I've seen a bit of the world - are a sanctimonious, frigid lot. Believe me. I remember a little mullato girl I left behind in Cuba. No comparison, eh? No comparison. The Caribbean female draws up to you with that island swing of hers and whispers "Ay, papito, gimme pleasure, gimme pleasure." And a real man, with blood in his veins . . . well, what can I say?'
It seemed to me that Fermin Romero de Torres, or whatever his true name was, longed for lighthearted conversation almost as much as he longed for a hot bath, a plate of stew, and a clean change of clothes. I got him going for a while, as I waited for my pain to subside. It wasn't very difficult, because all the man needed was a nod at the right moment and someone who appeared to be listening. The beggar was about to recount the details of a bizarre plan for kidnapping Franco's wife when I saw that the rain had abated and the storm seemed to be slowly moving away towards the north.
'It's getting late,' I mumbled, standing up.
Fermin Romero de Torres nodded with a sad look and helped me get up, pretending to dust down my drenched clothes.
'Some other day, then,' he said in a resigned tone. 'I'm afraid talking is my undoing. Once I start .. . Listen, this business about the kidnapping, it must go no further, understand?'
'Don't worry. I'm as silent as the grave. And thanks for the wine.'
I set off towards the Ramblas. I stopped by the entrance to the square and turned to look at the Barcelos apartment. The windows were still in darkness, weeping with rain. I wanted to hate Clara but was unable to. To truly hate is an art one learns with time.
I swore to myself that I would never see her again, that I wouldn't mention her name or remember the time I had wasted by her side. For some strange reason, I felt at peace. The anger that had driven me out of my home had gone. I was afraid it would return, and with renewed vigour, the following day. I was afraid that jealousy and shame would slowly consume me once all the pieces of my memory of that night fell into place. But dawn was still a few hours away, and there was one more thing I had to do before I could return home with a clean conscience.
Calle Arco del Teatro was there waiting for me. A stream of black water converged in the centre of the narrow street and made its way, like a funeral procession, toward the heart of the Raval quarter. I recognized the old wooden door and the baroque facade to which my father had brought me that morning at dawn, six years before. I went up the steps and took shelter from the rain under the arched doorway. It reeked of urine and rotten wood. More than ever, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books smelled of death. I didn't recall that the door knocker was shaped as a demon's face. I took it by its horns and knocked three times. The cavernous echo dispersed within the building. After a while I knocked again, six knocks this time, each one louder than before, until my fist hurt. A few more minutes went by, and I began to fear that perhaps there was no longer anyone there. I crouched down against the door and took the Carax from the inside of my jacket. I opened it and reread that first sentence that had entranced me years before.
That summer it rained every day, and although many said it was God's wrath because the villagers had opened a casino next to the church, I knew it was my fault, and mine alone, for I had learned to lie and my lips still retained the last words spoken by my mother on her deathbed: 'I never loved the man I married but another who, I was told, had been killed in the war; look for him and tell him my last thoughts were for him, for he is your real father.'
I smiled, remembering that first night of feverish reading six years earlier. I closed the book and was about to knock one last time, but before my fingers touched the knocker, the large door opened far enough to reveal the profile of the keeper. He was carrying an oil lamp.
'Good evening,' I mumbled. 'Isaac, isn't it?'
The keeper observed me without blinking. The glow from the oil lamp sculpted his angular features in amber and scarlet hues, conferring on him a striking likeness to the little demon on the door knocker.
'You're Sempere junior,' he muttered wearily.
'Your memory is excellent.'
'And your sense of timing is lousy. Do you know what time it is?'
His sharp eyes had already detected the book under my jacket. Isaac stared at me questioningly. I took the book out and showed it to him.
'Carax,' he said. 'I'd say there are at most ten people in this town who know of him, or who have read this book.'
'Well, one of them is intent on setting fire to it. I can't think of a better hiding place than this.'
'This is a cemetery, not a safe.'
'Exactly. What this book needs is to be buried where nobody can find it.'
Isaac glanced suspiciously down the alleyway. He opened the door a few inches and beckoned me to slip inside. The dark, unfathomable vestibule smelled of wax and dampness. An intermittent drip could be heard in the gloom. Isaac gave me the lamp to hold while he put his hand in his coat and pulled out a ring of keys that would have been the envy of any jailer. When, by some imponderable science, he found the right one, he inserted it into a bolt under a glass case full of relays and cogwheels, like a large music box. With a twist of his wrist, the mechanism clicked, and levers and fulcrums slid in an amazing mechanical ballet until the large door was clamped by a circle of steel bars that locked into place in the stone wall.
'The Bank of Spain couldn't do better,' I remarked, impressed. 'It looks like something out of Jules Verne.'
'Kafka,' Isaac corrected, retrieving the oil lamp and starting off towards the depths of the building. 'The day you come to realize that the book business is nothing but an empty plate and you decide you want to learn how to rob a bank, or how to set one up, which is much the same thing, come and see me and I'll teach you a few things about bolts.'
I followed him through corridors that I still remembered, flanked with fading frescoes of angels and shadowlike creatures. Isaac held the lamp up high, casting a flickering bubble of red light. He limped slightly, and his frayed flannel coat looked like an undertaker's. It occurred to me that this man, somewhere between Charon and the librarian at Alexandria, seemed to belong in one of Julian Carax's novels.
'Do you know anything about Carax?' I asked.
Isaac stopped at the end of a gallery and looked at me with indifference. 'Not much. Only what they told me.'
'Who?'
'Someone who knew him well, or thought so at least.'
My heart missed a beat. 'When was that?'
'When I still had use for a comb. You must have been in swaddling clothes. And you don't seem to have come on much, quite frankly. Look at yourself: you're shaking.'
'It's my wet clothes, and it's very cold in here.'
'Is it? Well, next time pray send advance notice of your call, and I'll turn on the fancy central heating system to welcome you, little rosebud. Come on, follow me. My office is over there. There's a stove and something for you to wrap yourself in while we dry your clothes. And some Mercurochrome and peroxide wouldn't go amiss either. You look as if you've just been dropped off by a police van.'
'Don't bother, really.'
'I'm not bothering. I'm doing it for me, not for you. Once you've passed through this door, you play by my rules. This cemetery is for books, not people. You might catch pneumonia, and I don't want to call the morgue. We'll see about the book later. In thirty-eight years, I have yet to see one that can run away.'
'I can't tell you how grateful I am-'
'Then don't. If I've let you in, it's out of respect for your father. Otherwise I would have left you in the street. Now, follow me. If you behave yourself, I might consider telling you what I know of your friend Julian Carax.'
Out of the corner of my eye, when he thought I couldn't see him, I noticed that, despite himself, he was smiling mischievously. Isaac clearly seemed to relish the role of sinister watchdog. I also smiled to myself. There was no doubt in my mind as to whom the face on the door knocker belonged.
10.
Isaac threw a couple of blankets over my shoulders and offered me a cup of some steaming concoction that smelled of hot chocolate and some sort of alcohol.
'You were saying about Carax. . .'
'There's not much to say. The first person I heard mention Carax was Toni Cabestany, the publisher. I'm talking about twenty years ago, when his firm was still in business. Whenever he returned from one of his scouting trips to London, Paris, or Vienna, Cabestany would drop by and we'd chat for a while. We were both widowers by then, and he would complain that we were now married to the books, I to the old ones and he to his ledgers. We were good friends. On one of his visits, he told me how, for a pittance, he'd just acquired the Spanish rights for the novels of Julian Carax, a young writer from Barcelona who lived in Paris. This must have been in 1928 or 1929. Seems that Carax worked nights as a pianist in some small-time brothel in Pigalle and wrote during the day in a shabby attic in Saint-Germain. Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art. Carax had published a couple of novels in France, which had turned out to be total flops. No one gave him the time of day in Paris, and Cabestany had always liked to buy cheap.'
'So did Carax write in Spanish or in French?'
'Who knows? Probably both. His mother was French, a music teacher, I believe, and he'd lived in Paris since he was about nineteen or twenty. Cabestany told me that his manuscripts arrived in Spanish. Whether they were a translation or the original, he didn't care. His favourite language was money, the rest was neither here nor there. It occurred to Cabestany that perhaps, by a stroke of luck, he might place a few thousand copies in the Spanish market.'
'Did he?'
Isaac frowned as he poured me a bit more of his restorative potion. 'I think the one that sold most, The Red House, sold about ninety copies.'
'But he continued to publish Carax's books, even though he was losing money,' I pointed out.
'That's right. Beats me. Cabestany wasn't exactly a romantic. But I suppose everyone has his secrets. .. . Between 1928 and 1936, he published eight of Carax's novels. Anyway, where Cabestany really made his money was in catechisms and a series of cheap sentimental novels starring a provincial heroine called Violeta LaFleur. Those sold like hot cakes. My guess is that he published Carax's novels because it tickled his fancy, or just to contradict Darwin.'
'What happened to Senor Cabestany?'
Isaac sighed, looking up. 'Age - the price we all must pay. He became ill and had a few money problems. In 1936 his eldest son took over the firm, but he was the sort who can't even read the size of his underpants. The business collapsed in less than a year. Fortunately, Cabestany never saw what his heirs did with the fruit of his life's work, or what the war did to his country. A stroke saw him off on All Souls' Night, with a Cuban cigar in his lips and a 25-year-old girl on his lap. What a way to go. The son was another breed altogether. Arrogant as only idiots can be. His first grand idea was to try to sell the entire stock of the company backlist, his father's legacy, and turn it into pulp or something like that. A friend, another brat with a house in Caldetas and an Italian sports car, had convinced him that photo romances and Mein Kampf were going to sell like crazy, and, as a result, there would be a huge demand for cellulose.
'Did he really do that?'
'He would have, but he ran out of time. Shortly after he took over the firm, someone turned up at his office and made him a very generous offer. He wanted to buy the whole remaining stock of Julian Carax novels and was offering to pay three times their market value.'
'Say no more. To burn them,' I murmured.
Isaac smiled. He looked surprised. 'Actually, yes. And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.'
'Who was that man?'
'Someone called Aubert or Coubert, I can't quite remember.'