“So-so. Quite the ascetic type. I remember that when I found out that the Frenchwoman had left him, I invited him to go whoring with a few mates of mine, nearby, in a fabulous establishment I know next to La Paloma dance hall. Just to cheer him up, eh? That’s all. And you know what? He would not talk to me, even greet me in the street anymore, as if I were invisible. What do you make of that?”
“I’m in shock. What else can you tell me about the Fortuny family? Do you remember them well?”
“Those were different times,” he murmured nostalgically. “The fact is that I already knew Grandfather Fortuny, the one who started the hat shop. About the son, there isn’t much to tell. Now, the wife, she was spectacular. What a woman. And decent, eh? Despite all the rumors and gossip…”
“Like the one about Julián’s not being the legitimate son of Mr. Fortuny?”
“And where did you hear that?”
“As I said, I’m part of the family. Everything gets out.”
“None of that was ever proved.”
“But it was talked about,” I said encouragingly.
“People talk too much. Humans aren’t descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.”
“And what did people say?”
“Don’t you feel like a little glass of rum? It’s Cuban, like all the good stuff that kills you.”
“No thanks, but I’ll keep you company. In the meantime, you can tell me…”
Antoni Fortuny, whom everyone called the hatter, met Sophie Carax in 1899 by the steps of Barcelona Cathedral. He was returning from making a vow to Saint Eustace—for of all the saints, Saint Eustace was considered the most diligent and the least fussy when it came to granting miracles to do with love. Antoni Fortuny, who was already over thirty and a confirmed bachelor, was looking for a wife, and wanted her right away. Sophie was a French girl who lived in a boardinghouse for young ladies on Calle Riera Alta and gave private music and piano lessons to the offspring of the most privileged families in Barcelona. She had no family or capital to rely on, only her youth and what musical education she had received from her father—the pianist at a Nîmes theater—before he died of tuberculosis in 1886. Antoni Fortuny, on the contrary, was a man on the road to prosperity. He had recently inherited his father’s business, a hat shop of some repute on Ronda de San Antonio, where he had learned the trade that he dreamed of one day teaching his own son. He found Sophie Carax fragile, beautiful, young, docile, and fertile. Saint Eustace had obliged. After four months of insistent courting, Sophie accepted Antoni’s marriage proposal. Mr. Molins, who had been a friend of Fortuny the elder, warned Antoni that he was marrying a stranger. He said that Sophie seemed like a nice girl, but perhaps this marriage was a bit too convenient for her, and he should wait a year at least…. Antoni Fortuny replied that he already knew everything he needed to about his future wife. The rest did not interest him. They were married at the Basílica del Pino and spent their three-day honeymoon in a spa in the nearby seaside resort of Mongat. The morning before they left, the hatter asked Mr. Molins, in confidence, to be initiated into the mysteries of the bedroom. Molins sarcastically told him to ask his wife. The newlyweds returned to Barcelona after only two days. The neighbors said Sophie was crying when she came into the building. Years later Viçenteta swore that Sophie had told her the following: that the hatter had not laid a finger on her and that when she had tried to seduce him, he had called her a whore and told her he was disgusted by the obscenity of what she was proposing. Six months later Sophie announced to her husband that she was with child. By another man.
Antoni Fortuny had seen his own father hit his mother on countless occasions and did what he thought was the right thing to do. He stopped only when he feared that one more blow would kill her. Despite the beating, Sophie refused to reveal the identity of the child’s father. Applying his own logic to the matter, Antoni Fortuny decided that it must be the devil, for that child was the child of sin, and sin had only one father: the One. Convinced in this manner that sin had sneaked into his home and also between his wife’s thighs, the hatter took to hanging crucifixes everywhere: on the walls, on the doors of all the rooms, and on the ceiling. When Sophie discovered him scattering crosses in the bedroom to which she had been confined, she grew afraid and, with tears in her eyes, asked him whether he had gone mad. Blind with rage, he turned around and hit her. “A whore like the rest,” he spit as he threw her out onto the landing, after flaying her with blows from his belt. The following day, when Antoni Fortuny opened the door of his apartment to go down to the hat shop, Sophie was still there, covered in dried blood and shivering with cold. The doctors never managed to fix the fractures on her right hand completely. Sophie Carax would never be able to play the piano again, but she would give birth to a boy, whom she would name Julián after the father she had lost when she was still too young—as happens with all good things in life. Fortuny considered throwing her out of his home but thought the scandal would not be good for business. Nobody would buy hats from a man known to be a cuckold—the two didn’t go together. From then on, Sophie was assigned a dark, cold room at the back of the apartment.
It was there she gave birth to her son with the help of two neighbors. Antoni did not return home until three days later. “This is the son God has given you,” Sophie announced. “If you want to punish anyone, punish me, but not an innocent creature. The boy needs a home and a father. My sins are not his. I beg you to take pity on us.”
The first months were difficult for both of them. Antoni Fortuny had downgraded his wife to the rank of servant. They no longer shared a bed or table and rarely exchanged any words except to resolve some domestic matter. Once a month, usually coinciding with the full moon, Antoni Fortuny showed up in Sophie’s bedroom at dawn and, without a word, charged at his former wife with vigor but little skill. Making the most of these rare and aggressive moments of intimacy, Sophie tried to win him over by whispering words of love and caressing him. But the hatter was not a man for frivolities, and the eagerness of desire evaporated in a matter of minutes, or even seconds. These assaults brought no children. After a few years, Antoni Fortuny stopped visiting Sophie’s chamber for good and took up the habit of reading the Gospels until the small hours, seeking in them a solace for his torment.
With the help of the Gospels, the hatter made an effort to kindle some affection for the child with deep eyes who loved making a joke of everything and inventing shadows where there were none. Despite his efforts, Antoni Fortuny was unable to feel as if little Julián were his own flesh and blood, nor did he recognize any aspect of himself in him. The boy, for his part, did not seem very interested either in hats or in the teachings of the catechism. During the Christmas season he would amuse himself by changing the positions of the small figures in the Nativity scene and devising plots in which Baby Jesus had been kidnapped by the three magi from the East, with wicked intentions. He soon became obsessed with drawing angels with wolf’s teeth and inventing stories about hooded spirits that came out of walls and ate people’s ideas while they slept. In time the hatter lost all hope of being able to set this boy on the right path. The child was not a Fortuny and never would be. Julián maintained that he was bored in school and came home with his notebooks full of drawings of monstrous beings, winged serpents, and buildings that were alive, walked, and devoured the unsuspecting. By then it was quite clear that fantasy and invention interested him far more than the daily reality around him. Of all the disappointments amassed during his lifetime, none hurt Antoni Fortuny more than that son whom the devil had sent to mock him.
At the age of ten, Julián announced that he wanted to be a painter, like Velázquez. He dreamed of embarking on canvases that the great master had been unable to paint during his life because, Julián argued, he’d been obliged to paint so many time-consuming portraits of mentally retarded royals. To make matters worse, Sophie, perhaps to relieve her loneliness and remember her father, decided to give him piano lessons. Julián, who loved music
, art, and all matters that were not practical in the world of men, soon learned the rudiments of harmony and concluded that he preferred to invent his own compositions rather than follow the music-book scores. At that time Antoni Fortuny still suspected that part of the boy’s mental deficiencies were due to his diet, which was far too influenced by his mother’s French cooking. It was a well-known fact that the richness of buttery foods led to moral ruin and confusion of the intellect. He forbade Sophie to cook with butter ever again. The results were not entirely as he had anticipated.
At twelve Julián began to lose his feverish interest in painting and in Velázquez, but the hatter’s initial hopes did not last long. Julián was abandoning his canvas dreams for a far more pernicious vice. He had discovered the library on Calle del Carmen and devoted any time he was allowed off from the hat shop to visiting the sanctuary of books and devouring volumes of fiction, poetry, and history. The day before his thirteenth birthday, he announced that he wanted to be someone called Robert Louis Stevenson, evidently a foreigner. The hatter remarked that with luck he’d become a quarry worker. At that point he became convinced that his son was nothing but an idiot.
At night Antoni Fortuny often writhed in his bed with anger and frustration, unable to get any sleep. At the bottom of his heart, he loved that child, he told himself. And although she didn’t deserve it, he also loved the slut who had betrayed him from the very first day. He loved her with all his soul, but in his own way, which was the correct way. All he asked God was to show him how the three of them could be happy, preferably also in his own way. He begged the Lord to send him a signal, a whisper, a crumb of His presence. God, in His infinite wisdom, and perhaps overwhelmed by the avalanche of requests from so many tormented souls, did not answer. While Antoni Fortuny was engulfed by remorse and suspicions, on the other side of the wall Sophie slowly faded away, her life shipwrecked on a sea of disappointment, isolation, and guilt. She did not love the man she served, but she felt she belonged to him, and the possibility of leaving him and taking her son with her to some other place seemed inconceivable. She remembered Julián’s real father with bitterness, and eventually grew to hate him and everything he stood for. In her desperation she began to shout back at Antoni Fortuny. Insults and sharp recriminations flew around the apartment like knives, stabbing anyone who dared get in their way, usually Julián. Later the hatter never remembered exactly why he had beaten his wife. He remembered only the anger and the shame. He would then swear to himself that this would never happen again, that, if necessary, he would give himself up to the authorities and get himself locked up in prison.
Antoni Fortuny was sure that, with God’s help, he would end up being a better man than his own father. But sooner or later, his fists would once more meet Sophie’s tender flesh, and in time Fortuny felt that if he could not possess her as a husband, he would do so as a tyrant. In this manner, secretly, the Fortuny family let the years go by, silencing their hearts and their souls to the point where, from so much keeping quiet, they forgot the words with which to express their real feelings and became strangers living under the same roof, like so many other families in the vast city.
It was past two-thirty when I returned to the bookshop. As I walked in, Fermín gave me a sarcastic look from the top of a ladder, where he was polishing up a collection of theEpisodios Nacionales by the famous Don Benito.
“Who is this I see before me? We thought you must have set off to the New World by now, Daniel.”
“I got delayed on the way. Where’s my father?”
“Since you didn’t turn up, he went off to deliver the rest of the orders. He asked me to tell you that this afternoon he was going to Tiana to value a private library belonging to a widow. Your father’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He said not to wait for him to close the shop.”
“Was he annoyed?”
Fermín shook his head, coming down the stepladder with feline nimbleness.
“Not at all. Your father is a saint. Besides, he was very happy to see you’re dating a young lady.”
“What?”
Fermín winked at me and smacked his lips.
“Oh, you little devil, you were hiding your light under a bushel! And what a girl, eh? Good enough to stop traffic. And such class. You can tell she’s been to good schools, although she has fire in her eyes…. If Bernarda hadn’t stolen my heart, and I haven’t yet told you all about our outing—there were sparks coming out of those eyes, I tell you, sparks, it was like a bonfire on Midsummer Night—”
“Fermín,” I interrupted. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“About your fiancée.”
“I don’t have a fiancée, Fermín.”
“Well, these days you young people call them anything, sugar pie, or—”
“Fermín, will you please start again. What are you talking about?”
Fermín Romero de Torres looked at me disconcertedly.
“Let me see. This afternoon, about an hour or an hour and a half ago, a gorgeous young lady came by and asked for you. Your father and yours truly were on the premises, and I can assure you without a shadow of doubt that the girl was no apparition. I could even describe her smell. Lavender, only sweeter. Like a little sugar bun just out of the oven.”
“Did little sugar bun say she was my fiancée, by any chance?”
“Well, not in so many words, but she gave a sort of quick smile, if you see what I mean, and said that she would see you on Friday afternoon. All we did was put two and two together.”
“Bea…” mumbled.
“Ergo, she exists,” said Fermín with relief.
“Yes, but she’s not my girlfriend.”
“Well, I don’t know what you’re waiting for, then.”
“She’s Tomás Aguilar’s sister.”
“Your friend the inventor?”
I nodded.
“All the more reason. Even if she were the pope’s niece, she’s a bombshell. If I were you, I’d be on the ready.”
“Bea already has a fiancé. A lieutenant doing his military service.”
Fermín sighed with irritation. “Ah, the army, blight and refuge for the basest simian instincts. All the better, because this way you can cuckold him without feeling guilty.”
“You’re delirious, Fermín. Bea’s getting married when the lieutenant finishes his service.”
Fermín gave me a sneaky smile. “Funny you should say that, because I have a feeling she’s not. I don’t think this pumpkin is going to be tying the knot anytime soon.”
“What do you know?”
“About women and other worldly matters, considerably more than you. As Freud tells us, women want the opposite of what they think or say they want, which, when you consider it, is not so bad, because men, as is more than evident, respond, contrariwise, to the dictates of their genital and digestive organs.”
“Stop lecturing me, Fermín, I can see what you’re getting at. If you have anything to say, say it.”
“Right, then, in a nutshell: this one hasn’t a single bone of obedient-little-wife material in her heavenly body.”
“Hasn’t she? Then what kind of bone does your expertise detect in her?”
Fermín came closer, adopting a confidential tone. “The passionate kind,” he said, raising his eyebrows with an air of mystery. “And you can be sure I mean that as a compliment.”
As usual, Fermín was right. Feeling defeated, I decided that attack was the best form of defense. “Speaking of passion, tell me about Bernarda. Was there or was there not a kiss?”
“Don’t insult me, Daniel. Let me remind you that you are talking to a professional in the craft of seduction, and this business of kissing is for amateurs and little old men in slippers. Real women are won over bit by bit. It’s all a question of psychology, like a goodfaena in the bullring.”
“In other words, she gave you the brush-off.”
“The woman is yet to be born who is capable of giving Fermín Romero de Torres the brush-off.
The trouble is that man, going back to Freud—and excuse the metaphor—heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand—and this is pure science—heats up like an iron, if you see what I mean. Slowly, over a low heat, like a tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there’s no stopping her. Like the steel furnaces in Vizcaya.”
I weighed up Fermín’s thermodynamic theories. “Is that what you’re doing with Bernarda? Heating up the iron?”
Fermín winked at me. “That woman is a volcano on the point of eruption, with a libido of igneous magma yet the heart of an angel,” he said, licking his lips. “If I had to establish a true parallel, she reminds me of my succulent mulatto girl in Havana, who was very devout and always worshiped her saints. But since, deep down, I’m an old-fashioned gent who doesn’t like to take advantage of women, I contented myself with a chaste kiss on the cheek. I’m not in a hurry, you see? All good things must wait. There are yokels out there who think that if they touch a woman’s behind and she doesn’t complain, they’ve hooked her. Amateurs. The female heart is a labyrinth of subtleties, too challenging for the uncouth mind of the male racketeer. If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is to win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.”
I clapped solemnly at his discourse. “You’re a poet, Fermín.”
“No, I’m with Ortega and I’m a pragmatist. Poetry lies, in its adorable wicked way, and what I say is truer than a slice of bread and tomato. That’s just what the master said: show me a Don Juan and I’ll show you a loser in disguise. What I aim for is permanence, durability. Bear witness that I will make Bernarda, if not an honest woman, because that she already is, at least a happy one.”
I smiled as I nodded. His enthusiasm was contagious, and his diction beyond improvement. “Take good care of her, Fermín. Do it for me. Bernarda has a heart of gold, and she has already suffered too many disappointments.”