“I’m going only as far as number thirty-two,” I told the conductor, offering him my best smile.
“I don’t care if you’re going to Cape Horn,” he replied with indifference. “Even Christ’s soldiers here have paid for their tickets. Either you fork out or you walk out. And I’m not charging you for the rhyme.”
Clad in sandals and the austere brown sackcloth cloaks of the Franciscan order, the friars nodded, showing their two pink tickets to prove the conductor’s point.
“I’ll get off, then,” I said. “Because I haven’t any small change.”
“As you wish. But wait for the next stop. I don’t want any accidents on my shift.”
The tram climbed almost at walking pace, hugging the shade of the trees and peeping over the walls and gardens of castlelike mansions that I imagined filled with statues, fountains, stables, and secret chapels. I looked out from one side of the platform and noticed the White Friar villa, silhouetted between the trees. As the train approached the corner with Calle Román Macaya, it slowed down until it almost came to a halt. The driver rang his bell, and the conductor threw me a sharp look. “Go on, smartie. Off you get, number thirty-two is just there.”
I got off and heard the clattering of the blue tram as it disappeared into the mist. The Aldaya residence was on the opposite side of the street from The White Friar, guarded by a large wrought-iron gate woven with ivy and dead leaves. Set in the iron bars, barely visible, was a small door, firmly locked. Above the gate, knotted into the shape of black iron snakes, was the number 32. I tried to peer into the property from there but could make out only the angles and arches of a dark tower. A trail of rust bled from the keyhole in the door. I knelt down and tried to get a better view of the courtyard from that position. All I could see was a tangle of weeds and the outline of what seemed to be a fountain or a pond from which an outstretched hand emerged, pointing up to the sky. It took me a few moments to realize that it was a stone hand and that there were other limbs and shapes I could not quite make out submerged in the fountain. Farther away, veiled by the weeds, I caught sight of a marble staircase, broken and covered in rubble and fallen leaves. The glory and fortune of the Aldayas had faded a long time ago. The place was a graveyard.
I walked back a few steps and then turned the corner to have a look at the south wing of the house. From here you could get a better view of one of the mansion’s towers. At that moment I noticed a human figure at the edge of my vision, an emaciated man in blue overalls, who brandished a large broom with which he was attacking the dead leaves on the pavement. He regarded me with some suspicion, and I imagined he must be the caretaker of one of the neighboring properties. I smiled as only someone who has spent many hours behind a counter can do.
“Good morning,” I intoned cordially. “Do you know whether the Aldayas’ house has been closed for long?”
He stared at me as if I had inquired about the sex of angels. The little man touched his chin with yellowed fingers that betrayed a weakness for cheap unfiltered Celtas. I regretted not having a packet on me with which to win him over. I rummaged in the pocket of my jacket to see what offering I could come up with.
“At least twenty or twenty-five years, and let’s hope it continues that way,” said the caretaker in that flat, resigned tone of people beaten into servility.
“Have you been here long?”
The man nodded. “Yours truly has been employed here with the Miravells since 1920.”
“You wouldn’t have any idea what happened to the Aldaya family, would you?”
“Well, as you know, they lost everything at the time of the Republic,” he said. “He who makes trouble…What little I know is what I’ve heard in the home of the Miravells, who used to be friends of the Aldayas. I think the eldest son, Jorge, went abroad, to Argentina. It seems they had factories there. Very rich people. They always fall on their feet. You wouldn’t have a cigarette, by any chance?”
“I’m sorry, but I can offer you a Sugus candy—it’s a known fact that they have as much nicotine in them as a Montecristo cigar, as well as bucketloads of vitamins.”
The caretaker frowned in disbelief, but he accepted. I offered him the lemon Sugus candy Fermín had given me an eternity ago, which I’d found in my pocket, hidden in a fold of the lining. I hoped it would not be rancid.
“It’s good,” ruled the caretaker, sucking at the rubbery sweet.
“You’re chewing the pride of the national sweets industry. The Generalissimo swallows them by the handful, like sugared almonds. And tell me, did you ever hear any mention of the Aldayas’ daughter, Penélope?”
The caretaker leaned on his broom in the manner of Rodin’sThinker.
“I think you must be mistaken. The Aldayas didn’t have any daughters. They were all boys.”
“Are you sure? I know that a young girl called Penélope Aldaya lived in this house around the year 1919. She was probably Jorge’s sister.”
“That might be, but as I said, I’ve been here only since 1920.”
“What about the property? Who owns it now?”
“As far as I know, it’s still for sale, though they were talking about knocking it down to build a school. That’s the best thing they could do, frankly. Tear it down to its foundations.”
“What makes you say that?”
The caretaker gave me a guarded look. When he smiled, I noticed he was missing at least four upper teeth. “Those people, the Aldayas. They were a shady lot, if you listen to what they say.”
“I’m afraid I don’t. What do they say about them?”
“You know. The noises and all that. Personally, I don’t believe in that kind of stuff, don’t get me wrong, but they say that more than one person has soiled his pants in there.”
“Don’t tell me the house is haunted,” I said, suppressing a smile.
“You can laugh. But where there’s smoke…”
“Have you seen anything?”
“Not exactly, no. But I’ve heard.”
“Heard? What?”
“Well, one night, years ago, when I accompanied Master Joanet. Only because he insisted, you know? I didn’t want to have anything to do with that place…. As I was saying, I heard something strange there. A sort of sobbing.”
The caretaker produced his own version of the noise to which he was referring. It sounded like someone with consumption humming a litany of folk songs.
“It must have been the wind,” I suggested.
“It must have, but I was scared shitless. Hey, you wouldn’t have another one of those sweets, would you?”
“Please accept a throat lozenge. They tone you up after a sweet.”
“Come on, then,” agreed the caretaker, putting out his hand to collect it.
I gave him the whole box. The strong taste of licorice seemed to loosen his tongue regarding the extraordinary tale of the Aldaya mansion.
“Between you and me, it’s some story. Once, Joanet, the son of Mr. Miravell, a huge guy, twice your size (he’s on the national handball team, that should give you some idea)…Anyhow, some mates of young Joanet had heard stories about the Aldaya house, and they roped him in. And he ropedme in, asking me to go with him—all that bragging, and he didn’t dare go on his own. Rich kids, what do you expect? He was determined to go in there at night, to show off in front of his girlfriend, and he nearly pisses himself. I mean, now you’re looking at it in the daylight, but at night the place looks quite different. Anyway, Joanet says he went up to the second floor (I refused to go in, of course—it can’t be lawful, even if the house has been abandoned for at least ten years), and he says there was something there. He thought he heard a sort of voice in one of the rooms, but when he tried to go in, the door shut in his face. What do you think of that?”
“I think it was a draft,” I said.
“Or something else,” the caretaker pointed out, lowering his voice. “The other day it was on the radio: the universe is full of mysteries. Imagine, they think they’ve found t
he Holy Shroud, the real one, bang in downtown Toledo. It had been sewn to a cinema screen, to hide it from the Muslims. Apparently they wanted to use it so they could say Jesus Christ was a black man. What do you make of that?”
“I am speechless.”
“Exactly. Mysteries galore. They should knock that building down and throw lime over the ground.”
I thanked him for the information and was about to turn down the avenue when I looked up and saw Tibidabo Mountain awakening behind the clouds of gauze. Suddenly I felt like taking the funicular up the hill to visit the old amusement park crowning its top and wander among its merry-go-rounds and the eerie automaton halls, but I had promised to be back in the bookshop on time.
As I returned to the station, I pictured Julián Carax walking down that same road, gazing at those same solemn façades that had hardly changed since then, perhaps even waiting to board the blue tram that tiptoed up to heaven. When I reached the foot of the avenue, I took out the photograph of Penélope Aldaya smiling in the courtyard of the family mansion. Her eyes spoke of an untroubled soul and an undisclosed future. “Penélope, who loves you.”
I imagined Julián Carax at my age, holding that image in his hands, perhaps in the shade of the same tree that now sheltered me. I could almost see him smiling confidently, contemplating a future as wide and luminous as that avenue, and for a moment I thought there were no more ghosts there than those of absence and loss, and that the light that smiled on me was borrowed light, real only as long as I could hold it in my eyes, second by second.
·18·
WHEN IGOT BACK HOME, I REALIZED THAT FERMÍN OR MY father had already opened the bookshop. I went up to the apartment for a moment to have a quick bite. My father had left some toast and jam and a thermos of strong coffee on the dining-room table for me. I polished it all off and was down again in ten minutes, reborn. I entered the bookshop through the door in the back room that adjoined the entrance hall of the building and went straight to my closet. I put on the blue apron I usually wore to protect my clothes from the dust on boxes and shelves. At the bottom of the cupboard, I kept an old tin cookie box, a treasure chest of sorts. There I stored a menagerie of useless bits of junk that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away: watches and fountain pens damaged beyond repair, old coins, marbles, wartime bullet cases I’d found in Laberinto Park, and fading postcards of Barcelona from the turn of the century. Still floating among all those bits and pieces was the old scrap of newspaper on which Isaac Monfort had written down his daughter Nuria’s address, the night I went to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books to hideThe Shadowof the Wind. I examined it in the dusty light that filtered between shelves and piled-up boxes, then closed the tin box and put the address in my wallet. Having resolved to occupy both mind and hands with the most trivial job that I could find, I walked into the shop.
“Good morning,” I announced.
Fermín was classifying the contents of various parcels that had arrived from a collector in Salamanca, and my father was struggling to decipher a German catalog of Lutheran apocrypha.
“And may God grant us an even better afternoon,” sang Fermín—a veiled reference, no doubt, to my meeting with Bea.
I didn’t grant him the pleasure of an answer. Instead I turned to the inevitable monthly chore of getting the account book up to date, checking receipts and order forms, collections and payments. The sound of the radio orchestrated our serene monotony, treating us to a selection of hit songs by the celebrated crooner Antonio Machín, quite fashionable at the time. Caribbean rhythms tended to get on my father’s nerves, but he tolerated the tropical soundscape because the tunes reminded Fermín of his beloved Cuba. The scene was repeated every week: my father pretended not to hear, and Fermín would abandon himself to a vague wiggling in time to thedanzón, punctuating the commercial breaks with anecdotes about his adventures in Havana. The shop door was ajar, and a sweet aroma of fresh bread and coffee wafted through, lifting our spirits. After a while our neighbor Merceditas, who was on her way back from doing her shopping in Boquería Market, stopped by the shop window and peered around the door.
“Good morning, Mr. Sempere,” she sang.
My father blushed and smiled at her. I had the feeling that he liked Merceditas, but his monkish manners confined him to an impregnable silence. Fermín ogled her out of the corner of his eye, keeping the tempo with his gentle hip swaying and licking his lips as if a Swiss roll had just walked in through the door. Merceditas opened a paper bag and gave us three shiny apples. I imagined she still fancied the idea of working in the bookshop and made little effort to hide her dislike for Fermín, the usurper.
“Aren’t they beautiful? I saw them and said to myself, these are for the Semperes,” she said in an affected tone. “I know you intellectuals like apples, like that Isaac of the gravity thing, you know.”
“Isaac Newton, pumpkin,” Fermín specified.
Merceditas looked angrily at him. “Hello, Mr. Smartmouth. You can be grateful that I’ve brought one for you, too, and not a sour grapefruit, which is what you deserve.”
“But, woman, coming from your nubile hands, this offering, this fleshy fruit of the original sin, ignites my—”
“Fermín, please,” interrupted my father.
“Yes, Mr. Sempere,” said Fermín obediently, beating a retreat.
Merceditas was on the point of shooting something back at Fermín when we heard an uproar in the street. We all fell silent, listening expectantly. We could hear indignant cries outside, followed by a surge of murmuring. Merceditas carefully put her head around the door. We saw a number of shopkeepers walk by looking uncomfortable and swearing under their breath. Soon Don Anacleto Olmo appeared—a resident of our block and unofficial spokesman for the Royal Academy of Language in the neighborhood. Don Anacleto was a high-school teacher with a degree in Spanish literature and a handful of other subjects, and he shared an apartment on the first floor with seven cats. When he was not teaching, he moonlighted as a blurb writer for a prestigious publishing firm, and it was rumored that he also composed erotic verse that he published under the saucy alias of “Humberto Peacock.” While among friends Don Anacleto was an unassuming, genial fellow, in public he felt obliged to act the part of declamatory poet, and the affected purple prose of his speech had won him the nickname of “the Victorian.”
That morning the teacher’s face was pink with distress, and his hands, in which he held his ivory cane, were almost shaking. All four of us stared at him.
“Don Anacleto, what’s the matter?” asked my father.
“Franco has died, please say he has,” prompted Fermín.
“Shut up, you beast,” Merceditas cut in. “Let the doctor talk.”
Don Anacleto took a deep breath, regained his composure, and, with his customary majesty, unfolded his account of what had happened.
“Dear friends, life is the stuff of drama, and even the noblest of the Lord’s creatures can taste the bitterness of destiny’s capricious and obstinate ways. Last night, in the small hours, while the city enjoyed the well-deserved sleep of all hardworking people, Don Federico Flaviá i Pujades, a well-loved neighbor who has so greatly contributed to this community’s enrichment and solace in his role as watchmaker, only three doors down from this bookshop, was arrested by the State Police.”
I felt my heart sink.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” remarked Merceditas.
Fermín puffed with disappointment, for it was clear that the dictator remained in perfect health.
Well on his way now, Don Anacleto took a deep breath and prepared to go on.
“According to a reliable account revealed to me by sources close to Police Headquarters, last night, shortly after midnight, two bemedaled undercover members of the Crime Squad caught Don Federico clad in the lush, licentious costume of a diva and singing risqué variety songs on the stage of some dive in Calle Escudillers, where he was allegedly entertaining an audience mostly made up of brainwise meagerly endowed member
s of the public. These godforsaken creatures, who had eloped that same afternoon from the sheltering premises of a hospice belonging to a religious order, had pulled down their trousers in the frenzy of the show and were dancing about with no restraint, clapping their hands, with their privates in full bloom and their mouths drooling.”
Merceditas made the sign of the cross, alarmed by the salacious turn the events were taking.
“On learning of what had transpired, the pious mothers of some of those poor souls made a formal complaint on the grounds of public scandal and affront to the most basic code of morality. The press, nefarious vulture that feeds on misfortune and dishonor, did not take long to pick up the scent of carrion. Thanks to the wretched offices of a professional informer, not forty minutes had elapsed since the arrival of the two members of the police when Kiko Calabuig appeared on the scene. Calabuig, ace reporter for the muckraking dailyEl Caso, was determined to uncover whatever deplorable vignettes were necessary and to leave no shady stone unturned to spice up his lurid report in time for today’s edition. Needless to say, the spectacle that took place in those premises is described with tabloid viciousness as Dantesque and horrifying, in twenty-four-point headlines.”
“This can’t be right,” said my father. “I thought Don Federico had learned his lesson.”
Don Anacleto gave a priestly nod. “Yes, but don’t forget the old sayings ‘The leopard cannot change his spots’ and ‘Man cannot live by bromide alone….’ And you still haven’t heard the worst.”
“Then, please, sire, could you get to the frigging point? Because with all this metaphorical spin and flourish, I’m beginning to feel a fiery bowel movement at the gates,” Fermín protested.
“Pay no attention to this animal. I love the way you speak. It’s like the voice on the newsreel, Dr. Anacleto,” interposed Merceditas.