She stared at me, without moving, as if she were afraid that the world around her was going to fall apart.
“I’ll only take a few minutes of your time,” I added. “I promise.”
She nodded, with a look of resignation. “How’s my father?” she asked, avoiding my eyes.
“He’s well. He’s aged a little. And he misses you a lot.”
Nuria Monfort let out a sigh I couldn’t decipher. “You’d better come up to the apartment. I don’t want to talk about this on the street.”
·20·
NURIA MONFORT LIVED ADRIFT IN SHADOWS. A NARROW COR ridor led to a dining room that also served as kitchen, library, and office. On the way I noticed a modest bedroom, with no windows. That was all, other than a tiny bathroom with no shower or tub out of which all kinds of odors emanated, from smells of cooking from the bar below to a musty stench of pipes and drains that dated from the turn of the century. The entire apartment was sunk in perpetual gloom, like a block of darkness propped up between peeling walls. It smelled of black tobacco, cold, and absence. Nuria Monfort observed me while I pretended not to notice the precarious condition of her home.
“I go down to the street because there’s hardly any light in the apartment,” she said. “My husband has promised to give me a reading lamp when he comes back.”
“Is your husband away?”
“Miquel is in prison.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know….”
“You couldn’t have known. I’m not ashamed of telling you, because he isn’t a criminal. This last time they took him away for printing leaflets for the metalworkers’ union. That was two years ago. The neighbors think he’s in America, traveling. My father doesn’t know either, and I wouldn’t like him to find out.”
“Don’t worry. He won’t find out through me,” I said.
A tense silence wove itself around us, and I imagined she was considering whether I was a spy sent by Isaac.
“It must be hard to run a house on one’s own,” I said stupidly, just to fill the void.
“It’s not easy. I get what money I can from translations, but with a husband in prison, that’s not nearly enough. The lawyers have bled me dry, and I’m up to my neck in debts. Translating is almost as badly paid as writing.”
She looked at me as if she was expecting an answer. I just smiled meekly. “You translate books?”
“Not anymore. Now I’ve started to translate forms, contracts, and customs documents—that pays much better. You get only a pittance for translating literature, though a bit more than for writing it, it’s true. The residents’ association has already tried to throw me out a couple of times. The least of their worries is that I’m behind with the maintenance fees. You can imagine, a woman who speaks foreign languages and wears trousers…. More than one neighbor has accused me of running a house of ill repute in this apartment. I should be so lucky….”
I hoped the darkness would hide my blushes.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I’m embarrassing you.”
“It’s my fault. I asked.”
She laughed nervously. She had around her a burning aura of loneliness.
“You remind me a bit of Julián,” she said suddenly. “The way you look, and your gestures. He used to do what you are doing now. He would stare at you without saying a word, and you wouldn’t know what he was thinking, and so, like an idiot, you’d tell him things it would have been better to keep to yourself…. Can I offer you anything? A cup of coffee maybe?”
“Nothing, thanks. I don’t want to trouble you.”
“It’s no trouble. I was about to make one for myself.”
Something told me that that cup of coffee was all she was having for lunch. I refused again and watched her walk over to a corner of the dining room where there was a small electric stove.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, her back to me.
I looked around and asked myself how. Nuria Monfort’s office consisted of a desk that took up the corner next to the balcony, an Underwood typewriter with an oil lamp beside it, and a shelf full of dictionaries and manuals. There were no family photos, but the wall by the desk was covered with postcards, all of them pictures of a bridge I remembered seeing somewhere but couldn’t pinpoint—perhaps Paris or Rome. Beneath this display the desk showcased an almost obsessive neatness and order. The pencils were sharpened and perfectly lined up. The papers and folders were arranged and placed in three symmetrical rows. When I turned around, I realized that Nuria Monfort was gazing at me from the entrance to the corridor. She regarded me in silence, the way one looks at strangers on the street or in the subway. She lit a cigarette and stayed where she was, her face masked by spirals of blue smoke. I suddenly thought that, despite herself, Nuria Monfort exuded a certain air of the femme fatale, like those women in the movies who dazzled Fermín when they materialized out of the mist of a Berlin station, enveloped in halos of improbable light, the sort of beautiful women whose own appearance bored them.
“There’s not much to tell,” she began. “I met Julián over twenty years ago, in Paris. At that time I was working for Cabestany, the publishing house. Mr. Cabestany had acquired the rights to Julián’s novels for peanuts. At first I worked in the accounts department, but when Mr. Cabestany found out that I spoke French, Italian, and a little German, he moved me to the purchasing department, and I became his personal secretary. One of my jobs was to correspond with foreign authors and publishers with whom our firm had business, and that’s how I came into contact with Julián Carax.”
“Your father told me you two were good friends.”
“My father probably told you we had a fling or something along those lines, right? According to him, I run after any pair of pants, like a bitch in heat.”
That woman’s frankness and her brazen manner left me speechless. I took too long to come up with an acceptable reply. By then Nuria Monfort was smiling to herself and shaking her head.
“Pay no attention to him. My father got that idea from a trip to Paris I once had to make, back in 1933, to resolve some matters between Mr. Cabestany and Gallimard. I spent a week in the city and stayed in Julián’s apartment for the simple reason that Mr. Cabestany preferred to save on hotel expenses. Very romantic, as you can see. Until then my relationship with Julián Carax had been conducted strictly by letter, normally dealing with copyright, proofs, or editorial matters. What I knew about him, or imagined, had come from reading the manuscripts he sent us.”
“Did he tell you anything about his life in Paris?”
“No. Julián didn’t like talking about his books or about himself. I didn’t think he was happy in Paris. Though he gave the impression that he was one of those people who cannot be happy anywhere. The truth is, I never got to know him well. He wouldn’t let you. He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in people. Mr. Cabestany thought he was shy and perhaps a bit crazy, but I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them—a comfortable prison of his own design.”
“You say this as if you envied him.”
“There are worse prisons than words, Daniel.”
I nodded, not quite sure what she meant.
“Did Julián ever talk about those memories, about his years in Barcelona?”
“Very little. During the week I was staying with him in Paris, he told me a bit about his family. His mother was French, a music teacher. His father had a hat shop or something like that. I know he was a very religious man, and very strict.”
“Did Julián explain to you what sort of a relationship he had with him?”
“I know they didn’t get on at all. It was something that went back a long time. In fact, the reason Julián went to Paris was to avoid being put into the army by his father. His mother had promised him she would take him as far away as possible from that man, rather tha
n let that happen.”
“That man was his father, after all.”
Nuria Monfort smiled. It was just a hint of a smile and her eyes shone weary and sad.
“Even if he was, he never behaved like one, and Julián never considered him as such. Once he confessed to me that before getting married, his mother had had an affair with a stranger whose name she never revealed to him. That man was Julián’s real father.”
“It sounds like the beginning ofThe Shadow of the Wind. Do you think he told you the truth?”
Nuria Monfort nodded. “Julián told me he had grown up watching how the hatter—that’s what he called him—insulted and beat his mother. Then he would go into Julián’s room and tell him he was the son of sin, that he had inherited his mother’s weak and despicable personality and would be miserable all his life, a failure at whatever he tried to do….”
“Did Julián feel resentful toward his father?”
“Time is a great healer. I never felt that Julián hated him. Perhaps that would have been better. I got the impression that he lost all respect for the hatter as a result of all those scenes. Julián spoke about all that as if it didn’t matter to him, as if it were part of a past he had left behind, but these things are never forgotten. The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.”
I wondered whether she was talking from experience, and the image of my friend Tomás Aguilar came to my mind, listening stoically to the diatribes of his haughty father.
“How old was Julián when his father started speaking to him like that?”
“About eight or ten, I imagine.”
I sighed.
“As soon as he was old enough to join the army, his mother took him to Paris. I don’t think they even said good-bye. The hatter could never accept that his family had abandoned him.”
“Did you ever hear Julián mention a girl called Penélope?”
“Penélope? I don’t think so. I’d remember.”
“She was a girlfriend of his, from the time when he still lived in Barcelona.”
I pulled out the photograph of Carax and Penélope Aldaya and handed it to her. I noticed how a smile lit up her face when she saw an adolescent Julián Carax. Nostalgia and loss were consuming her.
“He looks so young here…. Is this the Penélope you mentioned?”
I nodded.
“Very good-looking. Julián always managed to be surrounded by pretty women.”
Like you, I thought. “Do you know whether he had lots…?”
That smile again, at my expense. “Girlfriends? Lovers? I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I never heard him speak about any woman in his life. Once, just to needle him, I asked him. You must know that he earned his living playing the piano in a hostess bar. I asked him whether he wasn’t tempted, surrounded all day by beauties of easy virtue. He didn’t find the joke funny. He replied that he had no right to love anyone, that he deserved to be alone.”
“Did he say why?”
“Julián never said why.”
“Even so, in the end, shortly before returning to Barcelona in 1936, Julián Carax was going to get married.”
“So they said.”
“Do you doubt it?”
She looked skeptical as she shrugged her shoulders. “As I said, in all the years we knew each other, Julián never mentioned any woman in particular, and even less one he was going to marry. The story about his supposed marriage reached me later. Neuval, Carax’s last publisher, told Cabestany that the fiancée was a woman twenty years older than Julián, a rich widow in poor health. According to Neuval, she had been more or less supporting him for years. The doctors gave her six months to live, a year at the most. Neuval said she wanted to marry Julián so that he could inherit from her.”
“But the marriage ceremony never took place.”
“If there ever was such a plan, or such a widow.”
“From what I know, Carax was involved in a duel, on the dawn of the very day he was due to be married. Do you know who with, or why?”
“Neuval supposed it was someone connected to the widow. A grasping distant relative who didn’t want to see the inheritance fall into the hands of some upstart. Neuval published mostly penny dreadfuls, and I think the genre had gone to his head.”
“I see you don’t really believe the story of the wedding and the duel.”
“No. I never believed it.”
“What do you think happened, then? Why did Carax return to Barcelona?”
She smiled sadly. “I’ve been asking myself this question for seventeen years.”
Nuria Monfort lit another cigarette. She offered me one. I was tempted to accept but refused.
“But you must have some theory?” I suggested.
“All I know is that in the summer of 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the war, an employee at the municipal morgue phoned our firm to say they had received the body of Julián Carax three days earlier. They’d found him dead in an alleyway of the Raval quarter, dressed in rags and with a bullet through his heart. He had a book on him, a copy ofThe Shadow of the Wind, and his passport. The stamp showed he’d crossed the French border a month before. Where he had been during that time, nobody knew. The police contacted his father, but he refused to take responsibility for the body, alleging that he didn’t have a son. After two days without anyone’s claiming the corpse, he was buried in a common grave in Montjuïc Cemetery. I couldn’t even take him flowers, because nobody could tell me where he’d been buried. It was the employee of the morgue—who had kept the book found in Julián’s jacket—who had the idea of phoning Cabestany’s publishing house a couple of days later. That is how I found out what had happened. I couldn’t understand it. If Julián had anyone left in Barcelona to whom he could turn, it was me or, at a pinch, Mr. Cabestany. We were his only friends, but he never told us he’d returned. We only knew he’d come back to Barcelona after he died….”
“Were you able to find out anything else after getting the news?”
“No. Those were the first months of the war, and Julián was not the only one to disappear without a trace. Nobody talks about it anymore, but there are lots of nameless graves, like Julián’s. Asking was like banging your head against a brick wall. With the help of Mr. Cabestany, who by then was very ill, I made a complaint to the police and pulled all the strings I could. All I got out of it was a visit from a young inspector, an arrogant, sinister sort, who told me it would be a good idea not to ask any more questions and to concentrate my efforts on having a more positive attitude, because the country was in full cry, on a crusade. Those were his words. His name was Fumero, that’s all I remember. It seems that now he’s quite an important man. He’s often mentioned in the papers. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”
I swallowed. “Vaguely.”
“I heard nothing more about Julián until someone got in touch with the publishers and said he was interested in acquiring all the copies of Carax’s novels that were left in the warehouse.”
“Laín Coubert.”
Nuria Monfort nodded.
“Have you any idea who that man was?”
“I have an inkling, but I’m not sure. In March 1936—I remember the date because at the time we were preparingThe Shadow of the Wind for press—someone called the publishers to ask for his address. He said he was an old friend and he wanted to visit Julián in Paris. Give him a surprise. They put him onto me, and I said I wasn’t authorized to give out that information.”
“Did he say who he was?”
“Someone called Jorge.”
“Jorge Aldaya?”
“It might have been. Julián had mentioned him on more than one occasion. I think they had been together at San Gabriel’s School, and sometimes Julián referred to him as if he’d been his best friend.”
“Did you know that Jorge Aldaya was Penélope’s brother?”
Nuria Monfort frowned. She
looked disconcerted.
“Did you give Aldaya Julián’s address in Paris?”
“No. He made me feel uneasy.”
“What did he say?”
“He laughed at me, he said he’d find him some other way, and hung up.”
Something seemed to be gnawing at her. I began to suspect where the conversation was taking us. “But you heard from him again, didn’t you?”
She nodded nervously. “As I was telling you, shortly after Julián’s disappearance that man turned up at Cabestany’s firm. By then Mr. Cabestany could no longer work, and his eldest son had taken charge of the business. The visitor, Laín Coubert, offered to buy all the remaining stock of Julián’s novels. I thought the whole thing was a joke in poor taste. Laín Coubert was a character inThe Shadowof the Wind. ”
“The devil.”
Nuria Monfort nodded again.
“Did you actually see Laín Coubert?”
She shook her head and lit her third cigarette. “No. But I heard part of the conversation with the son in Mr. Cabestany’s office.”
She left the sentence in the air, as if she were afraid of finishing it or wasn’t sure how to. The cigarette trembled in her fingers.
“His voice,” she said. “It was the same voice as the man who phoned saying he was Jorge Aldaya. Cabestany’s son, an arrogant idiot, tried to ask for more money. Coubert—or whoever he was—said he had to think about the offer. That very night Cabestany’s warehouse in Pueblo Nuevo went up in flames, and Julián’s books with it.”
“Except for the ones you rescued and hid in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”
“That’s right.”
“Have you any idea why anyone would have wanted to burn all of Julián Carax’s books?”
“Why are books burned? Through stupidity, ignorance, hatred…goodness only knows.”
“Why do you think?” I insisted.
“Julián lived in his books. The body that ended up in the morgue was only a part of him. His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.”