I awoke at the break of a gray dawn. The windows were steamed up. I dressed for the cold weather and put on some calf-length boots, then went out into the corridor and groped my way through the apartment. I slipped out through the door and walked down to the street. The newsstands in the Ramblas were already lighting up in the distance. I steered a course toward the one that was anchored at the mouth of Calle Tallers and bought the first edition of the day’s paper, which still smelled of warm ink. I rushed through the pages until I found the obituary section. Nuria Monfort’s name lay printed under a cross, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at it. I walked away with the newspaper folded under my arm, in search of darkness. The funeral was that afternoon, in Montjuïc Cemetery. After walking around the block, I returned home. My father was still asleep, and I went back into my room. I sat at my desk and took the Meinsterstück pen out of its case, then took a blank sheet of paper and hoped the nib would guide me. In my hands the pen had nothing to say. In vain I tried to conjure up the words I wanted to offer Nuria Monfort, but I was incapable of writing or feeling anything except the terror of her absence, of knowing she was lost, wrenched away. I knew that one day she would return to me, in months or years to come, that I would always relive her memory in the touch of a stranger, in the recollection of images that no longer belonged to me.
·43·
SHORTLY BEFORE THREE O’CLOCK, I GOT ON A BUS ON PASEO DE Colón that would take me to the cemetery on Montjuïc. Through the window I could see the forest of masts and fluttering pennants at the docks. The bus, which was almost empty, circled Montjuïc Mountain and started up the road that led to the eastern gates of the boundless Barcelona cemetery. I was the last passenger.
“What time does the last bus leave?” I asked the driver before getting off.
“At half past four.”
The driver left me by the cemetery gates. An avenue of cypress trees rose in the mist. Even from there, at the foot of the mountain, one could already begin to see the vast city of the dead that scaled the slope to the very top: avenues of tombs, walks lined with gravestones, and alleyways of mausoleums, towers crowned by fiery angels and whole forests of sepulchers that seemed to grow against one another. The city of the dead was a pit of palaces guarded by an army of rotting stone statues sinking into the mud. I took a deep breath and entered the labyrinth. My mother lay buried a hundred yards away from the path along which I walked. With every step I took, I could feel the cold, the emptiness, and the fury of that place, the horror of its silence, of the faces trapped in the old photographs that had been abandoned to the company of candles and dead flowers. After a while I caught a glimpse of distant gas lamps lit around a grave, the shapes of half a dozen people lined up against an ashen sky. I quickened my step and stopped where I could hear the words of the priest.
The coffin, an unpolished pinewood box, rested on the mud. Two gravediggers guarded it, leaning on spades. I scanned those present. Old Isaac, the keeper of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, had not come to his daughter’s funeral. I recognized the neighbor who lived opposite. She shook her head, sobbing, while a man stroked her back with a resigned air. Her husband, I imagined. Next to them was a woman of about forty, dressed in gray and carrying a bunch of flowers. She cried quietly, looking away from the grave with tight lips. I had never seen her. Separated from the group, clad in a dark raincoat and holding his hat behind his back, was the policeman who had saved my life the day before. Palacios. He raised his eyes and observed me for a few seconds without blinking. The blind, senseless words of the priest were all that separated us from the terrible silence. I stared at the mud-splattered coffin. I imagined her lying inside it, and I didn’t realize I was crying until that woman in gray came up to me and offered me one of the flowers from her bunch. I remained there until the group dispersed. At a sign from the priest, the gravediggers got ready to do their work by the lamplight. I kept the flower in my coat pocket and walked away, unable to express my final farewell.
It was beginning to get dark by the time I reached the cemetery gates, and I assumed I’d missed the last bus. I was about to start a long walk, under the shadow of the necropolis, following the road that skirted the port on the way back to Barcelona. A black car was parked about twenty yards ahead of me, its lights on. Inside, a figure smoked a cigarette. As I drew near, Palacios opened the passenger door.
“Get in. I’ll take you home. You won’t find any buses or taxis around here at this time of day.”
I hesitated for a moment. “I’d rather walk.”
“Don’t be silly. Get in.”
He spoke in the steely tone of someone used to giving orders and being obeyed instantly. “Please,” he added.
I got into the car, and the policeman started the engine.
“Enrique Palacios,” he said, holding his hand out to me.
I didn’t shake it. “If you leave me in Colón, that’s fine.”
The car sped off. We joined the traffic on the road and traveled a good stretch without uttering a single word.
“I want you to know I’m very sorry about Señora Monfort.”
Coming from him, those words seemed an obscenity, an insult.
“I’m grateful to you for saving my life the other day, but I must tell you I don’t care a shit what you feel, Mr. Enrique Palacios.”
“I’m not what you think, Daniel. I’d like to help you.”
“If you expect me to tell you where Fermín is, you can leave me right here.”
“I don’t give a damn where your friend is. I’m not on duty now.”
I didn’t reply.
“You don’t trust me, and I don’t blame you. But at least listen to me. This has already gone too far. There was no reason why this woman should have died. I beg you to let this matter be and to put this man, Carax, out of your mind forever.”
“You speak as if I’m in control of what’s happening. I’m only a spectator. The whole show has been staged by your boss and all you lot.”
“I’m tired of funerals, Daniel. I don’t want to have to go to yours.”
“All the better, because you’re not invited.”
“I’m serious.”
“Me, too. Please stop and leave me here.”
“We’ll be in Colón in two minutes.”
“I don’t care. This car smells of death, like you. Let me out.”
Palacios slowed down and stopped on the hard shoulder. I got out of the car and banged the door shut, eluding Palacios’s eyes. I waited for him to leave, but the police officer didn’t drive off. I turned around and saw him lowering the car window. I thought I read honesty, even pain, in his face, but I refused to believe it.
“Nuria Monfort died in my arms, Daniel,” he said. “I think her last words were a message for you.”
“What did she say?” I asked, my voice gripped by an icy cold. “Did she mention my name?”
“She was delirious, but I think she was referring to you. At one point she said there were worse prisons than words. Then, before dying, she asked me to tell you to let her go.”
I looked at him without understanding. “To let who go?”
“Someone called Penélope. I imagined she must be your girlfriend.”
Palacios looked down and set off into the twilight. I remained there, staring disconcertedly at the lights of the car as they disappeared into the blue-and-red dusk. Then I walked on toward Paseo de Colón, repeating to myself those last words of Nuria Monfort but finding no meaning to them. When I reached the square called Portal de la Paz, I stopped next to the pleasure boats’ dock to gaze at the port. I sat on the steps that disappeared under the murky water, in the same place where, on a night that was now in the distant past, I had met Laín Coubert, the man without a face.
“There are worse prisons than words,” I murmured.
Only then did I understand that the message from Nuria Monfort was not meant for me. It wasn’t I who had to let Penélope go. Her last words hadn’t been for a stranger, bu
t for a man she had loved in silence for twenty years: Julián Carax.
·44·
NIGHT WAS FALLING WHEN I REACHED PLAZA DE SAN FELIPE Neri. The bench on which I had first caught sight of Nuria Monfort stood at the foot of a streetlamp, empty and tattooed by penknives with names of lovers, with insults and promises. I looked up to the windows of Nuria Monfort’s home on the third floor and noticed a dim, flickering copper light. A candle.
I entered the gloomy foyer and groped my way up the stairs. My hands shook when I reached the third-floor landing. A sliver of reddish light ran under the frame of the half-open door. I placed my hand on the doorknob and remained there motionless, listening. I thought I heard a whisper, a choked voice coming from within. For a moment I thought that if I opened that door, I’d find her waiting for me on the other side, smoking by the balcony, her legs tucked under her, leaning against the wall, anchored in the same place where I’d left her. Gently, fearing I might disturb her, I opened the door and went into the apartment. In the dining room, the balcony curtains swayed. A figure was sitting by the window, unmoving, holding a burning candle in its hands. I couldn’t make out the face against the light, but a bright pearl slid down its skin, shining like fresh resin, then falling on the figure’s lap. Isaac Monfort turned, his face streaked with tears.
“I didn’t see you this afternoon at the funeral,” I said.
He shook his head, drying his tears with the back of his lapel.
“Nuria wasn’t there,” he murmured after a while. “The dead never go to their own funeral.”
He looked around him, as if his daughter was in that room, sitting next to us in the dark, listening to us.
“Do you know that I’ve never been in this house?” he asked. “Whenever we met, it was always Nuria who came to me. ‘It’s easier for you, Father,’ she would say. ‘Why go up all those stairs?’ I’d always say to her, ‘All right, if you don’t invite me, I won’t go,’ and she’d answer, ‘I don’t need to invite you to my home, Father. One only invites strangers. You can come whenever you like.’ In over fifteen years, I didn’t go to see her once. I always told her she’d chosen a bad neighborhood. Not enough light. An old building. She would just nod in agreement. Like when I used to tell her she’d chosen a bad life. Not much future. A jobless husband. It’s funny how we judge others and don’t realize the extent of our disdain until they are no longer there, until they are taken from us. They’re taken from us because they’ve never been ours….”
The old man’s voice, deprived of its veil of irony, faltered and seemed almost as weary as his look.
“Nuria loved you very much, Isaac. Don’t doubt it for an instant. And I know she also felt loved by you,” I said.
Old Isaac shook his head again. He smiled, but his silent tears did not stop falling. “Perhaps she loved me, in her own way, as I loved her, in mine. But we didn’t know one another. Perhaps because I never allowed her to know me, or I never took any steps toward getting to know her. We spent our lives like two strangers who see each other every single day and greet one another out of politeness. And I think she probably died without forgiving me.”
“Isaac, I can assure you—”
“Daniel, you’re young and you try hard, but even though I’ve had a bit to drink and I don’t know what I’m saying, you still haven’t learned to lie well enough to fool an old man whose heart has been broken by misfortune.”
I looked down.
“The policeman says that the man who killed her is a friend of yours,” Isaac ventured.
“The police are lying.”
Isaac assented. “I know.”
“I can assure you—”
“There’s no need, Daniel. I know you’re telling the truth,” said Isaac, pulling out an envelope from his coat pocket.
“The afternoon before she died, Nuria came to see me, as she used to do years ago. I remember we used to go and eat in a café on Calle Guardia, where I would take her when she was a child. We always talked about books, about old books. She would sometimes tell me things about her work, trifles, the sort of things one tells a stranger on a bus…. Once she told me she was sorry she’d been a disappointment to me. I asked her where she’d got that ridiculous idea. ‘From your eyes, Father, from your eyes,’ she said. Not once did it occur to me that perhaps I’d been an even greater disappointment to her. Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they’re there to make our most absurd dreams come true.”
“Isaac, with all due respect, you’ve been drinking like a fish, and you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man. I know enough to understand that my own daughter never trusted me. She trusted more in you, Daniel, and she’d seen you only a couple of times.”
“I can assure you you’re wrong.”
“The last afternoon we saw each other, she brought me this envelope. She was restless, worried about something that she didn’t want to talk about. She asked me to keep this envelope and, should anything happen, to give it to you.”
“Should anything happen?”
“Those were her words. She looked so distressed that I suggested we go together to the police, that, whatever the problem, we’d find a solution. Then she said that the police was the last place she could go to for help. I begged her to let me know what it was about, but she said she had to leave and made me promise that I’d give you this envelope if she didn’t come back for it within a couple of days. She asked me not to open it.”
Isaac handed me the envelope. It was open. “I lied to her, as usual,” he said.
I examined the envelope. It contained a wad of handwritten sheets of paper. “Have you read them?” I asked.
The old man nodded slowly.
“What do they say?”
The old man looked up. His lips were trembling. He seemed to have aged a hundred years since the last time I’d seen him.
“It’s the story you were looking for, Daniel. The story of a woman I never knew, even though she bore my name and my blood. Now it belongs to you.”
I put the envelope into my coat pocket.
“I’m going to ask you to leave me alone here, with her, if you don’t mind. A while ago, as I was reading those pages, it seemed to me that I was seeing her again. However hard I try, I can only remember her the way she was as a little girl. She was very quiet then, you know. She looked at everything pensively, and never laughed. What she liked best were stories, and I don’t think any child has ever learned to read so early. She used to say she wanted to be an author and write encyclopedias and treatises on history and philosophy. Her mother said it was all my fault. She said that Nuria adored me and because she thought her father loved only books, she wanted to write books to make her father love her.”
“Isaac, I don’t think it’s a good idea to be on your own tonight. Why don’t you come home with me? Spend the night with us, and that way you can keep my father company.”
Isaac shook his head again. “I have things to do, Daniel. You go home and read those pages. They belong to you.”
The old man looked away, and I took a few steps toward the door. I was in the doorway when Isaac’s voice called me, barely a whisper.
“Daniel?”
“Yes?”
“Take great care.”
When I got out into the street, it seemed as if darkness were creeping along the paving in pursuit of me. I quickened my pace and didn’t slow down until I reached the apartment on Calle Santa Ana. I found my father in his armchair with an open book on his lap. It was a photograph album. On seeing me, he got up with an expression of great relief.
“I was beginning to get worried,” he said. “How was the funeral?”
I shrugged, and my father nodded gravely.
“I got a bit of dinner ready for you. If you like, I could warm it up and—”
“Thanks, but I’m not hungry. I had a bite to eat out there.”
He fixed his gaze
on me and nodded again. He turned to remove the plates he’d placed on the table. It was then, without quite knowing why, that I went up to him and hugged him. My father, surprised, hugged me back.
“Daniel, are you all right?”
I held my father tightly in my arms.
“I love you,” I murmured.
The cathedral bells were ringing when I began to read Nuria Monfort’s manuscript. Her small, neat writing reminded me of her impeccable desk. Perhaps she had been trying to find in these words the peace and safety that life had not granted her.
Nuria Monfort:
Remembrance of
the Lost
1933–1955
·1·
THERE ARE NO SECOND CHANCES IN LIFE, EXCEPT TO FEEL remorse. Julián Carax and I met in the autumn of 1933. At that time I was working for the publisher Toni Cabestany, who had discovered him in 1927 in the course of one of his “book-scouting” trips to Paris. Julián earned his living playing piano at a hostess bar in the afternoons, and he wrote at night. The owner of the establishment, one Irene Marceau, knew most of the Paris publishers, and, thanks to her entreaties, favors, or threats of disclosure, Julián Carax had managed to get a number of novels published, though with disastrous commercial results. For a giveaway price, Cabestany acquired the exclusive rights to publish Carax’s works in Spain and Latin America, with the translation of the French originals into Spanish by the author himself. Cabestany hoped to sell around three thousand copies per novel, but the first two titles he published in Spain turned out to be a total flop: barely a hundred copies of each sold. Despite these dismal results, every two years we received a new manuscript from Julián, which Cabestany accepted without any objections, saying that he’d signed an agreement with the author, that profit wasn’t everything, and that good literature had to be supported no matter what.