And so, through need or through weakness, Sophie continued to entertain the hatter’s advances, in the belief that one day he would meet a girl who would return his affection and his life would take a more rewarding course. In the meantime, being desired and appreciated was enough to alleviate her loneliness and the longing she felt for everything she had left behind. She saw Antoni on Sundays, after mass. The rest of the week was taken up by her music lessons. Her favorite pupil was a highly talented girl called Ana Valls, the daughter of a prosperous manufacturer of textile machinery who had built his fortune from nothing, by dint of great efforts and sacrifices, mostly other people’s. Ana expressed her desire to become a great composer and would make Sophie listen to small pieces she composed, imitating motifs by Grieg and Schumann—not without skill. Although Mr. Valls was convinced that women were incapable of creating anything but knitted garments or crocheted bedspreads, he approved of his daughter’s becoming a competent interpreter on the keyboard, for he had plans of marrying her off to some heir with a good surname, and he knew that refined people liked to discover unusual qualities in marriageable girls, besides submissiveness and the fecundity of youth.
It was in the Valls residence that Sophie met one of Mr. Valls’s greatest benefactors and financial godfathers: Don Ricardo Aldaya, inheritor of the Aldaya empire, by then already the great white hope of the Catalan oligarchy of the end of the century. A few months earlier, Don Ricardo Aldaya had married a rich heiress, a dazzling beauty with an unpronounceable name, attributes that wagging tongues held to be true, despite the fact that her newlywed husband seemed to see no beauty in her at all and never bothered to mention her name. It had been a match between families and banks, not any sentimental nonsense, said Mr. Valls, for whom it was very clear that one thing was the bed and the other the head.
Sophie had only to exchange one look with Don Ricardo Aldaya to know she was doomed. Aldaya had wolfish eyes, hungry and sharp, the eyes of a man who knew where and when to strike. He kissed her hand slowly, caressing her knuckles with his lips. Just as the hatter exuded kindness and warmth, Don Ricardo radiated cruelty and power. His canine smile made it clear that he could read her thoughts and desires and found them laughable. Sophie felt for him that species of contempt that is awakened in us by the things we most desire without knowing it. She immediately told herself she would not see him again, would stop teaching her favorite pupil if that was what it took to avoid any future encounters with Ricardo Aldaya. Nothing had ever terrified her so much as sensing that animality under her own skin, the prey’s instinctive recognition of her predator, dressed in elegant linen. It took her only a few seconds to make up a flimsy excuse for leaving the room, to the puzzlement of Mr. Valls, the amusement of Aldaya, and the dejection of little Ana, who understood people even better than she did music and knew she had irretrievably lost her teacher.
A week later Sophie saw Don Ricardo Aldaya waiting for her at the entrance of the music school on Calle Diputación, smoking and leafing through a newspaper. They exchanged glances, and, without saying a word, he led her to a building two blocks away. It was a new building, still uninhabited. They went up to the first floor. Don Ricardo opened the door and ushered her in. Sophie entered the apartment, a maze of corridors and galleries, bare of any furniture, paintings, lamps, or any other object that might have identified it as a dwelling. Don Ricardo Aldaya shut the door, and they looked at each other.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about you all week. Tell me you haven’t done the same and I’ll let you go, and you won’t ever see me again,” said Ricardo.
Sophie shook her head.
Their secret meetings lasted ninety-six days. They met in the afternoons, always in that empty apartment on the corner of Diputación and Rambla de Cataluña. Tuesdays and Thursdays at three. Their meetings never lasted more than an hour. Sometimes Sophie stayed on alone once Aldaya had left, crying or shaking in a corner of the bedroom. Then, when Sunday came, Sophie looked desperately into the hatter’s eyes for traces of the woman who was disappearing, yearning for both devotion and deception. The hatter didn’t see the marks on her skin, the cuts and burns that peppered her body. The hatter didn’t see the despair in her smile, in her meekness. The hatter didn’t see anything. Perhaps for that reason, she accepted his promise of marriage. By then she already suspected that she was carrying Aldaya’s child, but was afraid of telling him, almost as much as she was afraid of losing him. Once again it was Aldaya who saw in Sophie what she was incapable of admitting. He gave her five hundred pesetas and an address on Calle Platería and ordered her to get rid of the baby. Sophie refused. Don Ricardo Aldaya slapped her until her ears bled, then threatened to have her killed if she dared mention their meetings or admit that the child was his. When Sophie told the hatter that some thugs had assaulted her in Plaza del Pino, he believed her. When she told him she wanted to be his wife, he believed her. On the day of her wedding, someone erroneously sent a funeral wreath to the church. Everyone laughed nervously when they saw the florist’s mistake. All except Sophie, who knew perfectly well that Don Ricardo Aldaya had not forgotten her on her wedding day.
·4·
SOPHIE CARAX NEVER IMAGINED THAT YEARS LATER SHE WOULD SEE
Ricardo again (a mature man by now, heading up the family empire, and a father of two), nor that he would return to meet the boy he had wished to erase with five hundred pesetas.
“Perhaps it’s because I’m growing old,” he explained, “but I want to get to know this kid and give him the opportunities in life that a son of my flesh and blood deserves. It had not crossed my mind to think of him in all these years, and now, strangely enough, I’m unable to think of anything else.”
Ricardo Aldaya had decided that he couldn’t see himself in his firstborn, Jorge. The boy was weak, reserved, and lacked his father’s steadfast spirit. He lacked everything, except the right surname. One day Don Ricardo had woken up in the maid’s bed feeling that his body was getting old, that God had removed His blessing. Seized with panic, he ran to look at himself naked in the mirror and felt that the mirror was lying. That man was not Ricardo Aldaya.
He now wanted to find the man who had been stolen from him. For years he had known about the hatter’s son. Nor had he forgotten Sophie, in his own way. Don Ricardo Aldaya never forgot anything. The moment had arrived to meet the boy. It was the first time in fifteen years that he had come across someone who wasn’t afraid of him, who dared to defy him and even laugh at him. He recognized gallantry in the child, the silent ambition that fools can’t see but is there all the same. God had given him back his youth. Sophie, only an echo of the woman he remembered, didn’t even have the strength to come between them. The hatter was just a buffoon, a spiteful and resentful yokel whose complicity Aldaya counted on buying. He decided to tear Julián away from that stifling world of mediocrity and poverty and open the doors of his financial paradise to him. He would be educated in San Gabriel’s School, would enjoy all the privileges of his class, and would be initiated into the pursuits his father had chosen for him. Don Ricardo wanted a successor worthy of himself. Jorge would always live in the shadow of his entitlements, hiding from his mediocrity in creature comforts. Penélope, the beautiful Penélope, was a woman, and therefore a treasure, not a treasurer. Julián, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time. Don Ricardo estimated that within ten years he would have stamped his image on the boy. Never, in all the time Julián spent with the Aldayas as one of the family (as the chosen one, even), did it occur to Don Ricardo that the only thing Julián wanted from him was Penélope. It didn’t occur to him for an instant that Julián secretly despised him, that his affection was a sham, only a pretext to be close to Penélope. To possess her wholly and utterly. They did resemble each other in that.
When his wife told him she’d discovered Julián and Penélope naked in unequivocal circumstances, his entire world went up in flames. Horror
at this treason, the rage of knowing that he had been unspeakably affronted, outwitted at his own game, humiliated and stabbed in the back by the one person he had learned to adore as the image of himself—all these feelings assailed him with such fury that nobody was able to understand the magnitude of his pain. When the doctor who came to examine Penélope confirmed that the girl had been deflowered and that she was possibly pregnant, Don Ricardo’s soul dissolved into the thick, viscous liquid of blind hatred. He saw his own hand in Julián’s hand, the hand that had plunged the dagger deep into his heart. He didn’t know it yet, but the day he ordered Penélope to be locked up in the third-floor bedroom was the day he began to die. Everything he did from then on was only the final agony of his self-destruction.
In collaboration with the hatter, whom he had so deeply despised, he arranged Julián’s removal from Barcelona and his entry into the army, where Aldaya had given orders that he should meet with an “accidental” death. He forbade that anyone—doctors, servants, even members of the family, except himself and his wife—should see Penélope during the months when the girl remained imprisoned in that room that smelled of illness and death. By then Aldaya’s partners had secretly withdrawn their support and were maneuvering behind his back to seize his power, using the fortune that he himself had made available to them. By then the Aldaya empire was silently crumbling, at secret board meetings in Madrid, in hushed corridors, in Geneva banks. Julián, as Aldaya should have suspected, had escaped. Deep down he secretly felt proud of the boy, even though he wished him dead. Julián had done what he would have done in his place. Someone else would pay for Julián’s actions.
Penélope Aldaya gave birth to a stillborn baby boy on September 26, 1919. If a doctor had been able to examine her, he would have said that the baby had already been in danger for some days and must be delivered by cesarean. If a doctor had been present, perhaps he would have been able to stop the hemorrhage that took Penélope’s life, while she shrieked and scratched at the locked door, on the other side of which her father wept in silence and her mother cowered staring at her husband. If a doctor had been present, he would have accused Don Ricardo Aldaya of murder, for there was no other word that could describe the scene within that dark, bloodstained cell. But there was nobody there, and when at last they opened the door and found Penélope lying dead in a pool of her own blood, hugging a shining, purple-colored baby, nobody was capable of uttering a single word. The two bodies were buried in the basement crypt, with no ceremony or witnesses. The sheets and the afterbirth were thrown into the boilers, and the place was sealed with a brick wall.
When Jorge Aldaya, drunk with guilt and shame, told Miquel Moliner what had happened, Miquel decided to send Julián the letter, signed by Penélope, in which she declared that she didn’t love him, begged him to forget her, and announced a fictitious wedding. He preferred to have Julián believe that lie and rebuild his life in the shadow of a betrayal than have to present him with the truth. When, two years later, Mrs. Aldaya died, there were those who blamed her death on the curse that lay on the mansion, but her son, Jorge, knew that what had killed her was the fire that raged inside her, Penélope’s screams and her desperate banging on that door that hammered incessantly in her head. By then the family had already fallen from grace, and the Aldaya fortune was collapsing like a sand castle, swept away by a combination of greed and revenge. Secretaries and accountants devised the flight to Argentina, the beginning of a new, more modest, business. The important thing was to get away. Away from the specters that scurried through the corridors of the Aldaya mansion, as they had always done.
They departed one dawn of 1926, traveling under false names on board the ship that would take them across the Atlantic to the port of La Plata. Jorge and his father shared a cabin. Old Aldaya, foul smelling and dying, could barely stand up. The doctors whom he had not permitted to see Penélope feared him too much to tell him the truth, but he knew that death had boarded the ship with them, and that his body, which God had begun to steal from him on the morning he decided to look for his son Julián, was wasting away. Throughout that long crossing, sitting on the deck, shivering under the blankets and facing the ocean’s infinite emptiness, he knew that he would never see land. Sometimes, sitting in the stern, he would watch the school of sharks that had been following them since they left Tenerife. He heard one of the officers say that such a sinister escort was normal in transatlantic cruises. The beasts fed on the animal remains that the ship left in its wake. But Don Ricardo thought otherwise. He was convinced that those devils were following him. You’re waiting for me, he thought, seeing in them God’s true face. It was then he approached his son Jorge, whom he had so often despised and whom he now saw as his last resort, and made him swear he would carry out his dying wish. “You will find Julián Carax and you’ll kill him. Swear that you will.”
One dawn, two days before reaching Buenos Aires, Jorge woke up and saw that his father’s berth was empty. He went out to look for him; the deck was deserted, bathed in mist and spray. He found his father’s dressing gown, still warm, abandoned in the stern of the ship. The ship’s wake disappeared into a cloud of scarlet, a stain on the calm waters, as if the ocean itself were bleeding. It was then he noticed that the sharks had stopped following them. He saw them, in the distance, their dorsal fins flapping as they danced in a circle. During the remainder of the crossing, no passenger sighted the school of dogfish again.
When Jorge Aldaya disembarked in Buenos Aires and the customs officer asked him whether he was traveling alone, he nodded in assent. He had been traveling alone for a long time.
·5·
Ten years after disembarking in Buenos Aires, Jorge Aldaya, or the spent force he had become, returned to Barcelona. The misfortunes that had started to eat away at the Aldaya family in the Old World had only grown in Argentina. Jorge was left on his own to face the world, a fight for which he had neither his father’s strength nor his composure. Jorge had reached Buenos Aires with a numb heart, shot through with remorse. America, he would later say, by way of apology or epitaph, is a mirage, a land of savage predators, and he’d been educated into the privileges and frivolous refinements of Old Europe—a dead continent held together by inertia. In only a few years, he lost everything, starting with his reputation and ending with the gold watch his father had given him for his first communion. Thanks to the watch, he was able to buy himself a return ticket. The man who came back to Spain was almost a beggar, a bundle of bitterness and failure, poisoned by the memory of what he felt had been snatched from him and the hatred for the person on whom he blamed his ruin: Julián Carax.
The promise he had made to his father was still branded on his mind. As soon as he arrived, he tried to pick up Julián’s trail, only to discover that, like him, Carax also seemed to have vanished from Barcelona. It was then, through chance or fate, that he encountered a familiar character from his youth. After a prominent career in reformatories and state prisons, Francisco Javier Fumero had joined the army, attaining the rank of lieutenant. There were many who envisaged him as a future general, but a murky scandal caused his expulsion from the army. Even then his reputation outlasted his rank. He was talked about a great deal, but above all he was feared. Francisco Javier Fumero, that shy, disturbed boy who once gathered dead leaves from the courtyard at San Gabriel’s, was now a murderer. It was rumored that he killed off notorious characters for money, that he dispatched political figures on request. Fumero was said to be death itself.
Aldaya and he recognized each other instantly through the haze of the Novedades Café. Aldaya was ill, stricken by a strange fever that he blamed on the insects of South American jungles. “There, even the mosquitoes are sons of bitches,” he complained. Fumero listened to him with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. He revered mosquitoes and all insects in general. He admired their discipline, their fortitude and organization. There was no laziness in them, no irreverence or racial degeneration. His favorite species were spiders, blessed w
ith that rare science for weaving a trap in which they awaited their prey with infinite patience, knowing that sooner or later the prey would succumb, through stupidity or slackness. In his opinion society had a lot to learn from insects. Aldaya was a clear case of moral and physical ruin. He had aged noticeably and looked shabby, with no muscle tone. Fumero couldn’t bear people with no muscle tone. They nauseated him.
“Javier, I feel dreadful,” Aldaya pleaded. “Could you help me out for a few days?”
Fumero agreed to take Jorge Aldaya to his home. He lived in a gloomy apartment in the Raval quarter, on Calle Cadena, in the company of numerous insects stored in pharmacy jars, and half a dozen books. Fumero detested books as much as he loved insects, but those were no ordinary volumes: they were the novels of Julián Carax published by Cabestany. Two prostitutes lived in the apartment opposite—a mother and daughter duo who allowed themselves to be pinched and burned with cigars when business was slow, especially at the end of the month. Fumero paid them to take care of Aldaya while he was away at work. He had no desire to see him die. Not yet.