“Let’s leave this place, Julián….”
“There’s nowhere to go,” said Carax, with an oddly calm tone of voice that made his friend eye him carefully.
It was only then that Miquel noticed the revolver in Julián’s hand. The doorbell sounded above the murmur of the radio. Miquel snatched the gun from Carax’s hands and fixed his eyes on him.
“Give me your papers, Julián.”
The three policemen pretended to sit at the bar. One of them gave Miguel and Julián a sidelong glance. The other two felt inside their raincoats.
“Your papers, Julián. Now.”
Carax silently shook his head.
“I only have a month left, perhaps two, with luck. One of us has to get out of here, Julián. You have more going for you than I do. I don’t know whether you’ll find Penélope. But Nuria is waiting for you.”
“Nuria is your wife.”
“Remember the deal we made. The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours…”
“…except your dreams.”
They smiled at each other for the last time. Julián handed him his passport. Miquel put it next to the copy of The Shadow of the Wind that he had been carrying in his coat pocket since the day he’d received it.
“See you soon,” Julián whispered.
“There’s no hurry. I’ll be waiting.”
Just when the three policemen were turning toward them, Miquel rose from the table and went up to them. At first all they saw was a pale, tremulous man who seemed at death’s door as he smiled at them with blood showing on the corners of his thin, lifeless lips. By the time they noticed the gun in his right hand, Miquel was barely three yards away from them. One of them was about to scream, but the first shot blew off his lower jaw. The body fell on its knees, lifeless, at Miquel’s feet. The other two police officers had already drawn their weapons. The second shot went through the stomach of the one who looked older. The bullet snapped his backbone in two and splattered a handful of guts against the bar. Miquel never had time to fire a third shot. The remaining policeman was already pointing his gun at him. He felt it in his ribs, on his heart, and saw the man’s steely eyes, lit up with panic.
“Stand still, you son of a bitch, or I swear I’ll tear you apart.”
Miquel smiled and slowly raised his gun toward the policeman’s face. The man couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and his lips trembled.
“You tell Fumero, from Carax, that I remember his little sailor suit.”
He felt no pain, no fire. The impact, like a muffled blow from a hammer, threw him into the window, extinguishing the sound and color of things. As he crashed through the pane, he noticed an intense cold creeping down his throat and the light receding like dust in the wind. Miquel Moliner turned his head for the last time and saw his friend Julián running down the street. Miquel was thirty-six years old, which was longer than he’d hoped to live. Before he collapsed onto a pavement strewn with bloodstained glass, he was already dead.
·9·
THAT NIGHT AN UNIDENTIFIED VAN ARRIVED IN RESPONSE TO THE call from the policeman who had killed Miquel. I never knew his name, nor do I think he realized whom he had murdered. Like all wars, whether private or public, that one was like a stage show. Two men carried off the bodies of the dead policemen and made sure the manager of the bar understood that he must forget what had happened or there would be trouble. Never underestimate the talent for forgetting that wars awaken, Daniel. Miquel Moliner’s corpse was abandoned in an alleyway of the Raval quarter twelve hours later, so that his death could not be connected to that of the two police officers. When the body finally arrived at the morgue, Miquel had been dead for two days. He had left his own papers at home before going out. All that the employees at the mortuary could find was a disfigured passport in the name of Julián Carax, and a copy of The Shadow of the Wind. The police concluded that the deceased man was Julián Carax. The passport still gave his address as that of the Fortunys’ apartment on Ronda de San Antonio.
By then the news had reached Fumero, who went along to the morgue to bid farewell to Julián. There he met the hatter, whom the police had fetched to identify the body. Mr. Fortuny, who hadn’t seen Julián for two days, feared the worst. When he recognized the corpse as that of the man who only a week earlier had knocked on his door asking after Julián (and whom he’d taken to be one of Fumero’s henchmen), he began to scream and left. The police took this response as an admission of recognition. Fumero, who had witnessed the scene, went up to the body and inspected it silently. He hadn’t seen Julián for seventeen years. When he recognized Miquel Moliner, all he did was smile and sign the forensic report confirming that the body in question was Julián Carax. He then ordered its immediate removal to a common grave in Montjuïc.
For a long time, I wondered why Fumero would do something like that. But that was simply Fumero’s logic. By dying with Julián’s identity Miquel had involuntarily provided him with the perfect alibi. From that moment on, Julián Carax didn’t exist. There would be no official link between Fumero and the man who, sooner or later, he hoped to find and murder. It was wartime, and few would ask for explanations concerning the death of someone who didn’t even have a name. Julián had lost his identity. He was a shadow. I spent two days in the apartment waiting for Miquel or Julián, thinking I was going mad. On the third day, Monday, I went back to work at the publishing firm. Mr. Cabestany had been hospitalized a few weeks before and would not return to his office. His eldest son, Álvaro, had taken over the business. I didn’t say anything to anyone. There was nobody I could turn to.
That same afternoon I received a call from an employee at the morgue, Manuel Gutiérrez Fonseca. He explained that the body of someone called Julián Carax had been brought to the mortuary. Having compared the deceased man’s passport with the name of the author of the book that was on the body when it arrived, and suspecting, moreover, if not a breach in the rules, a certain laxity on the part of the police, he had felt it his moral duty to call the publishers and inform them of what had happened. As I listened to him, I almost died. The first thing I thought was that it was a trap set up by Fumero. Mr. Gutiérrez Fonseca expressed himself with the correctness of a conscientious public official, although something else tinged his voice, something that even he would have been unable to explain. I had taken the call in Mr. Cabestany’s office. Thank God, Álvaro had gone out for lunch and I was alone; otherwise it would have been difficult for me to explain away the tears and the shaking hands with which I held the telephone. Mr. Gutiérrez Fonseca told me he had thought it appropriate to let me know what had happened.
I thanked him for his call with that artificiality of coded conversations. As soon as I put down the receiver, I closed the office door and bit my fists so as not to scream. I washed my face and left for home immediately, leaving a message for Álvaro to say I was unwell and would return the following day earlier than usual, to catch up with the correspondence. I had to make an effort not to run in the street, to walk with the anonymous gray calm of people who have no secrets to hide. When I inserted the key in the apartment door, I realized that the lock had been forced. I froze. The doorknob began to turn from within. I wondered whether I was going to die like this, in a dark staircase, and without knowing what had become of Miquel. The door opened, and I encountered the dark eyes of Julián Carax. May God forgive me, but at that moment I felt that life was returning to me, and I thanked the heavens for giving me back Julián instead of Miquel.
We melted in a long embrace, but when I searched for his lips, Julián moved away and lowered his eyes. I closed the door and, taking Julián’s hand, led him to the bedroom. We lay together on the bed in silence. Evening was closing in, and the shadows of the apartment were ablaze with purple. As on every night since the start of the war, shots could be heard in the distance. Julián was crying as he lay on my chest, and I felt a tiredness beyond words. Later, once night had fallen, our lips met, and in the shelter of that pressing dar
kness, we removed our clothes, which smelled of fear and of death. I wanted to remember Miquel, but the fire of those hands on my stomach stole all my shame and my grief. I wanted to lose myself in them, even though I knew that at dawn, exhausted and perhaps overcome by contempt for ourselves, we would be unable to look each other in the eye without wondering what sort of people we had become.
·10·
I WAS WOKEN BY THE PITTER-PATTER OF THE RAIN AT DAYBREAK. THE bed empty, the room bathed in gray light.
I found Julián sitting in front of what had been Miquel’s desk, stroking the keys of his typewriter. He looked up and gave me that lukewarm, distant smile that said he would never be mine. I felt like spitting out the truth to him, like hurting him. It would have been so simple. Reveal to him that Penélope was dead. That he was living a lie. That I was now all he had in the world.
“I should never have returned to Barcelona,” he murmured, shaking his head.
I knelt beside him. “What you are searching for is not here, Julián. Let’s go away. The two of us. Far from here. While there is still time.”
Julián looked at me for a long moment, without blinking. “You know something you haven’t told me, don’t you?” he asked.
I shook my head and swallowed. Julián just nodded.
“Tonight I’m going back there.”
“Julián, please…”
“I must make sure.”
“Then I’ll go with you.”
“No.”
“The last time I stayed here and waited, I lost Miquel. If you go, I go, too.”
“This is nothing to do with you, Nuria. It’s something that concerns only me.”
I wondered whether, in fact, he didn’t realize how much his words hurt me, or whether he just didn’t care.
“That’s what you think,” I said.
He tried to stroke my cheek, but I drew his hand away.
“You should despise me, Nuria. It would bring you luck.”
“Yes, I know.”
We spent the day out, far from the oppressive darkness of the apartment that still smelled of warm sheets and skin. Julián wanted to be by the sea. I went with him to La Barceloneta, and we walked along the almost deserted beach, the shimmering sand seeming to trail off into the summer haze. We sat on the sand, near the shore, the way children or old people do. Julián smiled, saying nothing.
As evening fell, we took a tram near the aquarium and went up Vía Layetana to Paseo de Gracia, then onto Plaza de Lesseps and Avenida de la República Argentina, until we came to the end of the route. Julián gazed silently at the streets, as if he were afraid of losing the city as we traveled through it. Halfway along our journey, he took my hand and kissed it without saying a word. He held it until we got off. An elderly man who accompanied a little girl dressed in white looked at us, smiling, and asked us whether we were engaged. It was dark by the time we walked up Calle Román Macaya toward the Aldayas’ old mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo. A fine rain was falling, giving a silver coat to the thick stone walls. We climbed the property wall at the back, near the tennis courts. The large, rambling house rose into view through the rain. I recognized it immediately. I had come across that house in a thousand different guises in Julián’s books. In The Red House, it was a sinister mansion that was larger inside than out. It slowly changed shape, grew new corridors, galleries, and improbable attics, endless stairs that led nowhere; it illuminated dark rooms that came and went from one day to the next, taking with them the unsuspecting who entered them, never to be seen again. We stopped outside the main door, locked with chains and a padlock the size of a fist. The large windows on the first floor were boarded up with wooden planks that were covered in ivy. The air smelled of weeds and wet earth. The stone, dark and slimy with rain, shone like the skeleton of a huge reptile.
I wanted to ask him how he intended to get past that large oak door, which looked like the door of a basilica or a prison. Julián pulled a jar out of his coat and unscrewed the top. A fetid vapor issued from it, forming a slow, bluish spiral. He held one end of the padlock and poured the acid into the lock. The metal hissed like red-hot iron, enveloped in a cloud of yellow smoke. We waited a few minutes, and then he picked up a cobblestone that lay among the weeds and split the padlock by banging it half a dozen times. Julián then gave the door a kick. It opened slowly, like a tomb, exhaling a thick, damp breath. Beyond the doorway I could sense a velvety darkness. Julián had brought a benzine lighter, which he lit after taking a few steps into the entrance hall. I followed him, leaving the door behind us ajar. Julián walked on a few yards, holding the flame above his head. A carpet of dust lay at our feet, with no footprints but ours. The naked walls took on an amber hue from the flame. There was no furniture, there were no mirrors or lamps. The doors were still on their hinges, but the bronze doorknobs had been pulled out. The mansion was just a skeleton. We stopped at the bottom of the staircase. Julián looked up, his eyes scanning the heights. He turned around for a moment to look at me, and I wanted to smile, but in the half-light we could barely see each other’s eyes. I followed him up the stairs, treading the steps on which Julián had first seen Penélope. I knew where we were heading, and I felt a coldness inside me that had nothing to do with the biting, damp air of that place.
We went up to the third floor, where a narrow corridor led to the south wing of the house. Here the ceilings were much lower and the doors smaller. It was the floor for the servants’ living quarters. The last room, I knew without Julián’s having to tell me, had been Jacinta Coronado’s bedroom. Julián approached it slowly, fearfully. That had been the last place where he’d seen Penélope, where he had made love to a girl barely seventeen years old, who, months later, would bleed to death in that same cell. I wanted to stop him, but Julián had reached the doorway and was looking absently inside. I peered into the room with him. It was just a cubicle stripped of all ornamentation. The marks left where a bed had once stood were still visible beneath the flood of dust that covered the floorboards. A tangle of black stains snaked through the middle of the room. Julián stared at that emptiness for almost a minute, disconcerted. I could see from his look that he hardly recognized the place, that the sight of it seemed to him like a cruel trick. I took his arm and led him back to the stairs.
“There’s nothing here, Julián,” I murmured. “The family sold everything before leaving for Argentina.”
Julián nodded weakly. We walked down the stairs again, and when we reached the ground floor, Julián made his way to the library. The shelves were empty, the fireplace choked with rubble. The walls, a deathly pale hue, flickered in the breath of the flame. Creditors and usurers had managed to remove every last bit of the room, most of which must be lost in the twisted heaps of some junkyard by now.
“I’ve come back for nothing,” Julián mumbled.
Better this way, I thought. I was counting the seconds that separated us from the door. If I managed to get him away from there, we might still have a chance. I let Julián absorb the ruin of that place and purge his memories.
“You had to return and see it again,” I said. “Now you see there’s nothing here. It’s just a large, old, uninhabited house, Julián. Let’s go home.”
He looked at me, pale-faced, and nodded. I took his hand, and we went along the passageway that led to the exit. The chink of outdoor light was only half a dozen yards away. I could smell the weeds and the drizzle in the air. Then I felt I was losing Julián’s hand. I stopped and turned to see him standing motionless, his eyes staring into the darkness.
“What is it, Julián?”
He didn’t reply. He was gazing, mesmerized, at the mouth of a narrow corridor that led toward the kitchen area. I walked over to him and looked into the shadows that were being pushed aside by the blue flame of the lighter. The door at the end of the corridor was bricked up, a wall of red bricks roughly laid with mortar that bled out of the corners. I couldn’t quite understand what it meant, but I felt an icy cold taking my breath away
. Julián was slowly getting closer. All the other doors in the corridor—in the whole house—were open, their locks and doorknobs gone.
“Julián, please, let’s go….”
The impact of his fist on the brick wall drew a hollow echo on the other side. I thought I saw his hands trembling when he placed the lighter on the floor and gestured for me to move back a few steps.
“Julián…”
The first kick brought down a rain of red dust. Julián charged again. I thought I could hear his bones breaking, but Julián was unperturbed. He banged against the wall again and again, with the rage of a prisoner forcing his way out to freedom. His fists and his arms were bleeding when the first brick broke and fell onto the other side. In the dark, with bloodstained fingers, Julián began struggling to enlarge the gap. He panted, exhausted, possessed by a fury of which I would never have thought him capable. One by one the bricks loosened and the wall came down. Julián stopped, covered in a cold sweat, his hands flayed. He picked up the lighter and placed it on the edge of one of the bricks. A wooden door, carved with angel motifs, rose up on the other side. Julián stroked the wood reliefs, as if he were reading a hieroglyphic. The door yielded to the pressure of his hands.
A glutinous darkness came at us from the other side. A little farther back, the form of a staircase could be discerned. Black stone steps descended until they were lost in shadows. Julián turned for a moment, and I met his eyes. I saw fear and despair in them, as if he could sense what lay beyond. I shook my head, begging him without speaking not to go down. He turned back, dejected, and plunged into the gloom. I looked through the brick frame and saw him lurching down the steps. The flame flickered, now just a breath of transparent blue.