“Julián?”
All I got was silence. I could see Julián’s shadow, motionless, at the bottom of the stairs. I went through the brick hole and walked down the steps. The room was rectangular, with marble walls. It exuded an intense, penetrating chill. The two tombstones were covered with a veil of cobwebs that fell apart like rotten silk with the flame from the lighter. The white marble was scored with black tears of dampness that looked like blood dripping out of the clefts left by the engraver’s chisel. They lay side by side, like chained maledictions.
PENÉLOPE ALDAYA
DAVID ALDAYA
1902–1919
1919
·11·
I HAVE OFTEN PAUSED TO THINK ABOUT THAT MOMENT OF SILENCE AND tried to imagine what Julián must have felt when he discovered that the woman for whom he had been waiting seventeen years was dead, their child gone with her, and that the life he had dreamed about, the very breath of it, had never existed. Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice. In Julián’s case that certainty came to him in a matter of seconds. For a moment I thought he was going to rush up the stairs and flee from that accursed place, that I would never see him again. Perhaps it would have been better that way.
I remember that the flame from the lighter slowly went out, and I lost sight of his silhouette. My hands searched for him in the shadows. I found him trembling, speechless. He could barely stand, and he dragged himself into a corner. I hugged him and kissed his forehead. He didn’t move. I felt his face with my fingers, but there were no tears. I thought that perhaps, unconsciously, he had known it all those years, that perhaps the encounter was necessary for him to face the truth and set himself free. We had reached the end of the road. Julián would now understand that nothing held him in Barcelona any longer and that we could leave, go far away. I wanted to believe that our luck was about to change and that Penélope had finally forgiven us.
I looked for the lighter on the floor and lit it again. Julián was staring vacantly, indifferent to the blue flame. I held his face in my hands and forced him to look at me. I found lifeless, empty eyes, consumed by anger and loss. I felt the venom of hatred spreading slowly through his veins, and I could read his thoughts. He hated me for having deceived him. He hated Miquel for having wished to give him a life that now felt like an open wound. But above all he hated the man who had caused this calamity, this trail of death and misery: himself. He hated those filthy books to which he had devoted his life and about which nobody cared. He hated every stolen second and every breath.
He looked at me without blinking, the way one looks at a stranger or some unknown object. I kept shaking my head, slowly, my hands searching his hands. Suddenly he moved away roughly and stood up. I tried to grab his arm, but he pushed me against the wall. I saw him go silently up the stairs, a man I no longer knew. Julián Carax was dead. By the time I stepped out into the garden, there was no trace of him. I climbed the wall and jumped down onto the other side. The desolate streets seemed to bleed in the rain. I shouted out his name, walking down the middle of the deserted avenue. Nobody answered my call. It was almost four in the morning when I got home. The apartment was full of smoke and the stench of burned paper. Julián had been there. I ran to open the windows. I found a small case on my desk with the pen I had bought him years ago in Paris, the fountain pen I had paid a fortune for on the pretense it once had belonged to Victor Hugo. The smoke was oozing from the central-heating boiler. I opened the hatch and saw that Julián had thrown into it copies of his novels. I could just about read the titles on the leather spines. The rest had turned to cinders. I looked on my bookshelves: all of his books were gone.
Hours later, when I went to the publishing house in the middle of the morning, Álvaro Cabestany called me into his office. His father hardly ever came by anymore; the doctors said his days were numbered—as was my time at the firm. Cabestany’s son informed me that a gentleman called Laín Coubert had turned up, early that morning, saying he was interested in acquiring our entire stock of Julián Carax’s novels. The publisher’s son told him he had a warehouse full of them in the Pueblo Nuevo district, but as there was such a demand for them, he insisted on a higher price than Coubert was offering. Coubert had not taken the bait and had marched out. Now Álvaro Cabestany wanted me to find this person called Laín Coubert and accept his offer. I told that fool that Laín Coubert didn’t exist; he was a character in one of Carax’s novels. That he wasn’t in the least interested in buying his books; he only wanted to know where we stored them. Old Mr. Cabestany was in the habit of keeping a copy of every book published by his firm in his office library, even the works of Julián Carax: I slipped into the room, unnoticed, and took them.
That evening I visited my father in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and hid them where nobody, especially Julián, would ever find them. Night had fallen when I left the building. I wandered off down the Ramblas and from there to La Barceloneta, where I made for the beach, looking for the spot where I had gone to gaze at the sea with Julián. The pyre of flames from the Pueblo Nuevo warehouse was visible in the distance, its amber trail spilling over the sea and spirals of smoke rising to the sky like serpents of light. When the firefighters managed to extinguish the flames shortly before daybreak, there was nothing left, just the brick-and-metal skeleton that held up the vault. There I found Lluís Carbó, who had been the night watchman for ten years. He stared in disbelief at the smoldering ruins. His eyebrows and the hairs on his arms were singed, and his skin shone like wet bronze. It was he who told me that the blaze had started shortly after midnight and had devoured tens of thousands of books, until dawn came and he was faced with a river of ashes. Lluís still held a handful of books he had managed to save, some of Verdaguer’s collected poems and two volumes of the History of the French Revolution. That was all that had survived. Various members of the union had arrived to help the firefighters. One of them told me the firefighters found a burned body in the debris. At first they had assumed that the man was dead, but then one of them noticed he was still breathing, and they had taken him to the nearby Hospital del Mar.
I recognized him by his eyes. The fire had eaten away his skin, his hands, and his hair. The flames had torn off his clothes, and his whole body was a raw wound that oozed beneath his bandages. They had confined him to a room of his own at the end of a corridor, with a view of the beach, and had numbed him with morphine while they waited for him to die. I wanted to hold his hand, but one of the nurses warned me that there was almost no flesh under the bandages. The fire had cut away his eyelids. The nurse who found me, collapsed on the floor crying, asked me whether I knew who he was. I said I did: he was my husband. When a priest appeared to administer the last rites over him, I frightened him off with my screams. Three days later Julián was still alive. The doctors said it was a miracle, that his will to stay alive gave him a strength no medicine could offer. They were wrong. It was not a will to live. It was hatred. A week later, when they saw that this death-bitten body refused to expire, he was officially admitted under the name of Miquel Moliner. He would remain there for eleven months. Always in silence, with burning eyes, without rest.
I went to the hospital every day. Soon the nurses began to treat me less formally and invite me to lunch with them in their hall. They were all women who were on their own, strong women waiting for their men to return from the front. Some did. They taught me how to clean Julián’s wounds, how to change his bandages, how to change the sheets and make a bed with an inert body lying on it. They also taught me to lose all hope of ever seeing the man who had once been held by those bones. Three months later we removed his face bandages. Julián was a skull. He had no lips or cheeks. It was a featureless face, the charred remains of a doll. His eye sockets had become larger and now dominated his expression. The nurses would not admit it to me, but they were revolted by his appearance, almost afraid. The doctors had told me that, as the wounds healed, a sort of purplish, rep
tilelike skin would slowly form. Nobody dared to comment on his mental state. Everyone assumed that Julián—Miquel—had lost his mind in the blaze, and that he had survived thanks to the obsessive care of a wife who stood firm where so many others would have fled in terror. I looked into his eyes and knew that Julián was still in there, alive, tormenting himself, waiting.
He had lost his lips, but the doctors thought that the vocal cords had not suffered permanent damage and that the burns on his tongue and larynx had healed months earlier. They assumed that Julián didn’t say anything because his mind was gone. One afternoon, six months after the fire, when he and I were alone in the room, I bent over him and kissed him on the brow.
“I love you,” I said.
A bitter, harsh sound emerged from the doglike grimace that was now his mouth. His eyes were red with tears. I wanted to dry them with a handkerchief, but he repeated that sound.
“Leave me,” he said.
“Leave me.”
Two months after the warehouse fire, the publishing firm had gone bankrupt. Old Cabestany, who died that year, had predicted that his son would manage to ruin the company within six months. An unrepentant optimist to the last. I tried to find work with another publisher, but the war did away with everything. They all said that hostilities would soon cease and things would improve. But there were still two years of war ahead, and worse was yet to come. One year after the fire, the doctors told me that they had done all that could be done in a hospital. The situation was difficult, and they needed the room. They recommended that Julián be taken to a sanatorium like the Hospice of Santa Lucía, but I refused. In October 1937 I took him home. He hadn’t uttered a single word since that “Leave me.”
EVERY DAY I TOLD HIM THAT I LOVED HIM. I SET HIM UP IN THE armchair by the window, wrapped in blankets. I fed him with fruit juices, toast, and milk—when there was any to be found. Every day I read to him for a couple of hours. Balzac, Zola, Dickens…His body was beginning to fill out. Soon after returning home, he began to move his hands and arms. He tilted his neck. Sometimes, when I got back, I found the blankets on the floor, and household objects that had been knocked over. One day I found him crawling on the floor. Then, a year and a half after the fire, I woke up in the middle of a stormy night and found that someone was sitting on the bed stroking my hair. I smiled at him, hiding my tears. He had managed to find one of my mirrors, although I’d hidden them all. In a broken voice, he told me he’d been transformed into one of his fictional monsters, into Laín Coubert. I wanted to kiss him, to show him that his appearance didn’t disgust me, but he wouldn’t let me. He would hardly allow me to touch him. Day by day he was getting his strength back. He would prowl around the house while I went out in search of something to eat. The savings Miquel had left me kept us afloat, but soon I had to start selling jewels and old possessions. When there was no other alternative, I took the Victor Hugo pen I had bought in Paris and went out to sell it to the highest bidder. I found a shop behind the Military Government buildings where they took in that sort of merchandise. The manager did not seem impressed by my solemn oath that the pen had belonged to Victor Hugo, but he admitted it was a marvelous work of its kind and agreed to pay me as much as he could, bearing in mind these were times of great hardship.
When I told Julián that I’d sold it, I was afraid he would fly into a rage. All he said was that I’d done the right thing, that he’d never deserved it. One day, one of the many when I’d gone out to look for work, I returned to find that Julián wasn’t there. He didn’t come back until daybreak. When I asked him where he’d been, he just emptied the pockets of his coat (which had belonged to Miquel) and left a fistful of money on the table. From then on he began to go out almost every night. In the dark, concealed under a hat and scarf, with gloves and a raincoat, he was just one more shadow. He never told me where he went, and he almost always brought back money or jewels. He slept in the mornings, sitting upright in his armchair, with his eyes open. Once I found a penknife in one of his pockets. It was a double-edged knife, with an automatic spring. The blade was marked with dark stains.
It was then that I began to hear stories in town about some individual who was going around smashing bookshop windows at night and burning books. Other times the strange vandal would slip into a library or a collector’s study. He always took two or three volumes, which he would burn. In February 1938 I went to a secondhand bookshop to ask whether it was possible to find any books by Julián Carax in the market. The manager said it wasn’t: someone had been making them disappear. He himself had owned a couple and had sold them to a very strange person, a man who hid his face and whose voice he could barely understand.
“Until recently there were a few copies left in private collections, here and in France, but a lot of collectors are beginning to get rid of them. They’re frightened,” he said, “and I don’t blame them.”
More and more, Julián would vanish for whole days at a time. Soon his absences lasted a week. He always left and returned at night, and he always brought money back. He never gave any explanations, and if he did, they were meaningless. He told me he’d been in France: Paris, Lyons, Nice. Occasionally letters arrived from France addressed to Laín Coubert. They were always from secondhand booksellers or from collectors. Someone had located a lost copy of Julián Carax’s works. Like a wolf, he would disappear for a few days, then return.
It was during one of those absences that I came across Fortuny, the hatter, wandering about in the cathedral cloister lost in his thoughts. He still remembered me from the day I’d gone with Miquel to inquire after Julián, two years before. He took me to a corner and told me confidentially that he knew that Julián was alive, somewhere, but he suspected that his son wasn’t able get in touch with us for some reason he couldn’t quite figure out. “Something to do with that cruel man Fumero.” I told him that I felt the same. Wartime was turning out to be very profitable for Fumero. His loyalties shifted from month to month, from the anarchists to the communists, and from them to whoever came his way. He was called a spy, a henchman, a hero, a murderer, a conspirator, a schemer, a savior, a devil. Little did it matter. They all feared him. They all wanted him on their side. Perhaps because he was so busy with the intrigues of a wartime Barcelona, Fumero seemed to have forgotten Julián. Probably, like the hatter, he imagined that Julián had already escaped and was out of his reach.
MR. FORTUNY ASKED ME WHETHER I WAS AN OLD FRIEND OF HIS SON’S, and I said I was. He asked me to tell him about Julián, about the man he’d become, because, he sadly admitted, he didn’t really know him. “Life separated us, you know?” He told me he’d been to all the bookshops in Barcelona in search of Julián’s novels, but they were unobtainable. Someone had told him that a madman was looking for them in every corner of the city and then burning them. Fortuny was convinced that the culprit was Fumero. I didn’t contradict him. I lied as best I could, I know not whether through pity or spite. I told him that I thought Julián had returned to Paris, that he was well, that I knew for a fact he was very fond of Fortuny the hatter, that he would come back to see him as soon as circumstances permitted. “It’s this war,” he complained, “it just rots everything.” Before we said good-bye, he insisted on giving me his address and that of his ex-wife, Sophie, with whom he was back in touch after many years of “misunderstandings.” Sophie now lived in Bogotá with a prestigious doctor, he said. She ran her own music school and often wrote asking after Julián.
“It’s the only thing that brings us together now, you see. Memories. We make so many mistakes in life, young lady, but we only realize this when old age creeps up on us. Tell me, do you have faith?”
I took my leave, promising to keep him and Sophie informed if I ever had news from Julián.
“Nothing would make his mother happier than to hear how he is. You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense,” the hatter concluded sadly. “That’s why you live longer.”
Despite the fact that I’d heard
so many appalling stories about him, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor old man. He had little else to do in life but wait for the return of his son. He seemed to live in the hope of recovering lost time through some miracle from the saints, whom he visited with great devotion at their chapels in the cathedral. I had become used to picturing him as an ogre, a despicable and resentful being, but all I was able to see before me was a kind man, blind to reality, confused like everybody else. Perhaps because he reminded me of my own father, who hid from everyone, including himself, in that refuge of books and shadows, or because, without his suspecting it, the hatter and I were also linked by the hope of recovering Julián, I felt a growing affection for him and became his only friend. Unbeknownst to Julián, I often called on him in the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio. The hatter no longer worked in his shop downstairs.
“I don’t have the hands, or the sight, or the customers…” he would say.
He waited for me almost every Thursday and offered me coffee, biscuits, and pastries that he scarcely tasted. He spent hours reminiscing about Julián’s childhood, about how they worked together in the hat shop, and he would show me photographs. He would take me to Julián’s room, which he kept as immaculate as a museum, and bring out old notebooks, insignificant objects that he adored as relics of a life that had never existed, without ever realizing that he’d already shown them to me before, that he’d told me all those stories on a previous visit. One of those Thursdays, as I walked up the stairs, I ran into a doctor who had just been to see Mr. Fortuny. I asked him how the hatter was, and he looked at me strangely.