“Are you a relative?”
I told him I was the closest the poor man had to one. The doctor then told me that Fortuny was very ill, that it was just a matter of months.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I could tell you it’s the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.”
The hatter was pleased to see me and confessed that he didn’t trust that doctor. Doctors are just second-rate witches, he said. All his life the hatter had been a man of profound religious beliefs, and old age had only reinforced them. He saw the hand of the devil everywhere. The devil, he said, clouds the mind and ruins mankind.
“Just look at this war, or look at me. Of course, now I’m old and weak, but as a young man I was a swine and a coward.”
It was the devil who had taken Julián away from him, he added.
“God gives us life, but the world’s landlord is the devil….”
And so we passed the afternoon, nibbling on stale sponge fingers and discussing theology.
I once told Julián that if he wanted to see his father again before he died, he’d better hurry up. It turned out that he, too, had been visiting the hatter, without his knowing: from afar, at dusk, sitting at the other end of a square, watching him grow old. Julián said he would rather the old man took with him the image of the son he had created in his mind during those years than the person he had become.
“You keep that one for me,” I said, instantly regretting my words.
He didn’t reply, but for a moment it seemed as if he could think clearly again and was fully aware of the hell in which we had become trapped.
The doctor’s prognosis did not take long to come true. Mr. Fortuny didn’t see the end of the war. He was found sitting in his armchair, looking at old photographs of Sophie and Julián.
The last days of the war were the prelude to an inferno. The city had lived through the combat from afar, like a wound that throbs drowsily, with months of skirmishes and battles, bombardments and hunger. The spectacle of murders, fights, and conspiracies had been corroding the city’s heart for years, but even so, many wanted to believe that the war was still something distant, a storm that would pass them by. If anything, the wait made the inevitable worse. When the storm broke, there was no compassion.
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we’ve learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.
By then Julián hardly had any books left to burn. His father’s death, about which we never spoke, had turned him into an invalid. The anger and hatred that had at first possessed him were spent. We lived on rumors, secluded. We heard that Fumero had betrayed all the people who had helped him advance during the war and was now in the service of the victors. It was said that he was personally executing his main allies and protectors in the cells of Montjuïc Castle—his preferred method a pistol shot in the mouth. The heavy mantle of collective forgetfulness seemed to descend around us the day the weapons went quiet. In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell. The weeks that followed the fall of Barcelona were indescribable. More blood was shed during those days than during the combat, but secretly, stealthily. When peace finally came, it smelled of the sort of peace that haunts prisons and cemeteries, a shroud of silence and shame that rots one’s soul and never goes away. There were no guiltless hands or innocent looks. Those of us who were there, all without exception, will take the secret with us to our grave.
A faint patina of normality was being restored amid resentments, but by now Julián and I lived in abject poverty. We had spent all the savings and the booty from Laín Coubert’s nightly escapades, and there was nothing left in the house to sell. I looked desperately for work as a translator, typist, or cleaner, but it seemed that my past association with Cabestany had marked me out as an undesirable person, a source of unnamed suspicions. A government employee in a shiny new suit, with brilliantined hair and a pencil mustache—one of the hundreds who seemed to crawl out of the woodwork during those months—hinted that an attractive girl like me shouldn’t have to resort to such mundane jobs. Our neighbors accepted my story that I was caring for my poor husband, Miquel, who had become an invalid and was disfigured as a result of the war. They would bring us offerings of milk, cheese, or bread, sometimes even salted fish or sausages that had been sent to them by relatives in the country. After months of hardship, convinced that it would take a long time to find a job, I decided on a strategy borrowed from one of Julián’s novels.
I wrote to Julián’s mother in Bogotá, adopting the name of a fictitious new lawyer whom the deceased Mr. Fortuny had consulted in his last days, when he was trying to put his affairs in order. I informed her that, as the hatter had died without having made a will, his estate, which included the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio and the shop situated in the same building, was now theoretically the property of her son, Julián, who, it was believed, lived in exile in France. Since the death duties had not been satisfied, and since she lived abroad, the lawyer (whom I christened José María Requejo in memory of the first boy who had kissed me in school) asked her for authorization to start the necessary proceedings and carry out the transfer of the properties to the name of her son, whom he intended to contact through the Spanish embassy in Paris. In the meantime he was assuming the transitory and temporary ownership of the said properties, as well as a certain level of financial compensation. He also asked her to get in touch with the building administrator and instruct him to send all the documents, as well as the payment for the property expenses, to Mr. Requejo’s office, in whose name I opened a PO box with a fake address—that of an old, disused garage two blocks away from the ruins of the Aldaya mansion. I was hoping that, blinded by the possibility of being able to help Julián and getting back in touch with him, Sophie would not stop to question all that legal gibberish and would agree to help us, taking into account her prosperous situation in far-off Colombia.
A couple of months later, the building administrator began to receive a monthly money order to cover the expenses of the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio and the fees of José María Requejo’s law firm, which he proceeded to send as an open check to PO Box 2321 in Barcelona, just as Sophie Carax had requested him to do. The administrator, I noticed, retained an unauthorized percentage every month, but I preferred not to say anything. That way he wetted his beak and did not question such a convenient arrangement. With the rest, Julián and I had enough to survive. Terrible, bleak years went by, during which I had managed to find occasional work as a translator. By then nobody remembered Cabestany, and people began to forgive and forget, putting aside old rivalries and grievances. I lived under the perpetual threat that Fumero might decide to begin rummaging in the past again. Sometimes I convinced myself that it wouldn’t happen, that he must have given Julián up for dead by now or forgotten him. Fumero wasn’t the thug he was years ago. Now he had graduated into a public figure, a career man in the fascist regime, who couldn’t afford the luxury of Julián Carax’s ghost. Other times I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding, covered in sweat, thinking that the police were hammering on my door. I feared that some of the neighbors might begin to be suspicious of that ailing husband of mine who never left the house, who sometimes cried or banged the walls like a madman, and that they might report us to the police. I was afraid that Julián might escape again, that he might decide to go out hunting for his books once more. Distracted by so much fear, I forgot that I was growing old, that life was passing me by, that I had sacrificed my
youth to love a man who was now almost a phantom.
But the years went by in peace. Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station. Meanwhile, the scars from the war were, of necessity, healing. I found some work in a couple of publishing firms and spent most of the day out of the house. I had lovers with no name, desperate faces I came across in cinemas or in the subway, with whom I would share my loneliness. Then,absurdly, I’d be consumed by guilt, and when I saw Julián again, I always felt like crying and would swear to myself that I would never again betray him, as if I owed him something. On buses or on the street, I caught myself looking at women who were younger than me holding small children by the hand. They seemed happy, or at peace, as if those helpless little beings could fill all the emptiness in the world. Then I would remember the days when, fantasizing, I had imagined myself one of those women, with a child in my arms, a child of Julián’s. And then I would think about the war and about the fact that those who waged it were also children once.
I had started to believe that the world had forgotten us when someone turned up one day at our house. He looked young, barely a boy, an apprentice who blushed when he looked me in the eye. He asked after Miquel Moliner, and said he was updating some file at the School of Journalism. He told me that perhaps Mr. Moliner could be the beneficiary of a monthly pension, but if he were to apply for it, he would first have to update a number of details. I told him that Mr. Moliner hadn’t been living there since the start of the war, that he’d gone abroad. He said he was very sorry and went away leering. He had the face of a young informer, and I knew that I had to get Julián out of my apartment that night, without fail. By now he had almost shriveled up. He was as docile as a child, and his whole life revolved around the evenings we spent together, listening to music on the radio, as he held my hand and stroked it in silence.
When night fell, I took the keys of the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio, which the building administrator had sent to a nonexistent Mr. Requejo, and accompanied Julián back to the home where he had grown up. I set him up in his room and promised him I’d return on the following day, reminding him to be very careful.
“Fumero is looking for you again,” I said.
He made a vague gesture with his head, as if he couldn’t remember who Fumero was, or no longer cared. Several weeks passed in that way. I always went to the apartment at night, after midnight. I asked Julián what he’d done during the day, and he looked at me without understanding. We would spend the night together, holding each other, and I left at daybreak, promising to return as soon as I could. When I left, I always locked the door of the apartment. Julián didn’t have a copy of the key. I preferred to keep him there like a prisoner rather than risk his life.
Nobody else came around to ask after Miquel, but I made sure it got about in the neighborhood that my husband was in France. I wrote a couple of letters to the Spanish consulate in Paris saying that I knew that the Spanish citizen Julián Carax was in the city and asking for their assistance in finding him. I imagined that sooner or later the letters would reach the right hands. I took all the precautions, but I knew it was only a question of time. People like Fumero never stop hating.
The apartment on Ronda de San Antonio was on the top floor. I discovered that there was a door to the roof terrace at the top of the staircase. The roof terraces of the whole block formed a network of enclosures separated from one another by walls just a yard high, where residents went to hang out their laundry. It didn’t take me long to locate a building at the other end of the block, with its front door on Calle Joaquín Costa, to whose roof terrace I could gain access and therefore reach the building of Ronda de San Antonio without anyone seeing me go in or come out of the property. I once got a letter from the building administrator telling me that some neighbors had heard sounds coming from the Fortuny apartment. I answered in Requejo’s name stating that occasionally some member of the firm had gone to the apartment to look for papers or documents and there was no cause for alarm, even if the sounds were heard at night. I added a comment implying that among gentlemen—accountants and lawyers—a secret bachelor pad was no small treasure. The administrator, showing professional understanding, answered that I need not worry in the least, that he completely understood the situation.
During those years, playing the role of Mr. Requejo was my only source of entertainment. Once a month I went to visit my father at the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. He never showed any interest in meeting my invisible husband, and I never offered to introduce him. We would skirt around the subject in our conversations like expert mariners dodging reefs near the water’s surface. Occasionally he asked me whether I needed any help, whether there was anything he could do.
On Saturdays, at dawn, I sometimes took Julián to look at the sea. We would go up to the roof, cross over to the adjoining building, and then step out into Calle Joaquín Costa. From there we made our way down toward the port through the narrows streets of the Raval quarter. We never encountered anyone. People were afraid of Julián, even from a distance. At times we went as far as the breakwater. Julián liked to sit on the rocks, facing the city. We could spend hours like that, hardly speaking. Some afternoons we’d slip into a cinema, when the show had already started. In the dark nobody noticed Julián. As the months went by, I learned to confuse routine with normality, and in time I came to believe that my arrangement was perfect. Fool that I was.
·12·
NINETEEN FORTY-FIVE, A YEAR OF ASHES. ONLY SIX YEARS HAD elapsed since the end of the Civil War, and although its bruises were felt at every step, almost nobody spoke about it openly. Now people talked about the other war, the world war, which had polluted the entire globe with a stench of corpses that would never go away. Those were years of want and misery, strangely blessed by the sort of peace that the dumb and the disabled inspire in us—halfway between pity and revulsion. At last, after years of searching in vain for work as a translator, I found a job as a copyeditor in a publishing house run by a businessman of the new breed called Pedro Sanmartí. Sanmartí had built his company with the fortune of his father-in-law, who had then been promptly dispatched to a nursing home on the shores of Lake Bañolas while Sanmartí awaited a letter containing his death certificate. The businessman liked to court young ladies half his age by presenting himself as the self-made man, an image much in vogue at the time. He spoke broken English with a thick accent, convinced that it was the language of the future, and he finished his sentences with “Okay.”
Sanmartí’s firm (which he had named Endymion because he thought it sounded impressive and was likely to sell books) published catechisms, manuals on etiquette, and various series of moralizing novels whose protagonists were either young nuns in humorous capers, Red Cross workers, or civil servants who were happy and morally sound. We also published a comic-book series about soldiers called Brave Commando—a raging success among young boys in need of heroes. I made a good friend in the firm, Sanmartí’s secretary, a war widow called Mercedes Pietro, with whom I soon felt a great affinity. Mercedes and I had a lot in common: we were two women adrift, surrounded by men who were either dead or hiding from the world. Mercedes had a seven-year-old son who suffered from muscular dystrophy, for whom she cared as best she could. She was only thirty-two, but the lines on her face spoke of a life of hardship. All those years Mercedes was the only person to whom I felt tempted to tell everything.
It was she who told me that Sanmartí was a great friend of the increasingly renowned and decorated Inspector Javier Fumero. They both belonged to a clique of individuals that had risen from the ruins of the war to spread its tentacles throughout the city, a new power elite.
One day Fumero turned up at the publishing firm. He was coming to visit his friend Sanmartí, with whom he’d arranged to have lunch. Under some pretext or other, I hid in the filing room until they had both left. When I returned to my desk, Mercedes threw me a look; nothing needed to be sa
id. From then on, every time Fumero made an appearance in the offices of the publisher, she would warn me so that I could hide.
Not a day passed without Sanmartí’s trying to take me out to dinner, to the theater or the cinema, using any excuse. I always replied that my husband was waiting for me at home and that surely his wife must be anxious, as it was getting late. Mrs. Sanmartí fell well below the Bugatti on the list of her husband’s favorite items. Indeed, she was close to losing her role in the marriage charade altogether, now that her father’s fortune had passed into Sanmartí’s hands. Mercedes had already warned me: Sanmartí, whose powers of concentration were limited, hankered after young, unseen flesh and concentrated his inane womanizing on the new arrivals—which at the moment meant me. He would resort to all manner of ploys.
“They tell me your husband, this Mr. Moliner, is a writer…. Perhaps he would-be interested in writing a book about my friend Fumero. I have the title: Fumero, the Scourge of Crime. What do you think, Nurieta?”
“I’m very grateful, Mr. Sanmartí, but Miquel is caught up with a novel he’s writing, and I don’t think he would be able to do it at the moment….”
Sanmartí would burst out laughing.
“A novel? Goodness, Nurieta…the novel is dead and buried. A friend of mine who has just arrived from New York was telling me only the other day. Americans are inventing something called television, which will be like the cinema, only at home. There’ll be no more need for books, or churches, or anything. Tell your husband to forget about novels. If at least he were well known, if he were a football player or a bullfighter…Look, how about getting into the Bugatti and going to eat a paella in Castelldefels so we can discuss all this? Come on, woman, you’ve got to put your back into it…You know I’d like to help you. And your nice husband, too. You know only too well that in this country, without the right kind of friends, there’s no getting anywhere.”