WHEN YOU READ THESE WORDS, THIS PRISON OF MEMORIES, IT WILL mean that I will no longer be able to say good-bye to you as I would have wished, that I will not be able to ask you to forgive us, especially Julián, and to take care of him when I am no longer there to do so. I know I cannot ask anything of you, but I can ask you to save yourself. Perhaps so many pages have managed to convince me that whatever happens, I will always have a friend in you, that you are my only hope, my only real hope. Of all the things that Julián wrote, the one I have always felt closest to my heart is that so long as we are being remembered, we remain alive. As so often happened to me with Julián, years before meeting him, I feel that I know you and that if I can trust in someone, that someone is you. Remember me, Daniel, even if it’s only in a corner and secretly. Don’t let me go.
Nuria Monfort
The Shadow of the Wind
1955
·1·
DAY WAS BREAKING WHEN I FINISHED READING NURIA MONFORT’S manuscript. That was my story. Our story. In Carax’s lost footsteps, I now recognized my own, irretrievable. I stood, devoured by anxiety, and began to pace up and down the room like a caged animal. All my reservations, my suspicions and fears, seemed insignificant; I was overwhelmed by exhaustion, remorse, and dread, but I felt incapable of remaining there, hiding from the trail left by my actions. I slung on my coat, thrust the folded manuscript into the inside pocket, and ran down the stairs. I stepped out of the front door: it had started to snow, and the sky was melting into slow tears of light that seemed to lie on my breath before fading away. I ran up to Plaza de Cataluña. It was almost deserted but in the center of the square stood the lonely figure of an old man with long white hair, clad in a wonderful gray overcoat. King of the dawn, he raised his eyes to heaven and tried in vain to catch the snowflakes with his gloves, laughing to himself. As I walked past him, he looked at me and smiled gravely. His eyes were the color of gold, like magic coins at the bottom of a fountain.
“Good luck,” I thought I heard him say.
I tried to cling to that blessing, and I quickened my step, praying that it would not be too late and that Bea, the Bea of my story, was still waiting for me.
My throat was burning with cold when, panting after the run, I reached the building where the Aguilars lived. The snow was beginning to settle. I had the good fortune of finding Don Saturno Molleda stationed at the entrance. Don Saturno was the caretaker of the building and (from what Bea had told me) a secret surrealist poet. He had come out to watch the spectacle of the snow, broom in hand, wrapped in at least three scarves and wearing commando boots.
“It’s God’s dandruff,” he said, marveling, offering the snow a preview of his unpublished verse.
“I’m going up to the Aguilars’ apartment,” I announced.
“We all know that the early bird catches the worm, but you’re trying to catch an elephant, young man.”
“It’s an emergency. They’re expecting me.”
“Ego te absolvo,” he recited, blessing me.
I ran up the stairs. As I ascended, I weighed up my options with some caution. If I was lucky, one of the maids would open the door, and I was ready to break through her blockade without bothering about the niceties. However, if the fates didn’t favor me, perhaps Bea’s father would open the door, given the hour. I wanted to think that in the intimacy of his home, he would not be armed, at least not before breakfast. I paused for a few moments to recover my breath before knocking and tried to conjure up words that never came. Little did it matter. I struck the door hard with the knocker three times. Fifteen seconds later I repeated the operation, and went on doing this, ignoring the cold sweat that covered my brow and the beating of my heart. When the door opened, I was still holding the knocker in my hand.
“What do you want?”
The eyes of my old friend Tomás, cold with anger, bored through me.
“I’ve come to see Bea. You can smash my face in if you feel like it, but I’m not leaving without speaking to her.”
Tomás observed me with a fixed stare. I wondered whether he was going to cleave me in two then and there. I swallowed hard.
“My sister isn’t here.”
“Tomás…”
“Bea’s gone.”
There was despondency and pain in his voice, which he was barely able to disguise as wrath.
“She’s gone? Where?”
“I was hoping you would know.”
“Me?”
Ignoring Tomás’s closed fists and the threatening expression on his face, I slipped into the apartment.
“Bea?” I shouted. “Bea, it’s me, Daniel….”
I stopped halfway along the corridor. The apartment threw back the echo of my voice. Neither Mr. Aguilar nor his wife nor the servants appeared in response to my yells.
“There’s no one here. I’ve told you,” said Tomás behind me. “Now get out and don’t come back. My father has sworn he’ll kill you, and I’m not going to be the one to stop him.”
“For God’s sake, Tomás. Tell me where your sister is.”
He looked at me as if he wasn’t sure whether to spit at me or ignore me.
“Bea has left home, Daniel. My parents have been looking everywhere for her, desperately, for two days, and so have the police.”
“But…”
“The other night, when she came back from seeing you, my father was waiting for her. He slapped her so much he made her mouth bleed. But don’t worry, she refused to name you. You don’t deserve her.”
“Tomás…”
“Shut up. The following day my parents took her to the doctor.”
“What for? Is Bea ill?”
“She’s ill from you, you idiot. My sister is pregnant. Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”
I felt my lips quivering. An intense cold spread through my body, my voice stolen, my eyes fixed. I dragged myself toward the front door, but Tomás grabbed me by the arm and threw me against the wall.
“What have you done to her?”
“Tomás, I…”
His eyes flashed with impatience. The first blow cut my breath in two. I slid to the floor, my back leaning against the wall, my knees giving way. A powerful grip seized me by the throat and held me up, nailed to the wall.
“What have you done to her, you son of a bitch?”
I tried to get away, but Tomás knocked me down with a punch on the face. I fell into blackness, my head wrapped in a blaze of pain. I collapsed onto the corridor tiles. I tried to crawl away, but Tomás clutched my coat collar and dragged me without ceremony to the landing. He tossed me onto the staircase like a piece of rubbish.
“If anything has happened to Bea, I swear I’ll kill you,” he said from the doorway.
I got up on my knees, begging for a moment of time, for an opportunity to recover my voice. But the door closed, abandoning me to the darkness. A sharp pain struck me in my left ear, and I put my hand to my head, twisting with agony. I could feel warm blood. I stood up as best I could. My stomach muscles, where Tomás’s first blow had landed, were smarting—that was just the beginning. I slid down the stairs. Don Saturno shook his head when he saw me.
“Here, come inside for a minute, until you feel better.”
I shook my head, holding my stomach with both hands. The left side of my head throbbed, as if the bones were trying to detach themselves from the flesh.
“You’re bleeding,” said Don Saturno with a concerned look.
“It’s not the first time….”
“Well, then, keep on fooling around and you won’t have many chances left to bleed again. Here, come in and I’ll call a doctor, please.”
I managed to get to the main door and escape the caretaker’s kindness. It was now snowing hard; the pavement was covered in veils of white mist. The icy wind made its way between my clothes and licked at the bleeding wound on my face. I don’t know whether I cried with pain, anger, or fear. The indifferent snow silenced my cowardly weeping, and I walked away slowly in
the dusty dawn, one more shadow leaving his tracks in God’s dandruff.
·2·
AS I WAS APPROACHING THE CROSSING WITH CALLE BALMES, I noticed that a car was following me, hugging the pavement. The pain in my head had given way to a feeling of vertigo that made me reel, so that I had to walk holding on to the walls. The car stopped, and two men came out of it. A sharp whistling sound had filled my ears, and I couldn’t hear the engine or the calls of the two figures in black who grabbed hold of me, one on either side, and dragged me hurriedly to the car. I fell into the backseat, drunk with nausea. Floods of blinding light came and went inside my brain. I felt the car moving. A pair of hands touched my face, my head, my ribs. Coming upon the manuscript of Nuria Monfort, which was hidden inside my coat, one of the figures snatched it from me. I tried to stop him with jellylike arms. The other silhouette leaned over me. I knew he was talking when I felt his breath on my face. I waited to see Fumero’s face light up and feel the blade of his knife on my throat. Two eyes rested on mine, and as the curtain of consciousness fell, I recognized the gap-toothed, welcoming smile of Fermín Romero de Torres.
I WOKE UP IN A SWEAT THAT STUNG MY SKIN. TWO HANDS HELD MY shoulders firmly and settled me into a small bed surrounded by candles, as in a wake. Fermín’s face appeared on my right. He was smiling, but even in my delirium I could sense his anxiety. Next to him, standing, I recognized Don Federico Flaviá, the watchmaker.
“He seems to be coming around, Fermín,” said Don Federico. “Shall I go and prepare some broth, to revive him?”
“It won’t do him any harm. While you’re at it, you could make me a sandwich of whatever you find. Double-decker, if you please. All these nerves have suddenly revived my appetite.”
Federico scurried off, and we were left alone.
“Where are we, Fermín?”
“In a safe place. Technically speaking, we’re in a small apartment on the left side of the Ensanche quarter, the property of some friends of Don Federico, to whom we owe our lives and more. Slanderers would describe it as a love nest, but for us it’s a sanctuary.”
I tried to sit up. The pain in my ear was now a burning throb.
“Will I go deaf?”
“I don’t know about that, but a bit more beating and you’d have certainly been left bordering on the vegetative. That troglodyte Mr. Aguilar almost pulped your gray cells.”
“It wasn’t Mr. Aguilar who beat me. It was Tomás.”
“Tomás? Your friend? The inventor?”
I nodded.
“You must have done something to deserve it.”
“Bea has left home…” I began.
Fermín frowned. “Go on.”
“She’s pregnant.”
Fermín was looking at me openmouthed. For once his expression was impenetrable.
“Don’t look at me like that, Fermín, please.”
“What do you want me to do? Start handing out cigars?”
I tried to get up, but the pain and Fermín’s hands stopped me.
“I’ve got to find her, Fermín.”
“Steady, there. You’re not in any fit state to go anywhere. Tell me where the girl is, and I’ll go and find her.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to be more specific.”
Don Federico appeared around the door carrying a cup of steaming broth. He smiled at me warmly.
“How are you feeling, Daniel?”
“Much better, thanks, Don Federico.”
“Take a couple of these pills with the soup.”
He glanced briefly at Fermín, who nodded.
“They’re painkillers.”
I swallowed the pills and sipped the cup of broth, which tasted of sherry. Don Federico, the soul of discretion, left the room and closed the door. It was then I noticed that Fermín had Nuria Monfort’s manuscript on his lap. The clock ticking on the bedside table showed one o’clock—in the afternoon, I supposed.
“Is it still snowing?”
“That’s an understatement. This is a powdery version of the Flood.”
“Have you read it?” I asked.
Fermín simply nodded.
“I must find Bea before it’s too late. I think I know where she is.”
I sat up in bed, pushing Fermín’s arms aside. I looked around me. The walls swayed like weeds at the bottom of a pond. The ceiling seemed to be moving away. I could barely hold myself upright. Fermín effortlessly laid me back on the bed again.
“You’re not going anywhere, Daniel.”
“What were those pills?”
“Morpheus’s liniment. You’re going to sleep like a log.”
“No, not now, I can’t….”
I continued to blabber until my eyelids closed and I dropped into a black, empty sleep, the sleep of the guilty.
IT WAS ALMOST DUSK WHEN THAT TOMBSTONE WAS LIFTED OFF ME. I opened my eyes to a dark room watched over by two tired candles flickering on the bedside table. Fermín, defeated on an armchair in the corner, snored with the fury of a man three times his size. At his feet, scattered like a flood of tears, lay Nuria Monfort’s manuscript. The headache had lessened to a slow, tepid throb. I tiptoed over to the bedroom door and went out into a little hall with a balcony and a door that seemed to open onto the staircase. My coat and shoes lay on a chair. A purplish light came in through the window, speckled with iridescence. I walked over to the balcony and saw that it was still snowing. Half the roofs of Barcelona were mottled with white and scarlet. In the distance the towers of the Industrial College looked like needles in the haze, clinging to the last rays of sun. The windowpane was veiled with frost. I put my index finger on the glass and wrote:
Gone to find Bea. Don’t follow me. Back soon.
The truth had struck me when I woke up, as if some stranger had whispered it to me in a dream. I stepped out onto the landing and rushed down the stairs and out of the front door. Calle Urgel was like a river of shiny white sand, and the wind blew the snow about in gusts. Streetlamps and trees emerged like masts in a fog. I walked to the nearest subway station, Hospital Clínico, past the stand of afternoon papers carrying the news on the front page, with photographs of the Ramblas covered in snow and the fountain of Canaletas bleeding stalactites. SNOWFALL OF THE CENTURY, the headlines blared. I fell onto a bench on the platform and breathed in that perfume of tunnels and soot that the sound of trains brings with it. On the other side of the tracks, on a poster proclaiming the delights of the Tibidabo amusement park, the blue tram was lit up like a street party, and behind it one could just make out the outline of the Aldaya mansion. I wondered whether Bea had seen the same image and had realized she had nowhere else to go.
·3·
WHEN I CAME OUT OF THE SUBWAY TUNNEL, IT WAS STARTING to get dark. Avenida del Tibidabo lay deserted, stretching out in a long line of cypress trees and mansions. I glimpsed the shape of the blue tram at the stop and heard the conductor’s bell piercing the wind. A quick run, and I jumped on just as it was pulling away. The conductor, my old acquaintance, took the coins, mumbling under his breath, and I sat down inside the carriage, a bit more sheltered from the snow and the cold. The somber mansions filed slowly by, behind the tram’s icy windows. The conductor watched me with a mixture of suspicion and bemusement, which the cold seemed to have frozen on his face.
“Number thirty-two, young man.”
I turned and saw the ghostly silhouette of the Aldaya mansion advancing toward us like the prow of a dark ship in the mist. The tram stopped with a shudder. I got off, fleeing from the conductor’s gaze.
“Good luck,” he murmured.
I watched the tram disappear up the avenue, leaving behind only the echo of its bell. Darkness fell around me. I hurried along the garden wall, looking for the gap in the back, where it had tumbled down. As I climbed over, I thought I heard footsteps on the snow approaching on the opposite pavement. I stopped for a second and remained motionless on the top of the wall. The sound of f
ootsteps faded in the wind’s wake. I jumped down to the other side and entered the garden. The weeds had frozen into stems of crystal. The statues of the fallen angels were covered in shrouds of ice. The water in the fountain had iced over, forming a black, shiny mirror, from which only the stone claw of the sunken angel protruded, like an obsidian sword. Tears of ice hung from the index finger. The accusing hand of the angel pointed straight at the main door, which stood ajar.
I ran up the steps without bothering to muffle the sound of my footsteps. Pushing the door open, I walked into the lobby. A procession of candles lined the way toward the interior. They were Bea’s candles, almost burned down to the ground. I followed their trail and stopped at the foot of the grand staircase. The path of candles continued up the steps to the first floor. I ventured up the stairs, following my distorted shadow on the walls. When I reached the first-floor landing, I saw two more candles, set along the corridor. A third one flickered outside the room that had once been Penélope’s. I went up to the door and rapped gently with my knuckles.
“Julián?” came a shaky voice.
I grabbed hold of the doorknob and slowly opened the door. Bea gazed at me from a corner of the room, wrapped in a blanket. I ran to her side and held her. I could feel her dissolving into tears.
“I didn’t know where to go,” she murmured. “I called your home a few times, but there was no answer. I was scared….”
Bea dried her tears with her fists and fixed her eyes on mine. I nodded; there was no need to reply with words.
“Why did you call me Julián?”
Bea cast a glance at the half-open door. “He’s here. In this house. He comes and goes. He discovered me the other day, when I was trying to get into the house. Without my saying anything, he knew who I was and what was happening. He set me up in this room, and he brought me a blanket, water, and some food. He told me to wait. He said that everything was going to turn out all right, that you’d come for me. At night we talked for hours. He talked to me about Penélope, about Nuria—above all he spoke about you, about us two. He told me I had to teach you to forget him….”