That night, when I was trying to get to sleep, I turned my head on my pillow and noticed that the pen case was open. The pen was gone.
The Waters of March
1956
BEA AND I WERE MARRIED IN THE CHURCH OF SANTA ANA THREE months later. Mr. Aguilar, who still spoke to me in monosyllables and would go on doing so until the end of time, had given me his daughter’s hand in view of the impossibility of obtaining my head on a platter. Bea’s disappearance had done away with his anger, and now he seemed to live in a state of perpetual shock, resigned to the fact that his grandson would soon call me Dad and that life, in the shape of a rascal stitched back together after a bullet wound, should rob him of his girl—a girl who, despite his bifocals, he still saw as the child in her first-communion dress, not a day older.
A week before the ceremony, Bea’s father turned up at the bookshop to present me with a gold tiepin that had belonged to his father and to shake hands with me.
“Bea is the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. “Take care of her for me.”
My father went with him to the door and watched him walk away down Calle Santa Ana, with that sadness that softens men who are aware that they are growing old together.
“He’s not a bad person, Daniel,” he said. “We all love in our own way.”
Dr. Mendoza, who doubted my ability to stay on my feet for more than half an hour, had warned me that the bustle of a wedding and all the preparations were not the best medicine for a man who had been on the point of leaving his heart in the operating room.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “They’re not letting me do anything.”
I wasn’t lying. Fermín Romero de Torres had set himself up as absolute dictator of the ceremony, the banquet, and all related matters. When the parish priest discovered that the bride was arriving pregnant to the altar, he flatly refused to perform the wedding and threatened to summon the spirits of the Holy Inquisition and make them cancel the event. Fermín flew into a rage and dragged him out of the church, shouting to all and sundry that he was unworthy of his habit and of the parish, and swearing that if the priest as much as raised an eyebrow, he was going to stir up such a scandal in the bishopric that at the very least he would be exiled to the Rock of Gibraltar to evangelize the monkeys. A few passersby clapped, and the flower vendor in the square gave Fermín a white carnation, which he went on to wear in his lapel until the petals turned the same color as his shirt collar. All set up and without a priest, Fermín went to San Gabriel’s School, where he recruited the services of Father Fernando Ramos, who had not performed a wedding in his life and whose specialty was Latin, trigonometry, and gymnastics, in that order.
“You see, Your Reverence, the bridegroom is very weak, and I can’t upset him again. He sees in you a reincarnation of the great glories of the Mother Church, there, up high, with Saint Thomas, Saint Augustine, and the Virgin of Fátima. He may not seem so, but the boy is, like me, extremely devout. A mystic. If I now tell him that you’ve failed me, we may well have to celebrate a funeral instead of a wedding.”
“If you put it like that.”
From what they told me later—because I don’t remember it, and weddings always stay more clearly in the memory of others—before the ceremony Bernarda and Gustavo Barceló (following Fermín’s detailed instructions) softened up the poor priest with muscatel wine to rid him of his stage fright. When the time came for Father Fernando to officiate, wearing a saintly smile and a pleasantly rosy complexion, he chose, in a breach of protocol, to replace the reading of I don’t know which Letter to the Corinthians with a love sonnet, the work of a poet called Pablo Neruda. Some of Mr. Aguilar’s guests identified him as a confirmed communist and a Bolshevik, while others looked in the missal for those verses of intense pagan beauty, wondering whether this was already one of the first effects of the impending Ecumenical Council.
The night before the wedding, Fermín told me he had organized a bachelor party to which only he and I were invited.
“I don’t know Fermín. I don’t really like these—”
“Trust me.”
On the night of the crime, I followed Fermín meekly to a foul hovel on Calle Escudillers, where the stench of humanity coexisted with the most potent odor of refried food on the entire Mediterranean coast. A lineup of ladies with their virtue for rent and a lot of mileage on the clock greeted us with smiles that would only have excited a student of dentistry.
“We’ve come for Rociíto,” Fermín informed a pimp whose sideburns bore a surprising resemblance to Cape Finisterre.
“Fermín,” I whispered, terrified. “For heaven’s sake…”
“Have faith.”
Rociíto arrived in all her glory—which I reckoned to amount to around 175 pounds, not counting the feather shawl and a skeleton-tight red viscose dress—and took stock of me from head to toe.
“Hi, sweetheart. I thought you was older, to tell the God’s honest truth.”
“This is not the client,” Fermín clarified.
I then understood the nature of the situation, and my fears subsided. Fermín never forgot a promise, especially if it was I who had made it. The three of us went off in search of a taxi that would take us to the Santa Lucía Hospice. During the journey Fermín, who, in deference to my delicate health and my fiancé status, had offered me the front seat, was sitting in the back with Rociíto, taking in her attributes with obvious relish.
“You’re a dish fit for a pope, Rociíto. This egregious ass of yours is the Revelation According to Botticelli.”
“Oh, Mr. Fermín, since you got yourself a girlfriend, you’ve forgotten me, you rogue.”
“You’re too much of a woman for me, Rociíto, and now I’m monogamous.”
“Nah! Good ole Rociíto will cure that for you with some good rubs of penicillin.”
We reached Calle Moncada after midnight, escorting Rociíto’s heavenly body, and slipped her into the hospice by the back door—the one used for taking out the deceased through an alleyway that looked and smelled like hell’s esophagus. Once we had entered the shadows of the Tenebrarium, Fermín proceeded to give Rociíto his final instructions while I tried to find the old granddad to whom I’d promised a last dance with Eros before Thanatos settled accounts with him.
“Remember, Rociíto, the old geezer is probably as deaf as a post, so speak to him in a loud voice, clear and dirty, with sauciness, the way you know how. But don’t get too carried away either. We don’t want to give him heart failure and send him off to kingdom come before his time.”
“No worries, pumpkin. I’m a professional.”
I found the recipient of those rented favors in a corner of the first floor, the wise hermit still barricaded behind walls of loneliness. He raised his eyes and stared at me, confused.
“Am I dead?”
“No. You’re very much alive. Don’t you remember me?”
“I remember you as well as I remember my first pair of shoes, young man, but seeing you like this, looking so pale, I thought it might be a vision from beyond. Don’t hold it against me. Here one loses what you outsiders call discernment. So this isn’t a vision?”
“No. The vision is waiting for you downstairs, if you’ll do the honors.”
I led the grandpa to a gloomy cell, which Fermín and Rociíto had decorated festively with some candles and a few puffs of perfume. When his eyes rested on the abundant beauty of our Andalusian Venus, the old man’s face lit up with intimations of paradise.
“May God bless you all.”
“And may you live to see it,” said Fermín, as he signaled to the siren from Calle Escudillers to start displaying her wares.
I saw her take the old man with infinite delicacy and kiss the tears that fell down his cheeks. Fermín and I left the scene to grant them their deserved intimacy. In our winding journey through that gallery of despair, we encountered Sister Emilia, one of the nuns who managed the hospice. She threw us a venomous look.
“Some patients are telling me you’ve brought in a hooker. Now they also want one.”
“Most Illustrious Sister, who do you take us for? Our presence here is strictly ecumenical. This young lad, who tomorrow will be a man in the eyes of the Holy Mother Church, and I, have come to inquire after the patient Jacinta Coronado.”
Sister Emilia raised an eyebrow. “Are you related?”
“Spiritually.”
“Jacinta died two weeks ago. A gentleman came to visit her the night before. Is he a relative of yours?”
“Do you mean Father Fernando?”
“He wasn’t a priest. He said his name was Julián. I can’t remember his last name.”
Fermín looked at me, dumbstruck.
“Julián is a friend of mine,” I said.
Sister Emilia nodded. “He was with her for a few hours. I hadn’t heard her laugh for years. When he left, she told me they’d been talking about the old days, when they were young. She said that man had brought news of her daughter, Penélope. I didn’t know Jacinta had a daughter. I remember, because that morning Jacinta smiled at me, and when I asked her why she was so happy, she said she was going home, with Penélope. She died at dawn, in her sleep.”
Rociíto concluded her love ritual a short while later, leaving the old man merrily exhausted and in the hands of Morpheus. As we were leaving, Fermín paid her double, but Rociíto, who was crying from the sight of those poor, helpless people, forsaken by God and the devil, insisted on handing her fees to Sister Emilia so that they could all be given a meal of hot chocolate and sweet buns, because, she said, that was something that always made her forget the sorrows of life.
“I’m ever so sentimental. Look at that poor old soul, Mr. Fermín…. All he wanted was to be hugged and stroked. Breaks your heart, it does….”
We put Rociíto into a taxi with a good tip and walked up Calle Princesa, which was deserted and strewn with mist.
“We ought to get to bed, because of tomorrow,” said Fermín.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to get any sleep.”
We set off toward La Barceloneta. Before we knew it, we were walking along the breakwater until the whole city, shining with silence, spread out at our feet like the greatest mirage in the universe, emerging from the pool of the harbor waters. We sat on the edge of the jetty to gaze at the sight.
“This city is a sorceress, you know, Daniel? It gets under your skin and steals your soul without you knowing it.”
“You sound like Rociíto, Fermín.”
“Don’t laugh, it’s people like her who make this lousy world a place worth visiting.”
“Whores?”
“No. We’re all whores, sooner or later. I mean good-hearted people. And don’t look at me like that. Weddings turn me to jelly.”
We remained there embracing that special silence, gazing at the reflections on the water. After a while dawn tinged the sky with amber, and Barcelona woke up. We heard the distant bells from the basilica of Santa María del Mar, just emerging from the mist on the other side of the harbor.
“Do you think Carax is still there, somewhere in the city?” I asked.
“Ask me another question.”
“Do you have the rings?”
Fermín smiled. “Come on, let’s go. They’re waiting for us, Daniel. Life is waiting for us.”
She wore an ivory-white dress and held the world in her eyes. I barely remember the priest’s words or the faces of the guests, full of hope, who filled the church on that March morning. All that remains in my memory is the touch of her lips and, when I half opened my eyes, the secret oath I carried with me on my skin and would remember all the days of my life.
Dramatis Personae
1966
JULIÁN CARAX CONCLUDES THE SHADOW OF THE WIND WITH A brief coda in which he gathers up the threads of his characters’ fates in years to come. I’ve read many books since that distant night of 1945, but Carax’s last novel remains my favorite. Today, with three decades behind me, I can’t see myself changing my mind.
As I write these words on the counter of my bookshop, my son, Julián, who will be ten tomorrow, watches me with a smile and looks with curiosity at the pile of sheets that grows and grows, convinced, perhaps, that his father has also caught the illness of books and words. Julián has his mother’s eyes and intelligence, and I like to think that perhaps he possesses my sense of wonder. My father, who now has some difficulty reading the book spines, even though he won’t admit it, is at home, upstairs. I sometimes ask myself whether he’s a happy man, a man at peace, whether our company helps him or whether he lives within his memories and within that sadness that has always followed him. Bea and I manage the bookshop now. I do the accounts and the adding up. Bea does the buying and serves the customers, who prefer her to me. I don’t blame them.
Time has made her strong and wise. She hardly ever speaks about the past, although I often catch her marooned in one of her silences, alone with herself. Julián adores his mother. I watch them together, and I know they are linked by an invisible bond that I can barely begin to understand. It is enough for me to feel a part of their island and to know how fortunate I am. The bookshop provides us with enough to live modestly, but I can’t imagine myself doing anything else. Our sales lessen year by year. I’m an optimist, and I tell myself that what goes up comes down and what comes down must, one day, go up again. Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day. Every month we receive offers to turn our bookshop into a store selling televisions, girdles, or rope-soled shoes. They won’t get us out of here unless it’s feetfirst.
Fermín and Bernarda walked down the aisle in 1958, and they already have four children, all boys and all blessed with their father’s nose and ears. Fermín and I see each other less than we used to, although sometimes we still repeat that walk to the breakwater at dawn, where we solve the world’s problems. Fermín left his job at the bookshop years ago, and when Isaac Monfort died, he took over from him as the keeper of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Perhaps one day someone will find all the copies of Julián’s books that Nuria hid there. Isaac is buried next to Nuria in Montjuïc. I often visit them. There are always fresh flowers on Nuria’s grave.
My old friend Tomás Aguilar went off to Germany, where he works as an engineer for a firm making industrial machinery, inventing wonders I have never been able to understand. Sometimes we get letters from him, always addressed to Bea. He got married a couple of years ago and has a daughter we have never seen. Although he always sends me his regards, I know I lost him forever years ago. I like to think that life snatches away our childhood friends for no reason, but I don’t always believe it.
The neighborhood is much the same, and yet there are days when I feel that a certain brightness is tentatively returning to Barcelona, as if between us all we’d driven it out but it had forgiven us in the end. Don Anacleto left his post in the high school, and now he devotes his time exclusively to erotic poetry and to his jacket blurbs, which are more grandiose than ever. Don Federico Flaviá and Merceditas went off to live together when the watchmaker’s mother died. They make a splendid couple, although there is no lack of malicious people who maintain that a leopard cannot change his spots and that, every now and then, Don Federico goes out on a binge, dressed up as a Gypsy queen.
Don Gustavo Barceló closed his bookshop and sold us his stock. He said he was fed up to the back teeth with the bookseller’s trade and was looking forward to embarking on new challenges. The first and last of these was the creation of a publishing company dedicated to the rerelease of Julián Carax’s works. Volume I, which contained his first three novels (recovered from a set of proofs that had ended up in a furniture warehouse of the Cabestany family), sold 342 copies, many tens of thousands behind that year’s bestseller, an i
llustrated hagiography of El Cordobés, the famous bullfighter. Don Gustavo now devotes his time to traveling around Europe accompanied by distinguished ladies and sending postcards of cathedrals.
His niece Clara married the millionaire banker, but their union lasted barely a year. Her list of suitors is still long, though it dwindles year by year, as does her beauty. Now she lives alone in the apartment in Plaza Real, which she leaves less and less often. There was a time when I used to visit her, more because Bea reminded me of her loneliness and her bad luck than from any desire of my own. With the passing years, I have seen a bitterness grow in her, though she tries to disguise it as irony and detachment. Sometimes I think she is still waiting for that fifteen-year-old Daniel to return to adore her from the shadows. Bea’s presence, or that of any other woman, poisons her. The last time I saw her, she was feeling her face for wrinkles. I am told that sometimes she still sees her old music teacher, Adrián Neri, whose symphony is still unfinished and who, it seems, has made a career as a gigolo among the ladies of the Liceo circle, where his bedroom acrobatics have earned him the nickname “The Magic Flute.”
THE YEARS WERE NOT KIND TO THE MEMORY OF INSPECTOR FUMERO. Not even those who hated and feared him seem to remember him anymore. Years ago, on Paseo de Gracia, I came across Lieutenant Palacios, who left the police force and now teaches gymnastics at a school in the Bonanova quarter. He told me there is still a commemorative plaque in honor of Fumero in the basement of Central Police Headquarters on Vía Layetana, but a new soft-drinks machine covers it entirely.
As for the Aldaya mansion, it is still there, against all predictions. In the end Mr. Aguilar’s estate agency managed to sell it. It was completely restored, and the statues of angels were churned down to gravel to cover the parking lot that takes up what was once the Aldayas’ garden. Today it houses an advertising agency dedicated to the creation and promotion of that strange poetry singing the glories of cotton socks, skim milk, and sports cars for jet-setting businessmen. I must confess that one day, giving the most unlikely reasons, I turned up there and asked if I could be shown around the house. The old library where I nearly lost my life is now a boardroom decorated with ad posters of deodorants and detergents possessing magical powers. The room where Bea and I conceived Julián is now the bathroom of the chief executive.