The transformation from beggar into model citizen seemed miraculous, like one of those stories that priests from poor parishes loved to tell to illustrate the Lord’s infinite mercy—stories that invariably sounded too good to be true, like the ads for hair-restorer lotions that were plastered over the trams.
Three and a half months after Fermín started work in the bookshop, the telephone in the apartment on Calle Santa Ana woke us up one Sunday at two o’clock in the morning. It was Fermín’s landlady. In a voice choked with anxiety, she explained that Mr. Romero de Torres had locked himself in his room and was shouting like a madman, banging on the walls and swearing that if anyone dared come in, he would slit his own throat with a broken bottle.
“Don’t call the police, please. We’ll be right there.”
Rushing out, we made our way toward Calle Joaquín Costa. It was a cold night, with icy wind and tar-black skies. We hurried past the two ancient hospices—Casa de la Misericordia and Casa de Piedad—ignoring looks and words from dark doorways smelling of charcoal. Soon we reached the corner of Calle Ferlandina. Joaquín Costa lay there, a gap in the rows of blackened beehives, blending into the darkness of the Raval quarter. The landlady’s eldest son was waiting for us downstairs.
“Have you called the police?” asked my father.
“Not yet,” answered the son.
We ran upstairs. Thepensión was on the second floor, the staircase a spiral of grime scarcely visible in the ocher light shed by naked bulbs that hung limply from a bare wire. Doña Encarna, the landlady, the widow of a Civil Guard corporal, met us at the door wrapped in a light blue dressing gown, crowned with a matching set of curlers.
“Look here, Mr. Sempere, this is a decent house. I have more offers than I can take, and I don’t need to put up with this kind of thing,” she said as she guided us through a dark corridor that reeked of ammonia and damp.
“I understand,” mumbled my father.
Fermín Romero de Torres’s screams could be heard tearing at the walls at the end of the corridor. Several drawn and frightened faces peeped around half-open doors—boardinghouse faces fed on watery soup.
“And the rest of you, off to sleep, for fuck’s sake! This isn’t a variety show at the Molino!” cried Doña Encarna furiously.
We stopped in front of the door to Fermín’s room. My father rapped gently with his knuckles.
“Fermín? Are you there? It’s Sempere.”
The howl that pierced the walls chilled me. Even Doña Encarna lost her matronly composure and put her hands on her heart, hidden under the many folds of her ample chest.
My father called again. “Fermín? Come on, open the door.”
Fermín howled again, throwing himself against the walls, yelling obscenities at the top of his voice. My father sighed.
“Doña Encarna, do you have a key to this room?”
“Well, of course.”
“Give it to me, please.”
Doña Encarna hesitated. The other guests were peering into the corridor again, white with terror. Those shouts must have been heard from the army headquarters.
“And you, Daniel, run and find Dr. Baró. He lives very close, in number twelve, Riera Alta.”
“Listen, wouldn’t it be better to call a priest? He sounds to me as if he’s possessed by the devil,” suggested Doña Encarna.
“No. A doctor will do fine. Come on, Daniel. Run. And you, please give me that key.”
Dr. Baró was a sleepless bachelor who spent his nights reading Zola and looking at 3-D pictures of young ladies in racy underwear to relieve his boredom. He was a regular customer at my father’s bookshop, and, though he described himself as a second-rate quack, he had a better eye for reaching the right diagnosis than most of the smart doctors with elegant practices on Calle Muntaner. Many of his patients were old whores from the neighborhood or poor wretches who could barely afford to pay him, but he would see them all the same. I heard him say repeatedly that the world was God’s chamber pot and that his sole remaining wish was for Barcelona’s football team to win the league, once and for all, so that he could die in peace. He opened the door in his dressing gown, smelling of wine and flaunting an unlit cigarette between his lips.
“Daniel?”
“My father sent me. It’s an emergency.”
When we returned to thepensión, we found Doña Encarna sobbing with fear and the other guests turned the color of old candle wax. My father was holding Fermín Romero de Torres in his arms in a corner of the room. Fermín was naked, crying and shaking. The room was a wreck, the walls stained with something that could have been either blood or excrement—I couldn’t tell. Dr. Baró quickly took in the situation and gestured to my father to lay Fermín on the bed. They were helped by Doña Encarna’s son, a would-be boxer. Fermín moaned and thrashed about as if some vermin were devouring his insides.
“But for goodness’ sake, what’s the matter with this poor man? What’s wrong with him?” groaned Doña Encarna from the door, shaking her head.
The doctor took his pulse, examined his pupils with a flashlight, and, without saying a word, proceeded to prepare an injection from a bottle he carried in his bag.
“Hold him down. This will make him sleep. Daniel, help us.”
Between us four we managed to immobilize Fermín, who jerked violently when he felt the stab of the needle in his thigh. His muscles tensed like steel cables, but after a few seconds his eyes clouded over and his body went limp.
“Hey, be careful, that man’s not very strong, and anything could kill him,” said Doña Encarna.
“Don’t worry. He’s only asleep,” said the doctor as he examined the scars that covered Fermín’s starved body.
I saw him shake his head slowly. “Bastards,” he mumbled.
“What are these scars from?” I asked. “Cuts?”
Dr. Baró shook his head again, without looking up. He found a blanket amid the wreckage and covered his patient with it. “Burns. This man has been tortured,” he explained. “These marks are from a soldering iron.”
Fermín slept for two days. When he awoke, he could not remember anything; he just thought he’d woken up in a dark cell, that was all. He felt so ashamed of his behavior that he went down on his knees to beg for Doña Encarna’s forgiveness. He swore he would paint thepensión for her and, knowing she was very devout, promised she would have ten masses said for her in the Church of Belén.
“What you have to do is get better and not frighten me like that again. I’m too old for that sort of thing.”
My father paid for the damages and begged Doña Encarna to give Fermín another chance. She gladly agreed. Most of her guests were dispossessed people who were alone in the world, like her. Once she had got over the fright, she felt an even greater affection for Fermín and made him promise her that he would take the tablets Dr. Baró had prescribed.
“For you, Doña Encarna, I’d swallow a brick if need be.”
In time we all pretended we’d forgotten what had happened, but never again did I take the stories about Inspector Fumero lightly. After that incident we would take Fermín with us almost every Sunday for an afternoon snack at the Novedades Café, so as not to leave him on his own. Then we’d walk up to the Fémina Cinema, on the corner of Calle Diputación and Paseo de Gracia. One of the ushers was a friend of my father’s, and he would let us sneak in through the fire exit on the ground floor during the newsreel, always when the Generalissimo was in the act of cutting the ribbon to inaugurate some new reservoir, which really got on Fermín’s nerves.
“What a disgrace,” he would say indignantly.
“Don’t you like the cinema, Fermín?”
“Between you and me, this business of the seventh art leaves me cold. As far as I can see, it’s only a way of feeding the mindless and making them even more stupid. Worse than football or bullfights. The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it’s much the same.”
Fermín’s
attitude changed radically the day he discovered Carole Lombard.
“What breasts, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what breasts!” he exclaimed in the middle of the film, beside himself. “Those aren’t tits, they’re two schooners!”
“Shut up, you degenerate, or I’ll call the manager,” muttered a voice straight from the confessional, a few rows behind us. “People have no shame. What a country of pigs we live in.”
“You’d better lower your voice, Fermín,” I advised him.
Fermín Romero de Torres wasn’t listening to me. He was lost in the gentle swell of that miraculous bosom, with an enraptured smile and unblinking eyes. Later, walking back along Paseo de Gracia, I noticed that our bibliographic detective was still in a trance.
“I think we’re going to have to find you a woman,” I said. “A woman will brighten up your life, you’ll see.”
Fermín sighed, his mind still dwelling on charms that seemed to overcome the laws of gravity.
“Do you speak from experience, Daniel?” he asked in all innocence.
I just smiled, knowing that my father was watching me.
After that day Fermín Romero de Torres took to going to the movies every Sunday. My father preferred to stay at home reading, but Fermín would not miss a single double feature. He’d buy a pile of chocolates and sit in row seventeen, where he would devour them while he waited for the appearance of that day’s diva. As far as he was concerned, plot was superfluous, and he didn’t stop talking until some well-endowed lady filled the screen.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day, about finding a woman for me,” said Fermín Romero de Torres. “Perhaps you’re right. In thepensión there’s a new lodger, an ex-seminarist from Seville with plenty of spirit, who brings in some impressive young ladies every now and then. I must say, the race has improved no end. I don’t know how the lad manages it, because he’s not much to look at; perhaps he renders them senseless with prayers. He’s got the room next to mine, so I can hear everything, and, judging by the sound effects, the friar must be a real artist. Just shows what a uniform can do. Tell me, what sort of women do you like, Daniel?”
“I don’t know much about them, honestly.”
“Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it’s like electricity: you don’t have to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers. Come on, out with it. How do you like them? People might not agree with me, but I think a woman should have a feminine shape, something you can get your hands on. You, on the other hand, look like you might be partial to the skinny type, a point of view I fully respect, don’t misunderstand me.”
“Frankly, I don’t have much experience with women. None, to be precise.”
Fermín Romero de Torres looked at me carefully, intrigued by this revelation.
“I thought that what happened that night, you know, when you were beaten up…”
“If only everything hurt as little as a blow to the face…”
Fermín seemed to read my mind, and smiled supportively. “Don’t let that upset you, then. With women the best part is the discovery. There’s nothing like the first time, nothing. You don’t know what life is until you undress a woman the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot sweet potato on a winter’s night.”
A few seconds later, Veronica Lake made her grand entrance onto the scene, and Fermín was transported to another plane. Taking advantage of a reel in which Miss Lake was absent, Fermín announced that he was going to pay a visit to the candy stand in the foyer to replenish his stocks. After months of starvation, my friend had lost all sense of proportion, but, due to his metabolism, he never quite lost that hungry, squalid postwar look. I was left alone, barely following the action on the screen. I would lie if I said I was thinking of Clara. I was thinking only of her body, trembling under the music teacher’s charges, glistening with sweat and pleasure. My gaze left the screen, and only then did I notice a spectator who had just come in. I saw his silhouette moving to the center of the orchestra, six rows in front of me. He sat down. Cinemas are full of lonely people, I thought. Like me.
I tried to concentrate on picking up the thread of the story. The hero, a cynical but good-hearted detective, was telling a secondary character why women like Veronica Lake were the ruin of all sensible males and why all one could do was love them desperately and perish, betrayed by their double dealings. Fermín Romero de Torres, who was becoming an adept film scholar, called this genre “the praying mantis paradigm.” According to him, its permutations were nothing but misogynist fantasies for constipated office clerks, for pious women shriveled with boredom who dreamed about turning to a life of vice and unbridled lechery. I smiled as I imagined the asides my friend the critic would have made had he not gone to his meeting with the candy stand. But the smile froze on my face. The spectator who sat six rows in front of me had turned around and was staring at me. The projector’s misty beam bored through the darkness of the hall, a slim cloud of flickering light that revealed only outlines and blots of color. I recognized Coubert, the faceless man, immediately. His steely look, his shining eyes with no eyelids; his smile as he licked his nonexistent lips in the dark. I felt cold fingers gripping my heart. Two hundred violins broke out on-screen, there were shots and shouts, and the scene dissolved. For a moment the hall plunged into utter darkness, and I could only hear my own heartbeat hammering in my temples. Slowly a new scene glowed on the screen, replacing the darkness of the room with a haze of blue and purple. The man without a face had disappeared. I turned and caught a glimpse of a silhouette walking up the aisle and passing Fermín, who was returning from his gastronomic safari. He moved into the row, took his seat, and handed me a praline chocolate.
“Daniel, you’re as white as a nun’s buttock. Are you all right?” he asked, giving me a worried look.
A mysterious breath of air wafted through the hall.
“It smells odd,” Fermín remarked. “Like a rancid fart, from a councilman or a lawyer.”
“No. It smells of burned paper.”
“Go on. Have a lemon Sugus candy—it cures everything.”
“I don’t feel like one.”
“Keep it, then, you never know when a Sugus candy might get you out of a pickle.”
I put the sweet in my jacket pocket and drifted through the rest of the film without paying any attention to Veronica Lake or to the victims of her fatal charms. Fermín Romero de Torres was engrossed in the show and the chocolates. When the lights went on at the end of the film, I felt myself to be waking from a bad dream and was tempted to imagine that the man in the theater had been a mere illusion, a trick of memory. But his brief glance in the dark had been enough to convey his message. He had not forgotten me, or our pact.
·12·
THE FIRST EFFECT OF FERMÍN’S ARRIVAL SOON BECAME APPARENT: I discovered I had much more free time. When Fermín was not out hunting some exotic volume to satisfy a customer’s request, he spent his time organizing stocks in the bookshop, dreaming up marketing strategies, polishing the shop sign and windows till they sparkled, or buffing up the spines of the books with a rag and a bit of alcohol. Given this windfall, I decided to devote my leisure time to a couple of pursuits I had lately put aside: attempting to unravel the Carax mystery and, above all, spending more time with my friend Tomás Aguilar, whom I greatly missed.
Tomás was a thoughtful, reserved boy whom other children feared because his vaguely thuggish features gave him a grave and threatening look. He had a wrestler’s build, gladiator’s shoulders, and a steely, penetrating gaze. We had met many years before in the course of a fistfight, during my first week at the Jesuit school on Calle Caspe. His father had come to pick him up after classes, accompanied by a conceited girl who turned out to be Tomás’s sister. I had the brilliant idea of making some tasteless remark about her and before I could blink, Tomás had thrown himself on me and was showering me with a deluge of blows that left me smarting for a few weeks. Tomás was tw
ice my size, strength, and ferocity. During our school-yard duel, surrounded by boys who were thirsty for a bloody fight, I lost a tooth but gained an improved sense of proportion. I refused to tell my father or the priests who had inflicted such a thundering beating on me. Neither did I volunteer the fact that the father of my adversary had watched the thumping with an expression of sheer pleasure, joining in the chorus with the other schoolchildren.
“It was my fault,” I said, closing the subject.
Three weeks later Tomás came up to me during the break. I was paralyzed with fear. He is coming to finish me off, I thought. I began to stammer, but soon I understood that all he wanted to do was apologize for the thrashing, because he knew the fight had been uneven and unfair.
“I’m the one who should say I’m sorry, for picking on your sister,” I said. “I would have done it the other day, but you did my mouth in before I could speak.”
Tomás looked down, ashamed of himself. I gazed at that shy and quiet giant who wandered around the classrooms and school corridors like a lost soul. All the other children—me included—were scared stiff of him, and nobody spoke to him or dared look him in the eye. With his head down, almost shaking, he asked me whether I’d like to be his friend. I said I would. He held out his hand, and I shook it. His handshake hurt, but I didn’t flinch. That afternoon he invited me to his house for an after-school snack and showed me his collection of strange gadgets made from bits of scrap metal, which he kept in his room.
“I made them,” he explained proudly.
I was incapable of understanding how they worked or even what they were supposed to be, but I didn’t say anything. I just nodded in admiration. It seemed to me that this oversize, solitary boy had constructed his own tin companions and that I was the first person he was introducing them to. It was his secret. I shared mine. I told him about my mother and how much I missed her. When my voice broke, Tomás hugged me, without saying a word. We were ten years old. From that day on, Tomás Aguilar became my best—and I his only—friend.