The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘From Granada, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘Yes. From a town that…’

  ‘I knew it had to be Granada! From the capital or its surrounding areas, right?’

  ‘Near the capital, from a town, El Padul, that… How did you know?’

  ‘From your s’s. Or, I should say, from the s’s you don’t pronounce, from your lisp.’

  The woman then told her that her way of pronouncing the letter ‘s’ was peculiar to Granada. She spoke with such enthusiasm that it occurred to Encarni that the woman wasn’t exactly normal, but she still responded gamely to her next question.

  ‘Have you been in Barcelona long?’

  ‘Only a couple of years. I live in Monchuí.’ That was her pronunciation of Montjüic.

  She didn’t want to tell her that she lived in a shanty town, but that thought reminded her of why she was there: to get out of that slum once and for all.

  ‘Listen, you wouldn’t happen to need a girl to help around the house?’

  The woman looked her up and down. Encarni permitted the scrutiny, but lifted her chin proudly. She was clean, and although her clothes were mended, they were at least well mended.

  ‘The truth is, I could do with someone because I have a lot of work, but I can’t pay much.’

  ‘Room, board and what you can spare. I’ll settle for that.’

  ‘When can you start?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning.’

  The address the woman gave her was in a good part of the city, on the Rambla de Cataluña. Encarni was pleased to find out that there was no man of the house, but sad there were no children.

  The next day she turned up at the home of Señora Beatriz Noguer and learned that she was a professor who wasn’t teaching, for some political reason, but she wrote books. Books about how people around the world pronounced different words.

  Yes, she owed a lot to her zeds, which was why she picked up one of the apples, held it aloft and said to the missus, ‘Dizguzting orangez.’

  Her ‘s’ sounds always came out like zeds, and vice versa. The missus laughed.

  Encarni unwrapped the chicken. It was a bit lean, but she had haggled a good price. And she had made sure they gave her all the leavings.

  ‘The man in the chicken shop says they were Masons. They need eyes for their rituals. They dry them on a low flame, like prunes or mushrooms. Then they cut them into slices. They prefer blue eyes, says the chicken man.’

  ‘Then we’re safe,’ responded the missus.

  ‘Yup. Unless the Masons change their mind and all of a sudden start collecting brown eyes.’

  It seemed the Masons were to blame for everything. They probably didn’t even exist. Just like the bogeyman, who supposedly snatched away naughty children. If they did exist and needed eyes, then they wouldn’t leave them rolling around on the floor. The chicken man was talking rubbish.

  She looked around. All the shopping had been put away, everything was in its place. The missus was distracted again, lost in contemplation of the smoke rising from her cigarette. Encarni wondered whether it was the right moment to talk to her about the refrigerator. She seemed to be in a good mood.

  Señora Beatriz’s voice pulled her from her thoughts.

  ‘Encarni, was there any post for me?’

  No, there were no letters in the postbox. Yes, the postman had been and had left a thick envelope for Ramírez, on the second floor. No, nothing had come for her.

  The missus got up. She seemed displeased. Goodbye, good mood. She had been waiting for some letter for several days. Encarni sighed and started to peel the potatoes.

  4

  Beatriz watched the street from the window of her study. A dense layer of darkening cloud had covered the entire city. It was starting to rain, and along the Rambla de Cataluña people had opened their umbrellas and quickened their step.

  Her letter hadn’t come that day either. She gently pushed her armchair and swivelled inside it. The titles of the books on the shelves were barely visible. On the other hand, the gaps were perfectly discernible. Dark rectangles between the leather-bound volumes. Every time her eyes landed on one of the gaps she felt a stab of bad conscience, but it couldn’t be helped. There was no other choice. The old editions were worth more than the silver cutlery. Which would be the next to go? she wondered fleetingly. One of the emblem books? One of the Virgils? Probably The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius; the edition on her shelf was printed in Lyon in 1515. It had been read, like all the books in her library, but it was in perfect condition. Perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary. When the letter arrived with the message she was waiting for… her ticket out.

  In Spain, she couldn’t work at any university, couldn’t even teach sixth-formers. In order to be able to work she needed a certificate that guaranteed her adhesion to the Regime. And they would never give her that. When she had come back from Argentina she’d tried to get a post at the University of Barcelona. They had soon made it clear that there was no place for her in a university that was ‘free of subversive elements’.

  ‘I’m sorry, Doctor. There is no place here for people who wish to undermine the principles of the Movement,’ one of the professors told her sarcastically, a man whose face she thought she remembered from her student days in Madrid.

  She had never considered herself a subversive element; she had never even been particularly interested in politics. But some articles that she had written at the start of the Civil War defending the legitimacy of the Republic had meant she’d had to go into exile and, on her return, she found she was ostracised from academia.

  Returning from Buenos Aires in 1948, she went to live with her mother in the enormous family flat on the Rambla de Cataluña. Her father had died many years before. She settled into her old room. Her mother was already very ill by then. Beatriz read her French novels and her mother, who listened with her eyes closed, corrected her pronunciation every once in a while.

  ‘Young lady, I think you should take another trip to France.’

  Later, the intervals where her mother was awake grew shorter; her comments about her pronunciation grew few and far between. Finally Beatriz stopped reading and would sing softly to her, the same songs her mother had lulled her to sleep with more than thirty years earlier. She died the same day the national football team won against England, against ‘Perfidious Albion’, as the president of the Spanish Football Federation said on the radio. When she went into her mother’s room to tell her about it and give her a little laugh, she found her dead in her bed.

  Now she lives alone in the flat with Encarni. But not for much longer, if the letter she’s waiting for says what she’s hoping it will. And what if it doesn’t? Then she’ll have to continue hibernating.

  5

  ‘Goddamn it to hell. This is the last thing I need.’

  Inspector Isidro Castro, of the Criminal Investigation Brigade, had had a bad night. Daniel, his youngest child, had been coughing incessantly.

  The coughing had woken him at dawn. Every time he heard it, it stirred an old fear in him, a fear rooted in something he avoided mentioning despite knowing full well what it was. He got out of bed to see how the boy was doing.

  As he put on his flannel slippers, he heard a violent coughing fit from the children’s room. It gave him a stab of panic. Only the sight of Araceli, his wife, who continued sleeping peacefully, calmed him down a little. ‘If it were serious, if the lad was in danger, her mother’s instinct would wake her,’ he told himself.

  He left the room without turning on any lamps. He had enough light from the street lamp, light that entered through slits in a blind that didn’t close properly.

  He went into the children’s room. Cristóbal, the eldest, was sleeping face down, tangled in the blankets. He had inherited his own restless way of sleeping. Very carefully, so as not to wake him, Castro managed to undo the knot formed by his lanky legs, sheets, blankets and bedspread. ‘What a growth spurt this boy’
s had.’ He covered him up. It was bad enough having one child ill.

  As if wanting to remind him, Daniel coughed again. He went over to him. On the night table, between the two boys’ beds, lay the comics they’d read before falling asleep. He touched the small lamp. It was cold. He didn’t let them read for more than half an hour, but they would wait for their parents to fall asleep and then continue. Once, he discovered that they had covered up the slit under the door with clothing so that the line of light in the hallway wouldn’t give them away. He scolded them, of course; but inside he was proud that they had turned out clever. But even if they’d been stupid, the important thing was that they were there. Alive. Breathing.

  And coughing. Daniel had been coughing for several days.

  ‘A cold,’ the doctor had said.

  It was normal with the chilly, damp weather.

  ‘Chicken soup.’

  And, to Daniel’s delight, two days off school.

  Daniel. Dani. Daniel.

  Had it been a mistake to give him the same name as his son who’d died?

  His first Daniel had died in 1937, at eight years old. A superstitious fear made him believe that this one, the second Daniel, would only be safe once he had passed that age. He was still six months away. Six months of anguish, of trembling every time he coughed or got a bump. His wife wouldn’t understand his fears, which was why he hadn’t told her about them. She didn’t know, and Isidro hoped she never would, what it was like to lose a child. He also knew what losing your wife felt like.

  ‘They died in the war.’

  If anyone asked, that was all the explanation he gave.

  He had lost his first wife in Galicia. After the war he went to Barcelona, where he had married Araceli, a woman from Navarra who worked as a salesgirl in the El Siglo department store, in 1941. She was twenty-four years old; he was pushing forty. Araceli had fallen pregnant; when they married, she was already three months along. It was a boy, named Cristóbal after her father, although when she was seven months pregnant a woman from the neighbourhood had predicted, based on the shape of her belly, that it would be a girl.

  ‘If so, we’ll name her Régula,’ said Isidro when he heard the news.

  That was the name of his first wife.

  ‘No,’ Araceli had protested. ‘Not that! How can we give her a dead woman’s name?’

  It was the first and last time Isidro raised a hand to her. Seeing his threat, she protected her bulging belly with her left hand and used her right to grab his looming wrist.

  ‘I’m not one of the thieves and murderers you deal with at the police station. I’m your wife.’

  She didn’t have to say it twice. He never again mentioned the name of his first wife, and she didn’t seem to remember that the lost boy, who gave his name to their second son, was also called Daniel.

  That 29 April, Isidro’s sleep-deprived ill humour was exacerbated by the prospect of having to investigate the new case with someone looking over his shoulder, a journalist. Isidro had been at the police headquarters on Vía Layetana since seven and had already had an interrogation, two dressing-downs of subordinates, a wrangle with a typewriter and now, to top it all off, the conversation with Goyanes.

  ‘And from La Vanguardia, no less?’

  Isidro didn’t understand it. The newspaper’s treatment of the investigation into the murder of the high-class prostitute Carmen Broto in 1949 had raised hackles in police circles. Articles in La Vanguardia had questioned the police version, giving rise to all sorts of speculation about the important people who might have an interest in seeing that woman dead. The rumours about illustrious men among Broto’s ‘friends’ hadn’t bothered them as much as the insinuation, albeit very discreet, that the police investigation wasn’t being carried out as zealously as it should be. Gil Llamas, head of the CIB, went into a fit of rage that was still vivid in Isidro’s mind, one of those that could give you a stroke.

  ‘But weren’t we at loggerheads with La Vanguardia?’ he replied, although he didn’t usually ask questions, and especially not since Goyanes had become his superior. He knew that he wasn’t exactly among his favourites.

  The Commissioner looked at him in surprise, and, despite the fact that he wasn’t in the habit of explaining himself, answered him.

  ‘The order comes from higher up. Grau, the public prosecutor.’

  Another hothead, thought Isidro. The difference being that the fits his boss Gil had were flashes in the pan, intense but fleeting explosions, while Grau cultivated a stubborn rage that continued to corrode after detonation. It was dangerous for his enemies. The Commissioner wasn’t a declared enemy, but everyone knew they hated each other. Goyanes tried to hide it, with little success, struggling to keep a neutral tone as he said, ‘And he’s already spoken with the Civil Governor, it appears, since Acedo Colunga has shown a lot of interest in the case.’

  He certainly didn’t need to provide any more arguments. Which was why Goyanes’s shock turned to disbelief when Isidro insisted on his objections.

  ‘I still don’t understand why the press…’

  ‘This is going to be a model investigation, Castro. Get that into your thick head.’ Goyanes shook a piece of paper in the air. Isidro understood that it was the note from the governor.

  When Felipe Acedo Colunga took an interest in something, the matter became absolutely top priority; everyone knew about his ‘little notes’. If they reached a newspaper, publishing them was mandatory; if they arrived at a police station, they had to be obeyed.

  ‘Mariona Sobrerroca was a very important person in Barcelona’s society circles.’

  His dislike for the Catalan capital city echoed in his pronunciation of its name. Both men were from elsewhere: Goyanes was from León; Isidro, Galicia. Their police careers were quite different. Isidro had always been a part of the CIB and was unfamiliar with and uninterested in other aspects of the force; Goyanes came from the Social Investigation Brigade, the Regime’s political force. Some said they had transferred him to the Criminal Investigation Brigade so that they could better control its movements. Although their careers followed divergent paths, they shared a distrustful view of the world. But Goyanes suspected everyone of being a communist, a Mason or hostile to the Regime, observed Isidro. His own distrust was simpler, clearer: crime was nothing more than a confirmation of the criminal nature of humans.

  Goyanes kept talking. ‘Sobrerroca comes from a good Catalan family, they’re pro-monarchy but covertly, and we are going to put all our effort into clearing up her death and shutting up all those throughout Europe who conspire against the Caudillo in order to put that Bourbon whoremonger Don Juan at the helm of this country.’

  So the case had political connotations and, as if that weren’t enough, he’d have to contend with society people. ‘Fucking brilliant,’ he thought but didn’t say out loud; to his boss he replied, ‘I don’t understand all that stuff.’

  ‘And you don’t need to. As always, what matters is that you do a good job and that this journalist, this Señorita Ana María Martí Noguer, reports it as she should.’

  ‘Señorita? It’s a woman?’

  Isidro could tell that Goyanes didn’t like the idea at all either. Still, he nipped his new objection in the bud. Not even in this unpleasant situation could he expect any understanding from his superior.

  ‘Yes, a woman. And you are going to make sure she writes what she has to write. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By the way, how’s it going?’

  ‘Just getting started.’

  ‘Which means…’

  ‘Notifying relatives, talking to the maid, waiting for the forensic report, talking to the neighbours…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Not much, for the moment. But it looks like a break-in. A neighbour in the house across the street thought she saw a man running out of Sobrerroca’s townhouse, and the door looks as though it might have been picked open; the garden gate must have been unlocked.’ />
  ‘Yes. And?’ Goyanes made an impatient gesture.

  ‘The neighbour gave us a description of the man she saw, but it wasn’t very helpful. That’s all we have for the time being.’

  ‘All right. Well, give it to the journalist nice and tidy, and don’t forget to say that we’re going to find the murderer soon. With a bit of luck, he reads the paper, and he gets nervous.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Isidro waited until he was outside Goyanes’s office to mutter, ‘Fucking brilliant.’

  He repeated it again as he went down the stairs and passed two of his colleagues, noticing their breath. The one who walked past him on his right wrapped him in a cloud of poorly digested raw onion; the one on the other side left a trail of alcohol, the first splash in his morning coffee. Who knows how many more would follow it. Thinking that he didn’t have to work with Burguillos the drunkard gave him a spark of joy. It lasted for six, maybe seven steps. Until he remembered that a Señorita Ana María Martí Noguer from La Vanguardia would be waiting for him downstairs.

  ‘Fucking brilliant.’

  That last time he said it out loud. Over the next few days he would repeat it many more times, but to himself, because you didn’t say ‘fucking brilliant’ in front of a woman.

  The woman waiting for him was about twenty-five, maybe less. She was sitting on a bench in the hallway in front of his office. She kept her back very straight to avoid touching the wall, where many resting heads had left dark, greasy circles. Her hands were in her lap, her black jacket covering them like a muff. She wore a long skirt, dark stockings and flat shoes that couldn’t hide the fact that, when she rose to greet him, she was a couple of centimetres taller than him. ‘One sixty-nine,’ estimated Isidro, unwilling to concede all three of the centimetres that separated him from being a metre seventy. He didn’t like tall women – women taller than him. Nor did he like women who stood up to greet him and shook his hand firmly like a man. This one was pretty, besides. She looked at him expectantly, with enormous light brown eyes the same colour as her pulled-back hair; her plump lips slightly open as she smiled timidly, lifting her pronounced cheekbones and slightly square chin.