The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  All the same, she helped two more people with some official papers. Afterwards, she said goodbye to Oleguer Pons, closed the stall and headed to her parents’ house.

  9

  ‘The taxi’s here.’

  Calvet appeared in the doorway of Pablo’s office and started laughing when he saw his disconcerted expression.

  ‘We’re going to have lunch with Pla. I reserved a table at Siete Puertas. Weren’t we going to talk about your problem? Don’t tell me you forgot! I can’t believe that.’

  No, of course he hadn’t forgotten. Since he’d been told about the lunch, the hours had both stretched on interminably and passed in a flash; now it seemed that the meeting with his bosses was catching him unprepared. Calvet went off, leaving the door open.

  Pablo put on his jacket and went after him.

  ‘Calvet and Señor Pla have already gone downstairs,’ Maribel told him.

  They hadn’t waited for him. Bad sign.

  ‘Bon appétit!’ said Maribel in farewell.

  Siete Puertas was an expensive restaurant near the port. Was that a good sign? If they took him to eat there, surely they weren’t going to fire him. Or was that perhaps the last meal of a condemned man?

  Pla and Calvet sat in the back seat of the taxi and closed the door, making it clear that he should sit beside the driver. Another bad sign. During the ride Calvet talked constantly. Pablo saw out of the corner of his eye how the lawyer accentuated each of his words with gestures that he drew in the air like Chinese calligraphy. Sometimes he talked about the traffic. ‘There are more and more cars in this city! Soon you won’t be able to cross the road.’

  Or he commented on the building work being carried out for the Eucharistic Congress: ‘Did you know they are finally knocking down the rookeries on the Diagonal?’

  Pla’s worrying silence was broken only when Calvet talked about the new Civil Governor, but it was nothing more than an approving grunt. ‘A hardliner, just what this city needs,’ added Calvet, not allowing himself to be disheartened by his boss’s reserve.

  Pablo didn’t think that what the city needed was more of a hard line, but he was very careful not to state his opinion.

  ‘Noguer, I guess you must have noticed the change since they put one of the hardliners at the head of the CIB. Goyanes, the one who used to be in Social. A tough nut to crack.’

  And he was. Since Commissioner Goyanes had been in the CIB, not only had the number of arrests for common crimes gone up, but the penalties handed down by the public prosecutor’s office were much harsher. Rumour had it that they had put one of the political officers into the CIB to keep an eye on the investigators so they wouldn’t ‘go easy’. Goyanes had the support of the Civil Government. The Commissioner, Governor Acedo Colunga, and his right-hand man, Sánchez-Herranz, were outsiders and, judging by their declarations, seemed convinced that they were in a city whose inhabitants were, to a man, potential criminals who had to be kept at bay.

  Soon they arrived at the restaurant. Calvet took charge of ordering; he also chose the wine. Then Pla intervened. ‘Don’t even think about bringing us an Alvariño, for the love of God. We’ll have a Blanc D’Anjou,’ he said to the waiter.

  He shot a furious look at Calvet, who shrugged and went on talking about something or other.

  Shortly afterwards, the waiter brought a serving dish laden with seafood: cockles, clams, oysters, shrimp, crayfish, even two lobsters were piled up on a mountain of ice. Such merchandise was usually only obtained on the black market. At the summit of the seafood mountain an enormous spider crab lifted its pincers towards Pablo and glared at him with its dead, malevolent-looking eyes. Pla helped himself to the largest lobster and opened it with a surgeon’s precision. He turned towards Calvet. In all that time he hadn’t deigned to exchange a single word with Pablo.

  ‘Have you heard about Mariona Sobrerroca?’

  Calvet nodded as he deposited a crayfish head on his plate of shells with a vexed expression. Then he turned to Pablo, ‘Did you know her, Noguer?’

  ‘Slightly. My father had some business dealings with her husband. I saw her a few times at social events.’

  He remembered a night, six years or so ago, during an intermission at the Liceo Opera. He had finished secondary school and his father had insisted he accompany him to, as he put it, learn how to move about in society. In that encounter, Mariona had looked him in the eyes and told him something about one of the singers, he didn’t recall what, while her husband spoke with his father. He offered to bring her another glass of champagne and he felt worldly and gentlemanly because she accepted it with a childish smile. Still very naive, he interpreted what happened next as a series of coincidences. First, her clutch bag fell and he had to bend down to pick it up for her; as he did so, she gave him a little pat on the shoulder that forced him to look up in such a way that for a few seconds he looked like an enamoured young man at the feet of his beloved, an image that she must not have minded. In another moment the fur stole that covered her back slipped and he helped to replace it on her rounded white shoulders; she thanked him with a flirtatious smile. When the bell rang announcing the second act, Mariona tripped on a stair and had to grab onto Pablo’s arm to keep from falling.

  To his left, Pla lopped off a shrimp’s head as he asked him, ‘Did your father represent Garmendia?’

  Pablo nodded.

  ‘But I don’t know in which matters.’

  His father had defended him when a patient denounced him for medical negligence, but it didn’t get to court.

  If Pla’s question was designed to test his discretion, he had passed. If it was testing his loyalty, he had failed.

  Pla lifted a glass, swirled it around and looked expectantly at Pablo.

  ‘From what they say, Garmendia had very particular methods.’

  Pablo didn’t know much about that subject. He shrugged as he decided on the last king prawn over the shrimp.

  Then Calvet intervened. ‘What a looker Mariona Sobrerroca was!’

  ‘Lush. A bit over the hill, but that has its charms, too,’ commented Pla.

  ‘A real stunner.’ Calvet wiped his lips with a napkin.

  Pablo didn’t say anything, and not only because a waiter was there, taking away the plates before bringing the second course. All three had ordered meat. As they polished off a Catalana chicken and leg of lamb with rosemary, Pla and Calvet continued discussing Mariona Sobrerroca’s murder. Pablo ate his veal in silence. He didn’t find the subject very interesting, and he wondered why the other two were taking so long to get to what they were supposed to be discussing.

  To his right, Calvet’s voice demanded his attention: ‘Noguer, Noguer.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That veal must be heavenly, because your head is in the clouds,’ he joked. ‘I was saying that the article in La Vanguardia about Sobrerroca was written by a woman.’

  Pablo thought Calvet was expecting him to show surprise.

  ‘A woman?’ he said, although he didn’t really care.

  But that wasn’t what Calvet wanted to talk about either.

  ‘Ana María Martí Noguer. When I read it this morning I said to myself, “Look, like our Noguer.” Is she a relative?’

  Pla observed the exchange with indifference.

  ‘No. I don’t know of any Ana María Martí in the family.’

  ‘Of course, of course. It’s not such an uncommon last name. Could she be the daughter of the Martí who also worked at La Vanguardia?’

  Now he was talking to Pla instead of him.

  Pablo didn’t pay any special attention to the stories they were telling him about the journalist, and a couple of other people whose names were familiar but which didn’t spark his interest.

  When the coffee arrived, Calvet leaned back in his seat.

  ‘What are we going to do with you, Noguer?’

  Pablo lifted his cup to his mouth too quickly and burned his lips. Luckily Calvet started to speak again. ‘Well, I do
n’t see it as such a serious problem. We were just having a little fun.’

  ‘You were having fun? I don’t think I share your definition of fun. It’s not simply that Noguer admitted to taking drugs, it’s that they saw him selling them.’

  Calvet extended his arms as if to an auditorium crowd whose applause he wanted to win.

  ‘It’s not a capital crime. Your doctor can prescribe cocaine.’

  Pla set his cup down on the saucer and the teaspoon gave a slight tinkle of complaint.

  ‘I don’t want drug addicts in the firm, or neurasthenics who require to be prescribed cocaine.’

  Calvet nodded pensively, his forehead filling with wrinkles. For a moment he looked like a wise Buddha deep in contemplation. But it lasted just a moment, since he soon began to gesticulate and speak again.

  ‘That’s true, my friend, totally true. But surely our good Noguer isn’t a drug addict or a neurasthenic.’ He opened his arms again, this time to show that the world was how it was and that you had to take things with a pinch of salt. ‘We were young once, too, for God’s sake, and we’ve made plenty of slips.’

  Calvet put a hand on Pablo’s shoulder.

  ‘Our Noguer is young.’

  Pablo looked towards Pla, who drummed his fingers on the tablecloth.

  ‘All right, we’ll give our young friend the licence of youth. There’s still the drug trafficking. That isn’t a youthful peccadillo, is it? If I remember rightly, it’s punishable with a jail sentence.’ He said the last part with clear sarcasm.

  ‘We don’t know whether he did that or not. I was there, and I didn’t see it. Of course, I wasn’t watching him all night. Here we have his word against the accuser’s. In fact, in my view it’s slander.’

  The drumming stopped. Calvet continued: ‘And if I had to choose sides, I’d believe a colleague with whom I got along well over some anonymous letter.’

  Pla looked pointedly at Pablo.

  ‘Perhaps Noguer could do something to quash these rumours. Have you looked into it at all?’

  He shook his head. He hadn’t done anything. Why should he? Digging into the matter would only make it worse. Before he could say so, Calvet spoke again.

  ‘You did the right thing, Noguer.’ Then he addressed Pla. ‘Intervening in the situation would just give us more headaches.’

  Calvet put a hand on Pla’s forearm and looked at him.

  ‘Jaime, leave it be. The problem is solved. The accusation is no longer in police hands, and our anonymous author isn’t going to take any action against us.’

  He gestured to the waiter, who brought them three glasses of cognac.

  Pla nodded his head slowly.

  ‘Fine, you are responsible for Noguer. Let’s leave it at that.’

  Calvet stuck his nose into the glass with gusto.

  ‘French. Imported. Ten years old.’

  Pla tilted his head in satisfaction. They lifted their glasses. Pablo raised his, too. He was doubly thankful to Calvet, who had saved him from an ignominious dismissal and had exonerated his guilt. Or had he? The cognac left a bittersweet taste in his mouth; they hadn’t done him justice by believing him, they were merely condescending to let him off the hook.

  10

  ‘It’s dark in here!’ said Ana as she entered her parents’ dining room. It was two in the afternoon, but already the curtains were drawn at many of the windows and kept out the light of the one cloudless day that week. The room was dark, it was true. It was also true that the phrase was more of a ritual than a complaint. Ana knew that her mother wouldn’t agree to open the curtains.

  ‘What do the neighbours care what we eat?’

  They didn’t, of course, but ever since the day a neighbour across the street had waved to Patricia Noguer from the balcony, the curtains remained drawn at mealtimes and as soon as nightfall forced them to turn on the lights. Her mother wasn’t used to such proximity. Before – the time prior to the war was simply called ‘before’; it was neither necessary nor desirable to spell out before what – they lived in a flat of palatial dimensions on the Paseo de San Juan, where the houses opposite were merely a landscape, but after – ‘after’ what needed no explanation either – following her father’s fall from grace, the family had had to move to a much smaller flat in a more modest neighbourhood.

  ‘Modest’ wasn’t Ana’s word, it was the one her mother used to whitewash the dirty streets, the perennial odour of damp and urine in some of the doorways, the laundry hung on the balconies that dripped slow, heavy drops onto the pavements and the skeletal little plants that tried in vain to rise towards a sun that never touched those blackened walls. ‘Modest’ was a word as soft as the bobbin lace doilies that Patricia Noguer used to hide the worn arm of the chair Father sat in each evening, on the side where the radio was.

  ‘Poverty is narrowness,’ her mother would say. ‘Narrow streets, narrow staircases, narrow rooms.’

  Narrow rooms, even more so because she had insisted on bringing part of the furniture they’d had on the Paseo de San Juan to the new flat on Joaquín Costa Street. While the pieces were enormous and disproportionate to the dwelling, they kept alive her faith in returning to her rightful place, to streets with generous pavements, to grand entranceways which horse-drawn carriages had passed through not long before, to large picture windows that opened far, far away from the houses opposite.

  Now, in order to reach the little balcony that opened on to the street, she had to pass between the rectangular table and a bulky china cabinet that displayed a porcelain service that appeared complete. It was actually missing a cup from the coffee service, but Patricia Noguer had replaced it with a similar one, though one of ordinary china, like a person might disguise a missing tooth.

  ‘Where is Grandfather?’ asked Ana.

  ‘In his room, but he’s already up.’

  ‘That’s good. Will he eat with us?’

  ‘He will.’

  It was something. No one ever knew how long Grandfather would stay at the table, but they all counted the mouthfuls he managed to cut, chew and swallow before he noticed his dead grandson’s chair, shot a confused glance at the rest of the family and asked, ‘When is Ángel coming?’

  It hadn’t helped that they’d taken away all the photos of Ángel and stopped mentioning him in front of Grandfather. He still noticed his absence from the house, despite the fact that his grandson hadn’t ever lived in that flat.

  But today Ana would ignore her brother’s ghost, and she wouldn’t count her grandfather’s mouthfuls. She wouldn’t complain about her mother either, even though she not only condemned them to eating without natural light but also deprived them of much of the electric kind. She had brought from the other house an enormous chandelier with candle-shaped bulbs, four of which were lit. The other eight had been unscrewed. Sometimes Ana would climb up on one of the chairs, covered in cloth to protect the upholstering, and screw in two more bulbs.

  ‘Come on, Mamá. Just while we eat.’

  ‘Certainly, and how are we to pay the electricity bill? With what your father makes at the grocer’s…’

  But no, not this day. She wouldn’t screw in any more bulbs or try to open the curtains a few more centimetres.

  Not this day. Because this was the day the first crime article with her byline had been published. Ana María Martí Noguer. Her name on a text of almost four hundred words, the left-hand column on page eleven. The headline: ‘Police investigate brutal murder in Tibidabo’. Sanvisens hadn’t wanted to reveal the victim’s name in the headline. Then, ‘Initial enquiries by the Criminal Investigation Brigade’ and the text under her name.

  Several times that morning she had passed in front of the display window that La Vanguardia had on Pelayo Street. The pages of the day’s newspaper were exposed to the view of all onlookers, who read it for free, leaning forward with their hands clasped behind their backs. She had watched them, but the effort of pretending she wasn’t had made it impossible for her to determine how
many were reading her text.

  She had left it on her father’s old desk.

  He too was waiting to return someday to what he had been ‘before’, even if it wasn’t at a large national newspaper like La Vanguardia. It would be enough for her father to be able to set foot in even a small paper’s editorial office and listen to the music of the typewriters. The sounds her father now heard were the bell on the grocer’s door, the keys and crank of the enormous cash register that reigned over the counter in front of which, she recalled, the sacks of beans and chickpeas gave off a rancid, dusty odour that impregnated the place. It had been a while since Ana had passed by there; her father didn’t want her to see him in the store, stuffed into a dark grey smock with the name of the grocery embroidered on the breast pocket.

  More reading than writing was done these days at her father’s desk. When he came home at midday he went into his office for half an hour before lunch and he read ‘so I don’t get soft in the head’ after a morning spent loading bundles in the warehouse or serving customers.

  But he still kept his old typewriter, a majestic Underwood. Ana was surprised to see it without its protective cover on a small low table beside the desk. That was another of the pieces of furniture that the family had refused to abandon and, along with a bookshelf and her father’s chair, almost completely filled the small interior room he called his office, which in the other flats in the building must have been a utility room. She left the copy of La Vanguardia, open to the page with her article, on the leather blotter, another of the surviving castaways from the family’s economic shipwreck. The two silver inkwells, on the other hand, had been pawned several years earlier while her father was still in jail.

  Her father arrived punctually. He was surprised to see her. Ana ate with them every Sunday, but she hadn’t come for lunch on weekdays since she had moved into the flat that had been her grandfather’s, on Riera Alta Street.

  ‘I left something on your desk,’ was Ana’s reply to her father’s inquisitive look. ‘Something good,’ she added, so as not to alarm him.