The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  ‘Are you going to buy powdered milk and tinned goods so that we can throw out the refrigerator?’

  Encarni sighed.

  ‘The milk company is raffling off a prize. We have to fill out this form and tear off the label from a tin of milk and send them in together.’ Encarni searched with her finger on the paper on the table, ‘To Nestlé in Barcelona. With a bit of luck, you can win a refrigerator.’

  She looked at Beatriz triumphantly.

  ‘A modern, electric refrigerator.’

  She showed her a photo of a refrigerator that she had torn out of a magazine. A large box with rounded edges and a smooth bright surface. You couldn’t see any joints or seams, only a slightly convex metal sheet of light blue. An American Cadillac for the kitchen.

  ‘But, Encarni! You don’t have a chance of winning that refrigerator. How many people do you think are going to take part in the raffle? Half of Spain, I bet.’

  ‘And someone’s going to win it. Why not me?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’ sighed Beatriz.

  There was no point; nothing was going to make Encarni change her mind.

  ‘Look, we have to put the answers here.’

  ‘We have to? It’s up to you to respond, not me.’

  ‘But maybe you could take a look and tell me if they’re right. It’s the least you could do for a new fridge! Because I would leave it here.’

  ‘Gee, thanks.’

  ‘Where my mother lives, in Monchuí, there’s no electricity. She would get on fine with the old one.’

  Encarni’s family lived in a shanty town on Montjuïc.

  ‘Come on then, let’s have a look at those answers.’

  Encarni held out the form for her. Beatriz read aloud.

  ‘What do most consumers use La Lechera condensed milk for? A. To make coffee a sweet, creamy delight. B. To prepare a delicious rice pudding.’

  ‘I put A.’

  ‘That’s what I’d put, too.’

  ‘But those are the easy questions. Look at this one.’

  She pointed to question seven with one finger.

  ‘In what year did Enrique Nestlé invent the powdered milk that saved so many infants’ lives? A. 1867. B. 1810. C. 1905.’

  She looked up.

  ‘I’d say that —’

  Encarni didn’t let her finish.

  ‘We have to put 1810, Professor.’

  Beatriz thought. When were soup cubes invented in Germany? Surely the milk was made in a similar way; in the end it was the same thing, extracting the water in order to conserve it. It must have been at some point in the mid-nineteenth century. She was irritated with herself because she used to know and her memory was failing her.

  ‘It’s clear, ma’am, that the earlier it was, the more lives they can say it has saved.’

  ‘Bring me the encyclopedia. The N volume. Let’s check when Mr Nestlé invented powdered milk.’

  While Encarni was in the library, the doorbell rang.

  ‘I’ll get it, Encarni.’

  Beatriz saw through the peephole that it was Manolo, the doorman’s son. She opened the door and the boy handed her a letter. She took it. Her mother had always kept a small bowl of coins on the pedestal table in the entryway. Now Encarni filled it up so that she would always have some to hand. She took out a few coins and put them into Manolo’s hand. He mumbled ‘Thank you’ with a surprised expression. She must have given him too much. The boy quickly hid the coins in his fist and turned and disappeared down the stairs even faster.

  Beatriz closed the door. Just then the hand that held the envelope started to shake.

  For a second she considered waiting until evening to open the letter, so that she could enjoy the feeling of being the one to decide when the big moment arrived. But as she was thinking this, she found she’d already entered her study and was gripping her father’s letter opener. The blade made its way along the bright white paper with the Oxford University seal. Dominus illuminatio mea. The Lord is my light.

  She pulled the letter out of the envelope. She lowered the reading glasses she wore on her head; a few blonde and grey locks were tangled around the arms.

  ‘Esteemed Doctor…’

  It was a no. They hadn’t given her the visiting professor job. Jackson, who she’d known since the days of Don Ramón in Madrid, had told her it wasn’t going to be easy.

  There went her opportunity. Her ticket to another world. Her personal escape. She would have to stay here. The sky closed over her. This year, maybe the next one as well. There wouldn’t be many more such chances. She contemplated the frieze that ran around the room’s entire ceiling, a key pattern that repeated over and over. Always the same. Like the years that awaited her. In that city, in that narrowness; an endless succession of grey days.

  Then she jammed the letter into a pile of papers.

  18

  Two envelopes, one white, the other with black edges. A funeral notice. Ana grabbed them and closed the postbox. Then a metallic click warned her that perhaps it would be better to leave the building again. She recognised it straight away: the sound that preceded the opening of Teresina Sauret’s door.

  The old woman was familiar with the sound each of the postboxes made on opening, Ana was convinced of that. It wasn’t possible that she always had something to do at the very moment Ana was collecting her post. The doorkeeper could see which neighbours were going up and down the staircase, but in order to know who was arriving, Señora Sauret had to wait for the person to approach the stairs.

  Teresina Sauret’s door was to the right, hidden in a recess at the foot of the staircase. From her peephole she completely controlled the first flight and landing, but the row of twelve postboxes was out of her line of sight. In the world of doorkeepers, some have more good fortune than others. Teresina Sauret hadn’t been lucky in her guard post.

  Like musical instruments, which develop an unmistakably unique character over years of use, each of the postboxes had a sound of its own, the sum of the dents, creaking hinges and the rustiness of the lock. As for the doorkeeper, she had an incredibly sensitive ear, trained by hours of attentive listening behind the door, and thanks to which she also knew the footsteps of each tenant.

  But that day it would do her no good, because Ana too had an excellent ear and immediately recognised the stealthy but not imperceptible sound of the door being opened with cunning slowness. Like field mice who are alerted not by the flapping wings of the owl who hunts them, but the slight creak of the branch when the bird leaves the tree. She put the two envelopes in her bag and in a couple of strides was back out in the street. Teresina Sauret’s voice reached her, muffled by the door to the building, which had closed behind Ana’s back.

  ‘Señorita Martí! Señorita Martí! Remember that…’

  She knew full well what she had to remember; actually it had been on her mind all week. She also knew that Señora Sauret was lying in wait for her. It wasn’t the first and, given the situation, it wouldn’t be the last occasion when the doorkeeper would chase after her for the rent, but that evening she reached home too tired and hungry to face the disapproval in Teresina’s little weasel eyes.

  It pained her to remember that the flat had belonged to her family. Hers and the one next to it, because her paternal grandparents had lived in twice the space before the war. Then, when things changed, the Serrahimas bought the flats and divided them into two. They rented out half of her grandfather’s old home and, as long as someone in the family lived there, and paid the rent, they could carry on living there. When her grandfather had begun to have problems managing on his own, Ana had moved there to take care of him. She was pleased to do it because it got her out of the house. Then two years ago her parents had decided that it was best that Grandfather live with them. But she stayed in the flat. Her parents had been reluctant to accept that, but conceded because it would allow them to hold onto the property. Since she had lived there with her grandfather, there wasn’t, as far as she knew, talk about a
woman her age living alone. She gave the tongues no reason to wag. She never had visitors at home and had never even let Gabriel come up. Not that it was necessary; the hypocritical city offered plenty of options to slip past the gaze of its moral guardians.

  She left Riera Alta and turned on to the Ronda de San Antonio. When she passed by the café Els Tres Tombs, she saw a free table and went in.

  ‘What can I get you, sweetheart?’

  ‘A café au lait, please.’

  ‘Any pastries?’

  She had to say no to the waiter, although the sugar glaze on the heart-shaped puff pastries attractively laid out on the bar seemed to shine in the lamplight just for her. And the cigarette smoke couldn’t cover up the scent of the pile of madeleines beside them. But she only had enough money in her purse for the coffee.

  She put the two envelopes on the table. She didn’t know which one to open first.

  The waiter approached with the cup of coffee and the jug of hot milk. His short white jacket was small on him; it must belong to another waiter, who would put it on at the end of this shift. The waiter’s hands looked disproportionately large. He began to pour the milk. Ana saw that he was about to lift the jug before the cup was full.

  ‘A bit more, please. I don’t like my coffee too strong.’

  The waiter grumbled, but she pretended not to hear. A finger of milk, even when watered down, is a lot. Defiant, the waiter filled her cup to the brim without spilling a single drop.

  Once he had headed off, she considered her dilemma again: whether to open the funeral notice or the other envelope first. She remembered what Carlos Belda had once asked her, ‘Tell me, what is the page that women look for first in the newspaper?’

  Of course, she’d replied that it was the society pages, the section that for the time being was keeping food on her table and paying her rent, though not always on time.

  ‘You’re wrong, dollface,’ Belda had declared somewhat pedantically. ‘It’s the obituaries.’

  It was true.

  So she opened the black-bordered envelope first.

  The deceased was a woman named Blanca Noguer Figuerola. Who was Blanca Noguer Figuerola? She recalled that her mother had told her recently about a relative dying. She hadn’t paid much attention, and didn’t remember how closely they were related, but she had received the funeral notice, which meant that other members of the family did remember. She would have to go to the funeral, even if only not to disappoint her mother again.

  She looked at the birthdate. She guessed Carlos Belda also knew that the first thing women do when they read an obituary is calculate the deceased person’s age and mentally pronounce one of the two de rigueur phrases, depending on the results of the calculation: ‘Poor thing, so young’, or ‘Well, she had a long life’. In this case, the latter was the appropriate one and, reviewing the deceased woman’s list of relatives, Ana came to the conclusion that she must be one of her mother’s cousins. The burial was the next day in the Montjuïc cemetery. Yes, she would have to go.

  She felt the irksome sensation at the nape of her neck that she was being watched. She turned. It was the waiter, who was openly following her movements. She understood that he was waiting to see how she managed to drink her coffee without spilling half the cup. In such situations she was always grateful she had grown up with a brother. Eschewing the manners befitting a lady, she leaned over the table, brought her mouth to the full cup and took a good slurp. Then she turned to the waiter, ostentatiously wiped her lips with the back of her hand and smiled at him. He immediately looked away.

  Which was why he missed her surprised expression when she opened the white envelope. It was from her father. A brief little note that read: ‘So you can give yourself a treat’, along with several twenty-five-peseta notes. How had he managed to save up so much money? He hadn’t mentioned it the day before when she had eaten with them.

  ‘I am going to give myself two treats, Papa.’ She would go back home and walk through the door unhurriedly; she would reach the foot of the stairs without her heart pounding and she would start walking up at a leisurely pace. And when Teresina Sauret’s door opened and she started to say, ‘Señorita Martí, remember that you have to pay the ren —’

  She would answer her offhandedly, ‘Of course.’

  Then she would open her bag and hand the money to the doorkeeper. And in the same careless tone she would add, ‘May I please have a receipt?’

  But first, the other treat.

  ‘May I have a palmera, please?’ she asked, pointing to the heart-shaped pastries. ‘One of the darker ones. And another café au lait.’

  Then she pulled out the documents she had copied in Castro’s office. The letters that Mariona had received from her boyfriend had particularly awakened Ana’s curiosity. There were fourteen of them.

  The boyfriend was called Octavian. She repeated the name several times under her breath, searching her memory for someone with that name in the circles closest to the victim, but she couldn’t remember anyone, which was strange considering the Catalan bourgeoisie’s fondness for patrician names. Reading the letters, she realised that she shouldn’t actually be looking for an Octavian. Even though the letters were rather cryptic, and without Mariona’s replies it was impossible to understand some of the allusions, soon she could tell that Octavian was a pseudonym, behind which hid a man who called Mariona ‘my Marschallin’. They were adopting roles from the opera Der Rosenkavalier! That surely meant that Mariona’s lover was significantly younger than her. She understood now why they had wanted to keep their relationship secret, and she felt sad imagining the fiftysomething widow with a new spring in her step while her friends looked on disparagingly.

  Was that how Castro and his people had seen it, as well? Given the indifference with which they had let her copy the material, clearly not. It occurred to her that there wasn’t only gratitude behind Castro’s generosity in letting her see all that material. Perhaps he was hoping that she would happen on something that the police hadn’t been able to find. But most likely, she admitted with a stab to her pride, it was just a way to keep her busy, as if she were a child who had to be distracted so she wouldn’t be too much of a bother.

  She took a sip of coffee and kept reading. But nothing in those lines revealed to her who Octavian was, although she knew he had to be hidden in there somewhere.

  The next day she took a taxi to the cemetery, but first she walked to Paralelo so it would cost less. She was splurging, but in moderation, she told herself.

  She carried the funeral invitation in her bag. She had inherited it from one of her cousins, one of the rich ones, who gave her their old clothes so that she could attend the society parties she wrote about with some respectability. She inherited them in good condition, an advantage of having cousins who followed fashion. She had three coats, and hadn’t worn any of them yet. She also had several handbags, but this was her ‘journalist’ bag. She had managed to cover its few scuffs with shoe polish, and luckily no one besides her looked inside it, because the lining was coming apart.

  ‘The Montjuïc cemetery, please.’

  Along the way she realised that she hadn’t brought her veil. Her mother was going to be furious.

  She pulled out her notepad and, even though it made her a bit sick to read in the car, took a look at her notes on the Sobrerroca case. She had the letters with her. She wanted to read them one more time before the funeral; she was sure that at some point she would manage to get some information out of them.

  Sitting in the taxi on the way to the cemetery, she felt excitement at finally being involved in her first real case.

  After getting out of the car she entered the city of the dead and, for the first time, the sight of the rows of funereal niches that completely covered the hillside didn’t weigh on her heart.

  19

  ‘Imagine, they had to open the poor woman up three times.’

  ‘For the love of God! Couldn’t they just have emptied her out the fir
st time?’

  The first of the two women in black nodded; the feather in the small veiled hat she wore bobbed in time. A third woman brought her hands together over her handbag and added, ‘Those the Lord calls to his bosom…’

  One of the three women was married to one of Beatriz’s many cousins; the other two she had never seen before. She quickly turned her back on the small group. She didn’t want to be drawn into any conversation, especially not one like that. As she turned, the funeral invitation rustled in her jacket pocket.

  The doorman’s son had brought it to her the previous night. That time it had been Encarni who had opened the door and tipped him.

  ‘Cheeky little Manolito told me that you’re more generous, ma’am,’ she’d said as she delivered the black-bordered envelope.

  Encarni held it with two fingers, somewhat apprehensive, and sighed in relief when she put it down on the table. But then she had stood over Beatriz, waiting for her to open it.

  ‘Family?’ she had asked after Beatriz had taken out the funeral notice.

  ‘An aunt.’

  ‘My condolences. Should I prepare funeral clothes?’

  She nodded, and Encarni left the room.

  From the study she heard the muffled sounds of the young woman’s laborious search through the wardrobes for the appropriate attire.

  A funeral notice. More bad news. First she had thought about stuffing it in a pile of papers as she had done with the letter from Oxford, but then she’d decided to leave it out so that she wouldn’t forget the exact time and place of the burial.

  She joined the funeral procession that was slowly beginning to move. She heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path, the swish of mourning dresses and the occasional discreet murmur. The retinue wound its way up Montjuïc mountain along a path flanked by cypress trees. About a hundred people followed the coffin that swayed on the shoulders of the bearers as they took one of the many curves. The May sun fell on the oak wood that shone as brightly as the silver-plated, solid iron fittings. Blanca must have chosen it herself. It had been a long time since Beatriz had last seen her aunt, but unless she had changed a lot in her final years, the coffin perfectly reflected her discreet elegance.