The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  ‘How could we, when we don’t even play? I sold some things,’ her mother replied evasively. ‘What are you going to order, Aneta?’

  They both ordered the same thing: a dish of whipped cream with walnuts and a café au lait. Funerals always made them hungry. Their stomachs’ initial protests were silenced by scoops of whipped cream and caramel sauce. Perhaps because it was a strange time of the day for that dessert, the waitress had been especially generous with the caramel, and the drizzled lines that criss-crossed the mountains of whipped cream were thick and rose a few millimetres off the white surface. As they ate, her mother told her all about the people they’d seen at the burial.

  Then Ana’s thoughts returned to the strange conversation she had accidentally overheard while she was smoking behind the mausoleum. She wouldn’t have paid much attention, but she had been drawn in by their tone: both conspiratorial and intimate. The woman was the one who had turned to glare at them during the funeral procession, thanks to which Ana had been able to call a halt to her mother’s spiralling reproaches. She had noticed her again during the burial because she was wearing a jacket that, in another era, must have been very expensive. She estimated she was about forty years old. The conversation about papers and letters had awoken her curiosity.

  ‘Mama, who was the woman beside Aunt Adela at the burial?’

  ‘Which one? There were a lot of people.’

  ‘The one who wore a black jacket with batwing sleeves and embroidered lapels with a black rose brooch.’

  ‘Goodness, you really know your clothes.’

  Ana couldn’t help but smile, both because it amused her to find that the vast knowledge of the subject she’d accumulated on the job wasn’t entirely useless, and because of the glimmer of good mood she had managed to extract from her mother. She added a couple of details, imitating the style of her articles.

  ‘With discreet yet elegant black buckled shoes and honey-blonde hair pulled back into a chignon slightly streaked with grey and accentuated by a delicate tortoiseshell clasp.’

  ‘You’re a funny one! She wasn’t wearing a veil either, was she?’

  Please don’t let her get started on that subject again.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know who you mean. Beatriz.’

  ‘Is she a relative?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Beatriz Noguer is the eldest daughter of my cousin Josep. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason. She just caught my eye.’

  ‘Yes, they are striking; she is the intellectual of the family.’

  The word was generally pejorative when applied to a woman. She even recalled it being used as an insult when she had shown a fondness for reading in school. It wasn’t positive coming from her mother, either; even so, she kept digging. ‘Intellectual?’

  ‘Beatriz writes articles.’

  ‘She’s a journalist?’

  ‘No, something to do with literature. She is the younger sister of Salvador, the lawyer.’

  Her mother assumed Ana knew who she was talking about. Seeing Ana’s questioning expression, she added, ‘The lawyer who helped us so much with Papa’s thing, to get the sentence reduced.’

  Salvador Noguer: now she remembered who he was. It was hard for her to believe that he was the brother of the woman with the blonde bun. In that branch of the Noguer family there was also that marked difference in the appearance of men and women that she had noticed at the burial.

  All of a sudden, Beatriz Noguer’s name began to ring a bell in her head, accompanied by the title Spanish Dialects. A title from the bibliography of one of her classes in philosophy and language. She recalled having asked her mother at the time if they were related. She was overcome by a strong feeling of déjà vu, remembering that during that first conversation she’d had with her mother about Beatriz Noguer she had also thought she’d like to meet her.

  ‘And do you know where she works?’

  ‘Works? At home. She lived abroad for a while after the war, but she returned a couple of years ago now.’

  Even though she was exposing herself to a fresh tirade about her future with Gabriel, she asked, ‘Is she married?’

  ‘No. As far as I know, she had a boyfriend, a German man, but he left her. I think she’s a pretty difficult character. So you see, there she is, fortysomething and alone.’

  It wasn’t a harangue, but rather a latent threat. But allusions have the advantage that you can ignore them. She decided not to ask about the man with black leather gloves, and continued enquiring about Beatriz Noguer.

  ‘Do you know where she lives?’

  ‘Darling, where does this sudden interest in the family come from?’

  ‘Curiosity.’

  ‘She lives along the Rambla de Cataluña.’

  ‘Along, or on? Walking along the water and on the water isn’t the same thing.’

  Come on, laugh a little, she thought after uttering this gentle blasphemy. Her mother did laugh, although she feigned reluctance.

  ‘On the Rambla de Cataluña, next to the Alexandra Cinemas.’

  ‘Would you like another coffee, Mama?’

  She ordered two more from the waitress.

  While her mother related Salvador Noguer’s life story, Ana decided that she would go to the Rambla de Cataluña the next day to meet someone she found much more interesting than Salvador Noguer: Beatriz Noguer, who must be some sort of cousin.

  Perhaps Beatriz would be able to help her.

  22

  The room was growing dark. Beatriz rubbed her tired eyes and switched on the desk lamp. The bulb blinked out its death throes before it blew.

  Once again, she needed money. Her Introduction to the Dialects of the Iberian Peninsula and Their History was required reading in many Latin American universities, but the cheques from her Argentinian publisher arrived irregularly and were far from lavish. Ask her brother for money? It wasn’t only her pride that held her back, but the fact that he had already been quite generous when he’d given her his part of the family flat.

  She glanced at the bookshelves in her office. They looked like a set of teeth riddled with cavities. She counted the gaps. Twelve.

  She was sure that the bookseller would buy her edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. That would be the last casualty. But she had to be careful that he didn’t take advantage of her situation. She got up and surveyed the bookshelves slowly, stroking the spines with a finger. She could live for quite a while off the books and the remaining silver in the house, like a squirrel surviving the winter on its reserves. Except that in her case she had no way of knowing when the winter would end, especially now that her one-way ticket had turned out to be a pipe dream.

  Truth be told, she couldn’t afford the dictionary she had left on hold at the bookstore. It was pretty absurd to sell valuable books and spend the money on other expensive ones, even if she needed them for her work. It wasn’t pretence, like that of the starving squire in Lazarillo de Tormes, who scattered crumbs on his shirt front to make it look as if he’d eaten. Someday, when the winter this country was plunged into ended, she would write about that book to make it crystal clear how much she abhorred the glorification of Lázaro de Tormes as a representative of the national idiosyncrasy. Worshipping the picaresque, putting deception on a pedestal. What poverty of spirit!

  She took down the copy of the Metamorphoses, a lovely illustrated edition printed in Venice in 1521.

  It would be even better if, instead of buying the dictionary, she tried to negotiate with the bookseller to give her a cheaper edition of the book she was thinking of selling him. She had already done that at other times, but she had never put those inexpensive editions in the place of those she’d had to sell. The words were the same. What was lost, in the case of the Metamorphoses, was the thick paper, the leather binding, the initials on a black background. And the engravings. She ran her fingers over the ribs of a small treatise on emblems as if it were a sleeping kitten’s back. Her heart shrank at the thought of selling it.


  Just then the doorbell rang. Encarni had gone out. Beatriz thought that she must have forgotten her keys, so she opened the door without glancing through the peephole. In the doorway was the young woman she had seen at Aunt Blanca’s funeral procession, the one who had been arguing with her mother right behind her. Since Beatriz didn’t say anything, the young woman introduced herself.

  ‘I’m Ana Martí, Patricia Noguer’s daughter.’

  Beatriz stared at her, confused. Patricia Noguer? She tried to figure out how they were related; the girl told her before she had a chance to.

  ‘We’re cousins, second cousins, I think.’

  Even though she had no idea what this second cousin was doing here, it didn’t seem right to leave her in the doorway like a beggar. She invited her in with a wave of her hand.

  ‘I wanted to consult you about something.’

  Beatriz was unsure as to which room she should lead her to. Then Ana added, ‘It’s a linguistic consultation.’

  She led her to the study. She turned on the ceiling light and took a small lamp from a pedestal table between the two windows to replace the one on the desk with the blown bulb.

  ‘Make yourself at home.’

  She sat in front of her newly discovered cousin and gave her a professorial look.

  ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘Well, I work for La Vanguardia.’

  She noted a tinge of pride in her voice. It was justified; it was very difficult to get a position on the editorial staff of a newspaper, especially if you were a young woman.

  ‘Ana Martí,’ she repeated out loud, and suddenly realised who she could be. ‘So you are the daughter of Andreu Martí?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m so sorry about what happened to your father. He was a good journalist.’

  ‘He still is, although he doesn’t practise.’

  She was right. Wasn’t that her situation, too? She wondered if Ana Martí was aware of the parallels, if she was also referring to her with that comment. Just in case, she smiled at her. The young woman understood it as an invitation to return to the subject that had brought her there.

  ‘I write about criminal cases. Right now I am reporting on the murder of Mariona Sobrerroca.’

  She remembered that Encarni had mentioned it to her.

  ‘Mariona Sobrerroca? Is she the one who was killed in her house on Tibidabo?’

  ‘Have you read my article?’

  Beatriz shook her head. She had to disappoint her; she wasn’t among her readers.

  The young woman didn’t seem to mind, since she ploughed on with her account: ‘She was strangled. Brutally beaten beforehand.’

  Beatriz thought that if she asked whether they had also ripped out one of her eyes she would sound very morbid.

  ‘And the body, how shall I put it…? Was the body intact?’

  Her cousin looked at her, taken aback. This wasn’t surprising; the question had come out sounding quite odd.

  ‘Well, they tore off her right earlobe.’

  ‘Nothing more?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘I heard that she was missing an eye.’

  Ana’s eyes widened, her shock growing ever deeper.

  ‘No, not at all. Where did you hear that?’

  ‘Rumours.’

  Beatriz hoped that she sounded contemptuous enough that Ana wouldn’t ask anything more. Where had the rumour about the eye come from? Something like that usually had a solid basis in fact. The details were exaggerated, or left out; sometimes the nuance was changed, but there was always a basic structure that ran through each retelling.

  Then Ana burst out laughing.

  ‘Now that I think about it, there was an eye, but it was plastic, it fell from one of those skeletons that doctors have, where you can see the bones, the veins and all that.’

  Beatriz nodded. Well, there was the basis of the rumour. But surely that wasn’t why Ana had come.

  ‘You said you needed my help…’

  Ana drew some pages out of her handbag and placed them on the table.

  ‘In the Mariona Sobrerroca case, some letters were found. Love letters, with no return address. No one knows who the author could be. The only thing that seems clear at this point is that they were written by a young man.’

  Beatriz tilted her head with interest. Ana pointed to the letters.

  ‘These are copies of the originals. The police let me make them.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Yes. I am working with them.’

  Beatriz recoiled in her seat. A reflex that her cousin didn’t notice, because she was speaking with her eyes glued to the papers.

  ‘The author signs himself Octavian, like the character in Richard Strauss’s opera. Which is to say, a young man courting an older woman. That’s all I’ve been able to glean. If we could get more out of them, it might be important to the case…’

  She paused. Beatriz stared at her, waiting for more information. Ana continued, ‘Since I happened to hear something you said yesterday, about how the way someone writes is like a fingerprint, a clue that someone leaves…’

  Beatriz arched her eyebrows.

  ‘You happened to hear?’

  ‘Well, I was having a smoke behind the mausoleum when you were talking to that young man.’

  ‘And you didn’t feel the need to clear your throat so that we knew you were there, or leave so that you wouldn’t be eavesdropping?’

  ‘To be honest, no. Your conversation was too interesting.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ answered Beatriz curtly.

  Ana gave her a timid smile of apology and, with a few taps of her fingers, pushed the letters towards her.

  ‘I thought that perhaps you could read the letters and tell me something about their author.’

  Her cousin was asking her for help in a matter related to a police investigation. Just what she needed. The fewer dealings you had with the police, the better. What business did a linguist have with police matters?

  ‘I’m sorry, Ana, but I prefer not to have anything to do with these things.’

  ‘But you could really help. I have the impression that the investigation is heading in the wrong direction. And until now, no one has thought of consulting a specialist.’

  A specialist. If she was a specialist in anything, it was medieval literature and the dialects of the Iberian Peninsula.

  ‘Really, I don’t think I can help you.’

  She couldn’t, and she didn’t want to.

  Although, who knows? Maybe she could take a quick glance, out of professional curiosity, and see if she was able to extract any information from them. She tried to glance at them stealthily. Maybe she could tell Ana where the author was from.

  She realised that Ana had seen her surreptitious glance because she launched another offensive: ‘I was very impressed by everything you said in the cemetery about the letter that the young man showed you. Perhaps you could do the same with the author of these anonymous letters.’

  Beatriz shook her head. Even if she found something, it was unwise to get mixed up in police investigations.

  Ana was silent for a moment before saying, almost in a whisper, ‘I saw photos of the victim. Someone capable of abusing another person like that cannot go unpunished and walk the streets a free man.’

  Beatriz stared at Ana. There were all kinds in her family: supporters of the Republic, Falangists, priests, liberals, even a couple of anarchists. What side was Ana on? They had purged the father, and now his daughter was working for a newspaper that continued publishing under the Regime; therefore she had adapted. What’s more, she admitted collaborating with the police. Beatriz answered, also in a very soft voice, ‘This country is swarming with people who have abused many others with impunity.’

  She looked Ana in the eyes. Would she now remind her of her duties as a citizen of ‘new Spain’? What did she care, anyway? They had already branded her a Red, so she had nothing more to lose by speaking h
er mind. She felt bold, with a sudden desire to provoke Ana. ‘And some are even paid to do it. They’ve been given a post and honours. They have been promoted because they have been particularly efficient at liquidating their fellow countrymen. Taking them out of their beds and putting them up against a wall.’

  She shot a defiant glare at Ana, expecting her rebuttal, a fist on the table, a threatening tone. Instead she saw her sink into her chair, eyes downcast, biting her lips. The energy with which she had entered the house, the vivacity that shone in her gaze, had disappeared. Beatriz remembered the rest of the story too late: that Ana’s brother had been executed in prison by firing squad. Her own lack of sensitivity left her so stunned that she couldn’t say another word.

  Ana pulled out a handkerchief and dried her eyes. Then she stood up and made to collect her papers. Beatriz placed a hand on top of them to stop her.

  ‘Leave them here. I will take a look at them.’

  Ana still hadn’t let go of the papers, and gazed at her with a mix of surprise and scepticism. Beatriz didn’t want to tell her that she considered it her moral obligation after her obvious tactlessness.

  ‘Out of scientific curiosity. Perhaps I can find something out about their author. But, if I do find something, I don’t want anyone to know I helped you. I don’t want to have anything to do with the police. Understood?’

  Ana let go of the letters.

  ‘I appreciate it. And you have nothing to fear; I won’t reveal where I got any information you might give me.’

  ‘Then I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘When might you know something?’

  Beatriz looked at her. She had recovered a hint of her previous sparkle, but she squeezed the handkerchief in one hand.

  ‘I don’t know. Right now I have a lot of work, but I will try to find some time for it.’

  She escorted Ana to the door.

  ‘Why don’t you call me tomorrow?’ said Beatriz. She searched for a slip of paper and jotted down her number.

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘Around midday.’

  ‘At twelve noon on the dot.’