The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

‘Sure, like the Angelus.’

  Ana smiled again. Beatriz closed the door with relief.

  After Ana had left, Beatriz began to read the letters.

  Love letters. The spelling throughout was correct. Ana had told her she’d copied the texts word for word. Mariona’s lover wasn’t a bad writer.

  While she was at it, the best thing to do would be to work systematically. She spread out the papers over her desk, ordering them chronologically.

  The first one began with a very formal address:

  Dear Madam,

  Please forgive my urgency. Don’t think me impertinent if, mere hours after leaving your company, I pick up the pen to be able to be close to you again, even if only through words. The echoes of our conversation still resound within me; I still see you before me, graceful bearer of the white standard, and I feel the magic of your presence. Your intelligent words, both keen and so feminine, have made chords vibrate inside me that I thought had grown mute long ago.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t speak to you of this and offend your tender ears with the halting expression of my feelings. No, I shan’t reveal how much I enjoyed our conversation; to what point, after long years of grief, I now feel alive again, as if my tired heart has come back to life, freeing itself of the cold arms of the night in which my soul slumbered for so long. As you can see, I can barely contain my feelings long enough to organise my ruminations and I foresee that I shan’t be able to conclude this letter without stopping occasionally. But perhaps (it is merely a faint hope that I have no right to express), perhaps someday you may feel something similar.

  The author had made prolific use of motifs from Spanish literature, but his great inspiration was undoubtedly the Vicomte de Valmont. What could she tell Ana about him? The author was very well read, and seemed to be having a lot of fun. The torrent of words that supposedly flowed directly from his ardent heart onto the page was a collage of literary quotes.

  The third letter in particular caught her eye: the author was now addressing her familiarly and in a bolder tone. He no longer praised Mariona Sobrerroca’s spirit and charm from a respectful distance; rather, he launched into a description of her physical charms:

  I still see you before me, your magnificent figure, your blonde hair whose shine outstrips burnished gold, your graceful neck that triumphs with glowing disdain over shining crystal, the snow-white silk scarf, the beloved standard that once guided my steps towards your arms, your rose lips, the blue irises of your eyes whose gentle clarity reminded me of the shimmering of the morning reflected in the sea.

  Beatriz raised her eyebrows. How vain, lovestruck and, most of all, dim-witted does someone have to be to fall for such compliments, which were obviously cribbed from an anthology of Spanish love poems!

  Except for that ‘standard’. Why had the scarf been a standard? Because he had taken it off her, fondled her neck that shone brighter than crystal, and the rest had just happened naturally? Or what? Hadn’t he also mentioned it in the first letter? He had.

  Beatriz thought it over. She tested her hypothesis. It held up.

  23

  Surely Ana would be late. Beatriz glanced at her watch. She had arrived at the Athenaeum ten minutes early. As she almost always did, since she calculated that the trams could be running late, or so full that she’d have to wait for the next one, or that one of the frequent power outages would leave them stranded, immobile in the middle of the street.

  Ana’s call the day before had already been behind schedule. She had said she’d call at noon, and she’d called three hours later. She apologised, and Beatriz accepted her explanations reluctantly. She hated being made to wait; it bothered her because she knew that if she used that waiting time to get something done, it might be interrupted at the worst possible moment.

  ‘Have you found out anything?’ Ana asked when she called.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?’

  ‘It’s a bit involved to go through over the telephone. Why don’t we meet tomorrow at the Athenaeum and I’ll explain it to you?’

  ‘Tomorrow is Mariona Sobrerroca’s funeral.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing: just that it’s better if we meet up afterwards. That way I can tell you what I saw.’

  She wasn’t interested in what Ana might see at the funeral. She had other things to do. In fact, she had suggested the meeting place because once she had resolved this business with the letters, she could consult some books in the library there. The Athenaeum was located in an eighteenth-century palace in the old part of the city. She liked to work there, in one of the reading rooms with its green leather-topped desks and its tall bookshelves. She was still a member; a former school friend had made sure she didn’t lose her affiliation after the war. The library’s collection had grown during that time, bolstered by the private libraries of various scholars who had been forced into exile. At first she had found it difficult to work with volumes whose bookplates showed the names of their previous owners. With time she’d grown used to it, as with so many other things.

  The leather sofas in the café were the same as before the war. Unlike the watered-down coffee. On the table there was a copy of that day’s La Vanguardia, with a photo of the Santa María at anchor in Barcelona’s port and another of the Director of Prisons visiting the workshops at the Modelo prison. The third photograph was of a reservoir in Badajoz. She leafed through the newspaper. The announcement of an homage by the army to the Blessed Sacrament during the International Eucharistic Congress; an article by Tristán La Rosa about the novel La noria, which she didn’t want to read. Who wants to read about the reality of life in Barcelona? Wasn’t it enough having to live it? She noticed a long headline that trumpeted the end of food rationing. Thanks to the abundance of consumer goods that would be available in Spain from now on. So when you didn’t have to use ration cards to buy bread, you were living in ‘abundance’.

  She took a black notepad from her bag, jotted down the word ‘abundance’ and wrote in the margin: ‘When there is barely enough of something’. In recent years many words had changed their meaning. Like ‘red’, which was used vehemently to single out communists and enemies of the state. Little Red Riding Hood was now called Little Crimson Riding Hood. She had found a book of stories with that title in a bookshop a few days earlier. They had also changed the names of streets and squares, in the typical way that regimes take possession of places. The Library of Catalonia had been rebaptised as the Central Library. Some words disappeared, the meaning of others shifted and yet others became omnipresent, such as Spain, destiny, manhood, holy. She took notes on it all in her little book, without knowing if she’d be able to make use of her observations one day. Then, her gaze landed on the article about the most recent speech given by Barcelona’s Civil Governor.

  The crime rate in the new Spain is low. Precisely because our government is tolerant and humane, precisely because the rights of citizens are respected, precisely because we are not a police state, we value our security forces’ tireless work even more highly. They are men who are as patriotic as they are capable, who watch day and night over the well-being and peace of our citizens.

  Beatriz made a surprised face. Tolerant and humane were relatively recent additions to the list of qualities the Regime used to characterise itself. They were new labels, to be hung on the chest like medals. She turned a page in her notebook and took down the words and the quote, adding a brief commentary. Then she glanced at the photo illustrating the article and the text accompanying it.

  His Excellence, Señor Acedo Colunga, Civil Governor of Barcelona, accompanied by his personal secretary, Señor Sánchez-Herranz Robles.

  The Civil Governor was in uniform, his semi-bald head surrounded by a halo of curls. Beside him stood a young man, dressed in civilian clothes, with sloping shoulders and a doughy face.

  She continued reading and wrote down the reference to ‘the highly modern methods used by our police’
. Modernity was another of the new labels. In the second half of his speech, however, the governor began to threaten the press. He had nothing, he declared, against open criticism; that was healthy and appropriate. Beatriz shook her head as she read. How much of that supposedly healthy criticism got through the censors? Soon the Civil Governor got to his real target, the journalists who wrote with apparent correctness but who underneath that smooth, polished surface hid arrogant, when not treacherous, judgements on the well-intentioned actions of the Regime. The message was quite clear: ‘Be careful that even the slightest hint of critique of the Regime can’t be found in any of your copy’. Beatriz looked away from the newspaper in disgust. Then a shadow fell over the table.

  It was Ana. The girl had been running, and a lock of her hair had slipped out, which she’d tucked pell-mell behind her ear. Beatriz invited her to sit down, pointing to the sofa beside her and waving to the waiter.

  After they’d ordered, Ana picked up the newspaper and made a scowl of displeasure. She pointed to the young man in the suit.

  ‘Acedo Colunga and his lackey. He’s the one who writes all his speeches.’

  Beatriz said simply, ‘Dreadful.’

  She didn’t say that she wondered how she could work under such conditions, because to do so might put her cousin in the position of having to justify herself and she didn’t think that was right.

  Ana folded the newspaper so the article couldn’t be seen.

  ‘Yes, the man is terrifying, a really evil character. He was at the funeral too, standing in for his boss. All of Barcelona society was there. All of them very worked up and demanding that the murderer be arrested without delay. All in their finest black clothes.’ Her voice darkened as she added, ‘The article will appear in the society pages.’

  The waiter arrived with a coffee and poured in the hot milk. Ana said it was plenty just as the milk threatened to overflow the cup.

  ‘Will you have sugar, madam?’

  The waiter was already extracting one of the cubes that filled the sugar bowl with a pair of tongs.

  ‘Leave the sugar bowl there, I’ll serve myself.’

  She waited until he had gone and, to Beatriz’s surprise, managed to dissolve two cubes into her coffee without spilling a drop.

  Their eyes were still on her cup as they both started to talk at the same time.

  ‘I have the letters.’

  ‘I’m dying to know what you’ve discovered.’

  Beatriz put on her glasses and brought the letters out of her handbag.

  ‘Let’s see, where do I start? The first thing that caught my eye was that our author uses a lot of literary models. In the earliest letters he puts a great deal of care into winning over his beloved. At times I was reminded of epistolary novels in which the only thing the characters do is write letters to each other.’

  Ana eyed her expectantly. Beatriz enjoyed the attention.

  ‘He is a cultured, well-read person. The letters are a mosaic of quotes. That makes it difficult to say much about the author. He could be said to be wearing a mask.’

  ‘Der Rosenkavalier.’

  Beatriz shrugged. ‘It’s a very well-known opera; I’d say it forms part of the general culture of the well-educated bourgeoisie. And the decently educated. So it’s a banal choice that doesn’t tell us much about the writer.’

  She gazed at Ana.

  ‘But there is something that the letters do reveal.’

  She moved aside Ana’s coffee cup to put the copy of the letter on the table. She pointed with her finger to a few lines.

  ‘Here he describes her.’

  She gave Ana a little time to read the passage in which he compared Mariona’s blue eyes with the shimmer of the sea at dawn. The source of his inspiration was widely known and she expected her cousin to recognise it straight away.

  ‘He’s taken fragments from Bécquer’s Rhymes.’

  ‘Right. But I’m referring to something else. He mentions a silk scarf that showed him the path, calling it a standard.’

  ‘Surely that’s a metaphor. He is the lost wanderer who finally finds his way, thanks to Mariona.’

  ‘No. I believe that here it refers to something literal. I think they used the scarf to recognise each other.’

  ‘You mean, they made a date without having met?’

  Beatriz nodded in satisfaction. Ana was proving to be clever.

  ‘And they met through an advertisement and then they set a date? He wore a carnation in his lapel and she wore a white silk scarf?’

  ‘That’s my theory.’

  ‘But why don’t we have any letter where they introduce themselves and make a date to meet for the first time?’

  ‘Good question.’

  Which wouldn’t be any use unless they found some answer to it. It didn’t have to be definitive or complete. Half a reply is often a starting point. So she ventured, ‘Perhaps Mariona Sobrerroca threw it away because a beginning like that didn’t fit with her image of a romantic relationship. When someone heaps praise on your golden hair and shimmering blue eyes, you surely don’t want to think that you met him through an advert.’

  In her head she added, And when someone promises you the moon and stars, you lap it up. Until he leaves you.

  Ana shook her head.

  ‘I don’t think Mariona threw anything away. The boxes the police have from her house were filled with souvenirs. Letters, old postcards, theatre tickets, train tickets…’

  ‘But there was no advertisement.’

  ‘Not that I saw.’

  The waiter came in carrying a tray with the empty cups left by a group of men who had been sitting at one of the tables in the courtyard garden. One of them had abandoned a copy of the Falangist newspaper Arriba. The waiter made sure the men couldn’t see him and then threw it into the bin with an expression of disgust. She and Ana saw him. Her cousin turned towards her and said, ‘Maybe Mariona organised her keepsakes, the good ones in drawers so she could look at them, and perhaps she made the others disappear into an attic or behind the shelves.’

  Beatriz had to laugh, because this made her recall the pile of papers into which she had jammed the letter from Oxford.

  Ana went on thinking aloud. ‘If they met through an advertisement, the newspaper or magazine where it appeared would have the address of our Rosenkavalier. If he was the one who placed the ad, he would have had to leave an address where they could send the replies.’ Ana took another lump of sugar. Her fourth. ‘But if he was the one who answered her ad, that complicates things,’ she added after putting the cube onto her spoon and letting it soak up coffee. The spoon and the sugar disappeared into her mouth. She closed her eyes for a moment.

  Beatriz observed her. She realised that she had come through: she had read the letters, as promised, and she had even given Ana a useful clue. Her part was done. Still, she asked her, ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

  She was disconcerted. She had given Ana a clue, she had a thread to pull on and still she didn’t have any idea as to how to proceed.

  Ana beamed at her.

  ‘But I’ll think of something.’

  Having contributed one of the pieces of the puzzle, Beatriz realised that she wanted to identify the other pieces. She asked her, ‘What magazines publish that type of advertisement?’

  ‘Mostly women’s magazines: ¡Hola!, Mujer Actual, Luna y sol, Astra…’ Ana thought for a moment. ‘Each one has a specific audience. An article for Mujer Actual is very different from one for ¡Hola! You have to look for other adjectives, adjust the length of the sentences, because you are addressing a different public. Women like Mariona usually read Mujer Actual, but perhaps she saw the ad in Luna y sol and answered it.’

  ‘Then, in my opinion, the best thing would be to check the back issues of the magazine you think is most likely.’

  She made a huge effort to suggest this in such a way that it
didn’t seem intrusive, but she couldn’t conceive of letting Ana leave without a concrete plan. Since she seemed rather interested, and certainly not put out or irritated, Beatriz carried on, ‘Taking into account the dates on the letters, you could assume that the period to look at would probably be the first two weeks in January, maybe the final week of December last year.’

  ‘When almost two years had passed since her husband’s death. It could be that Mariona Sobrerroca considered her mourning over.’

  ‘Could be. The letter describing their meeting is the third one, and it’s dated 29 January. The others are dated one and two weeks later respectively. I don’t have much experience in these matters, but I imagine that between the advertisement and the first meeting not more than three or four weeks passed.’

  Ana nodded.

  ‘Then we would have to look at those weeks before to see if any advertisement was published with the name Octavian or The Knight of the Rose.’

  At that point her cousin interrupted her. ‘He might have used another name. Young Lonely Heart, or something like that.’

  Ana picked up her coffee cup and immediately set it down again on the saucer. Beatriz thought that it must be empty. Ana said, ‘It could also be that Mariona was the one who placed the ad.’

  ‘It’s possible, but I would look first for Octavian or The Knight of the Rose. And I’d start with the magazine you think it’s most likely Mariona would read, and if you don’t find anything there, try the next one on the list, and so on.’

  She trailed off. Ana laughed. ‘OK! Understood. But your plan has a lot of “maybes” and “perhapses”.’

  ‘Of course; but many of those can be eliminated if you give your plan a thorough review.’

  ‘All right.’

  Ana didn’t sound enthusiastic, exactly, but Beatriz felt it was a solid working plan. It was true that if she started with the wrong magazine, the search would be a long one. And if she had bad luck, it would be in vain. But then at least she would know that this path didn’t lead anywhere, and she’d have to look for another one.