The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  With a rapid movement, Ana swiped her finger through the remains of the coffee and sugar at the bottom of the cup and licked it. ‘You know what? This plan of yours is pretty laborious, but I’ll think about it. First, I have to go to the newspaper office.’

  She smiled at her. She got up, took her by the shoulders and gave her a loud kiss on each cheek.

  ‘Thanks so much for all your help. You are amazing!’

  Beatriz didn’t know how to respond to such effusiveness. She picked up the packet of letters and held it before her with both hands as if it were a protective shield. ‘I could analyse them further, if you’d like.’

  ‘Do you think you can find out even more?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  The letters didn’t stop Ana from hugging her.

  ‘Be careful! You’re going to crease them.’

  ‘Sorry. I have to go. I have to hand in the article about Mariona’s funeral.’

  She grabbed her bag and coat and gave her a last quick peck on the cheek.

  Beatriz watched her leave. She wondered if Ana would get in touch with the magazines right away. Beatriz didn’t have the impression that she was planning to make a list of publications and check them one by one. But, really, it was none of her business. Was it?

  24

  The Knight of the Rose.

  She could imagine Mariona feeling like the Marschallin of Strauss’s great work, in love at fifty-three with a younger man like the lover in the opera. Was he as young as Strauss’s Octavian, who was seventeen?

  They had already seen, from the dates on the letters, that she had waited quite some time after her husband’s death before answering a ‘friendship’ ad. The guardians of the nation’s morality couldn’t be so innocent as to believe that such a thing existed as friendship between men and women. Or did they think those ‘gentlemen’ were making innocent dates to escort women to concerts of the Montserrat Boys’ Choir? Where had she got that part about the boys’ choir? She realised that the music from the radio had infiltrated her thoughts. The host had announced the musical interlude after saying something about the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress. She turned off the radio.

  A ‘friendship’ advert, a euphemism constructed with forced words to suggest honesty. Mariona saved any slip of paper that reminded her of moments in her life, even the most routine meeting of the Ladies of Charity; how was it possible she hadn’t saved that ad? In some well-protected place, because it was also somewhat shameful, but she wouldn’t have got rid of it. It was still in Mariona’s house.

  So, once again, she set off running out of her own house. She took the stairs two by two on the way down and three by three when she reached the first floor, because Teresina Sauret had just scrubbed them. She came face to face with her on the last flight, still on her knees on a foam pad.

  ‘Some people have great timing,’ complained the doorkeeper.

  ‘If you had got to the fourth floor, I would have realised and waited,’ she responded wickedly and with the poise that being up to date on the rent gave her.

  It was mean and she knew it, a retaliatory ‘money talks’ after having avoided her for several weeks, but her remorse lasted only as long as it took to come up with her plan on the way to the newspaper, the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier echoing in her head.

  She went straight to Sanvisens’s office. ‘Would you be interested in some photos of Mariona Sobrerroca’s house?’

  ‘Of course. Especially of the scene of the crime. Is there a possibility?’

  ‘Castro told me that I can go with him to see the house. If you lend me a camera.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to send a photographer?’

  ‘No. I don’t think they want any more journalists.’

  ‘All right. Do you know how to use one?’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘Then tell Ramoneda to lend you one. Don’t forget to put a film in it.’

  ‘Come on, boss!’

  She left the office in such a hurry that she hardly paid any attention to the last thing that Sanvisens told her: ‘Carlos is coming back on Monday, Tuesday at the latest.’

  Twenty minutes later, she turned up at Castro’s office.

  ‘I was expecting you this afternoon.’

  ‘We had a meeting at the paper, and my boss has asked me for some photos.’

  ‘You aren’t taking any photos of me, I can tell you that now.’

  ‘No, not of you. They would be photos of Señora Sobrerroca’s house, to go with the article.’

  ‘What article? There’s nothing new to report.’

  ‘Another point in my favour. A couple of photos, a brief description of the crime scene and, since it’s new information, people will be satisfied.’

  There it was. She’d played her bluff card. There was no turning back.

  The tightening that preceded one of the inspector’s rare smiles started to be visible on his face. He had unmasked her. Once again he had read what she hadn’t wanted to tell him.

  Or had he?

  The words that followed were spoken in an unequivocally admiring tone: ‘You would sell your own grandmother for a good article!’

  She gave him a flustered smile in return for his unflattering praise.

  Castro rose, opened the door to his office and called for Officer Sevilla. He pulled the door behind him. Castro and Sevilla’s voices were so muffled that she couldn’t make out what they were saying. At one point they almost disappeared. The inspector must be giving him instructions about her. She imagined that he was asking him not to take his eyes off her, and to be discreet, not tell her anything about the case. If only he were also asking him to be kind.

  It seemed he had told him not to speak to her. Sevilla barely said a word on the way there, just gave instructions in the form of orders: ‘Sit down, you can get out of the car now, follow me, it’s this way, go in.’ And when they were inside, ‘Don’t touch anything.’

  ‘Relax, I won’t.’

  To avoid raising the officer’s suspicions, she said out loud everything she was supposedly doing: ‘I am going to go through the house to get an overall idea. I’m not touching anything… I hope you don’t mind if I take some notes. I’m not touching anything… I’m just taking a look in that corner to see the details. I’m not touching anything.’

  She did everything slowly. Soon she found three places where Mariona Sobrerroca could have hidden the advertisement. Did she need to hide it? Of course, she had a maid. From the occasional dealings she’d had with her, she knew that Mariona was a bit of a romantic. Ana had met her husband. Jerónimo Garmendia was like his name, solid and dour; she couldn’t imagine him capable of outpourings of love or awakening any sort of passion. She imagined that, after being widowed, Mariona had given free rein to her desires. She had already seen several bookcases filled with romance novels. That was one of the possible hiding places. Another was the significant collection of records lined up underneath a very modern record player. The third was among the programmes from the Liceo Opera that Mariona kept perfectly in order on a sideboard in the parlour.

  Sevilla, bored, decided to go out into the garden to smoke a cigarette.

  ‘Don’t touch anything.’

  She pretended to be absorbed in her notes and didn’t look up as she replied, ‘Of course not.’

  The officer went out.

  Ana didn’t have time to look in all three places. Which should she choose? Mariona, so romantic… in love with a younger man… sporadic visits… days of waiting…

  Her first impulse was to go over to the novels. She read the titles, hoping that one of them would suggest that it hid what she was searching for; but from I’ll Wait for You For Ever to Spring in Autumn, any one of them could contain the advert. When you enter into the parallel dimension of allusion, every interpretation is possible. Even Sacrifice for Love could be the key. And there were so many novels! Sevilla would have to smoke his way through an entire packet of cigarette papers to give her time to br
owse all the books. She gave it up as an impossible task, and took it on trust that the books weren’t the hiding place. The waltz from Der Rosenkavalier played again in her head. On another shelf the opera programmes were lined up chronologically. When had they performed Strauss’s opera at the Liceo? She couldn’t remember. She really didn’t know and she didn’t have time.

  She went towards the records, getting on her knees to see them better. Thank you, wonderful alphabetical order! O, P, there was no Q, R, S. Strauss, Johann, Richard. Der Rosenkavalier. Mariona, enthralled, listening to the final tercet but, unlike the Marschallin, she didn’t have to renounce her young lover so he could go with someone younger. Mariona would listen to the tercet in triumph.

  Ana also felt triumphant. There it was! The clipping of the advertisement was carefully placed between two of the records.

  She heard the creak of the door to the terrace. She stuck the advert between the pages of her notebook before putting the record back. She wouldn’t have time to get up and move away from the record player, so she sat on the floor and pretended to be taking notes.

  ‘What are you doing on the floor?’

  ‘I didn’t want to sit on the chairs in case they still needed to dust for prints.’

  The officer seemed convinced.

  ‘Have you taken the photos?’

  ‘Not yet. I only need to jot down one thing and then I’m ready.’

  She photographed the room where the crime had taken place: the exact place where they had found Mariona’s body, her husband’s desk, also the skull, which was still missing an eye; someone had left it to one side.

  ‘What’s going to happen to the house?’

  ‘I think it will go to a nephew or a brother. I don’t know,’ replied Sevilla.

  Then, as if he regretted having given her any information, no matter how insignificant, he asked in a surly tone, ‘Have you finished now?’

  ‘I have.’

  They left the house.

  In the car, Ana wondered if she had put the record back in the right place, or if she had mixed it up with those by Johann Strauss. She assessed Officer Sevilla out of the corner of her eye and relaxed. They weren’t going to notice if she had.

  Reading the advertisement that had caught Mariona’s eye, Ana wavered between compassion and laughter, with a hint of embarrassment for the other woman in the mix: ‘A young heart, disillusioned by the fickleness of blossoming girls, unripe fruits who have filled him with remorse and darkness, seeks correspondence with an understanding lady leading to friendship. The Knight of the Rose.’

  The target of his words was clear: the protective instinct of the mature woman, a little past her prime, who would be willing to heal the wounds of the Knight of the Rose. If the reader of the advert was an opera fan, the promise of possible romance was more than evident behind the ‘friendship’. It was the perfect bait for Mariona Sobrerroca.

  For the first time she also voiced to herself a suspicion that she’d been turning over in her head since she had known about the advert. What if the ‘Knight of the Rose’ was a professional? Someone who specialised in extracting money and a lifestyle from older women? The idea made her feel a combination of aversion and sadness.

  The piece of paper, just a few centimetres square, was neatly cut out; on the back of the advert there were three lines of an incoherent text, almost random words, few of them useful; the articles and prepositions weren’t much help. But the two imperatives ‘make’, and ‘then make a sa’. A what? A sack, a saddle, a sandwich? A sauce!

  It was a recipe.

  Recipes, friendship advertisements. She thought of a few publications that the clipping could have come from. She had to get copies of each of them.

  Yet again, she hurried out of her flat. Just as she was congratulating herself for having avoided the doorkeeper’s usual commentary, she ran into her at the street door. Broom at the ready, like a brigadier, Teresina Sauret was keeping watch over the house. Her eyes swept the ten or twelve metres of pavement that she considered her territory, although the bustling pedestrians walking on it were oblivious to that fact. Ana uttered a brief greeting; too bad she didn’t wear a hat like men did, allowing them to resolve such matters with a simple touch of the brim. She heard Teresina’s reproving murmur and joined the flow of people to her right, heading towards the Ramblas.

  She bought all the women’s magazines she could find, even some like Medina, the magazine of the Falange’s Women’s Section, where it was highly unlikely they would accept such advertisements. But an investigation was an investigation.

  Back home, she started to search, with the advertisement she had found in Mariona’s house in front of her. This I’ll save for later, she told herself when she came across a feature story on Mario Cabré and Ava Gardner. It seemed they were having a romance. Some people have all the luck!

  She found a couple more articles she wanted to read ‘later’, and got lost for a few seconds gazing into Tyrone Power’s eyes, but she kept up her search. Until she found it, in Mujer Actual. The classified section had the same typography. Mujer Actual, a magazine with fashion, recipes, some practical tips for the home and feature stories on the entertainment world. Another one. Maybe the difference lay in what there wasn’t: she didn’t find any articles that touched on religion or morality, at least not explicitly. The classifieds filled an entire page. She was in luck; the magazine was produced in Barcelona.

  Ana had never been much of a planner. At least not in her writing – her best ideas always came to her while she was working. On the way to the newspaper office she had come up with the idea of taking photos in Mariona’s house. She would have to write some copy to accompany the photos, or she’d have to do some explaining to both Sanvisens and Castro. She would do that ‘later’, too. First, trusting that the strategy would come to her in a similar way, she decided to go to the magazine’s headquarters.

  She found herself on the Vía Augusta. She took the bus. On the way she tried to think how she could obtain the address where the replies to the ‘Knight of the Rose’ were being sent, but without knowing what the place was like or what kind of people she would find there, she felt unable to come up with a plan.

  The magazine’s offices were on the main floor of a stately building with a reception area.

  She went in. The receptionist looked up with his eyes but didn’t lift his head. The little novel he was reading seemed to have him completely captivated.

  ‘If you’re here about the job, you’re too late.’

  ‘What job?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter; even if you knew, it’s already taken.’

  ‘Well, all right. I’m visiting the magazine Mujer Actual.’

  ‘On the main floor. But the job’s taken.’

  ‘Fine, I understand.’

  ‘I don’t want them getting angry with me later for having sent another one up.’

  ‘Another what?’

  ‘Another one looking for work. It’s taken.’

  ‘I’m not looking for work. Can I go up?’

  ‘Nobody’s stopping you.’

  He said all this without looking at her, his eyes glued to the book Merciless Duel in Carson City. What a title!

  She went up to the first floor. A small bronze plaque screwed to a heavy dark door announced the offices of Mujer Actual. Nothing that could help her with a plan, the plan.

  Perhaps another less conspicuous, handwritten sign taped beside the doorbell would be helpful. During office hours, enter without ringing. She did.

  She entered a wide vestibule with an empty counter behind which there was a table with a typewriter, some pigeonholes for correspondence and issues of the magazine in neat piles. There was a sheet of paper in the typewriter. So the post had only been temporarily abandoned.

  To one side of the door she saw a rack where men’s and women’s coats hung. She heard voices and the sound of typewriters from behind the closed doors. From a hallway to the left, footsteps approached. They belo
nged to a man of about fifty, who greeted her with an angry expression.

  ‘That Cesáreo has a brain like a sieve! Another one! Didn’t he tell you that the cleaning lady job is taken? That guy lives on the moon, I’m going to have to talk to the owner…’

  ‘Yes, he did tell me,’ interrupted Ana.

  ‘Then what are you doing here? Aren’t you a cleaner?’

  ‘No. I’m a journalist, from La Vanguardia.’

  ‘Excuse me, pardon the confusion.’ The man was visibly embarrassed. ‘How can I help you?’

  A bad conscience is one of the most powerful motors behind human actions. She would think that later, on the bus home, seated beside a woman who was sniffling noisily, though she didn’t dare to offer her a handkerchief so as not to draw attention to it. That maxim clearly explained her strategy.

  But at the moment the man realised his mistake, Ana’s reaction was instinctive rather than planned: ‘A very delicate matter has come to our attention.’

  The man indicated that it would be better if they went into his office. His name was Joaquín Muñárriz, and he was the magazine’s director. When Ana entered his office the first thing she saw were the portraits of José Antonio and Franco hanging on the wall flanking a large wooden cross. The usual. But it was the first time she’d come across an exhibition of framed photos such as the one she saw on the right-hand wall. Muñárriz must already have been aware of the surprising effect it had because, although he offered her a seat, he escorted her towards the wall and gave her time to look, one by one, at the images that completely covered it. All of the photos were dedicated, from the ones of Lola Flores, Celia Gámez and Luis Miguel Dominguín, to those of Gary Cooper, ‘for my friend Joaquín’; Charles Boyer and Ava Gardner, ‘Kisses, kisses, kisses for Joaquín’. Ana’s eyes leapt from Antonio Machín to Cary Grant.

  ‘You are a man of the world. That makes it a bit easier for me to explain the situation to you,’ began Ana with her eyes still on Burt Lancaster’s clear gaze.

  The actor’s mocking half-smile approved of her deception.

  ‘Tell me.’

  They moved away from the photos and sat face to face at Muñárriz’s desk.