The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  Abel always turned up well groomed, with his white shirt well ironed, his trousers impeccable with a perfect crease and his shoes shined by the expert hands of the bootblack in the Plaza Real, so that she could ruffle his hair, unbutton him and wrinkle his clothes.

  He rang the bell and waited. Nothing. He rang again and put his ear to the door. He couldn’t make out any footsteps or sounds. Although he wasn’t wearing a watch, he was sure that it was the time they had agreed on. Mariona had left the wrought-iron gate open so she wouldn’t have to go out to the street to receive him. He waited a few seconds and pressed the bell again as he knocked, as if the buzz he could hear perfectly as he held the black button down needed the reinforcement of percussion.

  Again, silence.

  He could think of only one explanation: she had fallen asleep in the garden. That had happened once before; she had been sitting in her double swing seat with the satin cushions beneath the pergola and within minutes he saw her nodding off, victim to drowsiness, in a languid pose she surely imagined was very romantic.

  Abel smiled. Mariona was sometimes quite twee.

  And when she slept, she slept soundly. So banging on the door wasn’t going to do him any good; the only thing he’d achieve was to attract the attention of someone in the neighbouring houses.

  He pricked up his ears to make sure that no one was approaching the house. Then he pulled out a picklock he carried in his jacket pocket and, since it wasn’t locked with a key, he had the door open in less than a minute.

  He headed towards the terrace with sure steps, convinced he would find her asleep in some ridiculous pose on the swing. She wasn’t there; only the point lace cushions. One had fallen to the floor; he picked it up and tossed it back with the others. In case she was spying on him from the gallery, he corrected his gesture and plumped it up with feigned care. Then he turned with a smile. He was expecting Mariona’s blonde head, and he gave a slight start when he saw his own reflection in one of the panes of glass.

  This must be a new game.

  He started to move through the house with exaggerated slowness.

  ‘Mariona, where are you?’

  He repeated the question like children playing hide and seek, dragging out the ‘o’ of her name.

  ‘Mariona, it’ll do you no good, the wolf is going to find you and he’s going to eat you up.’

  He leapt into the bedroom. Empty. The bed was unmade, the coverlet hung crumpled over it, the mattress somewhat out of place. The doors to the wardrobe and drawers stood open. What had Mariona been doing?

  He went into the dressing room. Empty. Clothes and shoes lay strewn over the floor. What ensemble had she chosen that day?

  He went into the dining room. Also empty, like the maid’s room – it was her day off – and like the parlour, which he gave just a quick glance, and like the kitchen. There was only one room left. Her husband’s office. She kept it intact, like a sanctuary. Abel trembled with excitement as he opened the door.

  ‘This is what you want today, you naughty girl?’

  There lay Mariona. Pale, blonde, voluptuous… and dead.

  Fortunately, he had found what Mariona had hidden and what the person who’d killed her had surely been searching for. Mariona had kept it very well concealed. Once it was in his possession, he hid it even better, using a technique his brother had learned from his comrades in the resistance.

  That night, worn out from another day of erratic wandering, he took refuge in Mercedes’s bedroom. While she slept, drunk on absinthe, Abel wrote two letters. One he sent to La Vanguardia, to the attention of Señora Ana Martí. The other he put into the inner pocket of his suit jacket. He would send it after he’d spoken with the journalist.

  That was the most dangerous step. He was afraid. Over the course of the day, the apprehension brought on by the news of his alleged death had become fear. Now he felt those words like a latent threat. Abel Mendoza, presumed murderer, committed suicide by throwing himself into the Llobregat River. An icy wave travelled up his spine, and he felt the cold, dark waters closing around his body. You can’t dream of your own death, but you can imagine it as you lie trying to fall asleep. The body dragged downriver, battered by branches, nibbled by fish, wrapped in a cold blanket of water. He hugged Mercedes’s feverish body to keep from drowning in that image, and submerged himself in sleep.

  39

  It was almost ten thirty when the telephone rang in Mateo Sanvisens’s office.

  ‘Hello, Mateo. It’s Joaquín Grau.’

  Sanvisens unconsciously pushed his back up against the chair, as if he were on a mountain climb and searching out a solid wall to protect him.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I just want to know one thing. What are you playing at, Mateo? What? Tell me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

  A moment of silence hung at the other end of the line, the kind you hear in the mountains before a dry crunch announces an avalanche. It wasn’t a crunch, but rather a weary, irritated sigh that preceded Grau’s words.

  ‘Why is the article you published about the Sobrerroca case so lukewarm? Or did you think we wouldn’t realise, because you butter up the police and the public prosecutor?’

  ‘Realise what?’

  ‘Well. I can see that the situation is worse than I thought. I am speaking with the editor-in-chief of La Vanguardia?’

  Sanvisens wasn’t going to fall into the trap of answering. Grau realised that and continued speaking.

  ‘Supposedly every article goes through your hands before it’s published. Isn’t that right?’ Since he already knew that he wasn’t going to respond, Grau forced him to. ‘Isn’t that right? Answer me.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Then I have to infer that you don’t agree with the resolution of the Sobrerroca case either.’

  While Grau was speaking, Sanvisens had searched for a copy of the newspaper and opened it to the page with Ana’s article, being careful not to make a noise with the paper. As soon as his eyes fell on the first ‘according to the police version’, he knew what Grau was talking about.

  The day before he hadn’t been feeling very well. Digestive problems had given him an acute headache. For the third time that year, he hadn’t reviewed the articles. He had got away with it the first two times; this third one was going to cost him. He couldn’t let the authorities accuse him of questioning the job the police had done. Not again, like the time they cast doubt on the official version of the Carmen Broto murder. So he interrupted Grau to keep him from doing what he usually did: getting worked up into a fit of rage.

  ‘I overlooked it. I read the text too superficially. I admit that it was my mistake, and I apologise. What do you want us to do? Issue a correction?’

  Grau was slow to respond. Sanvisens waited with his back glued to the chair.

  ‘I accept your apology because I know you. A correction doesn’t seem to me to be the right solution. It calls too much attention to the article that’s already been published. What I want is another article. And I want it in the proper tone.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘That’s better. I want it tomorrow, and I also want you to make it clear to the author of the text that these slip-ups won’t be tolerated. Why do you send a woman to do these things?’

  It was a rhetorical question. Grau had been pacified by his concessions and was now going on about the importance of the press in the attainment of the Movement’s objectives. Sanvisens agreed just enough to make it clear that he had been listening to the five minutes of monologue.

  After hanging up, he sat for a moment, defeated. From his chair, he glanced sadly at the framed photos of mountains that covered the wall. Montblanc, Everest, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua. The best ones were outside of Spain. The highest, in Nepal. The most dangerous, Nanga Parbat, in Pakistan. The most beautiful, in Africa. ‘And we’re here.’

  Had he made a mistake about Ana Martí? She had quickly outgrown the
society pages, and ghostwriting for her colleagues had given her experience. He had thought that her ambition would be compensated for by her womanly compliance, that her eagerness to follow in the family profession would make her more reasonable, more pragmatic. She had made a mistake, but it was only a mistake in that place and time. In other circumstances, he would have sworn that she was a good journalist. No, he hadn’t made a mistake about Ana.

  Even so, he had to punish her. In order to protect her.

  Half an hour later, Sanvisens glimpsed a burst of colour. A deep red jacket. Ana had just arrived. He rose, stepped out of his office and called to her.

  ‘Ana, can you come here for a minute?’

  40

  If there is such a thing as a time machine, it exists in words, she thought. Ana, can you come here for a minute? Her boss’s voice transported her with dizzying speed back to her childhood, when her parents would ask her that same question, almost always when she was about to get a scolding.

  She didn’t have time to take off her jacket. She crossed the typewriter-filled room and went into Sanvisens’s office.

  ‘Close the door. Sit down.’

  She remembered having sat on that side of the same desk after an ‘Ana, can you come here for a minute?’ when it was still her father’s. She was very young, and sometimes he would bring her to the newspaper. What age was she then? Six, seven? What had she done that time? Didn’t matter. That was before.

  Sanvisens immediately explained his crestfallen expression. ‘I got a call from the public prosecutor, from Grau. About your article. Not so much about the content, but about the tone.’

  Ana already knew what her boss wanted to tell her, but she let him repeat his conversation with Grau; otherwise she would have been admitting that she had done it on purpose, which she ended up doing anyway when he asked her, ‘Why did you put in that layer of distance?’

  ‘Because I’m not sure I believe what the police are saying.’

  ‘What reasons do you have for that?’

  Since she was already on the subject, she explained to him how she’d decided to consult with her cousin Beatriz about the letters and, despite the growing disapproval she saw in Sanvisens’s face, she also told him that they had travelled to Martorell together. Here she left out the visit to the Bar Pastís, instead highlighting that the police owed the discovery of the connection between Abel Mendoza, his love letters and Mariona Sobrerroca to her and her cousin. Finally, she reached Beatriz’s latest discovery, and confessed that it had made her doubtful.

  At that point her boss began to shake his head.

  ‘You should have kept it to yourself.’

  ‘Why? The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the police have left loose ends. And that gives rise to doubts. Reasonable doubts.’

  She was repeating Beatriz’s words.

  ‘That’s their job. Investigating in Martorell was their job too. Interfering was a mistake.’

  ‘Even if I were to give you that point, at least you can admit that I have a right to express my scepticism.’

  The word ‘right’ caused Sanvisens to wince. ‘Scepticism’ made it worse.

  ‘Another mistake.’

  ‘But our job is to tell the truth.’

  ‘It used to be, Ana, it used to be.’

  ‘So what are we doing here?’

  ‘Don’t act the innocent with me. I’m not buying it. What are we doing? We’re doing what we can.’

  ‘What they let us do, you mean.’

  ‘If you want to hear it that clearly stated, yes, what they let us do.’

  Ana bowed her head and bit her lower lip. Sanvisens got up, went around the desk and rested his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘That’s just the way it is. Take it or leave it. We aren’t in a position to negotiate.’

  She certainly wasn’t. A woman, and a rookie. As soon as she was married, if she married, her husband could forbid her from working. No, she wasn’t in any position to demand, or even expect, anything. So she just asked, ‘And now?’

  Sanvisens seemed relieved to move on to something less delicate and talk about action.

  ‘Now we have to do two things: first, you have to write a proper, unequivocal article, for tomorrow…’

  ‘Proper?’

  ‘Don’t start, Ana. And tonight you are going to put on your best dress and you’re going to go to the Italian consulate. Today they are introducing the new consul and there is a reception.’

  ‘A society piece? But…’

  ‘But what? Can’t you see that I’m helping you?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ana, trying to sound as if she meant it.

  41

  At eight in the evening, walking up to the first floor of the modest palazzo that was home to the Italian consulate, Ana felt out of place. Not because her dress was second-hand, a gift from one of her rich cousins. And not because her high-heeled shoes had already visited the local ‘while you wait’ shop, and certainly not because her earrings were the ones she always wore, the only ones she owned. It was because she was entering the hall lit by sumptuous Venetian glass chandeliers as a crime reporter, and not as a society columnist.

  Even so, before going in, she pasted on a wide smile that soon found its reflection in a familiar face, Conchita Comamala.

  ‘Aneta Martí!’

  The woman’s strange habit of always calling her by that name restored a certain order to her thoughts. Aneta Martí, society; Ana Martí Noguer, crime. Two names for a double life that still couldn’t erase the displeasure Sanvisens had caused her by sending her to cover the event. No, finding names for her two characters didn’t disguise the bitter taste of punishment in the assignment, but it gave her the courage to face up to it. She began to pay attention to the clothes the guests were wearing.

  Conchita Comamala wore a tailored sky-blue satin dress, which opened into a sweeping floor-length skirt; her dark hair was swept up in a chignon that revealed her neck, from which hung a platinum and diamond choker. She gripped Ana’s arm with a gloved hand, as if taking possession of her.

  Ana was surprised by the gesture of familiarity and, searching for something to say, she pointed to her dress and ventured, ‘Balenciaga?’

  ‘Your incursion into the underworld hasn’t clouded your keen eye.’

  ‘Mariona Sobrerroca didn’t exactly belong to the underworld.’

  ‘She didn’t, no, for God’s sake. But those policemen… and the killer, a brute from Martorell…’

  Comamala led her into the main salon. It seemed that all of Barcelona society was there that night, squeezed into the embassy’s three reception halls. Even though the balcony doors were open, she already noted a faint aroma of sweat mixed with various ladies’ perfumes. On a platform to the left of the room, a small string orchestra played, too timidly, fragments of Italian baroque pieces, adagios and largos. No vivace that could interrupt conversations.

  Several heads turned as she passed. Ana understood that she was a coveted person, the object of morbid curiosity about her experiences in the ‘underworld’, where policemen and criminals mingled in the mind, and not only of Conchita Comamala.

  Finally they reached a pedestal table that held a sculpture of two mythological figures whose carefree eroticism had made it a talking point for a group of women.

  ‘We’ll have to ask the consul to put it somewhere else. This hall is used for the celebration of public acts,’ one of them said vehemently.

  Other voices seconded her half-heartedly. The five women stared at the faun’s hands on the nymph’s body and tried to imagine what was happening in the parts the sculptor hadn’t made visible.

  Conchita Comamala and Ana arrived as their displays of moral indignation were reaching a climax.

  The youngest of the women was the one who seemed most bothered. Ana had seen her before. She was Dolores Antich, the wife of Fernando Sánchez-Herranz. Just then she addressed Isabel Mira, appealing to her in her role as a patron of the
arts and president of several foundations: ‘You have to talk to those degenerate Italians; it’s hard to believe their capital is the home of the Pope.’

  ‘Of course, Dolores. I will convey our indignation and I will ask them, kindly but firmly, to remove that indecent little statue from view.’

  Ana’s appearance shifted the attention of the small group of women who, rather than focusing on what was going on between the nymph’s legs, were now more interested in knowing what had happened between Mariona’s.

  ‘Is it true he was a swindler?’

  ‘A widow scammer?’ said the widow of Solsona, earning herself a couple of suspicious looks.

  ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘Did they take you to see the body?’

  ‘Whose? Mariona’s or the killer’s?’ asked Ana. She was starting to enjoy the attention. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad night after all.

  ‘Mariona’s,’ said one of the women.

  ‘No, the killer’s,’ corrected another.

  ‘Is it true he was black?’

  ‘Where did you get the idea that he was black?’ interjected Comamala.

  Ana smiled as the spiral of conjectures became more and more absurd. But she kept quiet, not even nodding or shaking her head. She knew that any information she gave them would give rise to new speculations that would have her name attached to them; so she kept quiet and smiled enigmatically.

  ‘Very young is what he was, that’s why Mariona was looking so well,’ declared Comamala.

  ‘What’s it like, working with the police?’

  ‘It must be unpleasant, dear girl, just thinking of the lout who was with you…’ declared Isabel Mira.

  ‘Did you notice his suit?’ said Comamala. ‘His tailor hates him.’