Fermín served him a cup of the concoction he kept in a thermos. It gave out an odor suspiciously like sherry.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
Tomás shrugged. “Nothing new. My father is having one of his days, and I thought it best to get out and breathe some fresh air for a while.”
I gulped. “Why’s that?”
“Goodness knows. Last night my sister, Bea, arrived very late. My father was waiting up for her, a bit worked up as usual. She refused to say where she’d been or who she’d been with, and my father flew into a rage. He was screaming and yelling until four o’clock in the morning, calling her all sorts of names, a tart being the least of them. He swore he was going to send her to a nunnery and said that if she ever came back pregnant, he was going to kick her out into the goddamn street.”
Fermín threw me a look of alarm. The beads of sweat already running down my back grew colder.
“This morning,” Tomás continued, “Bea locked herself up in her room, and she hasn’t come out all day. My father has plonked himself in the dining room to read his newspaper and listen to operettas on the radio, full blast. During the intermission ofLuisa Fernanda, I had to go out because I was going crazy.”
“Well, your sister was probably out with her fiancé, don’t you think?” Fermín needled. “It would be perfectly natural.”
I gave Fermín a kick under the counter, which he avoided with feline dexterity.
“Her fiancé is doing his military service,” Tomás said. “He doesn’t come back on leave for another two weeks. Besides, when she goes out with him, she’s home by eight at the latest.”
“And you have no idea where she was or who she was with?”
“He’s already told you he doesn’t, Fermín,” I intervened, anxious to change the subject.
“Nor your father?” insisted Fermín, who was thoroughly enjoying himself.
“No. But he’s sworn he’ll find out and he’ll break his legs and his face as soon as he knows who it is.”
I felt myself going deathly pale. Fermín offered me a cup of his concoction without asking. I drank it down in one gulp. It tasted like tepid diesel fuel. Tomás watched me but said nothing—a dark, impenetrable look.
“Did you hear that?” Fermín suddenly said. “Sounded like a drumroll for a somersault.”
“No.”
“Yours truly’s rumblings. Look, I’m suddenly terribly hungry…. Do you mind if I leave you two alone and run up to the baker’s to grab myself a bun? Not to mention the new shop assistant who’s just arrived from Reus: she looks so tasty you could eat her. She’s called María Virtudes, but despite her name the girl is pure vice…. That way I’ll leave you two to talk about your things, eh?”
In ten seconds Fermín had done a disappearing act, off for his snack and his meeting with the young woman. Tomás and I were left alone, enveloped in a silence as weighty as the Swiss franc. After several minutes I could no longer bear it.
“Tomás,” I began, my mouth dry. “Last night your sister was with me.”
He stared at me without even blinking.
I swallowed hard. “Say something,” I said.
“You’re not right in the head.”
A minute went by, with muffled sounds coming in from the street. Tomás held his coffee, which he had not touched.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“I’ve seen her only once.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Would you mind?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “You’d better know what you’re doing. Would you stop seeing her just because I asked you to?”
“Yes,” I lied. “But don’t ask me to.”
Tomás looked down. “You don’t know Bea,” he murmured.
I didn’t reply. We let another few minutes go by without saying a word, looking at the gray figures that scanned the shop window, praying that one of them would decide to come in and rescue us from our poisoned silence. After a while Tomás abandoned his cup on the counter and made his way to the door.
“You’re leaving already?”
He nodded.
“Shall we meet up tomorrow for a while?” I said. “We could go to the cinema, with Fermín, like before.”
He stopped by the door. “I’ll tell you only once, Daniel. Don’t hurt my sister.”
On his way out, he passed Fermín, who was returning laden with a bag full of steaming-hot buns. Fermín saw him go off into the dusk, shaking his head. He left the buns on the counter and offered me anensaimada just out of the oven. I declined. I wouldn’t have been able to swallow even an aspirin.
“He’ll get over it, Daniel. You’ll see. These things are common between friends.”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
·24·
FERMÍN AND I MET ON SUNDAY AT SEVEN-THIRTY IN THE MORNING at the Canaletas Café. Fermín treated me to a coffee and brioches whose texture, even with butter spread on them, bore some resemblance to pumice stone. We were served by a waiter who sported a fascist badge on his lapel and a pencil mustache. He didn’t stop humming to himself, and when we asked him the reason for his excellent mood, he explained that he’d become a father the day before. We congratulated him, and he insisted on giving us each a cigar to smoke during the day in honor of his firstborn. We said we would. Fermín kept looking at him out of the corner of his eye, frowning, and I suspected he was plotting something.
Over breakfast Fermín kicked off the day’s investigations with a general outline of the mystery.
“It all begins with the sincere friendship between two boys, Julián Carax and Jorge Aldaya, classmates since early childhood, like Don Tomás and yourself. For years all is well. Inseparable friends with a whole life before them, the works. And yet at some point a conflict arises that ruins this friendship. To paraphrase some drawing-room dramatists, the conflict bears a woman’s name: Penélope. Very Homeric. Do you follow me?”
The only thing that came to my mind was the last sentence spoken by Tomás the previous evening in the bookshop: “Don’t hurt my sister.” I felt nauseous.
“In 1919, Julián Carax sets off for Paris, Odysseus-fashion,” Fermín continued. “The letter, signed by Penélope, which he never receives, establishes that by then the young woman has been incarcerated in her own house, a prisoner of her family for reasons that are unclear, and that the friendship between Aldaya and Carax has ended. Moreover, according to Penélope, her brother, Jorge, has sworn that if he ever sees his old friend Julián again, he’ll kill him. Grim words to mark the end of a friendship. One doesn’t have to be Pasteur to deduce that the conflict is a direct consequence of the relationship between Penélope and Carax.”
A cold sweat covered my forehead. I could feel the coffee and the few mouthfuls of brioche I’d swallowed rising up my throat.
“All the same, we must assume that Carax never gets to know what happened to Penélope, because the letter doesn’t reach him. He vanishes from our sight into the mists of Paris, where he will lead a ghostly existence between his job as a pianist in a variety club and his disastrous career as a remarkably unsuccessful novelist. These years in Paris are a puzzle. All that remains of them today is a forgotten literary work that has virtually disappeared. We know that at some point he decides to marry a mysterious rich lady who is twice his age. The nature of such a marriage, if we are to go by what the witnesses say, seems more of an act of charity or friendship on behalf of an ailing lady than a love match. Whichever way you look at it, this patron of the arts, fearing for the financial future of her protégé, decides to leave him her fortune and bid farewell to this world with a roll in the hay to further her noble cause. Parisians are like that.”
“Perhaps it was a genuine love,” I suggested, in a tiny voice.
“Hey, Daniel, are you all right? You’re looking very pale, and you’re perspiring terribly.”
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“As I was saying. Love is a lot like pork: there�
��s loin steak and there’s bologna. Each has its own place and function. Carax had declared that he didn’t feel worthy of any love, and indeed, as I far as we know, no romances were recorded during his years in Paris. Of course, working in a bordello, perhaps his basic instinctive urges were satisfied by fraternizing with the employees of the firm, as if it were a perk of the job, so to speak. But this is pure speculation. Let us return to the moment when the marriage between Carax and his protectress is announced. That is when Jorge Aldaya reappears on the map of this murky business. We know he makes contact with Carax’s publisher in Barcelona to find out the whereabouts of the novelist. Shortly after, on the morning of his wedding day, Julián Carax fights a duel with an unknown person in Père Lachaise cemetery, and disappears. The wedding never takes place. From then on, everything becomes confused.”
Fermín allowed for a dramatic pause, giving me his conspiratorial look. “Supposedly Carax crosses the border and, with yet another show of his proverbial sense of timing, returns to Barcelona in 1936 at the very outbreak of the Civil War. His activities and whereabouts in Barcelona during these weeks are hazy. We suppose he stays in the city for about a month and that during this time he doesn’t contact any of his acquaintances. Neither his father nor his friend Nuria Monfort. Then he is found dead in the street, struck down by a bullet. It is not long before a sinister character makes his appearance on the scene. He calls himself Laín Coubert—a name he borrows from the last novel by Julián Carax—who, to cap it all, is none other than the Prince of Darkness. The supposed Lucifer states that he is prepared to obliterate what little is left of Carax and destroy his books forever. To round off the melodrama, he appears as a faceless man, disfigured by fire. A rogue from a gothic operetta in whom, just to confuse matters more, Nuria Monfort believes she recognizes the voice of Jorge Aldaya.”
“Let me remind you that Nuria Monfort lied to me,” I said.
“True. But even if Nuria Monfort lied to you, she might have done it more by omission and perhaps to disassociate herself from the facts. There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite. Listen, are you sure you’re all right? Your face is the color of goat cheese.”
I shook my head and dashed to the toilet.
I threw up my breakfast, my dinner, and a good amount of the anger I was carrying with me. I washed my face with freezing water from the sink and looked at my reflection in the blurry mirror on which someone had scrawled SHITHEAD FASCISTS with a wax crayon. When I got back to the table, I realized that Fermín was at the bar, paying the bill and discussing football with the waiter who had served us.
“Better?” he asked.
I nodded.
“That was a drop in your blood pressure,” said Fermín. “Here. Have a Sugus candy, they cure everything.”
On the way out of the café, Fermín insisted that we should take a taxi as far as San Gabriel’s School and leave the subway for another day, arguing that the morning was as bright as a political mural and that tunnels were for rats.
“A taxi up to Sarriá will cost a fortune,” I protested.
“The ride’s on the Cretins’ Savings Bank,” Fermín put in quickly. “The proud patriot back there gave me the wrong change, and we’re in business. And you’re not up to traveling underground.”
Equipped with ill-gotten funds, we positioned ourselves on a corner at the foot of Rambla de Cataluña and waited for a cab. We had to let a few go by, because Fermín stated that, since he so rarely traveled by car, he wanted to get into a Studebaker at the very least. It took us a quarter of an hour to find a vehicle to his liking, which Fermín hailed by waving his arms about like a windmill. Fermín insisted on traveling in the front seat, which gave him the chance to get involved in a discussion with the driver about Joseph Stalin, who was the taxi driver’s idol and distant spiritual guide.
“There have been three great figures in this century: La Pasionaria, bullfighter extraordinaire Manolete, and Joseph Stalin,” the driver proclaimed, getting ready to unload upon us a life of the saintly comrade.
I was riding comfortably in the backseat, paying little attention to the tedious speech, with the window open and enjoying the fresh air. Delighted to be driving around in a Studebaker, Fermín encouraged the cabdriver’s chatter, occasionally punctuating his emotive biography of the Soviet leader with matters of doubtful historic interest.
“I’ve heard he’s been suffering badly from prostate trouble ever since he swallowed the pip of a loquat, and now he can only pee if someone hums ‘The Internationale’ for him,” he put in.
“Fascist propaganda,” the taxi driver explained, more devout than ever. “The comrade pees like a bull. The Volga might envy such a flow.”
This high-level political debate accompanied us as we made our way along Vía Augusta toward the hills. Day was breaking, and a fresh breeze gave the sky an intense blue. When we reached Calle Ganduxer, the driver turned right, and we began the slow ascent toward Paseo de la Bonanova.
San Gabriel’s School, its redbrick façade dotted with dagger-shaped windows, stood in the middle of a grove, at the top of a narrow, winding street that led up from the boulevard. The whole structure was crowned by arches and towers, and peered over a group of plane trees like a Gothic cathedral. We got out of the taxi and entered a leafy garden strewn with fountains that were adorned with mold-covered angels. Here and there cobbled paths meandered among the trees. On our way to the main door, Fermín gave me the background on the institution.
“Even though it may look to you like Rasputin’s mausoleum, San Gabriel’s School was, in its day, one of the most prestigious and exclusive institutions in Barcelona. During the Republic it went downhill because the nouveaux riches of the time, the new industrialists and bankers to whose children it had for years refused access because their surnames smelled too new, decided to create their own schools, where they would be treated with due reverence and where they, in turn, could refuse access to the sons of others. Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood. In this world a surname is less lasting than a sugared almond. In its heyday—say, between 1880 and 1930, more or less—San Gabriel’s School took in the flower of old, established families with bulging wallets. The Aldayas and company came to this sinister establishment as boarders, to fraternize with their equals, go to mass, and learn their history in order to be able to repeat it ad nauseam.”
“But Julián Carax wasn’t precisely one of them,” I observed.
“Sometimes these illustrious institutions offer a scholarship or two for the sons of the gardener or the shoeshine man, just to show their magnanimity and Christian charity,” Fermín proffered. “The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich. That is the poison with which capitalism blinds the—”
“Please don’t get carried away with social doctrine, Fermín. If one of these priests hears you, they’ll kick us out of here.” I realized that a couple of padres were watching us with a mixture of curiosity and concern from the top of the steps that led up to the front door of the school. I wondered whether they’d heard any of our conversation.
One of them moved forward with a courteous smile, his hands crossed over his chest like a bishop. He must have been in his early fifties, and his build and sparse hair lent him the air of a bird of prey. He had a penetrating gaze and gave off an aroma of fresh eau de cologne and mothballs.
“Good morning. I’m Father Fernando Ramos,” he announced. “How can I help you?”
Fermín held out his hand. The priest examined it briefly before shaking it, shielded by his icy smile.
“Fermín Romero de Torres, bibliographic adviser to Sempere and Son. It is an enormous pleasure to greet Your Most Devout Excellency. Here, at my side, my collaborator and friend, Daniel, a young man of promise and much-recognized Christian qualities.”
Father Fernando observed us without blinking. I
wanted the earth to swallow me.
“The pleasure is all mine, Mr. Romero de Torres,” he replied amicably. “May I ask what brings such a formidable duo to our humble institution?”
I decided to intervene before Fermín made some other outrageous comment and we had to make a quick exit. “Father Fernando, we’re trying to locate two alumni from San Gabriel’s School: Jorge Aldaya and Julián Carax.”
Father Fernando pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. “Julián died over fifteen years ago, and Aldaya went off to Argentina,” he said dryly.
“Did you know them?” asked Fermín.
The priest’s sharp gaze rested on each of us before he answered. “We were classmates. May I ask what your interest is in this matter?”
I was wondering how to answer the question, but Fermín beat me to it. “You see, it so happens that we have in our possession a number of articles that belong or belonged—for on this particular the legal interpretation leads to confusion—to the two persons in question.”
“And what is the nature of these articles, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I beg Your Grace to accept our silence, for God knows there are abundant reasons of conscience and secrecy that have nothing to do with the unquestioning faith Your Excellency merits, as does the order which you represent with such measure of gallantry and piety,” Fermín spewed out at great speed.
Father Fernando appeared to be almost in shock. I decided to take up the conversation again before Fermín had time to get his breath back.
“The articles Mr. Romero de Torres is referring to are of a personal nature, mementos and objects of purely sentimental value. What we would like to ask you, Father, if this isn’t too much trouble, is to tell us what you remember about Julián and Aldaya from your days as schoolboys.”
Father Fernando was still looking at us suspiciously. It became obvious to me that the explanations we’d given him were not enough to justify our interest and earn us his collaboration. I threw a look of desperation at Fermín, begging him to find some cunning argument with which to win over the priest.
The Shadow of the Wind Page 20