I began to dress like a pious widow or one of those women who seem to confuse sunlight with mortal sin. I went to work with my hair drawn back into a bun and no makeup. Despite my tactics, Sanmartí continued to shower me with lascivious remarks accompanied by his oily, putrid smile. It was a smile full of disdain, typical of self-important jerks who hang like stuffed sausages from the top of all corporate ladders. I had two or three interviews for prospective jobs elsewhere, but sooner or later I would come up against another version of Sanmartí. They grew like a plague of fungi, thriving on the dung on which companies are built. One of them took the trouble to phone Sanmartí and tell him that Nuria Monfort was looking for work behind his back. Sanmartí summoned me to his office, wounded by my ingratitude. He put his hand on my cheek and tried to stroke it. His fingers smelled of tobacco and stale sweat. I went deathly pale.
“Come on, if you’re not happy, all you have to do is tell me. What can I do to improve your work conditions? You know how much I appreciate you, and it hurts me to hear from others that you want to leave us. How about going out to dinner, you and me, to make up?”
I removed his hand from my face, unable to go on hiding the repugnance it caused me.
“You disappoint me, Nuria. I have to admit that I don’t see a team player in you, that you don’t seem to believe in this company’s business objectives anymore.”
Mercedes had already warned me that sooner or later something like this would happen. A few days afterward, Sanmartí, whose grammar was no better than an ape’s, started returning all the manuscripts that I corrected, alleging that they were full of errors. Practically every day I stayed on in the office until ten or eleven at night, endlessly redoing pages and pages with Sanmartí’s crossings-out and comments.
“Too many verbs in the past tense. It sounds dead, lifeless…. The infinitive should not be used after a semicolon. Everyone knows that….”
Some nights Sanmartí would also stay until late, secluded in his study. Mercedes tried to be there, but more than once he sent her home. Then, when we were left alone in the premises, he would come out of his office and wander up to my desk.
“You work too hard, Nuria. Work isn’t everything. One must also enjoy oneself. And you’re still young. But youth passes, you know, and we don’t always know how to make the most of it.”
He would sit on the edge of my table and stare at me. Sometimes he would stand behind me and remain there a couple of minutes. I could feel his foul breath on my hair. Other times he placed his hands on my shoulders.
“You’re tense. Relax.”
I trembled, I wanted to scream or run away and never return to that office, but I needed the job and its miserly pay. One night Sanmartí started on his routine massage and then he began to fondle me.
“One of these days you’re going to make me lose my head,” he moaned.
I leaped up, breaking free from his grasp, and ran toward the exit, dragging my coat and bag. Behind me, Sanmartí laughed. At the bottom of the staircase, I ran straight into a dark figure.
“What a pleasant surprise, Mrs. Moliner….”
Inspector Fumero gave me one of his snakelike smiles. “Don’t tell me you’re working for my good friend Sanmartí! Lucky girl. Just like me, he’s at the top of his game. So tell me, how’s your husband?”
I knew that my time was up. On the following day, a rumor spread around the office that Nuria Monfort was a dyke—since she remained immune to Don Pedro Sanmartí’s charms and his garlic breath—and that she was involved with Mercedes Pietro. More than one promising young man in the company swore that on a number of occasions he had seen that “couple of sluts” kissing in the filing room. That afternoon, on her way out, Mercedes asked me whether she could have a quick word with me. She could barely bring herself to look at me. We went to the corner café without exchanging a single word. There Mercedes told me what Sanmartí had told her: that he didn’t approve of our friendship, that the police had supplied him with a report on me, detailing my suspected communist past.
“I can’t afford to lose this job, Nuria. I need it to take care of my son….”
She broke down crying, burning with shame and humiliation.
“Don’t worry, Mercedes. I understand,” I said.
“This man, Fumero, he’s after you, Nuria. I don’t know what he has against you, but it shows in his face….”
“I know.”
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, WHEN I ARRIVED AT WORK, I FOUND A skinny man with greased-back hair sitting at my desk. He introduced himself as Salvador Benades, the new copyeditor.
“And who are you?”
Not a single person in the office dared look at me or speak to me while I collected my things. On my way down the stairs, Mercedes ran after me and handed me an envelope with a wad of banknotes and some coins.
“Nearly everyone has contributed with whatever they could. Take it, please. Not for your sake, for ours.”
That night I went to the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio. Julián was waiting for me as usual, sitting in the dark. He’d written a poem for me, he said. It was the first thing he’d written in nine years. I wanted to read it, but I broke down in his arms. I told him everything, because I couldn’t hold back any longer. Julián listened to me without speaking, holding me and stroking my hair. It was the first time in years that I felt I could lean on him. I wanted to kiss him because I was sick with loneliness, but Julián had no lips or skin to offer me. I fell asleep in his arms, curled up on the bed in his room, a child’s bunk. When I woke up, Julián wasn’t there. At dawn I heard his footsteps on the roof terrace and pretended I was still asleep. Later that morning I heard the news on the radio without realizing its significance. A body had been found sitting on a bench on Paseo del Borne. The dead man had his hands crossed over his lap and was staring at the basilica of Santa María del Mar. A flock of pigeons pecking at his eyes caught the attention of a local resident, who alerted the police. The corpse had its neck broken. Mrs. Sanmartí identified it as her husband, Pedro Sanmartí Monegal. When the father-in-law of the deceased heard the news in his Bañolas nursing home, he gave thanks to heaven and told himself he could now die in peace.
·13·
JULIÁN ONCE WROTE THAT COINCIDENCES ARE THE SCARS OF FATE.
There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires. For years I had wanted to believe that Julián was still the man I had fallen in love with, or what was left of him. I had wanted to believe that we would manage to keep going with sporadic bursts of misery and hope. I had wanted to believe that Laín Coubert had died and returned to the pages of a book. We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.
Sanmartí’s murder opened my eyes. I realized that Laín Coubert was still alive, residing within Julián’s burned body and feeding on his memory. He had found out how to get in and out of the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio through a window that gave onto the inner courtyard, without having to force open the door I locked every time I left him there. I discovered that Laín Coubert, impersonating Julián, had been roaming through the city and visiting the old Aldaya mansion. I discovered that in his madness he had returned to the crypt and had broken the tombstones, that he had taken out the coffins of Penélope and his son. What have you done, Julián?
The police were waiting for me when I returned home, to interrogate me about the death of Sanmartí, the publisher. They took me to their headquarters, where, after five hours of waiting in a dark office, Fumero arrived, dressed in black, and offered me a cigarette.
“You and I could be good friends, Mrs. Moliner. My men tell me your husband isn’t home.”
“My husband left me. I don’t know where he is.”
He knocked me off the chair with a brutal slap in the face. I crawled into a corner, seized by fear. I didn’t dare look up. Fumero knelt beside me and grabbed me by my hair.
“Try to understand this, you fucking whore: I’m going to find him, and when I do, I’l
l kill you both. You first, so he can see you with your guts hanging out. And then him, once I’ve told him that the other tart he sent to the grave was his sister.”
“He’ll kill you first, you son of a bitch.”
Fumero spit in my face and let me go. I thought he was going to beat me up, but I heard his steps as he walked away down the corridor. I rose to my feet, trembling, and wiped the blood off my face. I could smell that man’s hand on my skin, but this time I recognized the stench of fear.
They kept me in that room, in the dark and with no water, for six hours. Night had fallen when they let me out. It was raining hard and the streets shimmered with steamy heat. When I got home, I found a sea of debris. Fumero’s men had been there. Among the fallen furniture and the drawers and bookshelves thrown on the floor, I saw my clothes all torn to shreds and Miquel’s books destroyed. On my bed I found a pile of feces and on the wall, written with excrement, I read the word WHORE.
I ran to the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio, making a thousand detours and ensuring that none of Fumero’s henchmen had followed me to the door on Calle Joaquín Costa. I crossed the roof terraces—they were flooded with the rain—and saw that the front door of the apartment was still locked. I went in cautiously, but the echo of my footsteps told me it was empty. Julián was not there. I waited for him, sitting in the dark dining room, listening to the storm, until dawn. When the morning mist licked the balcony shutters, I went up to the roof terrace and gazed at the city, crushed under a leaden sky. I knew that Julián would not return there. I had already lost him forever.
I saw him again two months later. I had gone into a cinema at night, alone, feeling incapable of returning to my cold, empty apartment. Halfway through the film, some stupid romance between a Romanian princess eager for adventure and a handsome American reporter immune to untidy hair, a man sat down next to me. It wasn’t the first time. In those days cinemas were crawling with anonymous men who reeked of loneliness, urine, and eau de cologne, wielding their sweaty, trembling hands like tongues of dead flesh. I was about to get up and warn the usher when I recognized Julián’s wrinkled profile. He gripped my hand tightly, and we remained like that, looking at the screen without seeing it.
“Did you kill Sanmartí?” I murmured.
“Does anyone miss him?”
We spoke in whispers, under the attentive gaze of the solitary men who were dotted around the orchestra, green with envy at the apparent success of their shadowy rival. I asked him where he’d been hiding, but he didn’t reply.
“There’s another copy of The Shadow of the Wind,” he murmured. “Here, in Barcelona.”
“You’re wrong, Julián. You destroyed them all.”
“All but one. It seems that someone more clever than I am hid it in a place where I would never be able to find it. You.”
That’s how I first came to hear about you, Daniel. Some bigmouthed bookseller called Gustavo Barceló had been boasting to a group of collectors about having located a copy of The Shadow of the Wind. The world of rare books is like an echo chamber. In less than two months, Barceló was receiving offers for the book from collectors in London, Paris, and Rome. Julián’s mysterious flight from Paris after a bloody duel and his rumored death in the Spanish Civil War had conferred on his works an undreamed-of market value. The black legend of a faceless individual who searched for them in every bookshop, library, and private collection and then burned them only added to the interest and the price. “We have the circus in our blood,” Barceló would say.
Julián, who continued to pursue the shadow of his own words, soon picked up the rumor. This is how he learned that Gustavo Barceló didn’t have the book: apparently the copy belonged to a boy who had discovered it by chance and who, fascinated by the novel and its mysterious author, refused to sell it and guarded it as his most precious possession. That boy was you, Daniel.
“For heaven’s sake, Julián, don’t say you’re going to harm a child…” I whispered, not quite sure of his intentions.
Julián then told me that all the books he’d stolen and destroyed had been snatched from people who felt nothing for them, from people who just did business with them or kept them as curiosities. Because you refused to sell the book at any price and tried to rescue Carax from the recesses of the past, you awoke a strange sympathy in him, and even respect. Unbeknownst to you, Julián observed you and studied you.
“Perhaps, if he ever discovers who I am and what I am, he, too, will decide to burn the book.”
Julián spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
“Who is this boy?”
“His name is Daniel. He’s the son of a bookseller whose shop, on Calle Santa Ana, Miquel used to frequent. He lives with his father in an apartment above the shop. He lost his mother when he was very young.”
“You sound as if you were speaking about yourself.”
“Perhaps. This boy reminds me of myself.”
“Leave him alone, Julián. He’s only a kid. His only crime has been to admire you.”
“That’s not a crime, it’s a misconception. But he’ll get over it. Perhaps then he’ll return the book to me. When he stops admiring me and begins to understand me.”
A minute before the end of the film, Julián stood up and left. For months we saw each other like that, in the dark, in cinemas or alleyways, at midnight. Julián always found me. I felt his silent presence without seeing him and was always vigilant. Sometimes he mentioned you. Every time I heard him talk about you, I sensed a rare tenderness in his voice that confused him, a tenderness that, for years now, I had thought lost. I found out that he’d returned to the Aldaya mansion and that he now lived there, halfway between a ghost and a beggar, watching over Penélope’s remains and those of their son. It was the only place that he still felt was his. There are worse prisons than words.
I went there once a month to make sure he was all right, or at least alive. I would jump over the tumbled-down wall in the back of the property, which couldn’t be seen from the street. Sometimes I’d find him there, other times Julián had disappeared. I left food for him, money, books…. I would wait for him for hours, until it got dark. A few times I ventured to explore the rambling old house. That is how I discovered that he’d destroyed the tombstones in the crypt and taken out the coffins. I no longer thought Julián was mad, nor did I view that desecration as a monstrous act, just a tragic one. When I did find him there we spoke for hours, sitting by the fire. Julián confessed that he had tried to write again but was unable to. He vaguely remembered his books as if they were the work of some other person that he’d happened to read. The pain of his attempts to write was visible. I discovered that he burned the pages he had written feverishly while I was not there. Once, taking advantage of his absence, I rescued a pile of them from the ashes. They spoke about you. Julián had once told me that a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise. For some time now, Julián had been wondering whether he’d gone out of his mind. Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist on convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality? Julián observed you, watched you grow, and wondered who you were. He wondered whether your presence was perhaps a miracle, a pardon he had to win by teaching you not to make his own mistakes. More than once I asked myself whether Julián hadn’t reached the conclusion that you, in that twisted logic of his universe, had become the son he had lost, a blank page on which to restart a story that he could not invent but could remember.
Those years in the old mansion went by, and Julián became increasingly watchful of you, of your progress. He talked to me about your friends, about a woman called Clara with whom you had fallen in love, about your father, a man he admired and esteemed, about your friend Fermín, and about a girl in whom he wanted to see another Penélope—your Bea. He spoke about you as if yo
u were his son. You were both looking for each other, Daniel. He wanted to believe that your innocence would save him from himself. He had stopped chasing his books, stopped wanting to destroy them. He was learning to see the world again through your eyes, to recover the boy he had once been, in you. The day you came to my apartment for the first time, I felt I already knew you. I feigned distrust so I could hide the fear you inspired in me. I was afraid of you, of what you might discover. I was afraid of listening to Julián and starting to believe, as he did, that we were all bound together in a strange chain of destiny, afraid of recognizing in you the Julián I had lost. I knew that you and your friends were investigating our past, that sooner or later you would discover the truth, but I hoped that it would be in due course, when you were able to understand its meaning. And I knew that sooner or later you and Julián would meet. That was my mistake. Because someone else knew it, someone who sensed that, in time, you would lead him to Julián: Fumero.
I understood what was happening when there was no turning back, but I never lost hope that you would lose the trail, that you would forget about us, or that life, yours and not ours, would take you far away, to safety. Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either. Hope is cruel, and has no conscience. For a long time, Fumero has been watching me. He knows I’ll fall, sooner or later. He’s not in a hurry. He lives to avenge himself. On everyone and on himself. Without vengeance, without anger, he would melt away. Fumero knows that you and your friends will take him to Julián. He knows that after almost fifteen years, I have no more strength or resources. He has watched me die for years, and he’s only waiting for the moment when he will deal me the last blow. I have never doubted that I will die by his hand. Now I know the moment is drawing near. I will give these pages to my father, asking him to make sure they reach you if anything should happen to me. I pray to that God who never crossed my path that you will never have to read them, but I sense that my fate, despite my wishes and my vain hopes, is to hand you this story. Yours, despite your youth and your innocence, is to set it free.
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