By good luck, my honorary uncle, Fermín Romero de Torres, didn’t share my parents’ information policy. By then Fermín no longer worked in the bookshop. He visited us often, but there was always an aura of mystery concerning what his new occupation was, and neither Fermín nor any member of my family volunteered to clarify it. Still, whatever his new job, it seemed to provide him with ample time for reading. He had recently taken in a number of anthropology treatises that had led him to come up with some formidable speculative theories, an occupation that, he said, helped him avoid kidney colic and expel stones the size of loquat seeds [sic] through the urinary system.
According to one of those peculiar theories, forensic evidence accumulated over the centuries proved that, after millennia of supposed evolution, humans had managed to eliminate a bit of body hair, perfect their loincloths, and refine their tools, but little else. From this premise, a second part of the theorem was inexplicably arrived at, and it went something like this: what the said threadbare evolution had not achieved even remotely was to understand that the more one tries to hide something from a child, the more he is set on finding it, be it a sweet or a postcard with outrageous chorus girls flaunting their charms to the wind.
“And thank goodness that’s the way things are, because the day we lose the spark that makes us want to know things, and young people are content with the nonsense dressed in tinsel sold to them by the current popes of bullshittery—be it a miniature electrical appliance or a battery-run chamber pot—and become incapable of understanding anything that lies beyond their backsides, we’ll return to the age of the slug.”
I would laugh and say, “This is apocalyptic,” making use of a word I’d learned from Fermín that always earned me a Sugus sweet.
“That’s what I like to hear,” he would reply. “So long as we have youngsters who know how to manage five-syllable words, there will be hope.”
Perhaps it was due to Fermín’s bad influence, or maybe to all those tricks I’d learned in the thrillers I devoured as if they were sugared almonds, but soon, by virtue of my enthusiasm for tying up loose ends, eavesdropping on furtive conversations, rummaging in forbidden drawers and, above all, reading all the pages my father thought had ended up in the wastepaper basket, the enigma of who Julián Carax had been and why my parents had decided to christen me with his name began to clear up. And wherever my skills of deduction and detection didn’t reach, Fermín and his magisterial impromptu lectures filled in, supplying me on the sly with clues for solving the mystery, and connecting the different strands of the story.
That morning, as if he didn’t have enough worries already, my father was served a double shot: that his son wanted to be a professional author, and that, moreover, I knew the entire cache of secrets he’d always tried to hide from me, probably more out of modesty than anything else. To his credit, I must say that he took it quite well. Instead of yelling and threatening to lock me up in a boarding school, the poor man just stood there staring at me, not knowing what to say.
“I thought you would want to be a bookseller, like me, like your grandfather, and like my grandfather before him, and like almost all the Semperes since time immemorial . . .”
Realizing that I’d caught him off guard, I decided to shore up my position.
“I’m going to be a writer,” I said. “A novelist. To crown it all, I think one says.”
That last phrase I let slip as a bit of humorous padding, but clearly my father didn’t find it funny. He crossed his arms, leaned back in his chair, and studied me cautiously. The puppy was showing a rebellious streak that didn’t please him. Welcome to fatherhood, I thought. You bring children into the world, and this is what you get.
“That’s what your mother has always said, but I thought she just said it to tease me.”
More in my favor. The day my mother makes a mistake will be when Judgment Day happens to fall on April Fool’s. But, being allergic to resignation from birth, my father was still stuck in his warning attitude, and I feared a speech to dissuade me was on its way.
“At your age I also thought I had what it takes to be a writer,” he began.
You could see him coming like a meteorite wrapped in flames. If I didn’t disarm him now, this could become a sermon on the dangers of devoting one’s life to literature. And I knew, because I’d often heard it from those starving authors who visited the bookshop—the ones to whom we had to sell on credit, and even treat to a snack—that literature showed as much devotion to its loyal followers as a praying mantis to its consort. Before my father got too worked up, I cast a melodramatic look over the battlefield of scattered pages on the floor and rested my eyes on him again without saying a word.
“As Fermín says,” he admitted, “wise men make mistakes.”
I realized that my counterargument could work as a bridge to his main premise, i.e., that the Semperes didn’t have scribblers’ blood, and booksellers also served literature without exposing themselves to absolute ruin and misery. Since, deep down, I suspected that the good man was as right as a saint, I went on the offensive. In a rhetorical duel one must never lose the initiative, even less when the opponent looks like he’s winning.
“What Fermín says is that wise men own up when they sometimes make mistakes, but idiots always make mistakes, even though they never admit it and always think they’re right. He calls it his Archimedean Principle of Communicable Imbecilities.”
“Oh, does he?”
“Yes. According to him, an idiot is an animal who doesn’t know how to, or is unable to, change his mind,” I machine-gunned back.
“You seem extremely well versed in Fermín’s philosophy and science.”
“Are you saying he’s wrong?”
“What he is, is disproportionately interested in speaking ex cathedra.”
“And what does that mean?”
“To piss outside the pot.”
“Well, in one of these pissy ex cathedra moments, he also told me there’s something you should have shown me ages ago.”
My father looked confused for a moment. Any hint of a sermon had evaporated, and now he was staggering around without knowing where the next punch would come from.
“He said what?”
“Something about books. And about the dead.”
“The dead?”
“Something or other about a cemetery. The bit about the dead is my idea.”
In fact, what had been going through my mind was that this business might have something to do with Carax, who in my personal canon combined the notion of books and the dead to perfection.
My father considered the matter. A flash crossed his eyes, as it always did when he had an idea. “I suppose on that point he was probably right.”
I sniffed the sweet scent of victory surfacing somewhere.
“Go on, go upstairs and get dressed,” said my father. “But don’t wake your mother.”
“Are we going somewhere?”
“It’s a secret. I’m going to show you something that changed my life, and might change yours too.”
I realized I’d lost the initiative, and the ball was in his court. “At this hour?”
My father smiled again and winked at me.
“Some things can only be seen in the dark.”
2
That dawn my father took me to visit the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the autumn of 1966, and a drizzle had decorated the Ramblas with little puddles that shone like copper tears as we walked. The mist I had so often dreamed about accompanied us, but it lifted when we turned into Calle Arco del Teatro. A dark breach lay before us, and soon a grand palace of blackened stone emerged from its shadows. My father knocked on the large front door with a knocker in the shape of a devil’s face. To my surprise, the person who opened the door to us was none other than Fermín Romero de Torres, who smiled mischievously when he saw me.
“About time,” he said. “All that cloak-and-dagger business was giving me stomach cramps.”
“Is this where you work now, Fermín?” I asked, intrigued. “Is this a bookshop?”
“Something like that, although there isn’t much in the comic book section. . . . Come on in.”
Fermín accompanied us through a curved gallery whose walls were painted with frescoes of angels and legendary creatures. Needless to say, by then I was in a trance. Little did I know that the wonders had only just begun.
The gallery led us to a hall with a vaulted ceiling that rose into infinity under a cascade of prodigious light. I looked up, and a labyrinthine structure materialized before my eyes. The tower formed in a never-ending spiral, like a reef on which all the libraries of the world had been shipwrecked. I advanced slowly, openmouthed, toward that castle woven together of all the books ever written. I felt as if I’d entered the pages of one of Julián Carax’s stories, afraid that if I dared to take one more step, that instant would turn to dust and I’d wake up in my room.
My father appeared by my side. I looked at him and took his hand, if only to convince myself that I was awake and that place was real.
He smiled. “Julián, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”
It took me quite a while to recover my pulse and reconnect to the laws of gravity. Once I had calmed down, my father murmured these words to me through the gloom:
“This is a place of mystery, Julián, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they only have us, Julián. Do you think you’ll be able to keep such a secret?”
My gaze was lost in the immensity of the place and its sorcery of light. I nodded, and my father smiled.
Fermín offered me a glass of water and stood there, looking at me. “Does the kid know the rules?”
“That’s what I was about to tell him,” said my father.
My father then gave me a detailed list of the rules and responsibilities that had to be accepted by all new entrants to the secret brotherhood of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, including the privilege of being able to adopt a book in perpetuity and become its protector for life.
While I listened to him, I began to wonder whether he hadn’t had some ulterior motive to have chosen that exact day to bombard my eyes and my brain with that vision. Perhaps, as a last resort, the good bookseller hoped that the sight of that city populated by hundreds of thousands of abandoned tomes, by so many forgotten lives, ideas, and universes, might serve as a metaphor of the future that awaited me if I persisted in my obstinate belief in being able, one day, to earn a living from literature. If that was his intention, the vision had quite the opposite effect. My vocation, which until then had been a mere child’s daydream, became etched on my heart that day. And nothing my father or anyone might say could make me change my mind.
Destiny, I suppose, had made the choice for me.
In my long wanderings through the tunnels of the labyrinth, I chose a book titled The Crimson Tunic, a novel belonging to a cycle called The City of the Damned, whose author was someone called David Martín, of whom I’d never heard until then. Or perhaps I should say that the book chose me; when at last I rested my eyes on the cover, I had the strange feeling that the copy had been waiting there for me for some time, as if it knew that on that dawn I would bump into it.
When at last I reemerged from the edifice, and my father saw the book I held in my hands, he turned pale. For a moment he looked as if he would collapse.
“Where did you find that book?” he murmured.
“On a table in one of the rooms. . . . It was standing up, as if someone had left it there for me to find.”
My father and Fermín exchanged mysterious glances.
“Is something the matter?” I asked. “Should I choose another one?”
My father shook his head.
“It’s destiny,” murmured Fermín.
I smiled with excitement. That was exactly what I had thought, even if I didn’t quite know why.
* * *
I spent the rest of the week in a trance, reading the adventures narrated by David Martín, savoring every scene as if I were observing a large canvas where the more I explored, the more details and landscapes I discovered. My father also retreated into his daydreaming, although his worries seemed to be anything but literary.
Like many men, by then my father was beginning to suspect that he’d stopped being a young man, and he often revisited the scenes of his early youth, looking for answers to questions he still didn’t fully understand.
“What’s the matter with Dad?” I asked my mother.
“Nothing. He’s just growing.”
“Isn’t he past the growing age?”
My mother gave a patient sigh. “You men are like that.”
“I’ll grow fast, and you won’t have to worry.”
My mother smiled. “We’re in no hurry, Julián. Let life take care of that.”
In one of his mysterious journeys to the center of his navel, my father came back from the post office carrying a parcel that came from Paris. Inside it was a book called The Angel of Mist. Anything with angels and mist in it sounded totally up my alley, so I decided to investigate, even if only because of the expression on my father’s face when he’d opened the parcel and seen the cover of the book. After some research I concluded that it was a novel written by a certain Boris Laurent, a pen name, I later discovered, for none other than Julián Carax. The book came with a dedication that made my mother cry—and she never was one to run for the handkerchief at the first chance—and finally convinced my father that destiny had us all caught by a place he wouldn’t be explicit about, but that, I surmised, required delicate handling.
To be honest, I was the one who was most surprised. For some reason, I had always supposed that Carax had been dead since time immemorial (a historical period comprising everything that had taken place before my birth). I always thought that Carax was another of the many phantoms from the past lurking in the haunted palace of the official family memory. When I realized that I had been mistaken and that Carax was alive, kicking, and writing in Paris, I had an epiphany.
As I caressed the pages of The Angel of Mist, I suddenly understood what I had to do. That is how the plan was hatched that would allow me to fulfill that destiny, a destiny that for once had decided to pay a house call, and many years later would give birth to this book.
3
Life went on at a steady pace, between revelations and fantasies, as it usually does, without paying too much attention to all of us who travel hanging on it by our fingertips. I enjoyed two childhoods: the first was quite conventional, if such a thing can ever be, and was the one others saw; the second was an imaginary childhood, and the one I truly lived. I made some good friends, most of them books. In school I was bored stiff and acquired the habit of spending my time in the classroom with my head in the clouds, a habit I still retain. I was lucky enough to come across a few good teachers, who treated me with patience and agreed that the fact that I was always different wasn’t necessarily something bad. It takes all sorts to make a world, including a few Julián Semperes. Still, I probably learned more about the world reading between the four walls of the bookshop, visiting libraries on my own, or listen
ing to Fermín, who always had some theory, advice, or practical warning to offer, than in all my years of schooling.
“At school they say I’m a bit odd,” I once admitted to Fermín.
“Well, that’s good news. We’ll start worrying the day they tell you you’re normal.”
For better or for worse, nobody ever accused me of that.
* * *
I suppose my adolescence offers a little more biographical interest because at least I lived a greater part of it outside my head. My paper-filled dreams and my ambitions of becoming a soldier of the pen without perishing in the attempt were gaining strength, even though they were somewhat restrained, I must admit, by a certain dose of realism acquired as time went by and I observed the workings of the world. Halfway through my journey, I had already realized that my dreams were forged with impossibilities, but that if I abandoned them before charging into battle, I would never win the war.
I was still confident that one day the gods on Mount Parnassus would take pity on me and allow me to learn how to tell stories. Meanwhile, I stocked up on raw material, hoping the day would come when I’d be able to premiere my own factory of dreams and nightmares. Slowly, I compiled everything related to the history of my family, its many secrets, and the thousand and one narratives that made up the little universe of the Semperes, an imagined world I had decided to name The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
Aside from discovering everything discoverable and whatever resisted discovery about my family, I had two great passions at the time: one magical and ethereal, which was reading, and the other mundane and entirely predictable, which was pursuing silly love affairs.
Concerning my literary ambitions, my successes went from slender to nonexistent. During those years I started a hundred woefully bad novels that died along the way, hundreds of short stories, plays, radio serials, and even poems that I wouldn’t let anyone read, for their own good. I only needed to read them myself to see how much I still had to learn and what little progress I was making, despite the desire and enthusiasm I put into it. I was forever rereading Carax’s novels and those of countless authors I borrowed from my parents’ bookshop. I tried to pull them apart as if they were transistor radios, or the engine of a Rolls-Royce, hoping I would be able to figure out how they were built and how and why they worked.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 78