The Labyrinth of the Spirits

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

  “Please.”

  “It’s practical advice I give all budding authors when they ask me what they should do. If you want to be a writer, write. If you have a story to tell, tell it. Or try.”

  “If to become a writer all one needed was a story to tell, everyone would be a novelist.”

  “Imagine how awful, a world full of novelists,” joked Rosiers. “The end of all times.”

  “Probably the last thing the world needs is one more.”

  “Let the world decide that,” Rosiers advised once again. “And if it doesn’t work out, don’t worry. All the better for you, according to statistics. But if one day you manage to capture on paper with some skill something like the idea you have just described to me, come and see me. I might be interested.”

  “And until then?”

  “Until then, forget about Carax.”

  “The Semperes never forget. It’s a congenital illness.”

  “In that case I feel sorry for you.”

  “Then perform an act of charity.”

  Rosiers hesitated. “Julián had a good friend. I believe he was his best friend. His name was Jean-Raymond Planaux. He had nothing to do with this absurd business of ours. An intelligent, levelheaded guy, with no nonsense about him. If anyone knows anything about Julián, he’ll be the one.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “In the catacombs.”

  I should have started there. Since this was Carax we were dealing with, it seemed inevitable that if there was any hope left of finding his trail on the face of this earth, it would be in a setting straight out of one of his books: the catacombs of Paris.

  * * *

  Jean-Raymond de Planaux Flavieu was a solid-looking bear of a man, a trifle intimidating at first sight, but who soon revealed his friendly disposition and a tendency to joke. He worked in the marketing office of the firm managing the Paris catacombs and was in charge of their advertising, tourist promotion, and everything related to that particular context of the hereafter.

  “Welcome to the world of death, kid,” he said, giving me a handshake that crunched my bones. “What can I do for you?”

  “I wondered whether you could help me find a friend of yours.”

  “Is he alive?” He laughed. “I don’t spend much time among the living.”

  “Julián Carax.”

  As soon as I’d uttered that name, Monsieur Planaux frowned, canceled his happy expression, and leaned forward with a threatening and protective air, cornering me against the wall.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Julián Sempere. My parents named me after Monsieur Carax.”

  “I don’t care whether they named you after the inventor of the public urinal.”

  Fearing for my safety, I tried to take a step backward. The thick wall, probably connected to the catacombs, stopped me. I could see myself wedged in there in perpetuity between a hundred thousand skulls.

  “My parents knew Monsieur Carax,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “Daniel and Bea.”

  Planaux’s eyes drilled into mine for a few seconds. I reckoned there was a fifty percent chance that he would smash my face in. The other fifty percent looked uncertain.

  “Are you the son of Daniel and Beatriz?”

  I nodded.

  “From the Sempere bookshop?”

  I nodded again.

  “Prove it.”

  For almost an hour I recited the same speech I’d delivered to Carax’s old agents and to his publisher. Planaux listened to me attentively, and I thought I glimpsed an air of sadness that intensified as I reeled off my story.

  When I’d finished, he pulled a cigar out of his jacket and lit it, producing a cloud of smoke that threatened to bury the whole of Paris. “Do you know how Julián and I met?”

  I shook my head.

  “When I was young, we worked together in a third-rate publishing house. That was before realizing that this death business has much more future than literature. I was one of the sales reps, and would go out to sell the junk we mostly published. Carax worked for a salary, writing horror stories for us. The amount of cigars like this one we smoked late at night, in the café below the publishing company, watching all the girls go by . . . Those were the days. Don’t be stupid: don’t grow old, it doesn’t bring you any nobility, knowledge, or shit skewered on a stick that’s worth it. I think that’s an expression from your country I once heard Julián use, and I found it very apt.”

  “Do you know where I could find him?”

  Planaux shrugged. “Julián left Paris long ago.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “But you can guess.”

  “You’re sharp.”

  “Where?” I insisted.

  “Where do people hide when they’re old?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then you’ll never find Julián.”

  “In memories?” I ventured.

  Planaux gave me a smile wounded with sadness.

  “Do you mean he went back to Barcelona?” I asked.

  “Not to Barcelona—to what he loved.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor did he. At least not for many years. It took him his whole life to realize what it was he had loved most.”

  All those years listening to stories about Carax, and I felt as lost as the day I arrived in Paris.

  “If you are who you say you are, you should know,” Planaux stated. “And if your answer is ‘literature,’ I’ll give you a beating you’ll never forget. But I don’t think you’re that stupid.”

  I swallowed hard. “I think I know what you’re referring to. Or who.”

  “Then you know what you must do.”

  * * *

  That evening I bade farewell to Paris, to Pascale, to my dazzling career in the catering industry, and to my nest in the clouds, and headed for the Gare d’Austerlitz. I spent all the cash I had left on a third-class ticket and took the night train back to Barcelona. I arrived at dawn, having survived the journey thanks to a couple of charitable pensioners from Lyon who were returning from visiting their daughter and shared the delicious food they’d bought that afternoon in the market on Rue Mouffetard, while I told them my story in the small hours of the night.

  “Bonne chance,” they said when they got off the train. “Cherchez la femme . . .”

  When I got back, and for the first few days, everything looked small to me, and closed and gray. The light of Paris had stayed trapped in my memory, and the world had suddenly become large and distant.

  “So, did you see Emmanuelle?” asked Fermín.

  “An impeccable screenplay,” I said.

  “Just as I imagined. The envy of Billy Wilder and company. And tell me, did you find the Phantom of the Opera?” Fermín gave the smile of a devil. I should have imagined he knew perfectly well why I’d traveled to Paris.

  “Not exactly,” I admitted.

  “So you’re not going to tell me anything juicy.”

  “I thought you were the one who was going to tell me something juicy. Remember?”

  “First solve your mystery, and then we’ll see.”

  “That seems unfair to me.”

  “Welcome to Planet Earth,” said Fermín. “Go on, impress me. Say something in French. ‘Bonjour’ and ‘Oh là là’ don’t count.”

  “Cherchez la femme,” I said.

  Fermín frowned. “The classic maxim of any self-respecting thriller . . .”

  “Voilà.”

  * * *

  Nuria Montfort’s grave lies on a promontory among trees, in the old part of Montjuïc Cemetery. It has a view of the sea and is not far from Isabella’s tomb. It was there, one summer’s evening in 1977, after unsuccessfully searching every corner of a Barcelona already receding into the past, that I found Julián Carax. He’d left fresh flowers on the headstone and was sitting on a stone bench facing the grave. He remained there for almost an hour, talking to
himself. I didn’t dare interrupt him.

  I found him again in the same place the following day, and the next. Julián Carax had realized only too late that the person he loved most in the world, the woman who had given her life for him, would never be able to hear his voice again. He went there every day and sat opposite her grave to talk to her and spend what was left of his life in her company.

  It was he who came up to me one day and stood there, looking at me in silence. The skin he’d lost in the fire had grown again and lent him an ageless face with no expression, which he hid beneath a bushy beard and an old-fashioned homburg hat.

  “Who are you?” he asked. There was no hostility in his voice.

  “My name is Julián Sempere. I’m the son of Daniel and Bea.”

  He nodded slowly. “Are they well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they know you’re here?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “And may I ask you why you’re here?”

  I didn’t know where to begin. “May I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “I don’t drink coffee,” he said. “But you can buy me an ice cream.”

  My face must have betrayed my surprise.

  “When I was young, there were hardly any ice creams. I’ve discovered them late, like so many other things . . .”

  * * *

  That is how, that slow summer evening, after having dreamed of that moment since I was a child, and having ransacked Paris and Barcelona trying to find him, I ended up in a milk bar in Plaza Real sharing a table with Julián Carax, whom I bought two scoops of strawberry ice cream and a rolled wafer. I ordered an iced lemonade, because the damp heat that pervades Barcelona summers was already looming.

  “What can I do for you, Señor Sempere?”

  “If I tell you, you’ll take me for a fool.”

  “I have a feeling you’ve been looking for me for some time. And since in the end you’ve found me, I would only take you for a fool if you didn’t tell me.”

  I drank half the lemonade in one gulp, to gather strength. Then I set out my idea. He listened attentively, showing no sign of disapproval or reservation.

  “Very ingenious,” he concluded at the end of my speech.

  “Don’t laugh at me.”

  “It wouldn’t occur to me. I’m telling you what I think.”

  “What else are you thinking?”

  “That you’re the one who should write this story. It belongs to you.”

  I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know how to. I’m not a writer.”

  “Get yourself an Underwood. The professional’s choice.”

  “I didn’t know that ad had also appeared in France.”

  “It ran everywhere. Don’t trust ads. An Olivetti would also do the job.”

  I smiled. At least I shared a sense of humor with Carax.

  “Let me show you something,” Carax offered.

  “How to write?”

  “That’s something you’ll have to learn on your own,” he replied. “Writing is a profession that can be learned, but nobody can teach it. The day you understand what that means will be the day you start learning to be a writer.”

  He opened up the black linen jacket he was wearing and pulled out a shiny object. He placed it on the table and pushed it toward me. “Take it,” he invited.

  It was the most fabulous pen I had ever seen, the queen of all Montblancs. Its nib was made of gold and platinum, and had I still been a child I would have thought that only masterpieces could flow from it.

  “They say it originally belonged to Victor Hugo, although I’d only take this in a metaphorical sense.”

  “Did fountain pens exist in Victor Hugo’s day?” I asked.

  “The first piston fountain pen was patented in 1827 by a Romanian called Petrache Poenaru, but it wasn’t until the eighteen eighties that it was perfected and began to be commercialized on a large scale.”

  “So technically it could have been Victor Hugo’s.”

  “If you insist. . . . Let’s say that from the dubious hands of Monsieur Hugo it passed on to the no less illustrious and more likely hands of one Daniel Sempere, a good friend of mine. Eventually it crossed my path, and I’ve been keeping it all these years, waiting for the day when someone, someone like you, came to collect it. About time.”

  I shook my head energetically, pushing the pen back toward his hands. “I won’t hear of it. I can’t accept it. It’s yours.”

  “A pen doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s a free spirit that stays with one while that person needs it.”

  “That’s what a character in one of your novels said.”

  “They always accuse me of repeating myself. It’s a disease that affects all novelists.”

  “I’ve never caught it. A sign that I’m not one.”

  “Just give it time. Take it.”

  “No.”

  Carax shrugged and put the pen back. “That’s because you’re not ready yet. A pen is like a cat—it only follows the person who will feed it. And just as it comes, it goes.”

  “What do you think of my proposal?”

  Carax took the last spoonful of his ice cream. “This is what we’ll do. We’ll write it together. You give it all the force of youth, and I’ll put in the old dog’s tricks.”

  I was stunned. “Are you serious?”

  He stood up and tapped my shoulder. “Thanks for the ice cream. Next time it’s on me.”

  * * *

  There was a next time, and many more. Carax always asked for two scoops of strawberry ice cream, whether it was summer or winter, but he never ate the rolled wafer. I would take what I’d written and he would go through it, cross things out, and rearrange the words on the page as if they were notes on a music score.

  “I’m not sure this beginning is the right one,” I would say.

  “A story has no beginning and no end, only points of entry.”

  Every time we met, Carax went carefully through the new pages I handed him. He pulled his pen open and made notes that he would then use to point out, with endless patience, what I’d done wrong, which was almost everything. Point by point he would show me what didn’t work, giving me the reason why and explaining in detail how it could be fixed. His analysis was extraordinarily meticulous. For every error I thought I’d made, he’d show me fifteen whose existence I hadn’t even suspected. He pulled apart every word, every sentence, and every paragraph, and put them together again like a goldsmith working with a magnifying glass. He did all this without condescension, as if he were an engineer telling an apprentice how combustion or steam engines work. Sometimes he would question turns of phrase and ideas that I thought were the only things likely to be saved that day, most of which I’d copied from him.

  “Don’t try to imitate me. Imitating another writer is a prop. It helps you learn and find your own voice, but it’s a beginner’s thing.”

  “And what am I?”

  I never knew where he spent his nights or the time he didn’t share with me. He never said, and I never dared ask him. We always arranged to meet in cafés and bars in the old town. The only condition was that they must serve strawberry ice cream. I was aware that every afternoon he went to his appointment with Nuria Montfort. The first time he read the section in which she appears as a character, he smiled with a sadness that still overwhelms me. Julián Carax had lost his tear ducts in the fire that disfigured him and couldn’t cry, but never in my life have I known anyone breathe the shadow of loss the way he did.

  I like to think that we became good friends. As far as I’m concerned, at least, I’ve never had a better one, nor do I think I ever will. Perhaps because of the affection he felt toward my parents, perhaps because that strange ritual of reconstructing the past helped him come to terms with the pain that had consumed his life, or perhaps simply because he saw in me something of himself, he stayed by my side, guiding my steps and my pen, through all the years it took me to write those four novels, correcting, crossing out, and rearr
anging to the end.

  “To write is to rewrite,” he kept reminding me. “One writes for oneself, and one rewrites for others.”

  * * *

  Of course, there was life beyond the fiction. A great deal happened during the years I devoted to rewriting once and a thousand times every page of the saga. True to my promise not to follow in my father’s footsteps and head up the bookshop (after all, he and my mother were more than capable of running it), I’d managed to find a job in an advertising agency that, in another twist of fate, was located on Avenida del Tibidabo number 32, the old mansion of the Aldayas where my parents had conceived me one distant stormy night in 1955.

  My work in the peculiar genre of advertising never seemed particularly memorable to me, but to my surprise my salary grew every month, and my value as a word and image mercenary was on the rise. The years went by, and I left a considerable trail of television, radio, and press advertisements behind me, for the greater renown of luxury cars that made rising executives drool, banks that were ever determined to make the small saver’s dreams come true, electrical appliances that promised happiness, perfumes that led to a frenzied love life, and the endless gifts that thrived in those days in Spain. In the absence of the old regime, or at least of its more visible censors, the country was growing, modernizing itself at the increasing speed of too much money in circulation, while displaying stock-market indexes that left the Swiss Alps in the shade. When my father learned how much I was earning, he asked me whether what I did was legal.

  “It’s legal, yes. But ethical? That’s another matter.”

  Fermín was delighted, showing no scruples about my prosperity. “As long as you don’t get too full of yourself and lose your way, make money now that you’re young, which is when it serves some purpose. And a loaded bachelor like you, well, what can I say? With the number of willing knockouts there must be in this publicity business, where everything is pretty and shiny . . . I wish I’d been able to have a taste of that in the postwar crap we were landed with, where even virgins had mustaches. Go for it. Enjoy all this, now’s the moment. Have adventures, you know what I mean, go over the limits that can be gone over, but remember to jump off the train in time. Some professions are only for the young, and unless you’re a main shareholder of this little shack—something I can’t see you becoming, because we both know you have matters to be dealt with in the less well paid writing business—it would be folly to remain in such a powder keg beyond thirty.”