The Shadow of the Wind (10 page)

“Daniel?”

“My father sent me. It's an emergency.”

When we returned to the
pensión,
we found Doña Encarna sobbing with fear and the other guests turned the color of old candle wax. My father was holding Fermín Romero de Torres in his arms in a corner of the room. Fermín was naked, crying and shaking. The room was a wreck, the walls stained with something that could have been either blood or excrement—I couldn't tell. Dr. Baró quickly took in the situation and gestured to my father to lay Fermín on the bed. They were helped by Doña Encarna's son, a would-be boxer. Fermín moaned and thrashed about as if some vermin were devouring his insides.

“But for goodness' sake, what's the matter with this poor man? What's wrong with him?” groaned Doña Encarna from the door, shaking her head.

The doctor took his pulse, examined his pupils with a flashlight, and, without saying a word, proceeded to prepare an injection from a bottle he carried in his bag.

“Hold him down. This will make him sleep. Daniel, help us.”

Between us four we managed to immobilize Fermín, who jerked violently when he felt the stab of the needle in his thigh. His muscles tensed like steel cables, but after a few seconds his eyes clouded over and his body went limp.

“Hey, be careful, that man's not very strong, and anything could kill him,” said Doña Encarna.

“Don't worry. He's only asleep,” said the doctor as he examined the scars that covered Fermín's starved body.

I saw him shake his head slowly. “Bastards,” he mumbled.

“What are these scars from?” I asked. “Cuts?”

Dr. Baró shook his head again, without looking up. He found a blanket amid the wreckage and covered his patient with it. “Burns. This man has been tortured,” he explained. “These marks are from a soldering iron.”

Fermín slept for two days. When he awoke, he could not remember anything; he just thought he'd woken up in a dark cell, that was all. He felt so ashamed of his behavior that he went down on his knees to beg for Doña Encarna's forgiveness. He swore he would paint the
pensión
for her and, knowing she was very devout, promised she would have ten masses said for her in the Church of Belén.

“What you have to do is get better and not frighten me like that again. I'm too old for that sort of thing.”

My father paid for the damages and begged Doña Encarna to give Fermín another chance. She gladly agreed. Most of her guests were dispossessed people who were alone in the world, like her. Once she had got over the fright, she felt an even greater affection for Fermín and made him promise her that he would take the tablets Dr. Baró had prescribed.

“For you, Doña Encarna, I'd swallow a brick if need be.”

In time we all pretended we'd forgotten what had happened, but never again did I take the stories about Inspector Fumero lightly. After that incident we would take Fermín with us almost every Sunday for an afternoon snack at the Novedades Café, so as not to leave him on his own. Then we'd walk up to the Fémina Cinema, on the corner of Calle Diputación and Paseo de Gracia. One of the ushers was a friend of my father's, and he would let us sneak in through the fire exit on the ground floor during the newsreel, always when the Generalissimo was in the act of cutting the ribbon to inaugurate some new reservoir, which really got on Fermín's nerves.

“What a disgrace,” he would say indignantly.

“Don't you like the cinema, Fermín?”

“Between you and me, this business of the seventh art leaves me cold. As far as I can see, it's only a way of feeding the mindless and making them even more stupid. Worse than football or bullfights. The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it's much the same.”

Fermín's attitude changed radically the day he discovered Carole Lombard.

“What breasts, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what breasts!” he exclaimed in the middle of the film, beside himself. “Those aren't tits, they're two schooners!”

“Shut up, you degenerate, or I'll call the manager,” muttered a voice straight from the confessional, a few rows behind us. “People have no shame. What a country of pigs we live in.”

“You'd better lower your voice, Fermín,” I advised him.

Fermín Romero de Torres wasn't listening to me. He was lost in the gentle swell of that miraculous bosom, with an enraptured smile and unblinking eyes. Later, walking back along Paseo de Gracia, I noticed that our bibliographic detective was still in a trance.

“I think we're going to have to find you a woman,” I said. “A woman will brighten up your life, you'll see.”

Fermín sighed, his mind still dwelling on charms that seemed to overcome the laws of gravity.

“Do you speak from experience, Daniel?” he asked in all innocence.

I just smiled, knowing that my father was watching me.

After that day Fermín Romero de Torres took to going to the movies every Sunday. My father preferred to stay at home reading, but Fermín would not miss a single double feature. He'd buy a pile of chocolates and sit in row seventeen, where he would devour them while he waited for the appearance of that day's diva. As far as he was concerned, plot was superfluous, and he didn't stop talking until some well-endowed lady filled the screen.

“I've been thinking about what you said the other day, about finding a woman for me,” said Fermín Romero de Torres. “Perhaps you're right. In the
pensión
there's a new lodger, an ex-seminarist from Seville with plenty of spirit, who brings in some impressive young ladies every now and then. I must say, the race has improved no end. I don't know how the lad manages it, because he's not much to look at; perhaps he renders them senseless with prayers. He's got the room next to mine, so I can hear everything, and, judging by the sound effects, the friar must be a real artist. Just shows what a uniform can do. Tell me, what sort of women do you like, Daniel?”

“I don't know much about them, honestly.”

“Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't have to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers. Come on, out with it. How do you like them? People might not agree with me, but I think a woman should have a feminine shape, something you can get your hands on. You, on the other hand, look like you might be partial to the skinny type, a point of view I fully respect, don't misunderstand me.”

“Frankly, I don't have much experience with women. None, to be precise.”

Fermín Romero de Torres looked at me carefully, intrigued by this revelation.

“I thought that what happened that night, you know, when you were beaten up…”

“If only everything hurt as little as a blow to the face…”

Fermín seemed to read my mind, and smiled supportively. “Don't let that upset you, then. With women the best part is the discovery. There's nothing like the first time, nothing. You don't know what life is until you undress a woman the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot sweet potato on a winter's night.”

A few seconds later, Veronica Lake made her grand entrance onto the scene, and Fermín was transported to another plane. Taking advantage of a reel in which Miss Lake was absent, Fermín announced that he was going to pay a visit to the candy stand in the foyer to replenish his stocks. After months of starvation, my friend had lost all sense of proportion, but, due to his metabolism, he never quite lost that hungry, squalid postwar look. I was left alone, barely following the action on the screen. I would lie if I said I was thinking of Clara. I was thinking only of her body, trembling under the music teacher's charges, glistening with sweat and pleasure. My gaze left the screen, and only then did I notice a spectator who had just come in. I saw his silhouette moving to the center of the orchestra, six rows in front of me. He sat down. Cinemas are full of lonely people, I thought. Like me.

I tried to concentrate on picking up the thread of the story. The hero, a cynical but good-hearted detective, was telling a secondary character why women like Veronica Lake were the ruin of all sensible males and why all one could do was love them desperately and perish, betrayed by their double dealings. Fermín Romero de Torres, who was becoming an adept film scholar, called this genre “the praying mantis paradigm.” According to him, its permutations were nothing but misogynist fantasies for constipated office clerks, for pious women shriveled with boredom who dreamed about turning to a life of vice and unbridled lechery. I smiled as I imagined the asides my friend the critic would have made had he not gone to his meeting with the candy stand. But the smile froze on my face. The spectator who sat six rows in front of me had turned around and was staring at me. The projector's misty beam bored through the darkness of the hall, a slim cloud of flickering light that revealed only outlines and blots of color. I recognized Coubert, the faceless man, immediately. His steely look, his shining eyes with no eyelids; his smile as he licked his nonexistent lips in the dark. I felt cold fingers gripping my heart. Two hundred violins broke out on-screen, there were shots and shouts, and the scene dissolved. For a moment the hall plunged into utter darkness, and I could only hear my own heartbeat hammering in my temples. Slowly a new scene glowed on the screen, replacing the darkness of the room with a haze of blue and purple. The man without a face had disappeared. I turned and caught a glimpse of a silhouette walking up the aisle and passing Fermín, who was returning from his gastronomic safari. He moved into the row, took his seat, and handed me a praline chocolate.

“Daniel, you're as white as a nun's buttock. Are you all right?” he asked, giving me a worried look.

A mysterious breath of air wafted through the hall.

“It smells odd,” Fermín remarked. “Like a rancid fart, from a councilman or a lawyer.”

“No. It smells of burned paper.”

“Go on. Have a lemon Sugus candy—it cures everything.”

“I don't feel like one.”

“Keep it, then, you never know when a Sugus candy might get you out of a pickle.”

I put the sweet in my jacket pocket and drifted through the rest of the film without paying any attention to Veronica Lake or to the victims of her fatal charms. Fermín Romero de Torres was engrossed in the show and the chocolates. When the lights went on at the end of the film, I felt myself to be waking from a bad dream and was tempted to imagine that the man in the theater had been a mere illusion, a trick of memory. But his brief glance in the dark had been enough to convey his message. He had not forgotten me, or our pact.

T
HE FIRST EFFECT OF
F
ERMÍN'S ARRIVAL SOON BECAME APPARENT:
I discovered I had much more free time. When Fermín was not out hunting some exotic volume to satisfy a customer's request, he spent his time organizing stocks in the bookshop, dreaming up marketing strategies, polishing the shop sign and windows till they sparkled, or buffing up the spines of the books with a rag and a bit of alcohol. Given this windfall, I decided to devote my leisure time to a couple of pursuits I had lately put aside: attempting to unravel the Carax mystery and, above all, spending more time with my friend Tomás Aguilar, whom I greatly missed.

Tomás was a thoughtful, reserved boy whom other children feared because his vaguely thuggish features gave him a grave and threatening look. He had a wrestler's build, gladiator's shoulders, and a steely, penetrating gaze. We had met many years before in the course of a fistfight, during my first week at the Jesuit school on Calle Caspe. His father had come to pick him up after classes, accompanied by a conceited girl who turned out to be Tomás's sister. I had the brilliant idea of making some tasteless remark about her and before I could blink, Tomás had thrown himself on me and was showering me with a deluge of blows that left me smarting for a few weeks. Tomás was twice my size, strength, and ferocity. During our school-yard duel, surrounded by boys who were thirsty for a bloody fight, I lost a tooth but gained an improved sense of proportion. I refused to tell my father or the priests who had inflicted such a thundering beating on me. Neither did I volunteer the fact that the father of my adversary had watched the thumping with an expression of sheer pleasure, joining in the chorus with the other schoolchildren.

“It was my fault,” I said, closing the subject.

Three weeks later Tomás came up to me during the break. I was paralyzed with fear. He is coming to finish me off, I thought. I began to stammer, but soon I understood that all he wanted to do was apologize for the thrashing, because he knew the fight had been uneven and unfair.

“I'm the one who should say I'm sorry, for picking on your sister,” I said. “I would have done it the other day, but you did my mouth in before I could speak.”

Tomás looked down, ashamed of himself. I gazed at that shy and quiet giant who wandered around the classrooms and school corridors like a lost soul. All the other children—me included—were scared stiff of him, and nobody spoke to him or dared look him in the eye. With his head down, almost shaking, he asked me whether I'd like to be his friend. I said I would. He held out his hand, and I shook it. His handshake hurt, but I didn't flinch. That afternoon he invited me to his house for an after-school snack and showed me his collection of strange gadgets made from bits of scrap metal, which he kept in his room.

“I made them,” he explained proudly.

I was incapable of understanding how they worked or even what they were supposed to be, but I didn't say anything. I just nodded in admiration. It seemed to me that this oversize, solitary boy had constructed his own tin companions and that I was the first person he was introducing them to. It was his secret. I shared mine. I told him about my mother and how much I missed her. When my voice broke, Tomás hugged me, without saying a word. We were ten years old. From that day on, Tomás Aguilar became my best—and I his only—friend.

Despite his aggressive looks, Tomás was a peaceful and good-hearted person whose appearance discouraged confrontations. He stammered quite a bit, especially when he spoke to anyone who wasn't his mother, his sister, or me, which was hardly ever. He was fascinated by outlandish inventions and mechanical devices, and I soon discovered that he carried out autopsies on all manner of appliances, from gramophones to adding machines, in order to discover their secrets. When he wasn't with me or working for his father, Tomás spent most of his time secluded in his room, devising incomprehensible contraptions. His intelligence was matched by his lack of practicality. His interest in the real world centered on details such as the synchronicity of traffic lights on Gran Vía, the mysteries of the illuminated fountains of Montjuïc, or the clockwork souls of the automatons at the Tibidabo amusement park.

Every afternoon Tomás worked in his father's office, and sometimes, on his way out, he'd stop by the bookshop. My father always showed an interest in his inventions and gave him manuals on mechanics or biographies of engineers like Eiffel and Edison, whom Tomás idolized. As the years went by, Tomás became very attached to my father and spent ages trying to invent an automatic system with which to file his bibliographic index cards, using parts of an old electric fan. He had been working on the project for four years now, but my father still showed great enthusiasm for its progress, because he didn't want Tomás to lose heart.

When I first introduced Tomás to Fermín, I was concerned about how Fermín was going to react to my friend.

“You must be Daniel's inventor friend. It's a great pleasure to make your acquaintance. Fermín Romero de Torres, bibliographic adviser to the Sempere bookshop, at your service.”

“Tomás Aguilar,” stammered my friend, smiling and shaking Fermín's hand.

“Watch out, my friend, for what you have here isn't a hand, it's a hydraulic press. I need violinist's fingers for my work with the firm.”

Tomás let go of his hand and apologized.

“So tell me, where do you stand on Fermat's theorem?” asked Fermín, rubbing his fingers.

After that they became engrossed in an unintelligible discussion about arcane mathematics, which was Dutch to me. From that day on, Fermín always addressed him with the formal
usted
or called him “doctor,” and pretended not to notice the boy's stammer. As a way of repaying Fermín for his infinite patience, Tomás brought him boxes of Swiss chocolates stamped with photographs of impossibly blue lakes, cows parading along Technicolor-green fields, and camera-ready cuckoo clocks.

“Your friend Tomás is talented, but he lacks drive and could benefit from a more winning demeanor. It's the only way to get anywhere,” Fermín said to me one day. “Alas, that's the scientist's mind for you. Just consider Albert Einstein. All those prodigious inventions, and the first one they find a practical application for is the atom bomb—without his permission. Tomás is going to have a hard time in academic circles with that boxer's face of his. In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.”

Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermín had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills.

“Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ‘ethical behavior,'” he argued. “It's pure biology.”

“Aren't you exaggerating?”

“Sometimes you're so naïve, Daniel.”

Tomás had inherited his tough looks from his father, a prosperous property manager with an office on Calle Pelayo, close to the sumptuous El Siglo department store. Mr. Aguilar belonged to that race of privileged minds who are always right. A man of deep convictions, he believed, among other things, that his son was both fainthearted and mentally deficient. To compensate for these shameful traits, he employed all sorts of private tutors in the hope of improving his firstborn. “I want you to treat my son as if he were an imbecile, do you understand?” I would often hear him say. The teachers tried everything, even pleading, but Tomás was in the habit of addressing them only in Latin, a language he spoke with papal fluency and in which he did not stammer. Sooner or later they all resigned in despair, fearing he might be possessed: he might be spouting demonic instructions in Aramaic at them, for all they knew. Mr. Aguilar's only hope was that military service would make a man of him.

Tomás had a sister, Beatriz. I owed our friendship to her, because if I hadn't seen her that afternoon, long ago, holding on to her father's hand, waiting for the classes to end, and hadn't decided to make a joke in very bad taste at her expense, my friend would never have rained all those blows on me and I would never have had the courage to speak to him. Bea Aguilar was the very image of her mother and the apple of her father's eye. Redheaded and exquisitely pale, she always wore very expensive dresses made of silk or pure wool. She had a mannequin's waist and wandered around straight as a rod, playing the role of princess in her own fairy tale. Her eyes were a greeny blue, but she insisted on describing them as “emerald and sapphire.” Despite her many years as a pupil at the strict Catholic school of the Teresian mothers, or perhaps for that very reason, when her father wasn't looking, Bea drank anise liqueur from a tall glass, wore nylon stockings from the elegant shop La Perla Gris, and dolled herself up like the screen goddesses who sent my friend Fermín into a trance. I couldn't stand the sight of her, and she repaid my open hostility with languid looks of disdain and indifference. Bea had a boyfriend who was doing his military service as a lieutenant in Murcia, a slick-haired member of the Falangist Party called Pablo Cascos Buendía. He belonged to an aristocratic family who owned a number of shipyards on the Galician
rías
and spent half his time on leave thanks to an uncle in the Military Government. Second Lieutenant Cascos Buendía wasted no opportunity to lecture people on the genetic and spiritual superiority of the Spanish people and the imminent decline of the Bolshevik empire.

“Marx is dead,” he would say solemnly.

“He died in 1883, to be precise,” I would answer.

“Zip it, bonehead, or I'll kick you all the way to the Rock of Gibraltar.”

More than once I had caught Bea smiling to herself at the inanities that her boyfriend came out with. She would raise her eyes and watch me, with a look I couldn't fathom. I would smile back with the feeble civility of enemies held together by an indefinite truce but would look away quickly. I would have died before admitting it, but in my heart of hearts, I was afraid of her.