The Shadow of the Wind (26 page)

The fact was that not only jewels disappeared. In time the family lost its joie de vivre entirely. The Aldaya family was never happy in the house that had been acquired through Don Ricardo's dark arts of negotiation. Mrs. Aldaya pleaded constantly with her husband to sell the property and move them to a home in the town or even return to the residence that Puig i Cadafalch had built for Grandfather Simón, the patriarch of the clan. Ricardo Aldaya flatly refused. Since he spent most of his time traveling or in the family's factories, he saw no problem with the house. On one occasion little Jorge disappeared for eight hours inside the mansion. His mother and the servants looked for him desperately, but without success. When he reappeared, pale and dazed, he said he'd been in the library the whole time, in the company of a mysterious black woman who had been showing him old photographs and had told him that all the females in the family would die in that house to atone for the sins of the males. The mysterious lady even revealed to little Jorge the date on which his mother would die: April 12, 1921. Needless to say, the so-called black lady was never found, but years later, on April 12, 1921, at first light, Mrs. Aldaya would be discovered lifeless on her bed. All her jewels had disappeared. When the pond in the courtyard was drained, one of the servant boys found them in the mud at the bottom, next to a doll that had belonged to her daughter, Penélope.

A week later Don Ricardo Aldaya decided to get rid of the house. By then his financial empire was already in its death throes, and there were those who insinuated that it was all due to that accursed house, which brought misfortune to whoever occupied it. Others, the more cautious ones, simply asserted that Aldaya had never understood the changing trends of the market and that all he had accomplished during his lifetime was to ruin the robust business created by the patriarch Simón. Ricardo Aldaya announced that he was leaving Barcelona and moving with his family to Argentina, where his textile industries were allegedly doing splendidly. Many believed he was fleeing from failure and shame.

In 1922 The Angel of Mist was put up for sale at a ridiculously low price. At first there was a strong interest in buying it, as much for its notoriety as for the growing prestige of the neighborhood, but none of the potential buyers made an offer after visiting the house. In 1923 the mansion was closed. The deed was transferred to a real-estate company high up on the long list of Aldaya's creditors, so that it could arrange for its sale or demolition. The house was on the market for years, but the firm was unable to find a buyer. The said company, Botell i Llofré S. L., went bankrupt in 1939 when its two partners were sent to prison on unknown charges. After the unexplained fatal accident that befell both men in the San Viçens jail in 1940, the company was taken over by a financial group, among whose shareholders were three fascist generals and a Swiss banker. This company's executive director turned out to be a certain Mr. Aguilar, father of Tomás and Bea. Despite all their efforts, none of Mr. Aguilar's salesmen were able to place the house, not even by offering it far beneath its already low asking price. Nobody had been back on the property for over ten years.

“Until today,” said Bea quietly, withdrawing into herself for a moment. “I wanted to show you this place, you see? I wanted to give you a surprise. I told myself I had to bring you here, because this was part of your story, of the story of Carax and Penélope. I borrowed the key from my father's office. Nobody knows we're here. It's our secret. I wanted to share it with you. And I was asking myself whether you'd come.”

“You knew I would.”

She smiled as she nodded. “I believe that nothing happens by chance. Deep down, things have their secret plan, even though we don't understand it. Like you finding that novel by Julián Carax in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books or the fact that you and I are here now, in this house that belonged to the Aldayas. It's all part of something we cannot comprehend, something that owns us.”

While she spoke, my hand had slipped awkwardly down to Bea's ankle and was sliding toward her knee. She watched it as if she were watching an insect climbing up her leg. I asked myself what Fermín would have done at that moment. Where was his wisdom when I most needed it?

“Tomás says you've never had a girlfriend,” said Bea, as if that explained me.

I removed my hand and looked down, defeated. I thought Bea was smiling, but I preferred not to make sure.

“Considering he's so quiet, your brother is turning out to be quite a bigmouth. What else does the newsreel say about me?”

“He says that for years you were in love with an older woman and that the experience left you brokenhearted.”

“All I had broken was a lip and my pride.”

“Tomás says you haven't been out with any other girl because you compare them all with that woman.”

Good old Tomás and his hidden blows. “Her name is Clara,” I proffered.

“I know. Clara Barceló.”

“Do you know her?”

“Everyone knows a Clara Barceló. The name is the least of it.”

We fell silent for a while, watching the fire crackle.

“After I left you, I wrote a letter to Pablo,” said Bea.

I swallowed hard. “To your lieutenant boyfriend? What for?”

Bea took an envelope out of her blouse and showed it to me. It was closed and sealed.

“In the letter I tell him I want us to get married very soon, in a month's time, if possible, and that I want to leave Barcelona forever.”

Almost trembling, I faced her impenetrable eyes.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want you to tell me whether I should send it or not. That's why I've asked you to come here today, Daniel.”

I examined the envelope that she twirled in her hand like a playing card.

“Look at me,” she said.

I raised my eyes and met her gaze. I didn't know what to answer. Bea lowered her eyes and walked away toward the end of the gallery. A door led to the marble balustrade that opened onto the inner courtyard of the house. I watched her silhouette fade into the rain. I went after her and stopped her, snatching the envelope from her hands. The rain beat down on her face, sweeping away the tears and the anger. I led her back into the mansion and to the heat of the blaze. She avoided my eyes. I took the envelope and threw it into the flames. We watched the letter breaking up among the hot coals and the pages evaporating in spirals of smoke, one by one. Bea knelt down next to me, with tears in her eyes. I embraced her and felt her breath on my throat.

“Don't let me fall, Daniel,” she murmured.

The wisest man I ever knew, Fermín Romero de Torres, had told me that there is no experience in life comparable to the first time a man undresses a woman. For all his wisdom, though he had not lied to me, he hadn't told me all the truth either. He hadn't told me anything about that strange trembling of the hands that turned every button, every zip, into a superhuman challenge. Nor had he told me about that bewitchment of pale, tremulous skin, that first brush of the lips, or about the mirage that seemed to shimmer in every pore of the skin. He didn't tell me any of that because he knew that the miracle happened only once and, when it did, it spoke in a language of secrets that, were they disclosed, would vanish again forever. A thousand times I've wanted to recover that first afternoon with Bea in the rambling house of Avenida del Tibidabo, when the sound of the rain washed the whole world away with it. A thousand times I've wished to return and lose myself in a memory from which I can rescue only one image stolen from the heat of the flames: Bea, naked and glistening with rain, lying by the fire, with open eyes that have followed me since that day. I leaned over her and passed the tips of my fingers over her belly. Bea lowered her eyelids and smiled, confident and strong.

“Do what you like to me,” she whispered.

She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.

D
ARKNESS ENVELOPED US IN BLUE SHADOW AS WE LEFT THE
mansion. The storm was receding, now barely an echo of cold rain. I wanted to return the key to Bea, but her eyes told me she wanted me to be the one to keep it. We strolled down toward Paseo de San Gervasio, hoping to find a taxi or a bus. We walked in silence, holding hands and hardly looking at each other.

“I won't be able to see you again until Tuesday,” Bea said in a tremulous voice, as if she suddenly doubted my desire to see her again.

“I'll be waiting for you here,” I said.

I took for granted that all my meetings with Bea would take place between the walls of that rambling old house, that the rest of the city did not belong to us. It even seemed to me that the firmness of her touch decreased as we moved away, that her strength and warmth diminished with every step we took. When we reached the avenue, we realized that the streets were almost deserted.

“We won't find anything here,” said Bea. “We'd better go down along Balmes.”

We started off briskly down Calle Balmes, walking under the trees to shelter from the drizzle. It seemed to me that Bea was quickening her pace at every step, almost dragging me along. For a moment I thought that if I let go of her hand, Bea would start running. My imagination, still intoxicated by her touch and her taste, burned with a desire to corner her on a bench, to seek her lips and recite a predictable string of nonsense that would have made anyone within hearing burst out laughing, anyone but me. But Bea was withdrawing into herself, fading a world away from me.

“What's the matter?” I murmured.

She gave me a broken smile, full of fear and loneliness. I then saw myself through her eyes: just an innocent boy who thought he had conquered the world in an hour but didn't yet realize that he could lose it again in an instant. I kept on walking, without expecting an answer. Waking up at last. Soon we heard the rumbling of traffic, and the air seemed to light up like a flame of gas with the heat from the streetlamps and traffic lights. They made me think of invisible walls.

“We'd better separate here,” said Bea, letting go of my hand.

The lights from a taxi rank could be seen on the corner, a procession of glowworms.

“As you wish.”

Bea leaned over and brushed my cheek with her lips. Her hair still smelled of candle wax.

“Bea,” I began, almost inaudibly. “I love you….”

She shook her head but said nothing, sealing my lips with her hand as if my words were wounding her.

“Tuesday at six, all right?” she asked.

I nodded again. I saw her leave and disappear into a taxi, almost a stranger. One of the drivers, who had followed the exchange as if he were an umpire, observed me with curiosity. “What do you say? Shall we head for home, chief?”

I got into the taxi without thinking. The taxi driver's eyes examined me through the mirror. I lost sight of the car that was taking Bea away, two dots of light sinking into a well of darkness.

 

I
DIDN'T MANAGE TO GET TO SLEEP UNTIL DAWN CAST A HUNDRED TONES
of dismal gray on my bedroom window. Fermín woke me up, throwing tiny pebbles at my window from the church square. I put on the first thing I found and ran down to open the door for him. Fermín was full of the insufferable enthusiasm of the early bird. We pushed up the grilles and hung up the
OPEN
sign.

“Look at those rings under your eyes, Daniel. They're as big as a building site. May we assume the owl got the pussycat to go out to sea with him?”

When I returned to the back room, I put on my blue apron and handed him his, or rather threw it at him angrily. Fermín caught it in midflight, with a sly smile.

“The owl drowned, period. Happy?” I snapped.

“Intriguing metaphor. Have you been dusting off your Verlaine, young man?”

“I stick to prose on Monday mornings. What do you want me to tell you?”

“I leave that up to you. The number of
estocadas
or the laps of honor.”

“I'm not in the mood, Fermín.”

“O youth, flower of fools! Oh, well, don't get irritated with me. I have fresh news concerning our investigation on your friend Julián Carax.”

“I'm all ears.”

He gave me one of his cloak-and-dagger looks, one eyebrow raised.

“Well, it turns out that yesterday, after leaving Bernarda back home with her virtue intact but a nice couple of well-placed bruises on her backside, I was assailed by a fit of insomnia—due to those evening erotic arousals—which gave me the pretext to walk down to one of the information centers of the Barcelona underworld—i.e., the tavern of Eliodoro Salfumán, aka ‘Coldprick,' situated in a seedy but rather colorful establishment in Calle Sant Jeroni, pride of the Raval quarter.”

“The abridged version, Fermín, for goodness' sake.”

“Coming. The fact is that once I was there, ingratiating myself with some of the usual crowd, old chums from troubled times of yore, I began to make inquiries about this Miquel Moliner, the husband of your Mata Hari Nuria Monfort and a supposed inmate at the local penitential hotels.”

“Supposed?”

“With a capital S. There are no slips at all 'twixt cup and lip in this case, if you see what I mean. I know from experience that when it comes to the census of the prison population, my informants in Coldprick's tabernacle are much more accurate than the pencil pushers in the law courts, and I can guarantee, Daniel, my friend, that nobody has heard mention of the name Miquel Moliner as an inmate, visitor, or any other living soul in the prisons of Barcelona, for at least ten years.”

“Perhaps he's serving in some other prison.”

“Yeah. Alcatraz, Sing Sing, or the Bastille. Daniel, that woman lied to you.”

“I suppose she did.”

“Don't suppose; accept it.”

“So what now? Miquel Moliner is a dead end.”

“Or this Nuria is very crafty.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“At the moment we must explore other avenues. It wouldn't be a bad idea to call on the good nanny in the story the priest foisted on us yesterday morning.”

“Don't tell me you also suspect that the governess has vanished.”

“No, but I do think it's time we stopped fussing about and knocking on doors as if we were begging for alms. In this line of business, one must go in through the back door. Are you with me?”

“You know that to me you walk on holy ground, Fermín.”

“Well, then, start dusting your altar-boy costume. This afternoon, as soon as we've closed the shop, we're going to make a charitable visit to the old lady in the Hospice of Santa Lucía. And now tell me, how did it go yesterday with the young filly? Don't be secretive. If you hold back, may you sprout virulent pimples.”

I sighed in defeat and made my confession, down to the last detail. At the end of my narrative, after listing what I was sure were just the existential anxieties of a moronic schoolboy, Fermín surprised me with a sudden heartfelt hug.

“You're in love,” he mumbled, full of emotion, patting me on the back. “Poor kid.”

That afternoon we left the bookshop precisely at closing time, a move that earned us a steely look from my father, who was beginning to suspect that we were involved in some shady business, with all this coming and going. Fermín mumbled something incoherent about a few errands that needed doing, and we quickly disappeared. I told myself that sooner or later I'd have to reveal part of all this mess to my father; what part, exactly, was a different question.

On our way, with his usual flair for tales, Fermín briefed me on where we were heading. The Santa Lucía hospice was an institution of dubious reputation housed within the ruins of an ancient palace on Calle Moncada. The legend surrounding the place made it sound like a cross between purgatory and a morgue, with sanitary conditions worse than in either. The story was, to say the very least, peculiar. Since the eleventh century, the palace had housed, among other things, various residences for well-to-do families, a prison, a salon for courtesans, a library of forbidden manuscripts, a barracks, a sculptor's workshop, a sanatorium for plague sufferers, and a convent. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was practically crumbling down in bits, the palace had been turned into a museum of circus freaks and atrocities by a bombastic impresario who called himself Laszlo de Vicherny, Duke of Parma and private alchemist to the House of Bourbon. His real name turned out to be Baltasar Deulofeu i Carallot, the bastard of a salted-pork entrepreneur and a fallen debutante, who was mostly known for his escapades as a professional gigolo and con artist.

The man took pride in owning Spain's largest collection of humanoid fetuses in different stages of deformity, preserved in jars of embalming fluid, and somewhat less pride in his even larger collection of warrants issued by some of Europe's and America's finest law-enforcement agencies. Among other attractions, “The Tenebrarium” (as Deulofeu had renamed the palace) offered séances, necromancy, fights (with cocks, rats, dogs, big strapping women, imbeciles, or some combination of the above), as well as betting, a brothel that specialized in cripples and freaks, a casino, a legal and financial consultancy, a workshop for love potions, a stage for regional folklore and puppet shows, and parades of exotic dancers. At Christmas a Nativity play was staged, sparing no expenses and featuring the troupe from the museum and the whole collection of prostitutes. Its fame reached the far ends of the province.

The Tenebrarium was a roaring success for fifteen years, until it was discovered that Deulofeu had seduced the wife, the daughter,
and
the mother-in-law of the military governor of the province within a single week. The blackest infamy descended on the place and its owner. Before Deulofeu was able to flee the city and don another of his multiple identities, a band of masked thugs seized him in the backstreets of the Santa María quarter and proceeded to hang him and set fire to him in the Ciudadela Park, leaving his body to be devoured by wild dogs that roamed in the area. After two decades of neglect, during which time nobody bothered to remove the collection of horrors of the ill-fated Laszlo, the Tenebrarium was transformed into a charitable institution under the care of an order of nuns.

“The Ladies of the Final Ordeal, or something equally morbid,” said Fermín. “The trouble is, they're very obsessive about the secrecy of the place (bad conscience, I'd say), which means we'll have to think of some ruse for getting in.”

In more recent times, the occupants of the Hospice of Santa Lucía were being recruited from the ranks of dying, abandoned, demented, destitute old people who made up the crowded underworld of Barcelona. Luckily for them, they mostly lasted only a short time after they had been taken in; neither the conditions of the establishment nor the company encouraged longevity. According to Fermín, the deceased were removed shortly before dawn and made their last journey to the communal grave in a covered wagon donated by a firm in Hospitalet that specialized in meat packing and delicatessen products of doubtful reputation—a firm that occasionally would be involved in grim scandals.

“You're making all this up,” I protested, overwhelmed by the horrific details of Fermín's story.

“My inventiveness does not go that far, Daniel. Wait and see. I visited the building on one unfortunate occasion about ten years ago, and I can tell you that it looked as if they'd hired your friend Julián Carax as an interior decorator. A shame we didn't bring some laurel leaves to stifle the aromas. But we'll have enough trouble as it is just being allowed in.”

With my expectations thus shaped, we turned into Calle Moncada, by that time of day already transformed into a dark passage flanked by old mansions that had been turned into storehouses and workshops. The litany of bells coming from the basilica of Santa María del Mar mingled with the echo of our footsteps. Soon a penetrating, bitter odor permeated the cold winter breeze.

“What's that smell?”

“We've arrived,” announced Fermín.