The Shadow of the Wind (5 page)

A
DEEP, DREAMLESS SLEEP AND THE PROSPECT OF SEEING
C
LARA
again that afternoon persuaded me that the vision had been pure coincidence. Perhaps that unexpected and feverish outbreak of imagination was just a side effect of the growth spurt I'd been waiting for, an event that all the women in the building said would turn me into a man, if not of stature, at least of a certain height. At seven on the dot, dressed in my Sunday best and smelling strongly of the Varón Dandy eau de cologne I had borrowed from my father, I turned up at the house of Gustavo Barceló ready to make my début as personal reader and living-room pest. The bookseller and his niece shared a palatial apartment in Plaza Real. A uniformed maid, wearing a white cap and the expressionless look of a soldier, opened the door for me with theatrical servility.

“You must be Master Daniel,” she said. “I'm Bernarda, at your service.”

Bernarda affected a ceremonial tone that could not conceal a Cáceres accent thick enough to spread on toast. With pomp and solemnity, she led me through the Barceló residence. The apartment, which was on the first floor, circled the building and formed a ring of galleries, sitting rooms, and passageways that to me, used as I was to our modest family home on Calle Santa Ana, seemed like a miniature of the Escorial palace. It was obvious that, as well as books, incunabula, and all manner of arcane bibliography, Don Gustavo also collected statues, paintings, and altarpieces, not to mention abundant fauna and flora. I followed Bernarda through a gallery that was full to overflowing with foliage and tropical species. A golden, dusky light filtered through the glass panes of the gallery and the languid tones from a piano hovered in the air. Bernarda fought her way through the jungle brandishing her docker's arms as if they were machetes. I followed her closely, examining the surroundings and noticing the presence of half a dozen cats and a couple of cockatoos (of a violent color and encyclopedic size) which, the maid explained, Barceló had christened Ortega and Gasset, respectively. Clara was waiting for me in a sitting room on the other side of this forest, overlooking the square. Draped in a diaphanous turquoise-blue cotton dress, the object of my confused desire was playing the piano beneath the weak light that came through the rose window. Clara played badly, with no sense of rhythm and mistaking half the notes, but to me her serenade was liquid heaven. I saw her sitting up straight at the keyboard, with a half smile and her head tilted to one side, and she seemed like a celestial vision. I was about to clear my throat to indicate my presence, but the whiff of cologne betrayed me. Clara suddenly stopped her playing, and an embarrassed smile lit up her face.

“For a moment I thought you were my uncle,” she said. “He has forbidden me to play Mompou, because he says that what I do with him is a sacrilege.”

The only Mompou I knew was a gaunt priest with a tendency to flatulence who taught us physics and chemistry at school. The association of ideas seemed to me both grotesque and downright improbable.

“Well, I think you play beautifully.”

“No I don't. My uncle is a real music enthusiast, and he's even hired a music teacher to mend my ways—a young composer who shows a lot of promise called Adrián Neri. He's studied in Paris and Vienna. You've got to meet him. He's writing a symphony that is going to have its premiere with the Barcelona City Orchestra—his uncle sits on the management board. He's a genius.”

“The uncle or the nephew?”

“Don't be wicked, Daniel. I'm sure you'll really fall for Adrián.”

More likely he'll fall on me like a grand piano plummeting down from the seventh floor, I thought.

“Would you like a snack?” Clara offered. “Bernarda makes the most breathtaking cinnamon sponge cakes.”

We took our afternoon snack like royalty, wolfing down everything the maid put before us. I had no idea about the protocol for this unfamiliar occasion and was not sure how to behave. Clara, who always seemed to know what I was thinking, suggested that I read from
The Shadow of the Wind
whenever I liked and that, while we were at it, I might as well start at the beginning. And so, trying to sound like one of those pompous voices on Radio Nacional that recited patriotic vignettes after the midday Angelus, I threw myself into revisiting the text of the novel. My voice, rather stiff at first, slowly became more relaxed, and soon I forgot myself and was submerged once more in the narrative, discovering cadences and turns of phrase that flowed like musical motifs, riddles made of timbre and pauses I had not noticed during my first reading. New details, strands of images, and fantasy appeared between the lines and new shapes revealed themselves, as in the structure of a building looked at from different angles. I read for about an hour, getting through five chapters, until my throat felt dry and half a dozen clocks chimed throughout the apartment, reminding me that it was getting late. I closed the book and observed that Clara was smiling at me calmly.

“It reminds me a bit of
The Red House,
” she said. “But this story seems less somber.”

“Don't you believe it,” I said. “This is just the beginning. Later on, things get complicated.”

“You have to go, don't you?” Clara asked.

“I'm afraid so. It's not that I want to, but…”

“If you have nothing else to do, you could come back tomorrow,” she suggested. “But I don't want to take advantage of you….”

“Six o'clock?” I offered. “That way we'll have more time.”

That meeting in the music room of the Plaza Real apartment was the first of many more throughout the summer of 1945 and the years to follow. Soon my visits to the Barcelós became almost daily, except for Tuesdays and Thursdays, when Clara had music lessons with Adrián Neri. I spent long hours there, and in time I memorized every room, every passageway, and every plant in Don Gustavo's forest.
The Shadow of the Wind
lasted us about a fortnight, but we had no trouble in finding successors with which to fill our reading hours. Barceló owned a fabulous library, and, for want of more Julián Carax titles, we ambled through dozens of minor classics and major bagatelles. Some afternoons we barely read, and spent our time just talking or even going out for a walk around the square or as far as the cathedral. Clara loved to sit and listen to the murmuring of people in the cloister and guess at the echoes of footsteps in the stone alleyways. She would ask me to describe the façades, the people, the cars, the shops, the lampposts and shop windows that we passed on our way. Often she would take my arm and I would guide her through our own private Barcelona, one that only she and I could see. We always ended up in a dairy shop on Calle Petritxol, sharing a bowl of whipped cream or a cup of hot chocolate with sponge fingers. Sometimes people would look at us askance, and more than one know-it-all waiter referred to her as “your older sister,” but I paid no attention to their taunts and insinuations. Other times, I don't know whether out of malice or morbidity, Clara confided in me, telling me far-fetched secrets that I was not sure how to take. One of her favorite topics concerned a stranger, a person who sometimes came up to her when she was alone on the street and spoke to her in a hoarse voice. This mysterious person, who never mentioned his name, asked her questions about Don Gustavo and even about me. Once he had stroked her throat. Such stories tormented me mercilessly. Another time Clara told me she had begged the supposed stranger to let her read his face with her hands. He did not reply, which she took as a yes. When she raised her hands to his face, he stopped her suddenly, but she still managed to feel what she thought was leather.

“As if he wore a leather mask,” she said.

“You're making that up, Clara.”

Clara would swear again and again that it was true, and I would give up, tortured by the image of that phantom who found pleasure in caressing her swan's neck—and heaven knows what else—while all I could do was long for it. Had I paused to reflect, I would have understood that my devotion to Clara brought me no more than suffering. Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most. During that bleak postwar summer, the only thing I feared was the arrival of the new school term, when I would no longer be able to spend all day with Clara.

 

B
Y DINT OF SEEING ME SO OFTEN AROUND THE HOUSE,
B
ERNARDA,
whose severe appearance concealed a doting maternal instinct, became fond of me and, in her own manner, decided to adopt me.

“You can tell this boy hasn't got a mother, sir,” she would say to Barceló. “I feel so sorry for him, poor little mite.”

Bernarda had arrived in Barcelona shortly after the war, fleeing from poverty and from a father who on a good day would beat her up and tell her she was stupid, ugly, and a slut, and on a bad one would corner her in the pigsty, drunk, and fondle her until she sobbed with terror—at which point he'd let her go, calling her prudish and stuck up, like her mother. Barceló had come across Bernarda by chance when she worked in a vegetable stall in the Borne Market and, following his instinct, had offered her a post in his household.

“Ours will be a brand-new
Pygmalion,
” he announced. “You shall be my Eliza and I'll be your Professor Higgins.”

Bernarda, whose literary appetite was more than satisfied with the church newsletter, looked at him out of the corner of her eye.

“One might be poor and ignorant, but very decent, too,” she said.

Barceló was not exactly George Bernard Shaw, but even if he had not managed to endow his pupil with the eloquence and spirit of a salon dame, his efforts had refined Bernarda and taught her the manners and speech of a provincial maid. She was twenty-eight, but I always thought she carried ten more years on her back, even if they showed only in her eyes. She was a serial churchgoer with an ecstatic devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes. Every morning she went to the eight o'clock service at the basilica of Santa María del Mar, and she confessed no less than three times a week, four in warm weather. Don Gustavo, who was a confirmed agnostic (which Bernarda suspected might be a respiratory condition, like asthma, but afflicting only refined gentlemen), deemed it mathematically impossible that the maid should be able to sin sufficiently to keep up that schedule of confession and contrition.

“You're as good as gold, Bernarda,” he would say indignantly. “These people who see sin everywhere are sick in their souls and, if you really press me, in their bowels. The endemic condition of the Iberian saint is chronic constipation.”

Every time she heard such blasphemy, Bernarda would make the sign of the cross five times over. Later, at night, she would say a prayer for the tainted soul of Mr. Barceló, who had a good heart but whose brains had rotted away due to excessive reading, like that fellow Sancho Panza. Very occasionally Bernarda had boyfriends, who would beat her, take what little money she had stashed in a savings account, and sooner or later dump her. Every time one of these crises arose, Bernarda would lock herself up in her room for days, where she would cry an ocean and swear she was going to kill herself with rat poison or bleach. After exhausting all his persuasive tricks, Barceló would get truly frightened and call the locksmith to open the door. Then the family doctor would administer a sedative strong enough to calm a horse. When the poor thing woke up two days later, the bookseller would buy her roses, chocolates, and a new dress and would take her to the movies to see the latest from Cary Grant, who in her book was the handsomest man in recorded history.

“Did you know? They say Cary Grant is queer,” she would murmur, stuffing herself with chocolates. “Is that possible?”

“Rubbish,” Barceló would swear. “Dunces and blockheads live in a state of perpetual envy.”

“You do speak well, sir. It shows that you've been to that Sorbet university.”

“The Sorbonne,” he would answer, gently correcting her.

It was very difficult not to love Bernarda. Without being asked, she would cook and sew for me. She would mend my clothes and my shoes, comb and cut my hair, buy me vitamins and toothpaste. Once she even gave me a small medal with a glass container full of holy water, which a sister of hers who lived in San Adrián del Besós had brought all the way from Lourdes by bus. Sometimes, while she inspected my head in search of lice and other parasites, she would speak to me in a hushed voice.

“Miss Clara is the most wonderful person in the world, and may God strike me dead if it should ever enter my head to criticize her, but it's not right that you, Master Daniel, should become too obsessed with her, if you know what I mean.”

“Don't worry, Bernarda, we're only friends.”

“That's just what I say.”

To illustrate her arguments, Bernarda would then bring up some story she had heard on the radio about a boy who had fallen in love with his teacher and on whom some sort of avenging spell had been cast. It made his hair and his teeth fall out, and his face and hands were covered with some incriminating fungus, a sort of leprosy of lust.

“Lust is a bad thing,” Bernarda would conclude. “Take it from me.”

Despite the jokes he made at my expense, Don Gustavo looked favorably on my devotion to Clara and my eager commitment to be her companion. I attributed his tolerance to the fact that he probably considered me harmless. From time to time, he would still let slip enticing offers to buy the Carax novel from me. He would tell me that he had mentioned the subject to colleagues in the antiquarian book trade, and they all agreed that a Carax could now be worth a fortune, especially in Paris. I always refused his offers, at which he would just smile shrewdly. He had given me a copy of the keys to the apartment so that I could come and go without having to worry about whether he or Bernarda were there to open the door. My father was another story. As the years went by, he had got over his instinctive reluctance to talk about any subject that truly worried him. One of the first consequences of that progress was that he began to show his obvious disapproval of my relationship with Clara.