Translated by Lucia Graves 13 страница

'Is your thing serious?'

'More than serious. Spiritual. And what about you and this pumpkin, Beatriz? You can see a mile off that she's worth a million, but the crux of the matter is this: is she the sort who makes you fall in love or the sort who merely stirs your nether regions?'

'I haven't the slightest idea,' I pointed out. 'Both things, I'd say.'

'Look, Daniel, this is like indigestion. Do you notice something here, in the mouth of the stomach - as if you'd swallowed a brick? Or do you just feel a general feverishness?'

'The brick things sounds more like it,' I said, although I didn't altogether discard the fever.

'That means it's a serious matter. God help us! Come on, sit down and I'll make you a lime-blossom tea.'

We settled down round the table in the back room, surrounded by books. The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows. Fermin handed me a steaming hot cup and smiled at me a little awkwardly. Something was bothering him.

'May I ask you a personal question, Daniel?'

'Of course.'

'I beg you to answer in all frankness,' he said, and he cleared his throat. 'Do you think I could ever be a father?'

He must have seen my puzzled expression, and he quickly added, 'I don't mean biologically - I may look a bit rickety, but by good luck Providence has endowed me with the potency and the fury of a fighting bull. I'm referring to the other sort of father. A good father, if you see what I mean.'

'A good father?'

'Yes. Like yours. A man with a head, a heart, and a soul. A man capable of listening, of leading and respecting a child, and not of drowning his own defects in him. Someone whom a child will not only love because he's his father but will also admire for the person he is. Someone he would want to grow up to resemble.'

'Why are you asking me this, Fermin? I thought you didn't believe in marriage and families. The yoke and all that, remember?'

Fermin nodded. 'Look, all that's for amateurs. Marriage and family are only what we make of them. Without that they're just a nest of hypocrisy. Garbage and empty words. But if there is real love, the sort you don't go around telling everyone about, the sort that is felt and lived...'

'You're a changed man, Fermin.'

'I am. Bernarda has made me want to be a better man.'

'How's that?'

'So that I can deserve her. You cannot understand such things right now, because you're young. But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up. Bernarda and I have been talking. She's quite a mother hen, as you know. She doesn't say so, but I think the one thing in life that would make her truly happy is to become a mother. And that woman is sweeter than peaches in syrup to me. Suffice it to say that, for her, I'm prepared to enter a church after thirty-two years of clerical abstinence and recite the psalms of St Seraph or whatever needs to be done.'

'Aren't you getting a bit ahead of yourself, Fermin? You've only just met her....'

'Look, Daniel, at my age either you begin to see things for what they are or you're pretty much done for. Only three or four things are worth living for; the rest is shit. I've already fooled around a lot, and now I know that the only thing I really want is to make Bernarda happy and die one day in her arms. I want to be a respectable man again, see? Not for my sake - as far as I'm concerned, I couldn't give a fly's fart for the respect of this chorus of simians we call humanity - but for hers. Because Bernarda believes in such things - in radio soaps, in priests, in respectability and in Our Lady of Lourdes. That's the way she is, and I want her exactly like that. I even like those hairs that grow on her chin. And that's why I want to be someone she can be proud of. I want her to think, My Fermin is one hell of a man, like Cary Grant, Hemingway, or Manolete.'

I crossed my arms, weighing up the situation. 'Have you spoken about all this with her? About having a child together?'

'Goodness no. What do you take me for? Do you think I go around telling women I want to get them knocked up? And it's not that I don't feel like it. Take that silly Merceditas: I'd put some triplets in her right now and feel on top of the world, but—'

'Have you told Bernarda you'd like to have a family?'

'These things don't need to be said, Daniel. They show on your face.'

I nodded. 'Well, then, for what my opinion is worth, I'm sure you'll be an excellent father and husband. And since you don't believe in those things, you'll never take them for granted.'

His face melted into happiness. 'Do you mean it?'

'Of course.'

'You've taken a huge weight off my mind. Because just remembering my own father and thinking that I might end up being like him makes me want to get sterilized.'

'Don't worry, Fermin. Besides, there's probably no treatment capable of crushing your procreative powers.'

'Good point,' he reflected. 'Go on, go and get some sleep. I mustn't keep you any longer.'

'You're not keeping me, Fermin. I have a feeling I'm not going to sleep a wink.'

'Take a pain for a pleasure.... By the way, remember you mentioned that PO box?'

'Have you discovered anything?'

‘I told you to leave it to me. This lunchtime I went up to the post office and had a word with an old acquaintance of mine who works there. PO Box 2321 is registered under the name of one Jose Maria Requejo, a lawyer with offices on Calle Leon XIII. I took the liberty of checking out the address and wasn't surprised to discover that it doesn't exist, although I imagine you already know that. Someone has been collecting the letters addressed to that box for years. I know because some of the mail received from a property business comes as registered post and requires a signature on a small receipt and proof of identification.'

'Who is it? One of Requejo's employees?' I asked.

‘I couldn't get that far, but I doubt it. Either I'm very mistaken or this Requejo guy exists on the same plane as Our Lady of Fatima. All I can tell you is the name of the person who collects the mail: Nuria Monfort.'

I felt the blood draining from me.

'Nuria Monfort? Are you sure, Fermin?'

'I saw some of those receipts myself. That name and the number of her identity card were on all of them. I deduce, from that sick look on your face, that this revelation surprises you.'

'Quite a lot.'

'May I ask who this Nuria Monfort is? The clerk I spoke to told me he remembered her clearly because she went there two weeks ago to collect the mail and, in his impartial opinion, she looked hotter than the Venus de Milo - and with a firmer bust. I trust his assessment, because before the war he was a professor of aesthetics - but he was also a distant cousin of Socialist leader Largo Caballero, so naturally he now licks one-peseta stamps.'

'I was with that woman today, in her home,' I murmured.

Fermin looked at me in amazement. 'With Nuria Monfort? I'm beginning to think I was wrong about you, Daniel. You've become quite a rake.'

'It's not what you think, Fermin.'

'That's your loss, then. At your age I was like El Molino music hall -shows morning, afternoon, and night.'

I gazed at that small, gaunt, and bony man, with his large nose and his yellow skin, and I realized he was becoming my best friend.

'May I tell you something, Fermin? Something that's been on my mind for some time?'

'But of course. Anything. Especially if it's shocking and concerns this yummy maiden.'

For the second time that night I began to tell the story of Julian Carax and the enigma of his death. Fermin listened very attentively, writing things down in a notebook and interrupting me every now and then to ask me some detail whose relevance escaped me. Listening to myself, it became increasingly clear to me that there were many lacunae in that story. More than once my mind went blank and my thoughts became lost as I tried to work out why Nuria Monfort would have lied to me. What was the significance of all this? Why had she, for years, been collecting the mail directed to a nonexistent lawyers' office that was supposedly in charge of the Fortuny-Carax apartment in Ronda de San Antonio? I didn't realize I was voicing my doubts out loud.

'We can't yet know why that woman was lying to you,' said Fermin.

'But we can speculate that if she did so in this respect, she may have done so, and probably did, in many others.'

I sighed, completely lost. What do you suggest, Fermin?'

Fermin Romero de Torres sighed and put on his most Socratic expression. 'I'll tell you what we can do. This coming Sunday, if you agree, we'll drop by San Gabriel's school quite casually, and we'll make some inquiries concerning the origins of the friendship between this Carax fellow and the other lad, the rich boy...'

'Aldaya.'

'I have a way with priests, you'll see, even if it's just because I look like a roguish monk. I butter them up a little, and I get them eating out of my hand.'

'Are you sure?'

'Positive. I guarantee this lot is going to sing like the Montserrat Boys' Choir.'

I spent the Saturday in a trance, anchored behind the bookshop counter in the hope of seeing Bea come through the door as if by magic. Every time the telephone rang, I rushed to answer it, grabbing the receiver from my father or Fermin. Halfway through the afternoon, after about twenty calls from clients and no news from Bea, I began to accept that the world and my miserable existence were coming to an end. My father had gone out to price a collection in San Gervasio, and Fermin took advantage of the situation to deliver another of his magisterial lectures on the many mysteries of romance.

'Calm down or you'll grow a stone in your liver,' Fermin advised me. 'This business of courtship is like a tango: absurd and pure embellishment. But you're the man, and you must take the lead.' It was all beginning to look pretty grim. 'The lead? Me?' 'What do you expect? One has to pay some price for being able to piss standing up.'

'But Bea implied that she would get back to me.' 'You really don't understand women, Daniel. I bet you my Christmas bonus that the little chick is in her house right now, looking languidly out of the window like the Lady of the Camellias, waiting for you to come and rescue her from that idiot father of hers and drag her into an unstoppable spiral of lust and sin.'

'Are you sure?'

'It's a mathematical certainty.'

'What if she's decided she doesn't want to see me again?'

'Look, Daniel. Women - with remarkable exceptions like your neighbour Merceditas - are more intelligent than we are, or at least more honest with themselves about what they do or don't want. Another question is whether they tell you or the world. You're facing the enigma of nature, Daniel. Womankind is an indecipherable maze. If you give her time to think, you're lost. Remember: warm heart, cold mind. The seducer's code.'.

Fermin was about to detail the particulars and techniques of the art of seduction when the doorbell tinkled and in walked my friend Tomas Aguilar. My heart missed a beat. Providence was denying me Bea but sending me her brother. A fateful herald, I thought. Tomas had a sombre expression and a certain despondent air.

'What a funereal appearance, Don Tomas,' Fermin remarked. 'You'll accept a small coffee at least, I hope?'

'I wouldn't say no,' said Tomas, with his usual reserve.

Fermin served him a cup of the concoction he kept in a Thermos. It gave out an odour suspiciously like sherry.

'Is there a problem?' I asked.

Tomas shrugged. 'Nothing new. My father is having one of his days, and I thought it best to get out and breathe some fresh air for a while.'

I gulped. 'Why's that?'

'Goodness knows. Last night my sister, Bea, arrived home very late. My father was waiting up for her, a bit worked up as usual. She refused to say where she'd been or who she'd been with, and my father flew into a rage. He was screaming and yelling until four o'clock in the morning, calling her all sorts of names, a tart being the least of them. He swore he was going to send her to a nunnery and said that if she ever came back pregnant, he was going to kick her out into the goddamn street.'

Fermin threw me a look of alarm. Cold beads of sweat were running down my back.

'This morning,' Tomas continued, 'Bea locked herself up in her room, and she hasn't come out all day. My father has plonked himself in the dining room to read his newspaper and listen to operettas on the radio, full blast. During the interval of Luisa Fernanda, I had to go out because I was going crazy.'

'Well, your sister was probably out with her fiance, don't you think?' Fermin needled. 'It would be perfectly natural'

I gave Fermin a kick under the counter, which he avoided with feline dexterity.

'Her fiance is doing his military service,' Tomas said. 'He doesn't come back on leave for another two weeks. Besides, when she goes out with him, she's home by eight at the latest.'

'And you have no idea where she was or who she was with?'

'He's already told you he doesn't, Fermin,' I intervened, anxious to change the subject.

'Nor your father?' insisted Fermin who was thoroughly enjoying himself.

'No. But he's sworn he'll find out, and break the guy's legs and his face as soon as he knows who it is.'

I felt myself going deathly pale. Fermin offered me a cup of his concoction without asking. I drank it down in one gulp. It tasted like tepid diesel fuel. Tomas watched me but said nothing - a dark, impenetrable look.

'Did you hear that?' Fermin suddenly said. 'Sounded like a drum roll for a somersault.'

'No.'

'Yours truly's rumblings. Look, I'm suddenly terribly hungry.... Do you mind if I leave you two alone and run up to the baker's to grab myself a bun? Not to mention the new shop assistant who's just arrived from Reus: she looks so tasty you could eat her. She's called Maria Virtudes, but despite her name the girl is pure vice.... That way I'll leave you two to talk in peace, eh?'

In ten seconds Fermin had done a disappearing act, off for his snack and his meeting with the young woman. Tomas and I were left alone, enveloped in a silence as weighty as the Swiss franc. After several minutes I could bear it no longer.

'Tomas,' I began, my mouth dry. 'Last night your sister was with me.'

He stared at me without even blinking. I swallowed hard. 'Say something,' I said.

'You're not right in the head.'

A minute went by, muffled sounds coming in from the street. Tomas held his coffee, which he had not touched.

'Are you serious?' he asked.

'I've only seen her once.'

'That's not an answer.'

'Do you mind?'

He shrugged his shoulders. 'You'd better be sure you know what you're doing. Would you stop seeing her just because I asked you to?'

'Yes,' I lied. 'But don't ask me to.'

Tomas looked down. 'You don't know Bea,' he murmured.

I didn't reply. We let another few minutes go by without saying a word, looking at the grey figures who were scanning the shop window, praying that one of them would decide to come in and rescue us from that poisonous silence. After a while Tomas abandoned his cup on the counter and made his way to the door.

'You're leaving already?'

He nodded.

'Shall we meet up tomorrow for a while?' I said. 'We could go to the cinema, with Fermin, like before.'

He stopped by the door. 'I'll only tell you once, Daniel. Don't hurt my sister.'

On his way out, he passed Fermin, who was returning laden with a bag full of steaming-hot buns. Fermin saw him go off into the dusk, shaking his head. He left the buns on the counter and offered me an ensaimada just out of the oven. I declined. I wouldn't even have been able to swallow an aspirin.

'He'll get over it, Daniel. You'll see. These things are common between friends.'

'I don't know,' I mumbled.

Fermin and I met on Sunday at seven-thirty in the morning at the Canaletas Cafe. Fermin treated me to a coffee and brioches whose texture, even with butter spread on them, bore a resemblance to pumice stone. We were served by a waiter who sported a fascist badge on his lapel and a pencil moustache. He didn't stop humming to himself, and when we asked him the reason for his excellent mood, he explained that he'd become a father the day before. We congratulated him, and he insisted on giving us each a cigar to smoke during the day, in honour of his firstborn. We said we would. Fermin kept looking at him out of the corner of his eye, frowning, and I suspected he was plotting something.

Over breakfast Fermin kicked off the day's investigations with a general outline of the mystery.

'It all begins with the sincere friendship between two boys, Julian Carax and Jorge Aldaya, classmates since early childhood, like Don Tomas and yourself. For years all is well. Inseparable friends with a whole life before them, the works. And yet at some point a conflict arises that ruins this friendship. To paraphrase the drawing-room dramatists, the conflict bears a woman's name: Penelope. Very Homeric. Do you follow me?'

The only thing that came to my mind was the last sentence spoken by Tomas the previous evening in the bookshop: 'Don't hurt my sister.' I felt nauseous.

'In 1919, Julian Carax sets off for Paris, Odysseus-fashion,' Fermin continued. 'The letter, signed by Penelope, which he never receives, establishes that by then the young woman has been incarcerated in her own house, a prisoner of her family for reasons that are unclear, and that the friendship between Aldaya and Carax has ended. Moreover, according to Penelope, her brother, Jorge, has sworn that if he ever sees his old friend Julian again, he'll kill him. Grim words indeed. One doesn't have to be Pasteur to deduce that this conflict is a direct consequence of the relationship between Penelope and Carax.'

A cold sweat covered my forehead. I could feel the coffee and the few mouthfuls of brioche I'd swallowed rising up my throat.

'All the same, we must assume that Carax never gets to know what happened to Penelope, because the letter doesn't reach him. He vanishes from sight into the mists of Paris, where he will lead a ghostly existence between his job as a pianist in a variety club and his disastrous career as a remarkably unsuccessful novelist. These years in Paris are a puzzle. All that remains of them today is a forgotten literary work that has virtually disappeared. We know that at some point he decides to marry a mysterious rich lady who is twice his age. The nature of such a marriage, if we are to go by what the witnesses say, seems more an act of charity or friendship on behalf of an ailing lady than a love match. Whichever way you look at it, this patron of the arts, fearing for the financial future of her protege, decides to leave him her fortune and bid farewell to this world with a roll in the hay to further her noble cause. Parisians are like that.'

'Perhaps it was a genuine love,' I suggested, in a tiny voice.

'Hey, Daniel, are you all right? You're looking very pale, and you're perspiring terribly.'

'I'm fine,' I lied.

'As I was saying. Love is a lot like pork: there's loin steak and there's bologna. Each has its own place and function. Carax had declared that he didn't feel worthy of any love, and indeed, as far as we know, no romances were recorded during his years in Paris. Of course, working in a brothel, perhaps his basic urges were satisfied by fraternizing with the employees, as if it were a perk of the job, so to speak. But this is pure speculation. Let us return to the moment when the marriage between Carax and his protectress is announced. That is when Jorge Aldaya reappears on the map of this murky business. We know he makes contact with Carax's publisher in Barcelona to find out the whereabouts of the novelist. Shortly afterwards, on the morning of his wedding day, Julian Carax fights a duel with an unknown person in Pere Lachaise cemetery, and disappears. The wedding never takes place. From then on, everything becomes confused.'

Fermin allowed for a dramatic pause, giving me his conspiratorial look. 'Supposedly Carax crosses the border and, with yet another show of his proverbial sense of timing, returns to Barcelona in 1936 at the very outbreak of the Civil War. His activities and whereabouts in Barcelona during these weeks are hazy. We suppose he stays in the city for about a month and that during this time he doesn't contact any of his acquaintances. Neither his father nor his friend Nuria Monfort. Then he is found dead in the street, struck down by a bullet. It is not long before a sinister character makes his appearance on the scene. He calls himself Lain Coubert - a name he borrows from the last novel by Julian Carax and who, to cap it all, is none other than the Prince of Darkness. The supposed Lucifer states that he is prepared to obliterate what little is left of Carax and destroy his books forever. To round off the melodrama, he appears as a faceless man, disfigured by fire. A rogue from a Gothic operetta in whom, just to confuse matters more, Nuria Monfort believes she recognizes the voice of Jorge Aldaya.'

'Let me remind you that Nuria Monfort lied to me,' I said.

'True. But even if Nuria Monfort lied to you, she might have done it more by omission and perhaps to disassociate herself from the facts. There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite. Listen, are you sure you're all right? Your face is the colour of goat's cheese.'

I shook my head and dashed to the toilet.

I threw up my breakfast, my dinner, and a good amount of the anger I was carrying with me. I washed my face with freezing water from the sink and looked at my reflection in the blurry mirror on which someone had scrawled shithead fascists with a wax crayon. When I got back to the table, I realized that Fermin was at the bar, paying the bill and discussing football with the waiter who had served us.

'Better?' he asked.

I nodded.

'That was a drop in your blood pressure,' said Fermin. 'Here. Have a Sugus sweet, they cure everything.'

On the way out of the cafe, Fermin insisted that we should take a taxi as far as San Gabriel's school and leave the subway for another day, arguing that the morning was as bright as a political mural and that tunnels were for rats.

'A taxi up to Sarria will cost a fortune,' I protested.

'The ride's on the Cretins' Savings Bank,' Fermin put in quickly. 'The proud patriot back there gave me the wrong change, and we're in business. And you're not up to travelling underground.'

Equipped with our ill-gotten funds, we positioned ourselves on a corner at the foot of Rambla de Cataluna and waited for a cab. We had to let a few go by, because Fermin stated that, since he so rarely travelled by car, he wanted to get into a Studebaker at the very least. It took us a quarter of an hour to find a vehicle to his liking, which Fermin hailed by waving his arms about like a windmill. Fermin insisted on travelling in the front seat, and this gave him the chance to get involved in a discussion with the driver about Joseph Stalin, who was the driver's idol and spiritual guide.

'There have been three great figures this century: La Pasionaria; bullfighter extraordinaire Monolete; and Joseph Stalin,' the taxi driver proclaimed, getting ready to unload upon us a life of the saintly comrade.

I was riding comfortably in the back seat, paying little attention to the tedious speech, with the window open and enjoying the fresh air. Delighted to be driving around in a Studebaker, Fermin encouraged the cabdriver's chatter, occasionally punctuating his emotive biography of the Soviet leader with matters of doubtful historic interest.

'I've heard he's been suffering badly from prostate trouble ever since he swallowed the pip of a loquat, and now he can only pee if someone hums "The Internationale" for him,' he put in.

'Fascist propaganda,' the taxi driver explained, more devout than ever. 'The comrade pisses like a bull. The Volga might envy such a flow.'

This high-level political debate accompanied us as we made our way along Via Augusta towards the hills. Day was breaking, with a fresh breeze, and the sky was an intense blue. When we reached Calle Ganduxer, the driver turned right, and we began the slow ascent toward Paseo de la Bonanova.

San Gabriel's school, its redbrick facade dotted with dagger-shaped windows, stood in the middle of a grove, at the top of a narrow, winding street that led up from the boulevard. The whole structure, crowned by arches and towers, peered over a group of plane trees like some Gothic cathedral. We got out of the taxi and entered a leafy garden strewn with fountains that were adorned with mould-covered angels. Here and there cobbled paths meandered between the trees. On our way to the main door, Fermin gave me the background on the institution.

'Even though it may look like Rasputin's mausoleum to you, San Gabriel's school was, in its day, one of the most prestigious and exclusive institutions in Barcelona. During the Republic it went downhill because the nouveaux riches of the time, the new industrialists and bankers to whose children it had for years refused access because their surnames smelled too new, decided to create their own schools, where they would be treated with due reverence and where they, in turn, could refuse access to the sons of others. Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood. In this world a surname is less durable than a sugared almond. In its heyday - say, between 1880 and 1930, more or less - San Gabriel's school took in the flower of old, established families with bulging wallets. The Aldayas and company came to this sinister establishment as boarders, to fraternize with their equals, go to mass, and learn their history in order to be able to repeat it ad nauseam.'

'But Julian Carax wasn't really one of them,' I observed.

'Sometimes these illustrious institutions offer a scholarship or two for the sons of the gardener or the shoeshine man, just to show their magnanimity and Christian charity,' Fermin proffered. 'The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich. That is the poison with which capitalism blinds the—'

'Please don't get carried away with social doctrine, Fermin. If one of these priests hears you, they'll kick us out of here.' I realized that a couple of padres were watching us with a mixture of curiosity and concern from the top of the steps that led up to the front door of the school. I wondered whether they'd heard any of our conversation.

One of them moved forward with a courteous smile, his hands crossed over his chest like a bishop. He must have been in his early fifties, and his lean build and sparse hair lent him the air of a bird of prey. He had a penetrating gaze and gave off an aroma of fresh eau de cologne and mothballs.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04