'They can mind their own bloody business,' answered Fermin in a loud voice.
The conductor turned towards the three ladies and shrugged, indicating that he had done what he could and was not inclined to get involved in a scuffle over a matter of semantic modesty.
'People who have no life always have to stick their nose into the life of others,' said Fermin. 'What were we talking about?'
'About my lack of guts.'
'Right. A textbook case. Trust you me, young man. Go after your girl. Life flies by, especially the bit that's worth living. You heard what the priest said. Like a flash.'
'She's not my girl.'
'Well, then, make her yours before someone else takes her, especially the little tin soldier.'
'You talk as if Bea were a trophy.'
'No, as if she were a blessing,' Fermin corrected. 'Look, Daniel. Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it yourself.'
I spent the rest of the journey considering this pearl of wisdom while Fermin had another snooze, an occupation for which he had a Napoleonic talent. We got off the bus on the corner of Gran Via and Paseo de Gracia under a leaden sky that stole the light of day. Buttoning his raincoat up to his neck, Fermin announced that he was departing in a hurry towards his pension, to smarten up for his meeting with Bernarda.
'You must understand that with rather modest looks such as mine, basic beautification requires at least ninety minutes. You don't get far without some looks; that's the sad truth about these dishonest times. Vanitas peccata mundi.'
I saw him walk away down Gran Via, barely a sketch of a little man sheltering himself in a drab raincoat that flapped in the wind like a ragged flag. I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world. When I turned the corner of Puerta del Angel and Calle Santa Ana, my heart missed a beat. As usual, Fermin had been right. Destiny was waiting for me in front of the bookshop, clad in a tight grey wool suit, new shoes, and silk stockings, studying her reflection in the shop window.
'My father thinks I've gone to twelve o'clock mass,' said Bea without looking up from her own image.
'You could easily be there. There's been a continuous performance since nine o'clock this morning less than twenty yards from here, in the Church of Santa Ana.'
We spoke like two strangers who have casually stopped by a shop window, looking for each other's eyes in the pane.
'Let's not make a joke of it. I've had to pick up a church leaflet to see what the sermon was about. He's going to ask me for a detailed synopsis.'
'Your father thinks of everything.'
'He's sworn he'll break your legs.'
'Before that he'll have to find out who I am. And while my legs are still in one piece, I can run faster than him.'
Bea was looking at me tensely, glancing over her shoulder at the people who drifted by behind us in puffs of grey and wind.
'I don't know what you're laughing about,' she said. 'He means it.'
'I'm not laughing. I'm scared shitless. It's just that I'm so happy to see you.'
A suggestion of a smile, nervous, fleeting. 'Me, too,' Bea admitted.
'You say it as if it were an illness.'
'It's worse than that. I thought that if I saw you again in daylight, I might come to my senses.'
I wondered whether that was a compliment or a condemnation.
'We can't be seen together, Daniel. Not like this, in full view of everyone.'
'If you like, we can go into the bookshop. There's a coffeepot in the back room and—'
'No. I don't want anyone to see me go into or come out of this place. If anyone sees me talking to you now, I can always say I happened to bump into my brother's best friend. If we are seen together more than once, we'll arouse suspicion.'
I sighed. 'And who's going to see us? Who cares what we do?'
'People always have eyes for what is none of their business, and my father knows half of Barcelona.'
'So why have you come here to wait for me?'
'I haven't come to wait for you. I've come to church, remember? You said so yourself. Twenty yards from here...'
'You scare me, Bea. You lie even better than I do.'
'You don't know me, Daniel.'
'So your brother tells me.'
Our eyes met in the reflection.
'The other night you showed me something I'd never seen before,' murmured Bea. 'Now it's my turn.'
I frowned, intrigued. Bea opened her bag, pulled out a folded card, and handed it to me.
'You're not the only person in Barcelona who knows secrets, Daniel. I have a surprise for you. I'll wait for you at this address today at four. Nobody must know that we have arranged to meet there.'
'How will I know that I've found the right place?'
'You'll know.'
I looked at her briefly, praying that she wasn't just making fun of me.
'If you don't come, I'll understand,' Bea said. 'I'll understand that you don't want to see me anymore.'
Without giving me a second to answer, she turned around and walked hurriedly off towards the Ramblas. I was left holding the card, my words still hanging on my lips, my eyes following her until her silhouette melted into the shadows that preceded the storm. I opened the card. Inside, in blue handwriting, was an address I knew well.
Avenida del Tibidabo, 32
The storm didn't wait until nightfall to show its teeth. The first flashes of lightning caught me by surprise shortly after taking a bus on Line 22. As we went round Plaza Molina and started up Calle Balmes, the city was already beginning to fade behind a curtain of liquid velvet, reminding me that I hadn't even thought of taking an umbrella with me.
'Now that's what I call courage,' said the conductor when I asked for the stop.
It was already ten past four when the bus left me in the middle of nowhere - somewhere at the end of Calle Balmes - at the mercy of the storm. Opposite, Avenida del Tibidabo disappeared in a watery mirage. I counted up to three and started to run. Minutes later, soaked to the bone and shivering, I stopped under a doorway to get my breath back. I scrutinized the rest of the route. The storm's icy blast blurred the ghostly outline of mansions and large, rambling houses veiled in the mist. Among them rose the dark and solitary tower of the Aldaya mansion, anchored among the swaying trees. I pushed my soaking hair away from my eyes and began to run toward it, crossing the deserted avenue.
The small door encased within the gates swung in the wind. Beyond it, a path wound its way up to the house. I slipped in through the door and made my way across the property. Through the undergrowth I could make out the pedestals of statues that had been knocked down. As I neared the mansion, I noticed that one of the statues, the figure of an avenging angel, had been dumped into the fountain that was the centrepiece of the garden. Its blackened marble shone, ghostlike, beneath the sheet of water that flowed over the edge of the bowl. The hand of the fiery angel emerged from the water; an accusing finger, as sharp as a bayonet, pointing towards the front door of the house. The carved oak door seemed to be ajar. I pushed it and ventured a few steps into a cavernous entrance hall, its walls flickering with the gentle light of a candle.
'I thought you weren't coming,' said Bea.
The corridor was entombed in shadows, and Bea's silhouette stood out against the pallid light of a gallery that opened up beyond. She was sitting on a chair against the wall, a candle at her feet.
'Close the door,' she told me without getting up. 'The key is in the lock.'
I obeyed. The lock creaked with a deathly echo. I heard Bea's footsteps approaching me from behind and felt her touch on my soaking clothes.
'You're trembling. Is it fear or cold?'
'I haven't decided yet. Why are we here?'
She smiled in the dark and took my hand. 'Don't you know? I thought you would have guessed....'
'This was the Aldayas' house, that's all I know. How did you manage to get in, and how did you know...?'
'Come on, we'll light a fire to warm you up.'
She led me through the corridor to the gallery, which presided over the inner courtyard of the house. The marble columns and naked walls of the sitting room crept up to the coffered ceiling, which was falling to pieces. You could make out the spaces where paintings and mirrors had once covered the walls, and there were marks on the marble floor where furniture had stood. At one end of the room was a fireplace laid with a few logs. A pile of old newspaper stood by the poker. The air from the fireplace smelled of recent flames and charcoal. Bea knelt down by the hearth and started to place a few sheets of newspaper among the logs. She pulled out a match and lit them, quickly conjuring up a crown of flames. I imagined she was thinking that I must be dying of curiosity and impatience, so I decided to adopt a nonchalant air, making it very clear that if she wanted to play games with me, she had every chance of losing. But she wore a triumphant smile. Perhaps my trembling hands did not help my acting.
'Do you often come here?' I asked.
'This is the first time. Intrigued?'
'Vaguely.'
She spread out a clean blanket that she took out of a canvas bag. It smelled of lavender.
'Come on, sit here, by the fire. You might catch pneumonia, and it would be my fault.'
The heat from the blaze revived me. Bea gazed silently at the flames, bewitched.
'Are you going to tell me the secret?' I finally asked.
Bea sighed and moved to one of the chairs. I remained glued to the fire, watching the steam rise from my clothes like a fleeing soul.
'What you call the Aldaya mansion has, in fact, got its own name. The house is called "The Angel of Mist", but hardly anyone knows this.
My father's firm has been trying to sell the property for fifteen years, but without any luck. The other day, while you were telling me the story of Julian Carax and Penelope Aldaya, I didn't think of it. Later that night, at home, I put two and two together and remembered I'd occasionally heard my father talk about the Aldaya family, and about this house in particular. Yesterday I went over to my father's office, and his secretary, Casasus, told me the story of the house. Did you know that this wasn't their official residence but one of their summer houses?'
I shook my head.
'The Aldayas' main house was a mansion that was knocked down in 1925 to erect a block of apartments, on the site where Calle Bruch and Calle Mallorca cross today. The building had been designed by Puig i Cadafalch and commissioned by Penelope and Jorge's grandfather, Simon Aldaya, in 1896, when that area was nothing more than fields and irrigation channels. The eldest son of the patriarch Simon, Don Ricardo Aldaya, bought this summer residence at the turn of the century from a rather bizarre character - at a ridiculous price, because the house had a bad reputation. Casasus told me it was cursed and that even the vendors didn't dare show people around and would dodge the issue with any old pretext....'
That afternoon, as I warmed myself by the fire, Bea told me the story of how The Angel of Mist had come into the possession of the Aldaya family. It had all the makings of a lurid melodrama; something that could well have come from the pen of Julian Carax. The house was built in 1899 by the architectural partnership of Nauli, Martorell i Bergada, for a prosperous and extravagant Catalan financier called Salvador Jausa, who was to live in it for only a year. The tycoon, an orphan since the age of six and of humble origins, had amassed most of his fortune in Cuba and Puerto Rico. People said that he was one of the many shady figures behind the plot that led to the fall of Cuba and the war with the United States, in which the last of the colonies were lost. He brought back rather more than a fortune from the New World: with him were an American wife - a fragile damsel from Philadelphia's high society who didn't speak a word of Spanish - and a mulatto maid who had been in his service since his first years in Cuba and who travelled with a caged macaque in harlequin dress, and seven trunks of luggage. At first they moved into a few rooms in the Hotel Colon, while they waited to acquire a residence that would suit the tastes and desires of Jausa.
Nobody doubted for a moment that the maid - an ebony beauty endowed with eyes and a figure that, according to the society pages, could make heart rates soar - was in fact his lover, his guide to innumerable illicit pleasures. It was assumed, moreover, that she was a witch and a sorceress. Her name was Marisela, or that's what Jausa called her. Her presence and her mysterious air soon became the favourite talking point at the social gatherings that wellborn ladies held to sample sponge fingers, and kill time and the autumn blues. Unconfirmed rumours circulated at these tea parties that the woman fornicated on top of the male, that is to say, rode him like a dog on heat, which violated at least five of six recognized mortal sins. In consequence, more than one person wrote to the bishopric asking for a special blessing and protection for the untainted, immaculate souls of all respectable families in Barcelona. And to crown it all, Jausa had the audacity to go out for a ride in his carriage on Sundays, in the middle of the morning, with his wife and Marisela, parading this Babylonian spectacle of depravity in front of the eyes of any virtuous young man who might happen to be strolling along Paseo de Gracia on his way to the eleven o'clock mass. Even the newspapers noted the haughty look of the strapping woman, who gazed at the Barcelona public 'as a queen of the jungle might gaze at a collection of pygmies'.
Around that time Catalan modernism was all the rage in Barcelona, but Jausa made it quite clear to the architects he had engaged to build his new home that he wanted something different. In his book 'different' was the highest praise. Jausa had spent years strolling past the row of neo-Gothic extravagances that the great tycoons of the American industrial age had erected on Fifth Avenue's Mansion Row in New York City. Nostalgic for his American days of glory, the financier refused to listen to any argument in favour of building in accordance with the fashion of the moment, just as he had refused to buy a box in the Liceo, which was de rigueur, labelling the opera house a Babel for the deaf, a beehive of undesirables. He wanted his home to be far from the city, in the still relatively isolated area of Avenida del Tibidabo. He wanted to gaze at Barcelona from a distance, he said. The only company he sought was a garden filled with statues of angels, which, according to his instructions (conveyed by Marisela), must be placed on each of the points of a six-point star - no more, no less. Resolved to carry out his plans, and with his coffers bursting with money with which to satisfy his every whim, Salvador Jausa sent his architects to New York for three months to study the exhilarating structures built to house Commodor Vanderbilt, the Astors, Andrew Carnegie, and the rest of the fifty golden families. He instructed them to assimilate the style and techniques of the Stanford, White & McKim firms, and warned them not to bother knocking on his door with a project that would please what he called 'pork butchers and button manufacturers'.
A year later the three architects turned up at his sumptuous rooms at the Hotel Colon to submit their proposal. Jausa, in the company of the Cuban Marisela, listened to them • in silence and, at the end of the presentation, asked them what it would cost to complete the work in six months. Frederic Martorell, the leading member of the architectural partnership, cleared his throat and, out of decorum, wrote down a figure on a piece of paper and handed it to the tycoon. The latter, without even blinking, wrote out a cheque for the total amount and dismissed the delegation with a vague gesture. Seven months later, in July 1900, Jausa, his wife, and the maid Marisela moved into the house. By August the two women would be dead and the police would find a dazed Salvador Jausa naked and handcuffed to the armchair in his study. The report made by the sergeant in charge of the case remarked that all the walls in the house were bloodstained, that the statues of the angels surrounding the garden had been mutilated - their faces painted like tribal masks - and that traces of black candles had been found on the pedestals. The inquiry lasted eight months. By then Jausa had fallen silent.
The police investigations concluded that by all indications, Jausa and his wife had been poisoned by some herbal extract that had been administered to them by Marisela, in whose rooms various bottles of the lethal substance had been found. For some reason Jausa had survived the poison, although the aftermath had been terrible, for he gradually lost his power of speech and his hearing, part of his body was paralysed, and he suffered pains so horrendous they condemned him to live the rest of his days in constant agony. Senora Jausa had been discovered in her bedroom, lying on her bed with nothing on but her jewels, one of which was a diamond bracelet. The police believed that once Marisela had committed the crime, she had slashed her own wrists with a knife and had wandered about the house spreading her blood on the walls of the corridors and rooms until she collapsed in her attic room. The motive, according to the police, had been jealousy. It seems that the tycoon's wife was pregnant at the time of her death. Marisela, it was said, had sketched a skeleton on the woman's naked belly with hot red wax. The case, like Salvador Jausa's lips, was sealed forever a few months later. Barcelona's high society observed that nothing like this had ever happened in the history of the city, and that the likes of rich colonials and other rabble arriving from across the pond was ruining the moral fibre of the country. Behind closed doors many were delighted that the eccentricities of Salvador Jausa had come to an end. As usual, they were mistaken: they had only just begun.
The police and Jausa's lawyers were responsible for closing the file on the case, but the nabob Jausa wanted to continue. It was at this point that he met Don Ricardo Aldaya - by then a rich industrialist with a colourful reputation for his womanizing and his leonine temper - who offered to buy the property off him with the intention of knocking it down and reselling it at a healthy profit: the value of land in that area was soaring. Jausa did not agree to sell, but he invited Ricardo Aldaya to visit the house and observe what he called a scientific and spiritual experiment. No one had entered the property since the investigation had ended. What Aldaya witnessed in there left him speechless. Jausa had completely lost his mind. The dark shadow of Marisela's blood still covered the walls. Jausa had summoned an inventor, a pioneer in the technological novelty of the moment, the cinematograph. His name was Fructuos Gelabert, and he'd agreed to Jausa's demands in exchange for funds with which to build a film studio in the Valles region, for he felt sure that, during the twentieth century, moving pictures would supplant organized religion. Apparently Jausa was convinced that the spirit of Marisela had remained in the house. He asserted that he could feel her presence, her voice, her smell, and even her touch in the dark. When they heard these stories, Jausa's servants had immediately fled in search of less stressful employment in the neighbouring Sarria district, where there were plenty more mansions and families incapable of filling up a bucket of water or darning their own socks.
Jausa, left on his own, sank further into his obsession with his invisible spectres. He decided that the answer to his woes lay in making the invisible visible. He had already had a chance to see some of the results of the invention of cinematography in New York, and he shared the opinion of the deceased Marisela that the camera swallowed up souls. Following this line of reasoning, he commissioned Fructuos Gelabert to shoot yards and yards of film in the corridors of The Angel of Mist, in search of signs and visions from the other world. Despite the cinematographer's noble efforts, the scientific pursuit of Jausa's phantoms proved futile.
Everything changed when Gelabert announced that he'd received a new type of sensitive film straight from the Thomas Edison factory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The new stock made it possible to shoot in extremely low light conditions - below candlelight - something unheard of at the time. Then, in circumstances that were never made clear, one of the assistants in Gelabert's laboratory accidentally poured some sparkling Xarelo wine from the Penedes region into the developing tray. As a result of the chemical reaction, strange shapes began to appear on the exposed film. This was the film Jausa wanted to show Don Ricardo Aldaya the night he invited him to his ghostly abode at number 32, Avenida del Tibidabo.
When Aldaya heard this, he supposed that Gelabert was afraid of losing Jausa's funding and had resorted to such an elaborate ruse to keep his patron's interest alive. Whatever the truth, Jausa had no doubt about the reliability of the results. Moreover, where others saw only shapes and shadows, he saw revenants. He swore he could see the silhouette of Marisela materializing under a shroud, a shadow that then mutated into a wolf and walked upright. Alas, all Ricardo Aldaya could see during the screening was large stains. He also maintained that both the film itself and the technician who operated the projector stank of wine and other entirely earthly spirits. Nonetheless, being a sharp businessman, the industrialist sensed that he could turn the situation to his advantage. A mad millionaire who was alone and obsessed with capturing ectoplasm on film constituted the ideal victim. So Aldaya agreed with him and encouraged him to continue with his enterprise. For weeks Gelabert and his men shot miles of film that was then developed in different tanks using chemical solutions diluted with exotic liqueurs, red wine blessed in the Ninot parish church, and all kinds of cava from the Tarragona vineyards. Between screenings, Jausa transferred powers, signed authorizations, and conferred the control of his financial reserves to Ricardo Aldaya.
Jausa vanished one November night of that year during a storm. Nobody knew what had become of him. Apparently he was developing one of Gelabert's special rolls of film himself when he met with an accident. Don Ricardo Aldaya asked Gelabert to recover the roll. After viewing it in private, Aldaya personally opted to set fire to it. Then, with the aid of a very generous cheque, he suggested to the technician that he forget all about the incident. By then Aldaya was already the owner of most of the properties belonging to the vanished Jausa. There were those who said that the deceased Marisela had returned to take Jausa with her to hell. Others pointed out that a beggar, who greatly resembled the deceased millionaire, was seen for a few months afterwards in the grounds of Ciudadela Park, until a black carriage with drawn curtains ran over him in the middle of the day, without bothering to stop. The stories spread: the dark legend of the rambling mansion, like the invasion of Cuban music in the city's dance halls, could not be contained.
A few months later, Don Ricardo Aldaya moved his family into the house in Avenida del Tibidabo, where, two weeks after their arrival, the couple's youngest child, Penelope, was born. To celebrate the occasion, Aldaya renamed the house 'Villa Penelope'. The new name, however, never stuck. The house had its own character and proved immune to the influence of its new owners. The recent arrivals complained about noises and banging on the walls at night, sudden putrid smells and freezing draughts that seemed to roam through the house like wandering sentinels. The mansion was a compendium of mysteries. It had a double basement, with a sort of crypt, as yet unused, on the lower level. On the higher floor, a chapel was dominated by a large polychrome figure of the crucified Christ, which the servants thought looked disturbingly like Rasputin - a very popular character in the press of the time. The books in the library were constantly being mysteriously rearranged, or turned back to front. There was a room on the third floor, a bedroom that was never used because of the unaccountable damp stains that showed up on the walls and seemed to form blurry faces, where fresh flowers would wilt in just a few minutes and where you could always hear the drone of flies, although it was impossible to see them.
The cooks swore that certain items, such as sugar, disappeared from the larder as if by magic and that the milk took on a red hue at every new moon. Occasionally they found dead birds at the doors of some of the rooms, or small rodents. Other times things went missing, especially jewels and buttons from clothes kept in cupboards and drawers. Sometimes the missing objects would mysteriously reappear, months later, in remote corners of the house or buried in the garden. But usually they were never found again. Don Ricardo was of the opinion that these incidents were nothing but pranks and nonsense. In his view a week's fasting would have curbed his family's fears. What he didn't regard so philosophically were the thefts of his dear wife's jewellery. More than five maids were sacked when different items from the lady's jewellery box disappeared, though they all cried their hearts out, swearing they were innocent. Those in the know tended to think there was no mystery involved: the explanation lay in Don Ricardo's regrettable habit of slipping into the bedrooms of the younger maids at midnight for some extramarital fun and games. His reputation in. this field was almost as notorious as his fortune, and there were those who said that at the rate his exploits were taking place, the illegitimate children he left behind would be able to organize their own union.
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. Senora 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 Simon, the patriarch of the clan. Ricardo Aldaya flatly refused. Since he spent most of his time travelling 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 women in the family would die in that house to atone for the sins of the men. The mysterious woman even revealed to little Jorge the date on which his mother would die: 12 April 1921. Needless to say, the so-called black lady was never found, but years later, on 12 April 1921, at first light, Senora 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, Penelope.
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 Simon. 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.
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