Translated by Lucia Graves 26 страница

One day Julian fell asleep in my arms, exhausted. The previous afternoon, as we passed by a pawnshop, he had stopped to show me a fountain pen that had been on display there for years. According to the pawnbroker, it had once belonged to Victor Hugo. Julian had never owned even a fraction of the means to buy that pen, but he would stop and look at it every day. I dressed quietly and went down to the pawnshop. The pen cost a fortune, which I didn't have, but the pawnbroker said that he'd accept a cheque in pesetas on any Spanish bank with a branch in Paris. Before she died, my mother had promised me she would save up to buy me a wedding dress. Victor Hugo's pen took care of that, veil and all, and although I knew it was madness, I have never spent any sum of money with more satisfaction. When I left the shop with the fabulous case, I noticed that a woman was following me. She was very elegant, with silvery hair and the bluest eyes I have ever seen. She came up to me and introduced herself. She was Irene Marceau, Julian's patron. Herve, my guide, had spoken to her about me. She only wanted to meet me and ask me whether I was the woman Julian had been waiting for all those years. I didn't have to reply. Irene nodded in sympathy and kissed my cheek. I watched her walking away down the street, and at that moment I understood that Julian would never be mine. I went back to the attic with the pencase hidden in my bag. Julian was awake and waiting for me. He undressed me without saying anything, and we made love for the last time. When he asked me why I was crying, I told him they were tears of joy. Later, when Julian went down to buy some food, I packed my bags and placed the case with the pen on his typewriter. I put the manuscript of the novel in my suitcase and left before Julian returned. On the landing I came upon Monsieur Darcieu, the old conjuror who read the palms of young ladies in exchange for a kiss. He took my left hand and gazed at me sadly.

'Vous avez du poison au coeur, mademoiselle?

When I tried to pay him his fee, he shook his head gently, and instead it was he who kissed my hand.

I got to the Gare d'Austerlitz just in time to catch the twelve o'clock train to Barcelona. The ticket inspector who sold me the ticket asked me whether I was feeling all right. I nodded and shut myself up in the compartment. The train was already leaving when I looked out the window and caught a glimpse of Julian's silhouette on the platform, in the same place I'd seen him for the first time. I closed my eyes and didn't open them again until we had lost sight of the station and that bewitching city to which I could never return. I arrived in Barcelona the following morning, as day was breaking. It was my twenty-fourth birthday, and I knew that the best part of my life was already behind me.

After I returned to Barcelona, I let some time pass before visiting Miquel Moliner again. I needed to get Julian out of my head, and I realized that if Miquel were to ask me about him, I wouldn't know what to say. When we did meet again, I didn't need to tell him anything. Miquel just looked me in the eyes and knew. He seemed to me thinner than before my trip to Paris; his face had an almost unhealthy pallor, which I attributed to the enormous workload with which he punished himself. He admitted that he was going through financial difficulties. He had spent almost all the money from his inheritance on his philanthropic causes, and now his brothers' lawyers were trying to evict him from the home, claiming that a clause in old Moliner's will specified that he could live there only providing he kept it in good condition and could prove he had the financial means for the upkeep of the property. Otherwise the Puertaferrissa mansion would pass into the custody of his other brothers.

'Even before dying, my father sensed that I was going to spend his money on all the things he most detested in life, down to the last centimo.'

Miquel's income as a newspaper columnist and translator was far from enough to maintain that sort of residence.

'Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to.'

I suspected that he was beginning to drink in secret. Sometimes his hands shook. Every Sunday I went over to see him and made him come out with me and get away from his desk and his encyclopaedias. I knew it hurt him to see me. He acted as if he didn't remember that he'd offered to marry me and I'd refused him, but at times I'd catch him gazing at me with a look of mingled yearning and defeat. My sole excuse for submitting him to such cruelty was purely selfish: only Miquel knew the truth about Julian and Penelope Aldaya.

During those months I spent away from Julian, Penelope Aldaya became a spectre who stole my sleep and invaded my thoughts. I could still remember the expression of disappointment on Irene Marceau's face when she realized I was not the woman Julian had been waiting for. Penelope Aldaya, treacherously absent, was too powerful an enemy for me. She was invisible, so I imagined her as perfect. Next to her I was unworthy, vulgar, all too real. I had never thought it possible to hate someone so much and so despite myself- someone I didn't even know, and had never seen in my life. I suppose I thought that if I met her face to face, if I could prove to myself that she was flesh and blood, her spell would break and Julian would be free again. And I with him. I wanted to believe that it was only a matter of time and patience. Sooner or later Miquel would tell me the truth. And the truth would liberate me.

One day, as we strolled through the cathedral cloister, Miquel once again hinted at his interest in me. I looked at him and saw a lonely man, devoid of hope. I knew what I was doing when I took him home and let myself be seduced by him. I knew I was deceiving him and that he knew, too, but had nothing else in the world. That is how we became lovers, out of desperation. I saw in his eyes what I would have wanted to see in Julian's. I felt that by giving myself to him I was taking revenge on Julian and Penelope and on everything that had been denied to me. Miquel, who was ill with desire and loneliness, knew that our love was a farce, but even so he couldn't let me go. Every day he drank more heavily and often could hardly make love to me. He would then joke bitterly that, after all, we'd turned into the perfect married couple in record time. We were hurting one another through spite and cowardice. One night, almost a year after I had returned from Paris, I asked him to tell me the truth about Penelope. Miquel had been drinking, and he became violent, as I'd never seen him before. In his rage he insulted me and accused me of never having loved him, of being a vulgar whore. He tore my clothes off me, shredding them in the process, and when he tried to force himself on me, I lay down, offering my body without resistance, crying quietly to myself. Miquel broke down and begged me to forgive him. How I wished I were able to love him and not Julian, to be able to choose to remain by his side. But I couldn't. We embraced in the dark, and I asked his forgiveness for all the pain I had caused him. He then told me that if it mattered so much to me, he would tell me the truth about Penelope Aldaya. It was another one of my mistakes.

That Sunday in 1919, when Miquel Moliner went to the station to give his friend Julian his ticket to Paris and see him off, he already knew that Penelope would not be coming to the rendezvous. Two days earlier, when Don Ricardo Aldaya returned from Madrid, his wife had confessed that she'd surprised Julian and their daughter Penelope in the governess's room. Jorge Aldaya had revealed all this to Miquel the day before, making him swear he would never tell anyone. Jorge explained how, when he was given the news, Don Ricardo exploded with anger and rushed up to Penelope's room, shouting like a madman. When she heard her father's cries, Penelope locked her door and wept with terror. Don Ricardo kicked in the door and found his daughter on her knees, trembling and begging for mercy. Don Ricardo then slapped her in the face so hard that she fell down. Not even Jorge was able to repeat the words Don Ricardo hurled at her in his fury. All the members of the family and the servants waited downstairs, terrified, not knowing what to do. Jorge hid in his room, in the dark, but even there he could hear Don Ricardo's shouts. Jacinta was dismissed that same day. Don Ricardo didn't even deign to see her. He ordered the servants to throw her out of the house and threatened them with a similar fate if any of them had any contact with her again.

When Don Ricardo went down to the library, it was already midnight. He'd left Penelope locked up in what had been Jacinta's bedroom and strictly forbade anyone, whether members of his staff or family, to go up to see her. From his room Jorge could hear his parents talking on the ground floor. The doctor arrived in the early hours. Senora Aldaya led him to the room where they kept Penelope under lock and key and waited by the door while the doctor examined her. When he came out, the doctor only nodded and collected his fee. Jorge heard Don Ricardo telling him that if he told anyone about what he'd seen there, he would personally ensure that his reputation was ruined and he would never be able to practise medicine again. Even Jorge knew what that meant.

Jorge admitted that he was very worried about Penelope and Julian. He had never seen his father so beside himself with rage. Even taking into account the offence committed by the lovers, he could not understand the extent of his anger. There must be something else, he said, something else. Don Ricardo had already ordered San Gabriel's school to expel Julian and had got in touch with the boy's father, the hatter, about sending him off to the army immediately. When Miquel heard all this, he decided he couldn't tell Julian the truth. If he disclosed to Julian that Don Ricardo was keeping Penelope locked up, and that she might be carrying his child, Julian would never take that train to Paris. He knew that if his friend remained in Barcelona, that would be the end of him. So he decided to deceive him and let him go to Paris without knowing what had happened; he would let him think that Penelope was going to join him sooner or later. When he said goodbye to Julian that day in the Estacion de Francia, even Miquel wanted to believe that not all was lost.

Some days later, when it was discovered that Julian had disappeared, all hell broke loose. Don Ricardo Aldaya was foaming at the mouth. He set half the police department in pursuit of the fugitive, but without success. He then accused the hatter of having sabotaged the plan they had agreed on and threatened to ruin him completely. The hatter, who couldn't understand what was going on, in turn accused his wife, Sophie, of having plotted the escape of that despicable son and threatened to throw her out of their home. It didn't occur to anyone that it was Miquel Moliner who had planned the whole thing - to anyone, that is, except Jorge Aldaya, who went to see him a fortnight later. He no longer exuded the fear and anxiety that had gripped him earlier. This was a different Jorge Aldaya, an adult robbed of all innocence. Whatever the secret that hid behind Don Ricardo's anger was, Jorge had found out. The reason for his visit was clear: he knew it was Miquel who had helped Julian escape. He told him their friendship was over, that he didn't ever want to see him again, and he threatened to kill him if he told anyone what he had revealed to him two weeks before.

A few weeks later, Miquel received a letter, with a false sender's name, posted by Julian in Paris. In it he gave him his address, told him he was well and missed him, and inquired after his mother and Penelope. He included a letter addressed to Penelope, which Miquel was to post from Barcelona, the first of many that Penelope would never read. Miquel prudently allowed a few months to go by. He wrote to Julian once a week, mentioning only what he felt was suitable, which was almost nothing. Julian, in turn, spoke to him about Paris, about how difficult everything was turning out to be, how lonely and desperate he felt. Miquel sent him money, books, and his friendship. In every letter Julian would include another one for Penelope. Miquel mailed them from different post offices, even though he knew it was useless. In his letters Julian never stopped asking after Penelope but Miquel couldn't tell him anything. He knew from Jacinta that Penelope had not left the house on Avenida del Tibidabo since her father had locked her in the room on the third floor.

One night Jorge Aldaya waylaid Miquel in the dark, two blocks from his home. 'Have you come to kill me then?' asked Miquel. Jorge said that he had come to do him and his friend Julian a favour. He handed him a letter and advised him to make sure it reached Julian, wherever he was hiding. 'For everyone's sake,' he declared portentously. The envelope contained a sheet of paper handwritten by Penelope Aldaya.

Dear Julian;

I'm writing to notify you of my forthcoming marriage and to entreat you not to write to me anymore, to forget me and rebuild your life. I don't bear you any grudge, but I wouldn't be honest if I didn't confess to you that I have never loved you and never will be able to love you. I wish you the best, wherever you may be.

Penelope

Miquel read and reread the letter a thousand times. The handwriting was unmistakable, but he didn't believe for a moment that Penelope had written that letter willingly: '... wherever you may be.' Penelope knew perfectly well where Julian was: in Paris, waiting for her. If she was pretending not to know his whereabouts, Miquel reflected, it was to protect him. But for that same reason, Miquel couldn't understand what could have induced her to write those words. What further threats could Don Ricardo Aldaya bring down on her, on top of keeping her locked up for months in that room like a prisoner? More than anyone, Penelope knew that her letter would be like a poisoned dagger to Julian's heart: a young boy of nineteen, lost in a distant and hostile city, abandoned by everyone, surviving only on his false hopes of seeing her again. What did she want to protect him from by pushing him from her in that way? After much consideration, Miquel decided not to send the letter. Not without knowing the reason for it first. Without a good reason, it would not be his hand that plunged that dagger into his friend's soul.

Some days later he found out that Don Ricardo Aldaya, tired of seeing Jacinta waiting like a sentry at the doors of his house, begging for news of Penelope, had used his contacts to get her admitted into the Horta lunatic asylum. When Miquel Moliner tried to see her, he was denied access. Jacinta Coronado was to spend the first three months in solitary confinement. After three months of silence and darkness, he was told by one of the doctors - a cheerful young individual - the patient's submission was guaranteed. Following a hunch, Miquel decided to pay a visit to the pension where Jacinta had been staying after her dismissal. When he identified himself, the landlady remembered that Jacinta had left a note for him and still owed her three weeks' rent. He paid the debt, even though he doubted its existence, and took the note. In it the governess explained how she had been informed that Laura, one of the Aldayas' servants, had been dismissed when it was discovered that she had secretly posted a letter from Penelope to Julian. Miquel deduced that the only address to which Penelope, from her captivity, could have sent the letter was Julian's parents' apartment in Ronda de San Antonio, hoping that they, in turn, would make sure it reached Julian in Paris.

Miquel decided to visit Sophie. Carax to recover the letter and forward it to Julian. When he arrived at the Fortunys' home, Miquel was in for an unpleasant surprise: Sophie Carax no longer lived there. She had abandoned her husband a few days earlier - or that, at least, was the rumour that was doing the rounds of the neighbours. Miquel then tried to speak to the hatter, who spent his days shut away in his shop, consumed by anger and humiliation. Miquel told him that he'd come to collect a letter that must have arrived for his son, Julian, a few days earlier.

'I have no son,' was the only answer he received.

Miquel Moliner went away without knowing that the letter in question had ended up in the hands of the caretaker and that, many years later, you, Daniel, would find it and read the words Penelope had meant for Julian, this time straight from her heart: words that he never received.

As Miquel left the Fortuny hat shop, one of the residents in the block of apartments, who identified herself as Vicenteta, approached him and asked him whether he was looking for Sophie. Miquel said he was and told her he was a friend of Julian's.

Vicenteta informed him that Sophie was staying in a boarding-house hidden in a small street behind the post office building, waiting for the departure of the boat that would take her to America. Miquel went to the address, where he found a narrow, miserable staircase almost devoid of light and air. At the top of the dusty spiral of sloping steps, he found Sophie Carax, in a damp, dark, room on the fourth floor. Julian's mother was facing the window, sitting on the edge of a makeshift bed on which two closed suitcases were lying like coffins, containing her twenty-two years in Barcelona.

When she read the letter signed by Penelope that Jorge Aldaya had given Miquel, Sophie shed tears of anger.

'She knows,' she murmured. 'Poor child, she knows....'

'Knows what?' asked Miquel.

'It's my fault,' said Sophie. 'It's all my fault.'

Miquel held her hands, not understanding. Sophie didn't dare meet his eyes.

'Julian and Penelope are brother and sister,' she whispered.

Years before becoming Antoni Fortuny's slave, Sophie Carax had been a woman who made a living from her talents. She was only nineteen when she arrived in Barcelona in search of a promised job that never materialized. Before dying, her father had obtained the necessary references for her to go into the service of the Benarenses, a prosperous family of merchants from Alsace who had established themselves in Barcelona.

'When I die,' he urged her, 'go to them, and they'll treat you like a daughter.'

The warm welcome she received was part of the problem. Monsieur Benarens indeed received her with open arms - all too open, in the opinion of Madame Benarens. Madame Benarens gave Sophie one hundred pesetas and turned her out of the house, but not without showing some pity towards her and her bad fortune.

'You have your whole life ahead of you; but the only thing I have is this miserable, lewd husband.'

A music school in Calle. Diputacion agreed to give Sophie work as a private music and piano tutor. In those days it was considered respectable for girls of well-to-do families to be taught proper social graces with a smattering of music for the drawing room, where the polonaise was considered less dangerous than conversation or questionable literature. That is how Sophie Carax began her visits to palatial mansions, where starched, silent maids would lead her to the music rooms. There the hostile offspring of the industrial aristocracy would be waiting for her, to laugh at her accent, her shyness, or her lowly position - the fact that she could read music didn't alter that. Gradually Sophie learned to concentrate on the tiny number of pupils who rose above the status of perfumed vermin and forget the rest of them.

It was about that time that Sophie met a young hatter (for so he liked to be referred to, with professional pride) called Antoni Fortuny, who seemed determined to court her, whatever the cost. Antoni Fortuny, for whom Sophie felt a warm friendship and nothing else, did not take long to propose to her, an offer Sophie refused - and kept refusing, a dozen times a month. Every time they parted, Sophie hoped she wouldn't see him again, because she didn't want to hurt him. The hatter, brushing aside her refusals, stayed on the offensive, inviting her to dances, to take a stroll, or have a hot chocolate with sponge fingers on Calle Canuda. Being all alone in Barcelona, Sophie found it difficult to resist his enthusiasm, his company, and his devotion. She only had to look at Antoni Fortuny to know that she would never be able to love him. Not the way she dreamed she would love somebody one day. But she also found it hard to cast aside the image of herself that she saw reflected in the hatter's besotted eyes. Only in them did she see the Sophie she would have wished to be.

And so, either through need or through weakness, Sophie continued to entertain the hatter's advances, in the belief that one day he would meet a girl who would return his affection and his life would take a more rewarding course. In the meantime, being desired and appreciated was enough to alleviate the loneliness and the longing she felt for everything she had left behind. She saw Antoni on Sundays, after mass. The rest of the week was taken up by her music lessons. Her favourite pupil was a highly talented girl called Ana Valls, the daughter of a prosperous manufacturer of textile machinery who had built up his fortune from nothing, by dint of great effort and sacrifices, although mostly other people's. Ana expressed her desire to become a great composer and would make Sophie listen to small pieces she had composed, imitating motifs by Grieg and Schumann, and not without skill. Although Senor Valls was convinced that women were incapable of creating anything but knitted garments or crocheted bedspreads, he approved of his daughter becoming competent on the keyboard, for he had plans of marrying her off to some heir with a good surname. He knew that refined people liked to discover unusual qualities in a marriageable girl, besides submissiveness and the fecundity of youth.

It was in the Valls residence that Sophie met one of Senor Valls's greatest benefactors and financial godfathers: Don Ricardo Aldaya, inheritor of the Aldaya empire, and by then already the great white hope of the Catalan oligarchy of the end of the century. A few months earlier, Don Ricardo Aldaya had married a rich heiress, a dazzling beauty with an unpronounceable name - attributes that wagging tongues held to be true, despite the fact that her newlywed husband seemed to see no beauty in her at all and never bothered to mention her name. It had been a match between families and banks, none of that sentimental nonsense, said Senor Valls, for whom it was very clear that the bed was one thing, and the other the head.

Sophie had only to exchange one look with Don Ricardo Aldaya to know she was doomed. Aldaya had wolfish eyes, hungry and sharp; the eyes of a man who knew where and when to strike. He kissed her hand slowly, caressing her knuckles with his lips. Just as the hatter exuded kindness and warmth, Don Ricardo radiated cruelty and power. His canine smile made it clear that he could read her thoughts and desires and found them laughable. Sophie felt for him the sort of contempt that is awakened in us by the things we subconsciously most desire. She immediately told herself she would not see him again, would stop teaching her favourite pupil if that was what it took to avoid any future encounters with Ricardo Aldaya. Nothing had ever terrified her so much as sensing that animality under her own skin, the prey's instinctive recognition of the predator. It took her only a few seconds to make up a flimsy excuse for leaving the room, to the puzzlement of Senor Valls, the amusement of Aldaya, and the dejection of little Ana, who understood people better than she did music and knew she had irretrievably lost her teacher.

A week later Sophie saw Don Ricardo Aldaya waiting for her at the entrance to the music school in Calle Diputacion, smoking and leafing through a newspaper. They exchanged glances, and, without saying a word, he led her to a building two blocks away. It was a new building, still uninhabited. They went up to the first floor. Don Ricardo opened the door and ushered her in. Sophie entered the apartment, a maze of corridors and galleries, bare of any furniture, paintings, lamps, or any other object that might have identified it as a home. Don Ricardo Aldaya shut the door, and they looked at one another.

'I haven't stopped thinking about you all week. Tell me you haven't done the same and I'll let you go, and you won't ever see me again,' said Ricardo.

Sophie shook her head.

Their secret meetings lasted ninety-six days. They met in the afternoons, always in that empty apartment on the corner of Diputacion and Rambla de Cataluna. Tuesdays and Thursdays, at three. Their meetings never lasted more than an hour. Sometimes Sophie stayed on alone once Aldaya had left, crying or shaking in a corner of the bedroom. Then, when Sunday came, Sophie looked desperately into the hatter's eyes for traces of the "woman who was disappearing, yearning for both devotion and deception. The hatter didn't see the marks on her skin, the cuts and burns that peppered her body. The hatter didn't see the despair in her smile, in her meekness. The hatter didn't see anything. Perhaps for that reason, she accepted his promise of marriage. By then she already suspected that she was carrying Aldaya's child, but was afraid of telling him, almost as much as she was afraid of losing him. Once again it was Aldaya who saw in Sophie what she was incapable of admitting. He gave her five hundred pesetas and an address in Calle Plateria and ordered her to get rid of the baby. Sophie refused. Don Ricardo Aldaya slapped her until her ears bled, then threatened to have her killed if she dared mention their meetings to anyone or admit that the child was his. When Sophie told the hatter that some thugs had assaulted her in Plaza del Pino, he believed her. When she told him she wanted to be his wife, he believed her. On the day of her wedding, someone erroneously sent a funeral wreath to the church. Everyone laughed nervously when they saw the florist's mistake. All except Sophie, who knew perfectly well that Don Ricardo Aldaya had not forgotten her on her wedding day.

Sophie Carax never imagined that years later she would see Ricardo again - a mature man by now, heading up the family empire, and a father of two - nor that he would return to meet the boy he had wished to erase with five hundred pesetas.

'Perhaps it's because I'm growing old,' was his only explanation, 'but I want to get to know this child and give him the opportunities in life that a son of my flesh and blood deserves. He hadn't crossed my mind in all these years, and now,. strangely enough, I'm unable to think of anything else.'

Ricardo Aldaya had decided that he couldn't see himself in his firstborn, Jorge. The boy was weak, reserved, and he lacked his father's steadfast spirit. He lacked everything, except the right surname. One day Don Ricardo had woken up in the maid's bed feeling that his body was getting old, that God had removed His blessing. Seized with panic, he ran to look at himself naked in the mirror and felt that the mirror was lying. That man was not Ricardo Aldaya.

He now wanted to find the man who had disappeared. For years he had known about the hatter's son. And he had not forgotten Sophie, in his own way. Don Ricardo Aldaya never forgot anything. The moment had arrived to meet the boy. It was the first time in fifteen years that he had come across someone who wasn't afraid of him, who dared to defy him and even laugh at him. He recognized gallantry in the child, the silent ambition that fools can't see but is there all the same. God had given him back his youth. Sophie, only an echo of the woman he remembered, didn't even have the strength to come between them. The hatter was just a buffoon, a spiteful and resentful peasant whose complicity Aldaya counted on buying. He decided to tear Julian away from that stifling world of mediocrity and poverty and open the doors of his financial paradise to him. He would be educated in San Gabriel's school, would enjoy all the privileges of his class, and would be initiated onto the path his father had chosen for him. Don Ricardo wanted a successor worthy of himself. Jorge would always be cocooned in the privileges of his class, hiding from his mediocrity in creature comforts. Penelope, the beautiful Penelope, was a woman, and therefore a treasure, not a treasurer. Julian, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time. Don Ricardo estimated that within ten years he would have stamped his image on the boy. Never, in all the time Julian spent with the Aldayas as one of the family (as the chosen one, even), did it occur to Don Ricardo that the only thing Julian wanted from him was Penelope. It didn't occur to him for an instant that Julian secretly despised him, that his affection was a sham, only a pretext to be close to Penelope. To possess her completely and utterly. They did resemble one another in that.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04