When his wife told him she'd discovered Julian and Penelope naked together, his entire world went up in flames. Horror at this treason, the rage of knowing that he had been unspeakably affronted, outwitted at his own game, humiliated and stabbed in the back by the one person he had learned to adore as the image of himself - all these feelings assailed him with such fury that nobody could understand the magnitude of his pain. When the doctor who came to examine Penelope confirmed that the girl had been deflowered and that she was possibly pregnant, Don Ricardo's soul dissolved into the thick, viscous liquid of blind hatred. He saw his own hand in Julian's hand, the hand that had plunged the dagger deep into his heart. He didn't yet know it, but the day he ordered Penelope to be locked up in the third-floor bedroom was the day he began to die. Everything he did from then on was only the last throes of his self-destruction.
In collaboration with the hatter, whom he had so deeply despised, he arranged for Julian's removal from Barcelona and his entry into the army, where Aldaya had given orders that he should meet with an 'accidental' death. He forbade that anyone - doctors, servants, even members of the family, except himself and his wife - should see Penelope during the months when the girl remained imprisoned in that room that smelled of illness and death. By then, Aldaya's partners had secretly withdrawn their support and were manoeuvring behind his back to seize power, using the very fortune that he had made available to them. By then the Aldaya empire was beginning to crumble, at secret board meetings in Madrid, in hushed corridors, in Geneva banks. Julian, as Aldaya should have suspected, had escaped. Deep down he secretly felt proud of the boy, even though he wished him dead. Julian had done what he would have done in his place. Someone else would have to pay for Julian's actions.
Penelope Aldaya gave birth to a stillborn baby boy on 26 September 1919. If a doctor had been able to examine her, he would have said that the baby had already been in danger for some days and must be delivered by Caesarean. If a doctor had been present, perhaps he would have been able to stop the haemorrhaging that took Penelope's life, while she shrieked and scratched at the locked door, on the other side of which her father wept in silence and her mother cowered, staring at her husband. If a doctor had been present, he would have accused Don Ricardo Aldaya of murder, for there was no other word that could describe the scene within that dark, bloodstained cell. But there was nobody there, and when at last they opened the door and found Penelope lying dead in a pool of her own blood, hugging a shining, purple-coloured baby, nobody was capable of uttering a single word. The two bodies were buried in the basement crypt, with no ceremony or witnesses. The sheets and the afterbirth were thrown into the boilers, and the place was sealed with a brick wall.
When Jorge Aldaya, drunk with guilt and shame, told Miquel Moliner what had happened, Miquel decided to send Julian the letter, signed by Penelope, in which she declared that she didn't love him, begged him to forget her, and announced a fictitious wedding. He preferred that Julian should believe the lie and rebuild his life, feeling himself betrayed, than to present him with the truth. When, two years later, Senora Aldaya died, there were those who blamed her death on the curse that lay on the mansion, but her son, Jorge, knew that what had killed her was the fire that raged inside her, Penelope's screams and her desperate banging on that door that hammered incessantly in her head. By then the family had already fallen from grace, and the Aldaya fortune was collapsing like a sand castle, swept away by a combination of greed and revenge. Secretaries and accountants devised the flight to Argentina; the beginning of a new, more modest, business. The important thing was to get away. Away from the spectres that scurried through the corridors of the Aldaya mansion, as they had always done.
They departed one dawn of 1926, travelling under false names on board the ship that would take them across the Atlantic to the port of La Plata. Jorge and his father shared a cabin. Old Aldaya, smelling foul and dying, could barely stand up. The doctors whom he had not permitted to see Penelope feared him too much to tell him the truth, but he knew that death had boarded the ship with them, and that his body, which God had begun to steal from him on the morning he decided to look for his son Julian, was wasting away. Throughout that long crossing, sitting on the deck, shivering under the blankets and facing the ocean's infinite emptiness, he knew that he would never see land. Sometimes, sitting at the stern, he would watch the school of sharks that had been following them since they left Tenerife. He heard one of the officers say that such a sinister escort was normal in transatlantic cruises. The beasts fed on the animal remains that the ship left in its wake. But Don Ricardo thought otherwise. He was convinced that those devils were following him. You're waiting for me, he thought, seeing in them God's true face. It was then he approached his son Jorge, whom he had so often despised and whom he now saw as his last resort, and made him swear he would carry out his dying wish. 'You will find Julian Carax and you'll kill him. Swear that you will.'
One dawn, two days before reaching Buenos Aires, Jorge woke up and saw that his father's berth was empty. He went out to look for him; the deck was deserted, bathed in mist and spray. He found his father's dressing gown, still warm, abandoned on the stern of the ship. The ship's wake disappeared into a cloud of scarlet, a stain on the calm waters, as if the ocean itself were bleeding. It was then he noticed that the sharks had stopped following them. He saw them, in the distance, their dorsal fins flapping as they danced in a circle. During the remainder of the crossing, no passenger sighted the school again.
When Jorge Aldaya disembarked in Buenos Aires and the customs officer asked him whether he was travelling alone, he nodded in assent. He had been travelling alone for a long time.
Ten years after disembarking in Buenos Aires, Jorge Aldaya, or the spent force he had become, returned to Barcelona. The misfortunes that had started to eat away at the Aldaya family in the Old World had only grown worse in Argentina. Jorge was left on his own to face the world, a fight for which he had neither his father's strength nor his composure. Jorge had reached Buenos Aires with a numb heart, shot through with remorse. The New World he would later say, by way of apology or epitaph, is an illusion, a land of savage predators, and he'd been educated into the privileges and frivolous refinements of Old Europe - a dead continent held together by inertia. In only a few years, he lost everything, starting with his reputation and ending with the gold watch his father had given him for his first communion. Thanks to the watch, he was able to buy himself a return ticket. The man who came back to Spain was almost a beggar, a bundle of bitterness and failure, poisoned by the memory of what he felt had been snatched from him and the hatred for the person on whom he blamed his ruin: Julian Carax.
The promise he had made to his father was still branded on his mind. As soon as he arrived, he tried to pick up Julian's trail, only to discover that, like him, Carax also appeared to have vanished from Barcelona. It was then, through chance or fate, that he encountered a familiar character from his youth. After a prominent career in reformatories and state prisons, Francisco Javier Fumero had joined the army, attaining the rank of lieutenant. There were many who envisaged him as a future general, but a murky scandal caused his expulsion from the army. Even then his reputation outlasted his rank. He was talked about a great deal, but above all he was feared. Francisco Javier Fumero, that shy, disturbed boy who once gathered dead leaves from the courtyard of San Gabriel's, was now a murderer. It was rumoured that he killed notorious characters for money, and that he dispatched political figures on request. Fumero was said to be death incarnate.
Aldaya and he recognized one another instantly through the haze of the Novedades cafe. Aldaya was ill, stricken by a strange fever that he blamed on the insects of the South American jungles. 'There, even the mosquitoes are sons of bitches,' he complained. Fumero listened to him with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. He revered mosquitoes and all insects in general. He admired their discipline, their fortitude and organization. There was no laziness in them, no irreverence or racial degeneration. His favourite species were spiders, blessed with that rare science for weaving a trap in which they awaited their prey with infinite patience, knowing that sooner or later the prey would succumb, either through stupidity or negligence. In his opinion society had a lot to learn from insects. Aldaya was a clear case of moral and physical ruin. He had aged noticeably and looked shabby, with no muscle tone. Fumero couldn't bear people with no muscle tone. They nauseated him.
'Javier, I feel dreadful,' Aldaya pleaded. 'Could you help me out for a few days?'
Fumero agreed to take Jorge Aldaya to his home. He lived in a gloomy apartment in the Raval quarter, in Calle Cadena, in the company of numerous insects stored in jars, and half a dozen books. Fumero detested books as much as he loved insects, hut these were no ordinary volumes: they were the novels of Julian Carax published by Cabestany. Two prostitutes lived in the apartment opposite - a mother and daughter who allowed themselves to be pinched and burned with cigars when business was slow, especially at the end of the month. Fumero paid them to take care of Aldaya while he was at work. He had no desire to see him die. Not yet.
Francisco Javier Fumero had joined the Crime Squad. There was always work there for the type of person who could confront the most awkward situations, the sort of situations that had to be solved discreetly so that respectable citizens could continue living in blissful ignorance. Words to that effect had been used by Lieutenant Duran, a man given to solemn pronouncements, and under whose command Fumero had joined the police force.
'Being a policeman isn't a job, it's a mission,' Duran would proclaim. 'Spain needs more balls and less chatter.'
Unfortunately, Lieutenant Duran was soon to die in a lamentable accident during a police raid in the district of La Barceloneta: in the confusion of an encounter with a group of anarchists, he fell through a skylight, and plunged five floors to his death. Everyone agreed that Spain had lost a great man, a national hero with vision for the future, a thinker who did not fear action. Fumero took over his post with pride, knowing that he had done the right thing by pushing him, for Duran was getting too old for the job. Fumero found old men revolting - as he did crippled men, Gypsies, and queers - whether or not they had good muscle tone. Sometimes God made mistakes. It was the duty of every upright citizen to correct these small failings and keep the world looking presentable.
In March 1932, a few weeks after their meeting in the Novedades Cafe, Jorge Aldaya began to feel better and opened his heart to Fumero. He begged forgiveness for the way he had treated him during their school days. With tears in his eyes, he told Fumero the whole story, without omitting anything. Fumero listened silently, nodding, taking it in, all the while wondering whether he should kill Aldaya there and then, or wait. He wondered whether Aldaya would be so weak that the blade would meet only tepid resistance from that stinking flesh, softened by so many years of indolence. He decided to postpone the vivisection. He was intrigued by the story, especially insofar as it concerned Julian Carax.
He knew, from the information he obtained at the publishing house, that Carax lived in Paris, but Paris was a very large city, and nobody in Cabestany's company seemed to know the exact address. Nobody except for a woman called Monfort who kept it to herself. Fumero had followed her two or three times on her way out of the office, without her realizing. He had even travelled in a tram at half a yard's distance from her. Women never noticed him, and if they did, they turned their faces the other way, pretending not to have seen him. One night, after following her right up to her front door in Plaza de San Felipe Neri, Fumero went back to his home and masturbated furiously; as he did so, he imagined himself plunging a knife into that woman's body, an inch or so at a time, slowly, methodically, his eyes fixed on hers. Maybe then she would deign to give him Carax's address and treat him with the respect due to a police officer.
Julian Carax was the only person whom Fumero had failed to kill once he'd made up his mind. Perhaps because he had been Fumero's first, and it takes time to master your game. When Fumero heard that name again, he smiled in a way his neighbours, the prostitutes, found so frightening: without blinking, and slowly licking his upper lip. He could still remember Carax kissing Penelope Aldaya in the large mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo. His Penelope. His had been a pure love, a true love, like the ones you saw in movies. Fumero was very keen on movies and went to the cinema at least twice a week. It was in a cinema that he had understood that Penelope had been the love of his life. The rest, especially his mother, had been nothing but tarts. As he listened to the last snippets of Aldaya's story, he decided that he wasn't going to kill him after all. In fact, he was pleased that fate had reunited them. He had a vision, like the ones in the films he so enjoyed: Aldaya was going to hand him the others on a platter. Sooner or later they would all end up ensnared in his web.
In the winter of 1934, the Moliner brothers finally managed to evict Miquel from the house on Calle Puertaferrissa, which is still empty and in a derelict state to this day. All they wanted was to see him out on the street, shorn of what little he had left, his books and the freedom and independence that so offended them and filled them with such deep hatred. He didn't tell me anything or come to me for help. I only discovered he'd become a virtual beggar when I went to look for him in what had been his home and found his brothers' hired legal thugs drawing up an inventory of the property and selling off the few objects that had belonged to him. Miquel had already been spending a few nights in a pension on Calle Canuda, a dismal, damp hovel that looked and smelled like a brothel. When I saw the tiny room in which he was confined, like a coffin with no windows and a prisoner's bunk, I grabbed hold of him and took him home. He couldn't stop coughing, and he looked emaciated. He said it was a lingering cold, an old maid's complaint that would go away when it got bored. Two weeks later he was worse.
As he always dressed in black, it took me some time to realize that those stains on his sleeves were bloodstains. I called a doctor, and after he examined Miquel, he asked me why I'd waited so long to call him. Miquel had tuberculosis. Bankrupt and ill, he now lived only on his memories and regrets. He was the kindest and frailest man I had ever known, my only friend. We got married one cold February morning in a county court. Our honeymoon consisted of taking the bus up to Guell Park and gazing down on Barcelona - a little world of fog - from its sinuous terraces. We didn't tell anyone we'd got married, not Cabestany, or my father, or Miquel's family, who believed him to be dead. Eventually I wrote a letter to Julian, telling him about it, but I never mailed it. Ours was a secret marriage. A few months after the wedding, someone knocked on our door saying his name was Jorge Aldaya. He looked like a shattered man, and his face was covered in sweat despite the biting cold. When he saw Miquel again after more than ten years, Aldaya smiled bitterly and said, 'We're all cursed, Miquel. You, Julian, Fumero, and me.' The alleged reason for the visit was an attempt to make up with his old friend Miquel, who he hoped would now let him know how to get in touch with Julian Carax, because he had a very important message for him from his deceased father, Don Ricardo Aldaya. Miquel said he didn't know where Carax was.
'We lost touch years ago,' he lied. 'The last thing I heard, he was living in Italy.'
Aldaya was expecting such an answer. 'You disappoint me, Miquel. I had hoped that time and misfortune would have made you wiser.'
'Some disappointments honour those who inspire them.'
Shrivelled up and on the verge of collapse, Aldaya laughed.
'Fumero sends you his most heartfelt congratulations on your marriage,' he said on his way to the door.
Those words froze my heart. Miquel didn't wish to speak, but that night, while I held him close and we both pretended to fall asleep, I knew that Aldaya had been right. We were cursed.
A few months went by without any news from either Julian or Aldaya. Miquel was still writing regular pieces for the press in Barcelona and Madrid. He worked without pause, sitting at the typewriter pouring out what he considered to be drivel, to feed commuters on the tram. I kept my job at the publishing house, perhaps because that was where I felt closest to Julian. He had sent me a brief note saying he was working on a new novel, called The Shadow of the Wind, which he hoped to finish within a few months. The letter made no mention at all of what had happened in Paris. The tone was colder and more distant than before. But my attempts at hating him were unsuccessful. I began to believe that Julian was not a man, he was an illness.
Miquel had no illusions about my feelings. He offered me his affection and devotion without asking for anything in exchange except my company and perhaps my discretion. No reproach or complaint ever passed his lips. In time I came to feel an immense tenderness for him, beyond the friendship that had brought us together and the compassion that had later doomed us. Miquel opened a savings account in my name, into which he deposited almost all the income he earned from his journalism. He never said no to an article, a review, or a gossip column. He wrote under three different pseudonyms, fourteen or sixteen hours a day. When I asked him why he worked so hard, he just smiled or else he said that if he didn't do anything, he'd be bored. There was never any deceit between us, not even the wordless kind. Miquel knew he would soon die.
'You must promise that if anything happens to me, you'll take that money and get married again, that you'll have children, and that you'll forget about us all, starting with me.'
'And who would I marry, Miquel? Don't talk nonsense.'
Sometimes I'd catch him looking at me with a gentle smile, as if the
very sight of my presence were his greatest treasure. Every afternoon he
would come to meet me on my way out of the office, his only moment of leisure in the whole day. He feigned strength, but I saw how he stooped when he walked, and how he coughed. He would take me for a snack or to window-shop in Calle Fernando, and then we'd go back home, where he would continue working until well after midnight. I silently blessed every minute we spent together, and every night he would fall asleep embracing me, while I hid the tears caused by the anger I felt at having been incapable of loving that man the way he loved me, incapable of giving him what I had so pointlessly abandoned at Julian's feet. Many a night I swore to myself that I would forget Julian, that I would devote the rest of my life to making that poor man happy and returning to him some small part of what he had given me. I was Julian's lover for two weeks, but I would be Miquel's wife the rest of my life. If some day these pages should reach your hands and you should judge me, as I have judged myself when writing them, looking at my reflection in this mirror of remorse, remember me like this, Daniel. The manuscript of Julian's last novel arrived towards the end of 1935. I don't know whether it was out of spite or out of fear, but I handed it to the printer without even reading it. Miquel's last savings had financed the edition in advance, months earlier, so Cabestany, who at the time was having health problems, paid little attention. That week the doctor who was attending Miquel came to see me at the office, looking very concerned. He told me that if Miquel didn't slow down and give himself some rest, there was little he could do to help him fight the tuberculosis.
'He should be in the mountains, not in Barcelona breathing in clouds of bleach and charcoal. He's not a cat with nine lives, and I'm not a nanny. Make him listen to reason. He won't pay any attention to me.'
That lunchtime I decided to go home and speak to him. Before I opened the door of the apartment, I heard voices filtering from inside. Miquel was arguing with someone. At first I assumed it was someone from the newspaper, but then I thought I caught Julian's name in the conversation. I heard footsteps approaching the door, and I ran up to hide on the attic landing. From there I was able to catch a glimpse of the visitor.
A man dressed in black, with somewhat nondescript features and thin lips, like an open scar. His eyes were black and expressionless, fish eyes. Before he disappeared down the stairs, he looked up into the darkness. I leaned against the wall, holding my breath. The visitor remained there for a few moments, as if he could smell me, licking his lips with a doglike grin. I waited for his steps to fade away completely before I left my hiding place and went into the apartment. A smell of camphor drifted in the air. Miquel was sitting by the window, his arms hanging limply on either side of the chair. His lips trembled. I asked him who that man was and what he wanted.
'It was Fumero. He came with news of Julian.'
"What does he know about Julian?'
Miquel looked at me, more dispirited than ever. 'Julian is getting married.'
The news left me speechless. I fell into a chair, and Miquel took my hands. He seemed tired and spoke with difficulty. Before I was able to open my mouth, he began to give me a summary of the events Fumero had related to him, and what could be inferred from them. Fumero had made use of his contacts in the Paris police to discover Julian Carax's whereabouts and keep a watch on him. This could have taken place months or even years earlier, Miquel said. What worried him wasn't that Fumero had found Carax - that was just a question of time - but that he should have decided to tell Miquel about it now, together with some bizarre news about an improbable marriage. The wedding, it seemed, was going to take place in the early summer of 1936. All that was known about the bride was her name, which in this case was more than sufficient: Irene Marceau, the owner of the club where Julian had worked as a pianist for years.
'I don't understand,' I murmured. 'Julian is marrying his patron?'
'Exactly. This isn't a wedding. It's a contract.'
Irene Marceau was twenty-five or thirty years older than Julian. Miquel suspected she had decided on the marriage so that she could transfer her assets to Julian and secure his future.
'But she already helps him. She always has done.'
'Perhaps she knows she's not going to be around forever,' Miquel suggested.
The echo of those words cut us both to the quick. I knelt down next to him and held him tight, biting my lips because I didn't want him to see me cry.
'Julian doesn't love this woman, Nuria,' he said, thinking that was the cause of my sorrow.
'Julian doesn't love anyone but himself and his damned books,' I muttered.
I looked up to find Miquel wearing the wise smile of an old child.
'And what does Fumero hope to gain by bringing this out into the open now?'
It didn't take us long to find out. Two days later a ghostlike, hollow-eyed Jorge Aldaya turned up at our home, inflamed with anger. Fumero had told him that Julian was going to marry a rich woman in a splendid, romantic ceremony. Aldaya had spent days obsessing over the thought that the man responsible for his misfortunes was now clothed in glamour, sitting astride a fortune, while his had disappeared. Fumero had not told him that Irene Marceau, despite being a woman of some means, was the owner of a brothel and not a princess in some fairy tale. He had not told him that the bride was thirty years older than Carax and that, rather than a marriage, this was an act of charity towards a man who had reached the end of the road. He had not told him when or where the wedding was going to take place. All he had done was sow the seeds of a fantasy that was devouring what little energy remained in Jorge's wizened, polluted body.
'Fumero has lied to you, Jorge,' said Miquel.
'And you, king of liars, you dare accuse your brother!' cried a delirious Aldaya.
There was no need for Aldaya to disclose his thoughts. In a man so withered, they could easily be read beneath the scrawny skin that covered his haunted face. Miquel saw Fumero's game clearly. After all, he was the one who had shown him how to play chess twenty years earlier in San Gabriel's school. Fumero had the strategy of a praying mantis and the patience of the immortals. Miquel sent Julian a warning note.
When Fumero decided the moment was right, he had taken Aldaya aside and told him Julian was getting married in three days' time. Since he was a police officer, he explained, he couldn't get involved in this sort of thing. But Aldaya, as a civilian, could go to Paris and make sure that the wedding in question never took place. How? a feverish Aldaya would ask, smouldering with hatred. By challenging him to a duel on the very day of his wedding. Fumero even supplied the weapon with which Jorge was convinced he would perforate the stony heart that had ruined the Aldaya dynasty. The report from the Paris police would later state that the weapon found at his feet was faulty and could never have done more than what it did: blow up in Jorge's hands. Fumero already knew this when he handed it to him in a case on the platform of the Estacion de Francia. He knew perfectly well that even if fever, stupidity, and blind anger didn't prevent Aldaya from killing Julian Carax in a duel, the weapon he carried almost certainly would. It wasn't Carax who was destined to die in that duel, but Aldaya.
Fumero also knew that Julian would never agree to confront his old friend, dying as Aldaya was, reduced to nothing but a whimper. That is why Fumero carefully coached Aldaya on every step he must take. He would have to admit to Julian that the letter Penelope had written to him years ago, announcing her wedding and asking him to forget her, was a lie. He would have to disclose that it was he, Jorge Aldaya, who had forced his sister to write that string of lies while she cried in despair, protesting her undying love for Julian. He would have to tell Julian that she had been waiting for him, with a broken soul and a bleeding heart, ever since then, dying of loneliness. That would be enough. Enough for Carax to pull the trigger and shoot him in the face. Enough for him to forget any wedding plans and to think of nothing else but returning to Barcelona in search of Penelope. And, once in Barcelona, his cobweb, Fumero would be waiting for him.
Julian Carax crossed the French border a few days before the start of the Civil War. The first and only edition of The Shadow of the Wind had left the press two weeks earlier, bound for the anonymity of its predecessors. By then Miquel could barely work: although he sat in front of the typewriter for two or three hours a day, weakness and fever prevented him from coaxing more than a feeble trickle of words out onto the paper. He had lost several of his regular columns due to missed deadlines. Other papers were fearful of publishing his articles after receiving anonymous threats. He had only one daily column left in the Diario de Barcelona, which he signed under the name of 'Adrian Maltes'. The spectre of the war could already be felt in the air. The country stank of fear. With nothing to occupy him, and too weak to complain, Miquel would go down into the square or walk up to Avenida de la Catedral, always carrying with him one of Julian's books as if it were an amulet. The last time the doctor had weighed him, he was only eight stone thirteen pounds. We listened to the news of the uprising in Morocco on the radio, and a few hours later a colleague from Miquel's newspaper came round to tell us that Cansinos, the editor in chief, had been murdered with a bullet to the neck, opposite the Canaletas cafe, two hours earlier. Nobody dared remove the body, which was still lying there, staining the pavement with a web of blood.
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