'I should never have returned to Barcelona,' he murmured, shaking his head.
I knelt beside him. 'What you are searching for is not here, Julian. Let's go away. The two of us. Far from here. While there is still time.'
Julian looked at me for a long moment, without blinking. 'You know something you haven't told me, don't you?' he asked.
I shook my head and swallowed. Julian just nodded.
'Tonight I'm going back there.'
'Julian, please
'I must make sure.'
'Then I'll go with you.'
'No.'
'The last time I stayed here and waited, I lost Miquel. If you go, I go, too.'
'This has nothing to do with you, Nuria. It's something that concerns only me.'
I wondered whether he didn't realize how much his words hurt me, or whether he just didn't care.
'That's what you think,' I said.
He tried to stroke my cheek, but I drew his hand away.
'You should despise me, Nuria. It would bring you better luck.'
'Yes, I know.'
We spent the day outside, far from the oppressive darkness of the apartment that still smelled of warm sheets and skin. Julian wanted to see the sea. I went with him to La Barceloneta, and we walked along the almost deserted beach, the shimmering sand seeming to trail off into the summer haze. We sat on the sand, near the shore, the way children or old people do. Julian smiled, saying nothing.
As evening fell, we took a tram near the aquarium and went up Via Layetana to Paseo de Gracia, then onto Plaza de Lesseps and Avenida de la Republica Argentina, until we came to the end of the route. Julian gazed silently at the streets, as if he were afraid of losing the city as we travelled through it. Halfway through our journey, he took my hand and kissed it without saying a word. He held it until we got off. An elderly man who was accompanied by a little girl dressed in white looked at us, smiling, and asked us whether we were engaged. It was dark by the time we walked up Calle Roman Macaya towards the Aldayas' old mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo. A fine rain was falling, coating the thick stone walls with silver. We climbed the external wall at the back, near the tennis courts. The large, rambling house rose into view through the rain. I recognized it immediately. I had come across that house in a thousand different guises in Julian's books. In The Red House, it was a sinister mansion that was larger inside than out. It slowly changed shape, grew new corridors, galleries, and improbable attics, endless stairs that led nowhere; it illuminated dark rooms that came and went from one day to the next, taking with it any unsuspecting individual who entered them, never to be seen again. We stopped outside the main door, locked with chains and a padlock the size of a fist. The large windows on the first floor were boarded up with wooden planks that were covered in ivy. The air smelled of weeds and wet earth. The stone, dark and slimy with rain, shone like the scales of a huge reptile.
I wanted to ask Julian how he intended to get past that large oak door, which looked like the door of a basilica or a prison. Julian pulled a jar out from his coat and unscrewed the top. A fetid vapour issued from it, forming a slow, bluish spiral. He held one end of the padlock and poured the acid into the lock. The metal hissed like red-hot iron, enveloped in a cloud of yellow smoke. We waited a few minutes, and then he picked up a cobblestone that lay among the weeds and split the padlock by banging it half a dozen times. Julian then gave the door a kick. It opened slowly, like a tomb, exhaling a thick, damp breath. Beyond the doorway I could sense a velvety darkness. Julian had brought a benzine lighter, which he lit after taking a few steps into the entrance hall. I followed him, leaving the door behind us ajar. Julian walked on a few yards, holding the flame above his head. A carpet of dust lay at our feet, with no footprints but ours. The naked walls took on an amber hue from the flame. There was no furniture, no mirrors, or lamps. The doors were still on their hinges, but the bronze doorknobs had been pulled out. The mansion was just a skeleton. We stopped at the bottom of the staircase. Julian looked up, his eyes scanning the heights. He turned around for a moment to look at me, and I wanted to smile, but in the half-light we could barely see each other's eyes. I followed him up the stairs, treading the steps on which Julian had first seen Penelope. I knew where we were heading, and I felt a coldness inside me that had nothing to do with the biting, damp air of that place.
We went up to the third floor, where a narrow corridor led to the south wing of the house. Here the ceilings were much lower and the doors smaller. It was the floor for the servants' living quarters. The last room, I knew without Julian having to tell me, had been Jacinta Coronado's bedroom. Julian approached it slowly, fearfully. That had been the last place he'd seen Penelope, where he had made love to a girl barely seventeen years old, and who, months later, would bleed to death in that same cell. I wanted to stop him, but Julian had reached the doorway and was looking absently inside. I peered into the room with him. It was just a cubicle stripped of all ornamentation. The marks where a bed had once stood were still visible beneath the flood of dust that covered the floorboards. A tangle of black stains snaked across the middle of the room. Julian stared at the emptiness for almost a minute, disconcerted. I could see from his look that he hardly recognized the place, that the sight of it seemed like a cruel trick. I took his arm and led him back to the stairs.
'There's nothing here, Julian,' I murmured. 'The family sold everything before leaving for Argentina.'
Julian nodded weakly. We walked down the stairs again, and when we reached the ground floor, Julian made his way to the library. The shelves were empty, the fireplace choked with rubble. The walls, a deathly pale, flickered in the breath of the flame. Creditors and usurers had managed to remove every last bit of it, most of which must be lost in the twisted heaps of some junkyard by now.
'I've come back for nothing,' Julian mumbled.
Better this way, I thought. I was counting the seconds that separated us from the door. If I managed to get him away from there, we might still have a chance. I let Julian absorb the ruin of that place, purging his memories.
'You had to return and see it again,' I said. 'Now you know there's nothing here. It's just a large old, uninhabited house, Julian. Let's go home.'
He looked at me, pale-faced, and nodded. I took his hand, and we went along the passageway that led to the exit. The chink of outdoor light was only half a dozen yards away. I could smell the weeds and the drizzle in the air. Then I felt I was losing Julian's hand. I stopped and turned to see him standing motionless, his eyes staring into the darkness.
'What is it, Julian?'
He didn't reply. He was gazing, mesmerized, at the mouth of a narrow corridor that led towards the kitchen area. I walked over to him and looked into the shadows. The door at the end of the corridor was bricked up, a wall of red bricks laid roughly with mortar that bled out of the corners. I couldn't quite understand what it meant, but I felt an icy cold that took my breath away. Julian was slowly getting closer. All the other doors in the corridor - in the whole house - were open, their locks and doorknobs gone. All except this one.
'Julian, please, let's go....'
The impact of his fist on the brick wall drew a hollow echo on the other side. I thought I saw his hands trembling when he placed the lighter on the floor and gestured for me to move back a few steps.
'Julian...'
The first kick brought down a rain of red dust. Julian charged again. I thought I could hear his bones breaking, but Julian was unperturbed. He banged against the wall again and again, with the rage of a prisoner forcing his way out to freedom. His fists and his arms were bleeding when the first brick broke and fell onto the other side. In the dark, with bloodstained fingers, Julian struggled to enlarge the gap. He panted, exhausted, possessed by a fury of which I would never have thought him capable. One by one, he loosened the bricks and the wall came down. Julian stopped, covered in a cold sweat, his hands flayed. He picked up the lighter and placed it on the edge of one of the bricks. A wooden door, carved with angel motifs, rose up on the other side. Julian stroked the wooden reliefs, as if he were reading a hieroglyph. The door yielded to the pressure of his hands.
A glutinous darkness came at us from the other side. A little further back, the form of a staircase could be discerned. Black stone steps descended until they were lost in shadows. Julian turned for a moment, and I met his eyes. I saw fear and despair in them, as if he could sense what lay beyond. I shook my head, begging him without speaking not to go down. He turned back, dejected, and plunged into the gloom. I looked through the brick frame and saw him lurching down the steps. The flame flickered, now just a breath of transparent blue.
'Julian?'
All I got was silence. I could see Julian's shadow, motionless at the bottom of the stairs. I went through the brick hole and walked down the steps. The room was rectangular, with marble walls. It exuded an intense, penetrating chill. The two tombstones were covered with a veil of cobwebs that fell apart like rotten silk with the flame from the lighter. The white marble was scored with black tears of dampness that looked like blood dripping out of the clefts left by the engraver's chisel. They lay side by side, like maledictions, chained together.
PENELOPE ALDAYA DAVID ALDAYA
1902-1919 1919
I have often paused to think about that moment of silence and tried to imagine what Julian must have felt when he discovered that the woman he had been waiting seventeen years for was dead, their child gone with her, and that the life he had dreamed about, the very breath of it, had never existed. Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice it. In Julian's case that certainty came to him in a matter of seconds. For a moment I thought he was going to rush up the stairs and flee from that accursed place, and that I would never see him again. Perhaps it would have been better that way.
I remember that the flame from the lighter slowly went out, and I lost sight of his silhouette. My hands searched for him in the shadows and I found him trembling, speechless. He could barely stand, and he dragged himself into a corner. I hugged him and kissed his forehead. He didn't move. I felt his face with my fingers, but there were no tears. I thought that perhaps, unconsciously, he had known it all those years, that perhaps the encounter was necessary for him to face the truth and set himself free. We had reached the end of the road. Julian would now understand that nothing held him in Barcelona any longer and that we could leave, go far away. I wanted to believe that our luck was about to change and that Penelope had finally forgiven us.
I looked for the lighter on the floor and lit it again. Julian was staring vacantly, indifferent to the blue flame. I held his face in my hands and forced him to look at me. I found lifeless, empty eyes, consumed by anger and loss. I felt the venom of hatred spreading slowly through his veins, and I could read his thoughts. He hated me for having deceived him. He hated Miquel for having wished to give him a life that now felt like an open wound. But above all he hated the man who had caused this calamity, this trail of death and misery: himself. He hated those filthy books to which he had devoted his life and about which nobody cared. He hated every stolen second.
He looked at me without blinking, the way one looks at a stranger or some foreign object. I kept shaking my head, slowly, my hands searching his hands. Suddenly he moved away, roughly, and stood up. I tried to grab his arm, but he pushed me against the wall. I saw him go silently up the stairs, a man I no longer knew. Julian Carax was dead. By the time I stepped out into the garden, there was no trace of him. I climbed the wall and jumped down onto the other side. The desolate streets seemed to bleed in the rain. I shouted out his name, walking down the middle of the deserted avenue. Nobody answered my call. It was almost four in the morning when I got home. The apartment was full of smoke and the stench of burned paper. Julian had been there. I ran to open the windows. I found a small case on my desk with the pen I had bought for him years ago in Paris, the fountain pen I had paid a fortune for on the pretence it once had belonged to Victor Hugo. The smoke was oozing from the central-heating boiler. I opened the hatch and saw that Julian had thrown copies of his novels into it. I could just about read the titles on the leather spines; the rest had turned to cinders. I looked on my bookshelves: all of his books were gone.
Hours later, when I went to the publishing house in the middle of the morning, Alvaro Cabestany called me into his office. His father hardly ever came by anymore; the doctors said his days were numbered - as was my time at the firm. Cabestany's son informed me that a gentleman called Lain Coubert had turned up early that morning, saying he was interested in acquiring our entire stock of Julian Carax's novels. The publisher's son told him we had a warehouse full of them in the Pueblo Nuevo district, but as there was such a demand for them, he insisted on a higher price than Coubert was offering. Coubert had not taken the bait and had marched out. Now Alvaro Cabestany wanted me to find this person called Lain Coubert and accept his offer. I told the fool that Lain Coubert didn't exist; he was a character in one of Carax's novels. That he wasn't in the least interested in buying his books; he only wanted to know where we stored them. Old Senor Cabestany was in the habit of keeping a copy of every book published by his firm in his office library, even the works of Julian Carax. I slipped into the room, unnoticed, and took them.
That evening I visited my father in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and hid them where nobody, especially Julian, would ever find them. Night had fallen when I left the building. I wandered off down the Ramblas and from there to La Barceloneta, where I made for the beach, looking for the spot where I had gazed at the sea with Julian. The pyre of flames from the Pueblo Nuevo warehouse was visible in the distance, its amber trail spilling out over the sea and spirals of smoke rising to the sky like serpents of light. When the fire-fighters managed to extinguish the flames shortly before daybreak, there was nothing left, just the brick-and-metal skeleton that held up the vault. There I found Lluis Carbo, who had been the night watchman for ten years. He stared in disbelief at the smouldering ruins. His eyebrows and the hairs on his arm were singed, and his skin shone like wet bronze. It was he who told me that the blaze had started shortly after midnight and had devoured tens of thousands of books, until dawn came and he was faced with a river of ashes. Lluis still held a handful of books he had managed to save, some of Verdaguer's collected poems and two volumes of the History of the French Revolution. That was all that had survived. Various members of the union had arrived to help the fire-fighters. One of them told me the fire-fighters found a burned body among the debris. At first they had assumed that the man was dead, but then one of them noticed he was still breathing, and they had taken him to the nearby Hospital del Mar.
I recognized him by his eyes. The fire had eaten away his skin, his hands, and his hair. The flames had torn off his clothes, and his whole body was a raw wound that oozed beneath his bandages. They had confined him to a room on his own at the end of a corridor, with a view of the beach, and had numbed him with morphine while they waited for him to die. I wanted to hold his hand, but one of the nurses warned me that there was almost no flesh under the bandages. The fire had cut away his eyelids. The nurse who found me collapsed on the floor, crying, asked me whether I knew who he was. I said I did: he was my husband. When a priest appeared to administer the last rites over him, I frightened him off with my screams. Three days later Julian was still alive. The doctors said it was a miracle, that his will to live gave him a strength no medicine could offer. They were wrong. It was not a will to live. It was hatred. A week later, when they saw that this death-bitten body refused to expire, he was officially admitted under the name of Miquel Moliner. He would remain there for eleven months. Always in silence, with burning eyes, without rest.
I went to the hospital every day. Soon the nurses began to treat me less formally and invited me to lunch with them in their hall. They were all women who were on their own, strong women waiting for their men to return from the front. Some did. They taught me how to clean Julian's wounds, how to change his bandages, how to change the sheets and make a bed with an inert body lying on it. They also taught me to lose all hope of ever seeing the man who had once been held by those bones. Three months later we removed his face bandages. Julian was a skull. He had no lips or cheeks. It was a featureless face, the charred remains of a doll. His eye sockets had become larger and now dominated his face. The nurses would not admit it to me, but they were revolted by his appearance, almost afraid. The doctors had told me that, as the wounds healed, a sort of purplish, reptile like skin would slowly form. Nobody dared to comment on his mental state. Everyone assumed that Julian - Miquel - had lost his mind in the blaze, and that he had survived thanks to the obsessive care of a wife who stood firm where so many others would have fled in terror. I looked into his eyes and knew that Julian was still in there, alive, tormenting himself, waiting.
He had lost his lips, but the doctors thought that the vocal cords had not suffered permanent damage and that the burns on his tongue and larynx had healed months earlier. They assumed that Julian didn't say anything because his mind was gone. One afternoon, six months after the fire, when he and I were alone in the room, I bent over him and kissed him on the brow..
'I love you,' I said.
A bitter, harsh sound emerged from the doglike grimace that was now his mouth. His eyes were red with tears. I wanted to dry them with a handkerchief, but he repeated that sound.
'Leave me,' he said.
'Leave me.'
Two months after the warehouse fire, the publishing firm had gone bankrupt. Old Cabestany, who died that year, had predicted that his son would manage to ruin the company within six months. An unrepentant optimist to the last. I tried to find work with another publisher, but the war did away with everything. They all said that hostilities would soon cease and things would improve. But there were still two years of war ahead, and worse was yet to come. One year after the fire, the doctors told me that they had done all that could be done in a hospital. The situation was difficult, and they needed the room. They recommended that Julian be taken to a sanatorium like the Hospice of Santa Lucia, but I refused. In October 1937 I took him home. He hadn't uttered a single word since that 'Leave me'.
Every day I told him that I loved him. I set him up in the armchair by the window, wrapped in blankets. I fed him with fruit juices, toast, and milk - when there was any to be found. Every day I read to him for a couple of hours. Balzac, Zola, Dickens... His body was beginning to fill out and soon after returning home, he began to move his hands and arms. He tilted his neck. Sometimes, when I got back, I found the blankets on the floor, and objects that had been knocked over. One day I found him crawling on the floor. Then, a year and a half after the fire, I woke up in the middle of a stormy night and found that someone was sitting on the bed stroking my hair. I smiled at him, hiding my tears.
He had managed to find one of my mirrors, although I'd hidden them all. In a broken voice, he told me he'd been transformed into one of his fictional monsters, into Lain Coubert. I wanted to kiss him, to show him that his appearance didn't disgust me, but he wouldn't let me. He would hardly allow me to touch him. Day by day he was getting his strength back. He would prowl around the house while I went out in search of something to eat. The savings Miquel had left me kept us afloat, but soon I had to begin selling jewellery and old possessions. When there was no other alternative, I took the Victor Hugo pen I had bought in Paris and went out to sell it to the highest bidder. I found a shop behind the Military Government buildings where they took in that sort of merchandise. The manager did not seem impressed by my solemn oath that the pen had belonged to Victor Hugo, but he admitted it was a marvellous piece of its kind and agreed to pay me as much as he could, bearing in mind these were times of great hardship.
When I told Julian that I'd sold it, I was afraid he would fly into a rage. All he said was that I'd done the right thing, that he'd never deserved it. One day, one of the many when I'd gone out to look for work, I returned to find that Julian wasn't there. He didn't come back until daybreak. When I asked him where he'd been, he just emptied the pockets of his coat (which had belonged to Miquel) and left a fistful of money on the table. From then on he began to go out almost every night. In the dark, concealed under a hat and scarf, with gloves and a raincoat, he was just one more shadow. He never told me where he went, and he almost always brought back money or jewellery. He slept in the mornings, sitting upright in his armchair, with his eyes open. Once I found a penknife in one of his pockets. It was a double-edged knife, with an automatic spring. The blade was marked with dark stains.
It was then that I began to hear stories in town about some individual who was going around at night, smashing bookshop windows and burning books. Other times the strange vandal would slip into a library or a collector's study. He always took two or three volumes, which he would then burn. In February 1938 I went to a secondhand bookshop to ask whether it was possible to find any books by Julian Carax on the market. The manager said it wasn't: someone had been making them disappear. He had owned a couple himself and had sold them to a very strange person, a man who hid his face and whose voice he could barely understand.
'Until recently there were a few copies left in private collections, here and in France, but a lot of collectors are beginning to get rid of them. They're frightened,' he said, 'and I don't blame them.'
More and more, Julian would vanish for whole days at a time. Soon his absences lasted a week. He always left and returned at night, and he always brought back money. He never gave any explanations, or if he did, they were meaningless. He told me he'd been in France: Paris, Lyons, Nice. Occasionally letters arrived from France addressed to Lain Coubert. They were always from secondhand booksellers, or from collectors. Someone had located a lost copy of Julian Carax's works. Like a wolf, he would disappear for a few days, then return.
It was during one of those absences that I came across Fortuny, the hatter, wandering about in the cathedral cloister, lost in his thoughts. He still remembered me from the day I'd gone with Miquel to inquire after Julian, two years before. He took me to a corner and told me confidentially that he knew that Julian was alive, somewhere, but he suspected that his son wasn't able to get in touch with us for some reason he couldn't quite figure out. 'Something to do with that cruel man Fumero.' I told him that I felt the same. Wartime was turning out to be very profitable for Fumero. His loyalties shifted from month to month, from the anarchists to the communists, and from them to whoever came his way. He was called a spy, a henchman, a hero, a murderer, a conspirator, a schemer, a saviour, a devil. Little did it matter. They all feared him. They all wanted him on their side. Perhaps because he was so busy with the intrigues of wartime Barcelona, Fumero seemed to have forgotten Julian. Probably, like the hatter, he imagined that Julian had already escaped and was out of his reach.
Senor Fortuny asked me whether I was an old friend of his son's, and I said I was. He asked me to tell him about Julian, about the man he'd become, because, he sadly admitted, he didn't really know him. 'Life separated us, you know?' He told me he'd been to all the bookshops in Barcelona in search of Julian's novels, but they were unobtainable. Someone had told him that a madman was looking for them in every corner of the city and then burning them. Fortuny was convinced that the culprit was Fumero. I didn't contradict him. Whether through pity or spite, I lied as best I could. I told him I thought that Julian had returned to Paris, that he was well, that I knew for a fact he was very fond of Fortuny the hatter, that he would come back to see him as soon as circumstances permitted. 'It's this war,' he complained, 'it just rots everything.' Before we said goodbye, he insisted on giving me his address and that of his ex-wife, Sophie, with whom he was back in touch after many years of 'misunderstandings'. Sophie now lived in Bogota with a prestigious doctor, he said. She ran her own music school and often wrote asking after Julian.
'It's the only thing that brings us together now, you see. Memories. We make so many mistakes in life, young lady, but we only realize this when old age creeps up on us. Tell me, are you religious?'
I took my leave, promising to keep him and Sophie informed if I ever had any news from Julian.
'Nothing would make his mother happier than to hear how he is. You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense,' the hatter concluded sadly. 'That's why you live longer.'
Despite the fact that I'd heard so many appalling stories about him, I couldn't help feeling sorry for the poor old man. He had little else to do in life but wait for the return of his son. He seemed to live in the hope of recovering lost time, through some miracle of the saints, whom he visited with great devotion at their chapels in the cathedral. I had become used to picturing him as an ogre, a despicable and resentful human being, but all I could see before me was a kind man, blind to reality, confused like everybody else. Perhaps because he reminded me of my own father, who hid from everyone, including himself, in that refuge of books and shadows, or because the hatter and I were also linked by the hope of recovering Julian, I felt a growing affection for him and became his only friend. Unbeknownst to Julian, I often called on him at the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio. The hatter no longer worked in his shop downstairs.
'I don't have the hands, or the sight, or the customers...' he would say.
He waited for me almost every Thursday and offered me coffee, biscuits, and pastries that he scarcely touched. He spent hours reminiscing about Julian's childhood, about how they worked together in the hat shop, and he would show me photographs. He would take me to Julian's room, which he kept as immaculate as a museum, and bring out old notebooks and everyday objects without ever realizing that he'd already shown them to me before, that he'd told me all those stories on a previous visit. He seemed to be reconstructing a past that had never existed. One of those Thursdays, as I walked up the stairs, I ran into a doctor who had just been to see Fortuny. I asked him how the hatter was, and he looked at me strangely.
'Are you a relative?'
I told him I was the closest the poor man had to one. The doctor then told me that Fortuny was very ill, that it was just a matter of months.
'What's wrong with him?'
'I could tell you it's his heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.'
The hatter was pleased to see me and confessed that he didn't trust that doctor. Doctors are just second-rate witches, he said. All his life the hatter had been a man of profound religious beliefs, and old age had only reinforced them. He saw the hand of the devil everywhere. The devil, he said, clouds the mind and destroys mankind.
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