The Shadow of the Wind (13 page)

I went up to the chair where Mr. Fortuny had died. Next to the Bible was a small box containing black-and-white photographs, old studio portraits. I knelt down to examine them, almost afraid to touch them. I felt I was profaning the memories of a poor old man, but my curiosity got the better of me. The first print showed a young couple with a boy who could not have been more than four years old. I recognized him by his eyes.

“Look, there they are. Mr. Fortuny as a young man, and her…”

“Didn't Julián have any brothers or sisters?”

The caretaker shrugged her shoulders and let out a sigh. “I heard rumors that she miscarried once because of the beatings her husband gave her, but I don't know. People love to gossip, don't they? But not me. All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake. My Isabelita had nightmares for a whole month. That child could be really morbid at times.”

I glanced at the kitchen. There was a broken pane in a small window overlooking an inner courtyard, and you could hear the nervous and hostile flapping of the pigeons' wings on the other side.

“Do all the apartments have the same layout?” I asked.

“The ones that look onto the street do. But this one is an attic, so it's a bit different. There's the kitchen and a laundry room that overlooks the inside yard. Down this corridor there are three bedrooms, and a bathroom at the end. Properly decorated, they can look very nice, believe me. This one is similar to my Isabelita's apartment—but of course right now it looks like a tomb.”

“Do you know which Julián's room was?”

“The first door is the master bedroom. The second is a smaller room. It was probably that one, I'd say.”

I went down the corridor. The paint on the walls was falling off in shreds. At the end of the passage, the bathroom door was ajar. A face seemed to stare at me from the mirror. It could have been mine, or perhaps the face of the sister who lived there. As I got closer, it withdrew into darkness. I tried to open the second door.

“It's locked,” I said.

The caretaker looked at me in astonishment. “These doors don't have locks,” she said.

“This one does.”

“Then the old man must have had it put in, because all the other apartments…”

I looked down and noticed that the footprints in the dust led up to the locked door. “Someone's been in this room,” I said. “Recently.”

“Don't scare me,” said the caretaker.

I went up to the other door. It didn't have a lock. It opened with a rusty groan when I touched it. In the middle stood an old four-poster bed, unmade. The sheets had turned yellowish, like winding sheets, and a crucifix presided over the bed. The room also contained a chest of drawers with a small mirror on it, a basin, a pitcher, and a chair. A wardrobe, its door ajar, stood against the wall. I went around the bed to a bedside table with a glass top, under which lay photographs of ancestors, funeral cards, and lottery tickets. On the table were a carved wooden music box and a pocketwatch, frozen forever at twenty past five. I tried to wind up the music box, but the melody got stuck after six notes. When I opened the drawer of the bedside table, I found an empty spectacle case, a nail clipper, a hip flask, and a medal of the Virgin of Lourdes. Nothing else.

“There must be a key to that room somewhere,” I said.

“The administrator must have it. Look, I think it's best we leave.”

Suddenly I looked down at the music box. I lifted the cover and there, blocking the mechanism, I found a gold key. I took it out, and the music box resumed its tinkling. I recognized a tune by Ravel.

“This must be the key.” I smiled at the caretaker.

“Listen, if the room was locked, there must be a reason. Even if it's just out of respect for the memory of—”

“If you'd rather, you can wait for me down in your apartment, Doña Aurora.”

“You're a devil. Go on. Open up if you must.”

A
BREATH OF COLD AIR WHISTLED THROUGH THE HOLE IN THE
lock, licking at my fingers while I inserted the key. The lock that Mr. Fortuny had fitted in the door of his son's unoccupied room was three times the size of the one on the front door. Doña Aurora looked at me apprehensively, as if we were about to open a Pandora's box.

“Is this room on the front of the house?” I asked.

The caretaker shook her head. “It has a small window, for ventilation. It looks out over the yard.”

I pushed the door inward. An impenetrable well of darkness opened up before us. The meager light from behind crept ahead, barely able to scratch at the shadows. The window overlooking the yard was covered with pages of yellowed newspaper. I tore them off, and a needle of hazy light bored through the darkness.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” murmured the caretaker.

The room was infested with crucifixes. They hung from the ceiling, dangling from the ends of strings, and they covered the walls, hooked on nails. There were dozens of them. You could sense them in every corner, carved with a knife on the wooden furniture, scratched on the floor tiles, painted red on the mirrors. The footprints that had led us to the doorway could now be traced in the dust around the naked bed, just a skeleton of wires and worm-eaten wood. At one end of the room, under the window, stood a closed rolltop desk, crowned by a trio of metal crucifixes. I opened it with care. There was no dust in the joins of the wooden slats, from which I inferred that the desk had been opened quite recently. It had six drawers. The locks had been forced open. I inspected them one by one. Empty.

I knelt down by the desk and fingered the scratches that covered the wood, imagining Julián Carax's hands making those doodles, hieroglyphics whose meaning had been obscured by time. In the desk, I noticed a pile of notebooks and a vase filled with pencils and pens. I took one of the notebooks and glanced at it. Drawings and single words. Mathematical exercises. Unconnected phrases, quotes from books. Unfinished poems. All the notebooks looked the same. Some drawings were repeated page after page, with slight variations. I was struck by the figure of a man who seemed to be made of flames. Another might have been an angel or a reptile coiled around a cross. Rough sketches hinted at a fantastic rambling house, woven with towers and cathedral-like arches. The strokes were confident and showed a certain facility. Young Carax appeared to be a draftsman of some promise, but none of the drawings were more than rough sketches.

I was about to put the last notebook back in its place without looking at it when something slipped out from its pages and fell at my feet. It was a photograph in which I recognized the same girl who appeared in the other picture—the one taken at the foot of that building. The girl was posed in a luxurious garden, and beyond the treetops, just visible, was the shape of the house I had seen sketched in the drawings of the adolescent Carax. I recognized it immediately. It was the villa called “The White Friar,” on Avenida del Tibidabo. On the back of the photograph was an inscription that simply said:

Penélope, who loves you

I put it in my pocket, closed the desk, and smiled at the caretaker.

“Seen enough?” she asked, anxious to leave the place.

“Almost,” I replied. “Before, you said that soon after Julián left for Paris, a letter came for him, but his father told you to throw it away….”

The caretaker hesitated for a moment, and then she nodded. “I put the letter in the drawer of the cabinet in the entrance hall, in case the Frenchwoman should come back one day. It must still be there.”

We went down to the cabinet and opened the top drawer. An ocher-colored envelope lay on top of a collection of stopped watches, buttons, and coins that had ceased being legal tender twenty years ago. I picked up the envelope and examined it.

“Did you read it?”

“What do you take me for?”

“I meant no offense. It would have been quite natural, under the circumstances, if you thought that Julián was dead….”

The caretaker shrugged, looked down, and started walking toward the door. I took advantage of that moment to put the letter in the inside pocket of my jacket.

“Look, I don't want you to get the wrong impression,” said the caretaker.

“Of course not. What did the letter say?”

“It was a love letter. Like the stories on the radio, only sadder, you know, because it sounded as if it was really true. Believe me, I felt like crying when I read it.”

“You're all heart, Doña Aurora.”

“And you're a devil.”

 

T
HAT SAME AFTERNOON, AFTER SAYING GOOD-BYE TO
D
OÑ A
A
URORA
and promising that I would keep her up to date with my investigations on Julián Carax, I went along to see the administrator of the block of apartments. Mr. Molins had seen better days and now moldered away in a filthy first-floor office on Calle Floridablanca. Still, Molins was a cheerful and self-satisfied individual. His mouth was glued to a half-smoked cigar that seemed to grow out of his mustache. It was hard to tell whether he was asleep or awake, because he breathed like most people snore. His hair was greasy and flattened over his forehead, and he had mischievous piggy eyes. His suit wouldn't have fetched more than ten pesetas in the Encantes Flea Market, but he made up for it with a gaudy tie of tropical colors. Judging by the appearance of the office, not much was managed anymore, except the bugs and cobwebs of a forgotten Barcelona.

“We're in the middle of refurbishment,” he said apologetically.

To break the ice, I let drop the name of Doña Aurora, as if I were referring to some old friend of the family.

“When she was young, she was a real looker” was Molins's comment. “With age she's gone on the heavier side, but then I'm not what I used to be either. You may not believe this, but when I was your age, I was an Adonis. Girls would go on their knees to beg for a quickie, or to have my babies. Alas, the twentieth century is for shit. What can I do for you, young man?”

I presented him with a more or less plausible story about a supposed distant relationship with the Fortunys. After five minutes' chatter, Molins dragged himself to his filing cabinet and gave me the address of the lawyer who dealt with matters related to Sophie Carax, Julián's mother.

“Let me see…José María Requejo. Fifty-nine, Calle León XIII. But we send the mail twice a year to a PO box in the main post office, on Vía Layetana.”

“Do you know Mr. Requejo?”

“I've spoken to his secretary occasionally on the telephone. The fact is that all business with him is done by mail, and my secretary deals with that. And today she's at the hairdresser's. Lawyers don't have time for face-to-face dealings anymore. There are no gentlemen left in the profession.”

There didn't seem to be any reliable addresses left either. A quick glance at the street guide on the manager's desk confirmed what I suspected: the address of the supposed lawyer, Mr. Requejo, didn't exist. I told Mr. Molins, who took the news in as if it were a joke.

“Well, I'll be dammed!” he said laughing. “What did I say? Crooks.”

The manager lay back in his chair and made another of his snoring noises.

“Would you happen to have the number of that PO box?”

“According to the index card it's 2837, although I can't read my secretary's numbers. As I'm sure you know, women are no good at math. What they're good for is—”

“May I see the card?”

“Sure. Help yourself.”

He handed me the index card, and I looked at it. The numbers were perfectly legible. The PO box was 2321. It horrified me to think of the accounting that must have gone on in that office.

“Did you have much contact with Mr. Fortuny during his lifetime?” I asked.

“So-so. Quite the ascetic type. I remember that when I found out that the Frenchwoman had left him, I invited him to go whoring with a few mates of mine, nearby, in a fabulous establishment I know next to La Paloma dance hall. Just to cheer him up, eh? That's all. And you know what? He would not talk to me, even greet me in the street anymore, as if I were invisible. What do you make of that?”

“I'm in shock. What else can you tell me about the Fortuny family? Do you remember them well?”

“Those were different times,” he murmured nostalgically. “The fact is that I already knew Grandfather Fortuny, the one who started the hat shop. About the son, there isn't much to tell. Now, the wife, she was spectacular. What a woman. And decent, eh? Despite all the rumors and gossip…”

“Like the one about Julián's not being the legitimate son of Mr. Fortuny?”

“And where did you hear that?”

“As I said, I'm part of the family. Everything gets out.”

“None of that was ever proved.”

“But it was talked about,” I said encouragingly.

“People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.”

“And what did people say?”

“Don't you feel like a little glass of rum? It's Cuban, like all the good stuff that kills you.”

“No thanks, but I'll keep you company. In the meantime, you can tell me…”

 

Antoni Fortuny, whom everyone called the hatter, met Sophie Carax in 1899 by the steps of Barcelona Cathedral. He was returning from making a vow to Saint Eustace—for of all the saints, Saint Eustace was considered the most diligent and the least fussy when it came to granting miracles to do with love. Antoni Fortuny, who was already over thirty and a confirmed bachelor, was looking for a wife, and wanted her right away. Sophie was a French girl who lived in a boardinghouse for young ladies on Calle Riera Alta and gave private music and piano lessons to the offspring of the most privileged families in Barcelona. She had no family or capital to rely on, only her youth and what musical education she had received from her father—the pianist at a Nîmes theater—before he died of tuberculosis in 1886. Antoni Fortuny, on the contrary, was a man on the road to prosperity. He had recently inherited his father's business, a hat shop of some repute on Ronda de San Antonio, where he had learned the trade that he dreamed of one day teaching his own son. He found Sophie Carax fragile, beautiful, young, docile, and fertile. Saint Eustace had obliged. After four months of insistent courting, Sophie accepted Antoni's marriage proposal. Mr. Molins, who had been a friend of Fortuny the elder, warned Antoni that he was marrying a stranger. He said that Sophie seemed like a nice girl, but perhaps this marriage was a bit too convenient for her, and he should wait a year at least…. Antoni Fortuny replied that he already knew everything he needed to about his future wife. The rest did not interest him. They were married at the Basílica del Pino and spent their three-day honeymoon in a spa in the nearby seaside resort of Mongat. The morning before they left, the hatter asked Mr. Molins, in confidence, to be initiated into the mysteries of the bedroom. Molins sarcastically told him to ask his wife. The newlyweds returned to Barcelona after only two days. The neighbors said Sophie was crying when she came into the building. Years later Viçenteta swore that Sophie had told her the following: that the hatter had not laid a finger on her and that when she had tried to seduce him, he had called her a whore and told her he was disgusted by the obscenity of what she was proposing. Six months later Sophie announced to her husband that she was with child. By another man.

Antoni Fortuny had seen his own father hit his mother on countless occasions and did what he thought was the right thing to do. He stopped only when he feared that one more blow would kill her. Despite the beating, Sophie refused to reveal the identity of the child's father. Applying his own logic to the matter, Antoni Fortuny decided that it must be the devil, for that child was the child of sin, and sin had only one father: the One. Convinced in this manner that sin had sneaked into his home and also between his wife's thighs, the hatter took to hanging crucifixes everywhere: on the walls, on the doors of all the rooms, and on the ceiling. When Sophie discovered him scattering crosses in the bedroom to which she had been confined, she grew afraid and, with tears in her eyes, asked him whether he had gone mad. Blind with rage, he turned around and hit her. “A whore like the rest,” he spit as he threw her out onto the landing, after flaying her with blows from his belt. The following day, when Antoni Fortuny opened the door of his apartment to go down to the hat shop, Sophie was still there, covered in dried blood and shivering with cold. The doctors never managed to fix the fractures on her right hand completely. Sophie Carax would never be able to play the piano again, but she would give birth to a boy, whom she would name Julián after the father she had lost when she was still too young—as happens with all good things in life. Fortuny considered throwing her out of his home but thought the scandal would not be good for business. Nobody would buy hats from a man known to be a cuckold—the two didn't go together. From then on, Sophie was assigned a dark, cold room at the back of the apartment.

It was there she gave birth to her son with the help of two neighbors. Antoni did not return home until three days later. “This is the son God has given you,” Sophie announced. “If you want to punish anyone, punish me, but not an innocent creature. The boy needs a home and a father. My sins are not his. I beg you to take pity on us.”

The first months were difficult for both of them. Antoni Fortuny had downgraded his wife to the rank of servant. They no longer shared a bed or table and rarely exchanged any words except to resolve some domestic matter. Once a month, usually coinciding with the full moon, Antoni Fortuny showed up in Sophie's bedroom at dawn and, without a word, charged at his former wife with vigor but little skill. Making the most of these rare and aggressive moments of intimacy, Sophie tried to win him over by whispering words of love and caressing him. But the hatter was not a man for frivolities, and the eagerness of desire evaporated in a matter of minutes, or even seconds. These assaults brought no children. After a few years, Antoni Fortuny stopped visiting Sophie's chamber for good and took up the habit of reading the Gospels until the small hours, seeking in them a solace for his torment.