The Shadow of the Wind (42 page)

T
en 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 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. America, he would later say, by way of apology or epitaph, is a mirage, 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: Julián 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 Julián's trail, only to discover that, like him, Carax also seemed 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 at San Gabriel's, was now a murderer. It was rumored that he killed off notorious characters for money, that he dispatched political figures on request. Fumero was said to be death itself.

Aldaya and he recognized each other instantly through the haze of the Novedades Café. Aldaya was ill, stricken by a strange fever that he blamed on the insects of 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 favorite 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, through stupidity or slackness. 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, on Calle Cadena, in the company of numerous insects stored in pharmacy jars, and half a dozen books. Fumero detested books as much as he loved insects, but those were no ordinary volumes: they were the novels of Julián Carax published by Cabestany. Two prostitutes lived in the apartment opposite—a mother and daughter duo 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 away 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 qualified personnel capable of confronting the most awkward situations, the sorts of situations that needed to be solved discreetly so that respectable citizens could continue living in blissful ignorance. Words to that effect had been said to him by Lieutenant Durán, a man given to solemn pronouncements, under whose command Fumero had joined the police force.

“Being a policeman isn't a job, it's a mission,” Durán would proclaim. “Spain needs more balls and less chatter.”

Unfortunately, Lieutenant Durán 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 a vision of 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 Durán 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 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 Café, Jorge Aldaya began to feel better and opened his heart to Fumero. He begged forgiveness for the way he had treated him in their school days. With tears in his eyes, he told him his whole story, without omitting anything. Fumero listened silently, nodding, taking it in, all the while wondering whether he should kill Aldaya then and there, or wait. He wondered whether Aldaya would be so weak that the blade would meet only a tepid resistance from that stinking flesh, softened by indolence. He decided to postpone the vivisection. He was intrigued by the story, especially insofar as it concerned Julián 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 traveled 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 his 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.

Julián 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 neighbors, the prostitutes, found so frightening: without blinking, and slowly licking his upper lip. He could still remember Carax kissing Penélope Aldaya in the large mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo. His Penélope. 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 Penélope 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, after all, he was not going to kill him. 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.

I
N THE WINTER OF 1934, THE
M
OLINER BROTHERS FINALLY MANAGED
to evict Miquel from the house on Calle Puertaferrissa, which still remains empty and in a derelict state. All they wanted was to see him on the street, shorn of what little he had left, his books and the freedom and independence that 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
pensión
on Calle Canuda, a dismal, damp hovel that looked and smelled like a brothel. When I saw the room in which he was confined, a sort of 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, a spinster'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 for 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 Güell 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 Julián, 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, Julián, 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 Julián 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 was that 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 honor those who inspire them.”

Shriveled up, on the verge of collapsing into a heap of bile, 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 Julián or Aldaya. Miquel was still writing regular pieces for the press in Barcelona and Madrid. He worked without pause, sitting at the typewriter and pouring out what he considered drivel to feed commuters on the tram. I kept my job at the publishing house, perhaps because that was where I felt closest to Julián. 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 Julián 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 were never any deceits between us, not even wordless ones. Miquel knew he would die soon.

“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 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 look at the shop windows on 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 Julián's feet. Many a night I swore to myself that I would forget Julián, 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 Julián'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 curses and remorse, remember me like this, Daniel.

The manuscript of Julián's last novel arrived toward the end of 1935. I don't know whether out of spite or out of fear, 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 already 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 left 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 leaking out from inside. Miquel was arguing with someone. At first I assumed it was someone from the newspaper, but then I thought I caught Julián'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.

It was a man dressed in black, with somewhat indifferent 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 Julián.”

“What does he know about Julián?”

Miquel looked at me, more dispirited than ever. “Julián 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 Julián 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 of 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 Julián had worked as a pianist for years.

“I don't understand,” I murmured. “Julián is marrying his patron?”

“Exactly. This isn't a wedding. It's a contract.”

Irene Marceau was twenty-five or thirty years older than Julián. Miquel suspected she had decided on the marriage so that she could transfer her assets to Julián and secure his future.

“But she already helps him. She always has.”

“Perhaps she knows she's not going to be around forever,” Miquel suggested.

The echo of those words cut us to the quick. I knelt down next to him and held him tight. I bit my lips because I didn't want him to see me cry.

“Julián doesn't love this woman, Nuria,” he said, thinking that was the cause of my sorrow.

“Julián 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 from bringing all this out into the open now?”

It didn't take long for us 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 Julián was going to marry a rich woman in a ceremony of romantic splendor. Aldaya had spent days obsessed with the thought that the man responsible for his misfortunes was now clothed in glitter, sitting astride a fortune, while his had been lost. 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 a fairy tale. He had not told him that the bride was thirty years older than Carax and that, rather than a real marriage, this was an act of charity toward 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 be read like words beneath the scrawny skin that covered his haunted face. Miquel saw Fumero's game clearly. He 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 Julián a warning note.

When Fumero decided the moment was right, he took Aldaya aside and told him Julián was getting married in three days' time. Since he was a police officer, he explained, he couldn't get involved in this sort of matter. But Aldaya, as a civilian, could go to Paris and make sure that the wedding in question would never take place. How? a feverish Aldaya would ask, smoldering with hatred. Challenging him to a duel on the very day of his wedding. Fumero even supplied him with 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 Estación de Francia. He knew perfectly well that even if fever, stupidity, and blind anger didn't prevent Aldaya from killing Julián Carax in a duel with pistols at dawn after a sleepless night, the weapon he carried would. It wasn't Carax who had to die in Père Lachaise cemetery, but Aldaya.

Fumero also knew that Julián would never agree to confront his old friend, dying as Aldaya was, reduced to a whimper. That is why Fumero carefully coached Aldaya on every step he must take. He would have to admit to Julián that the letter Penélope 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 Julián. He would have to tell Julían that she had been waiting for him, with a broken soul and a bleeding heart, 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 plan and think of nothing else but returning to Barcelona in search of Penélope. And, once in Barcelona, his cobweb, Fumero would be waiting for him.