The Shadow of the Wind (46 page)

 

M
R.
F
ORTUNY ASKED ME WHETHER
I
WAS AN OLD FRIEND OF HIS SON'S,
and I said I was. He asked me to tell him about Julián, 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 Julián'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. I lied as best I could, I know not whether through pity or spite. I told him that I thought Julián 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 good-bye, 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 Bogotá with a prestigious doctor, he said. She ran her own music school and often wrote asking after Julián.

“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, do you have faith?”

I took my leave, promising to keep him and Sophie informed if I ever had news from Julián.

“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 from 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 being, but all I was able to 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, without his suspecting it, the hatter and I were also linked by the hope of recovering Julián, I felt a growing affection for him and became his only friend. Unbeknownst to Julián, I often called on him in the apartment on 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 tasted. He spent hours reminiscing about Julián's childhood, about how they worked together in the hat shop, and he would show me photographs. He would take me to Julián's room, which he kept as immaculate as a museum, and bring out old notebooks, insignificant objects that he adored as relics of a life that had never existed, without ever realizing that he'd already shown them to me before, that he'd told me all those stories on a previous visit. One of those Thursdays, as I walked up the stairs, I ran into a doctor who had just been to see Mr. 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 the 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 ruins mankind.

“Just look at this war, or look at me. Of course, now I'm old and weak, but as a young man I was a swine and a coward.”

It was the devil who had taken Julián away from him, he added.

“God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil….”

And so we passed the afternoon, nibbling on stale sponge fingers and discussing theology.

I once told Julián that if he wanted to see his father again before he died, he'd better hurry up. It turned out that he, too, had been visiting the hatter, without his knowing: from afar, at dusk, sitting at the other end of a square, watching him grow old. Julián said he would rather the old man took with him the image of the son he had created in his mind during those years than the person he had become.

“You keep that one for me,” I said, instantly regretting my words.

He didn't reply, but for a moment it seemed as if he could think clearly again and was fully aware of the hell in which we had become trapped.

The doctor's prognosis did not take long to come true. Mr. Fortuny didn't see the end of the war. He was found sitting in his armchair, looking at old photographs of Sophie and Julián.

The last days of the war were the prelude to an inferno. The city had lived through the combat from afar, like a wound that throbs drowsily, with months of skirmishes and battles, bombardments and hunger. The spectacle of murders, fights, and conspiracies had been corroding the city's heart for years, but even so, many wanted to believe that the war was still something distant, a storm that would pass them by. If anything, the wait made the inevitable worse. When the storm broke, there was no compassion.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

By then Julián hardly had any books left to burn. His father's death, about which we never spoke, had turned him into an invalid. The anger and hatred that had at first possessed him were spent. We lived on rumors, secluded. We heard that Fumero had betrayed all the people who had helped him advance during the war and was now in the service of the victors. It was said that he was personally executing his main allies and protectors in the cells of Montjuïc Castle—his preferred method a pistol shot in the mouth. The heavy mantle of collective forgetfulness seemed to descend around us the day the weapons went quiet. In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell. The weeks that followed the fall of Barcelona were indescribable. More blood was shed during those days than during the combat, but secretly, stealthily. When peace finally came, it smelled of the sort of peace that haunts prisons and cemeteries, a shroud of silence and shame that rots one's soul and never goes away. There were no guiltless hands or innocent looks. Those of us who were there, all without exception, will take the secret with us to our grave.

A faint patina of normality was being restored amid resentments, but by now Julián and I lived in abject poverty. We had spent all the savings and the booty from Laín Coubert's nightly escapades, and there was nothing left in the house to sell. I looked desperately for work as a translator, typist, or cleaner, but it seemed that my past association with Cabestany had marked me out as an undesirable person, a source of unnamed suspicions. A government employee in a shiny new suit, with brilliantined hair and a pencil mustache—one of the hundreds who seemed to crawl out of the woodwork during those months—hinted that an attractive girl like me shouldn't have to resort to such mundane jobs. Our neighbors accepted my story that I was caring for my poor husband, Miquel, who had become an invalid and was disfigured as a result of the war. They would bring us offerings of milk, cheese, or bread, sometimes even salted fish or sausages that had been sent to them by relatives in the country. After months of hardship, convinced that it would take a long time to find a job, I decided on a strategy borrowed from one of Julián's novels.

I wrote to Julián's mother in Bogotá, adopting the name of a fictitious new lawyer whom the deceased Mr. Fortuny had consulted in his last days, when he was trying to put his affairs in order. I informed her that, as the hatter had died without having made a will, his estate, which included the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio and the shop situated in the same building, was now theoretically the property of her son, Julián, who, it was believed, lived in exile in France. Since the death duties had not been satisfied, and since she lived abroad, the lawyer (whom I christened José María Requejo in memory of the first boy who had kissed me in school) asked her for authorization to start the necessary proceedings and carry out the transfer of the properties to the name of her son, whom he intended to contact through the Spanish embassy in Paris. In the meantime he was assuming the transitory and temporary ownership of the said properties, as well as a certain level of financial compensation. He also asked her to get in touch with the building administrator and instruct him to send all the documents, as well as the payment for the property expenses, to Mr. Requejo's office, in whose name I opened a PO box with a fake address—that of an old, disused garage two blocks away from the ruins of the Aldaya mansion. I was hoping that, blinded by the possibility of being able to help Julián and getting back in touch with him, Sophie would not stop to question all that legal gibberish and would agree to help us, taking into account her prosperous situation in far-off Colombia.

A couple of months later, the building administrator began to receive a monthly money order to cover the expenses of the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio and the fees of José María Requejo's law firm, which he proceeded to send as an open check to PO Box 2321 in Barcelona, just as Sophie Carax had requested him to do. The administrator, I noticed, retained an unauthorized percentage every month, but I preferred not to say anything. That way he wetted his beak and did not question such a convenient arrangement. With the rest, Julián and I had enough to survive. Terrible, bleak years went by, during which I had managed to find occasional work as a translator. By then nobody remembered Cabestany, and people began to forgive and forget, putting aside old rivalries and grievances. I lived under the perpetual threat that Fumero might decide to begin rummaging in the past again. Sometimes I convinced myself that it wouldn't happen, that he must have given Julián up for dead by now or forgotten him. Fumero wasn't the thug he was years ago. Now he had graduated into a public figure, a career man in the fascist regime, who couldn't afford the luxury of Julián Carax's ghost. Other times I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding, covered in sweat, thinking that the police were hammering on my door. I feared that some of the neighbors might begin to be suspicious of that ailing husband of mine who never left the house, who sometimes cried or banged the walls like a madman, and that they might report us to the police. I was afraid that Julián might escape again, that he might decide to go out hunting for his books once more. Distracted by so much fear, I forgot that I was growing old, that life was passing me by, that I had sacrificed my youth to love a man who was now almost a phantom.

But the years went by in peace. Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station. Meanwhile, the scars from the war were, of necessity, healing. I found some work in a couple of publishing firms and spent most of the day out of the house. I had lovers with no name, desperate faces I came across in cinemas or in the subway, with whom I would share my loneliness. Then,absurdly, I'd be consumed by guilt, and when I saw Julián again, I always felt like crying and would swear to myself that I would never again betray him, as if I owed him something. On buses or on the street, I caught myself looking at women who were younger than me holding small children by the hand. They seemed happy, or at peace, as if those helpless little beings could fill all the emptiness in the world. Then I would remember the days when, fantasizing, I had imagined myself one of those women, with a child in my arms, a child of Julián's. And then I would think about the war and about the fact that those who waged it were also children once.

I had started to believe that the world had forgotten us when someone turned up one day at our house. He looked young, barely a boy, an apprentice who blushed when he looked me in the eye. He asked after Miquel Moliner, and said he was updating some file at the School of Journalism. He told me that perhaps Mr. Moliner could be the beneficiary of a monthly pension, but if he were to apply for it, he would first have to update a number of details. I told him that Mr. Moliner hadn't been living there since the start of the war, that he'd gone abroad. He said he was very sorry and went away leering. He had the face of a young informer, and I knew that I had to get Julián out of my apartment that night, without fail. By now he had almost shriveled up. He was as docile as a child, and his whole life revolved around the evenings we spent together, listening to music on the radio, as he held my hand and stroked it in silence.

When night fell, I took the keys of the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio, which the building administrator had sent to a nonexistent Mr. Requejo, and accompanied Julián back to the home where he had grown up. I set him up in his room and promised him I'd return on the following day, reminding him to be very careful.

“Fumero is looking for you again,” I said.

He made a vague gesture with his head, as if he couldn't remember who Fumero was, or no longer cared. Several weeks passed in that way. I always went to the apartment at night, after midnight. I asked Julián what he'd done during the day, and he looked at me without understanding. We would spend the night together, holding each other, and I left at daybreak, promising to return as soon as I could. When I left, I always locked the door of the apartment. Julián didn't have a copy of the key. I preferred to keep him there like a prisoner rather than risk his life.