The Shadow of the Wind (47 page)

Nobody else came around to ask after Miquel, but I made sure it got about in the neighborhood that my husband was in France. I wrote a couple of letters to the Spanish consulate in Paris saying that I knew that the Spanish citizen Julián Carax was in the city and asking for their assistance in finding him. I imagined that sooner or later the letters would reach the right hands. I took all the precautions, but I knew it was only a question of time. People like Fumero never stop hating.

The apartment on Ronda de San Antonio was on the top floor. I discovered that there was a door to the roof terrace at the top of the staircase. The roof terraces of the whole block formed a network of enclosures separated from one another by walls just a yard high, where residents went to hang out their laundry. It didn't take me long to locate a building at the other end of the block, with its front door on Calle Joaquín Costa, to whose roof terrace I could gain access and therefore reach the building of Ronda de San Antonio without anyone seeing me go in or come out of the property. I once got a letter from the building administrator telling me that some neighbors had heard sounds coming from the Fortuny apartment. I answered in Requejo's name stating that occasionally some member of the firm had gone to the apartment to look for papers or documents and there was no cause for alarm, even if the sounds were heard at night. I added a comment implying that among gentlemen—accountants and lawyers—a secret bachelor pad was no small treasure. The administrator, showing professional understanding, answered that I need not worry in the least, that he completely understood the situation.

During those years, playing the role of Mr. Requejo was my only source of entertainment. Once a month I went to visit my father at the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. He never showed any interest in meeting my invisible husband, and I never offered to introduce him. We would skirt around the subject in our conversations like expert mariners dodging reefs near the water's surface. Occasionally he asked me whether I needed any help, whether there was anything he could do.

On Saturdays, at dawn, I sometimes took Julián to look at the sea. We would go up to the roof, cross over to the adjoining building, and then step out into Calle Joaquín Costa. From there we made our way down toward the port through the narrows streets of the Raval quarter. We never encountered anyone. People were afraid of Julián, even from a distance. At times we went as far as the breakwater. Julián liked to sit on the rocks, facing the city. We could spend hours like that, hardly speaking. Some afternoons we'd slip into a cinema, when the show had already started. In the dark nobody noticed Julián. As the months went by, I learned to confuse routine with normality, and in time I came to believe that my arrangement was perfect. Fool that I was.

N
INETEEN FORTY-FIVE, A YEAR OF ASHES.
O
NLY SIX YEARS HAD
elapsed since the end of the Civil War, and although its bruises were felt at every step, almost nobody spoke about it openly. Now people talked about the other war, the world war, which had polluted the entire globe with a stench of corpses that would never go away. Those were years of want and misery, strangely blessed by the sort of peace that the dumb and the disabled inspire in us—halfway between pity and revulsion. At last, after years of searching in vain for work as a translator, I found a job as a copyeditor in a publishing house run by a businessman of the new breed called Pedro Sanmartí. Sanmartí had built his company with the fortune of his father-in-law, who had then been promptly dispatched to a nursing home on the shores of Lake Bañolas while Sanmartí awaited a letter containing his death certificate. The businessman liked to court young ladies half his age by presenting himself as the self-made man, an image much in vogue at the time. He spoke broken English with a thick accent, convinced that it was the language of the future, and he finished his sentences with “Okay.”

Sanmartí's firm (which he had named Endymion because he thought it sounded impressive and was likely to sell books) published catechisms, manuals on etiquette, and various series of moralizing novels whose protagonists were either young nuns in humorous capers, Red Cross workers, or civil servants who were happy and morally sound. We also published a comic-book series about soldiers called
Brave Commando
—a raging success among young boys in need of heroes. I made a good friend in the firm, Sanmartí's secretary, a war widow called Mercedes Pietro, with whom I soon felt a great affinity. Mercedes and I had a lot in common: we were two women adrift, surrounded by men who were either dead or hiding from the world. Mercedes had a seven-year-old son who suffered from muscular dystrophy, for whom she cared as best she could. She was only thirty-two, but the lines on her face spoke of a life of hardship. All those years Mercedes was the only person to whom I felt tempted to tell everything.

It was she who told me that Sanmartí was a great friend of the increasingly renowned and decorated Inspector Javier Fumero. They both belonged to a clique of individuals that had risen from the ruins of the war to spread its tentacles throughout the city, a new power elite.

One day Fumero turned up at the publishing firm. He was coming to visit his friend Sanmartí, with whom he'd arranged to have lunch. Under some pretext or other, I hid in the filing room until they had both left. When I returned to my desk, Mercedes threw me a look; nothing needed to be said. From then on, every time Fumero made an appearance in the offices of the publisher, she would warn me so that I could hide.

Not a day passed without Sanmartí's trying to take me out to dinner, to the theater or the cinema, using any excuse. I always replied that my husband was waiting for me at home and that surely his wife must be anxious, as it was getting late. Mrs. Sanmartí fell well below the Bugatti on the list of her husband's favorite items. Indeed, she was close to losing her role in the marriage charade altogether, now that her father's fortune had passed into Sanmartí's hands. Mercedes had already warned me: Sanmartí, whose powers of concentration were limited, hankered after young, unseen flesh and concentrated his inane womanizing on the new arrivals—which at the moment meant me. He would resort to all manner of ploys.

“They tell me your husband, this Mr. Moliner, is a writer…. Perhaps he would-be interested in writing a book about my friend Fumero
.
I have the title:
Fumero, the Scourge of Crime.
What do you think, Nurieta?”

“I'm very grateful, Mr. Sanmartí, but Miquel is caught up with a novel he's writing, and I don't think he would be able to do it at the moment….”

Sanmartí would burst out laughing.

“A novel? Goodness, Nurieta…the novel is dead and buried. A friend of mine who has just arrived from New York was telling me only the other day. Americans are inventing something called television, which will be like the cinema, only at home. There'll be no more need for books, or churches, or anything. Tell your husband to forget about novels. If at least he were well known, if he were a football player or a bullfighter…Look, how about getting into the Bugatti and going to eat a paella in Castelldefels so we can discuss all this? Come on, woman, you've got to put your back into it…You know I'd like to help you. And your nice husband, too. You know only too well that in this country, without the right kind of friends, there's no getting anywhere.”

I began to dress like a pious widow or one of those women who seem to confuse sunlight with mortal sin. I went to work with my hair drawn back into a bun and no makeup. Despite my tactics, Sanmartí continued to shower me with lascivious remarks accompanied by his oily, putrid smile. It was a smile full of disdain, typical of self-important jerks who hang like stuffed sausages from the top of all corporate ladders. I had two or three interviews for prospective jobs elsewhere, but sooner or later I would come up against another version of Sanmartí. They grew like a plague of fungi, thriving on the dung on which companies are built. One of them took the trouble to phone Sanmartí and tell him that Nuria Monfort was looking for work behind his back. Sanmartí summoned me to his office, wounded by my ingratitude. He put his hand on my cheek and tried to stroke it. His fingers smelled of tobacco and stale sweat. I went deathly pale.

“Come on, if you're not happy, all you have to do is tell me. What can I do to improve your work conditions? You know how much I appreciate you, and it hurts me to hear from others that you want to leave us. How about going out to dinner, you and me, to make up?”

I removed his hand from my face, unable to go on hiding the repugnance it caused me.

“You disappoint me, Nuria. I have to admit that I don't see a team player in you, that you don't seem to believe in this company's business objectives anymore.”

Mercedes had already warned me that sooner or later something like this would happen. A few days afterward, Sanmartí, whose grammar was no better than an ape's, started returning all the manuscripts that I corrected, alleging that they were full of errors. Practically every day I stayed on in the office until ten or eleven at night, endlessly redoing pages and pages with Sanmartí's crossings-out and comments.

“Too many verbs in the past tense. It sounds dead, lifeless…. The infinitive should not be used after a semicolon. Everyone knows that….”

Some nights Sanmartí would also stay until late, secluded in his study. Mercedes tried to be there, but more than once he sent her home. Then, when we were left alone in the premises, he would come out of his office and wander up to my desk.

“You work too hard, Nuria. Work isn't everything. One must also enjoy oneself. And you're still young. But youth passes, you know, and we don't always know how to make the most of it.”

He would sit on the edge of my table and stare at me. Sometimes he would stand behind me and remain there a couple of minutes. I could feel his foul breath on my hair. Other times he placed his hands on my shoulders.

“You're tense. Relax.”

I trembled, I wanted to scream or run away and never return to that office, but I needed the job and its miserly pay. One night Sanmartí started on his routine massage and then he began to fondle me.

“One of these days you're going to make me lose my head,”
he moaned.

I leaped up, breaking free from his grasp, and ran toward the exit, dragging my coat and bag. Behind me, Sanmartí laughed. At the bottom of the staircase, I ran straight into a dark figure.

“What a pleasant surprise, Mrs. Moliner….”

Inspector Fumero gave me one of his snakelike smiles.
“Don't tell me you're working for my good friend Sanmartí! Lucky girl. Just like me, he's at the top of his game. So tell me, how's your husband?”

I knew that my time was up. On the following day, a rumor spread around the office that Nuria Monfort was a dyke—since she remained immune to Don Pedro Sanmartí's charms and his garlic breath—and that she was involved with Mercedes Pietro. More than one promising young man in the company swore that on a number of occasions he had seen that “couple of sluts” kissing in the filing room. That afternoon, on her way out, Mercedes asked me whether she could have a quick word with me. She could barely bring herself to look at me. We went to the corner café without exchanging a single word. There Mercedes told me what Sanmartí had told her: that he didn't approve of our friendship, that the police had supplied him with a report on me, detailing my suspected communist past.

“I can't afford to lose this job, Nuria. I need it to take care of my son….”

She broke down crying, burning with shame and humiliation.

“Don't worry, Mercedes. I understand,”
I said.

“This man, Fumero, he's after you, Nuria. I don't know what he has against you, but it shows in his face….”

“I know.”

 

T
HE FOLLOWING
M
ONDAY, WHEN
I
ARRIVED AT WORK,
I
FOUND A
skinny man with greased-back hair sitting at my desk. He introduced himself as Salvador Benades, the new copyeditor.

“And who are you?”

Not a single person in the office dared look at me or speak to me while I collected my things. On my way down the stairs, Mercedes ran after me and handed me an envelope with a wad of banknotes and some coins.

“Nearly everyone has contributed with whatever they could. Take it, please. Not for your sake, for ours.”

That night I went to the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio. Julián was waiting for me as usual, sitting in the dark. He'd written a poem for me, he said. It was the first thing he'd written in nine years. I wanted to read it, but I broke down in his arms. I told him everything, because I couldn't hold back any longer. Julián listened to me without speaking, holding me and stroking my hair. It was the first time in years that I felt I could lean on him. I wanted to kiss him because I was sick with loneliness, but Julián had no lips or skin to offer me. I fell asleep in his arms, curled up on the bed in his room, a child's bunk. When I woke up, Julián wasn't there. At dawn I heard his footsteps on the roof terrace and pretended I was still asleep. Later that morning I heard the news on the radio without realizing its significance. A body had been found sitting on a bench on Paseo del Borne. The dead man had his hands crossed over his lap and was staring at the basilica of Santa María del Mar. A flock of pigeons pecking at his eyes caught the attention of a local resident, who alerted the police. The corpse had its neck broken. Mrs. Sanmartí identified it as her husband, Pedro Sanmartí Monegal. When the father-in-law of the deceased heard the news in his Bañolas nursing home, he gave thanks to heaven and told himself he could now die in peace.