The Shadow of the Wind (50 page)

November 27, 1955

T
he room was white, a shimmer of sheets and curtains made of mist and bright sunshine. From my window I could make out a blue sea. One day someone would try to convince me that one cannot view the sea from the Corachán Clinic, that its rooms are not white or ethereal, and that the sea of that November was like a leaden pond, cold and hostile; that it went on snowing every day of that week until all of Barcelona was buried in three feet of snow, and that even Fermín, the eternal optimist, thought I was going to die again.

I had already died before, in the ambulance, in the arms of Bea and Lieutenant Palacios, who ruined his uniform with my blood. The bullet, said the doctors, who spoke about me thinking that I couldn't hear them, had destroyed two ribs, had brushed my heart, had severed an artery, and had come out at full speed through my side, dragging with it everything it had encountered on the way. My heart stopped beating for sixty-four seconds. They told me that when I returned from my excursion to eternity, I opened my eyes and smiled before losing consciousness.

I didn't come around until eight days later. By then the newspapers had already published the news of Francisco Javier Fumero's death during a struggle with an armed gang of criminals, and the authorities were busy trying to find a street or an alleyway they could rename in memory of the distinguished police inspector. His was the only body found in the old mansion of the Aldayas. The bodies of Penélope and her son were never discovered.

I awoke at dawn. I remember the light, like liquid gold, pouring over the sheets. It had stopped snowing, and somebody had exchanged the sea outside my window for a white square from which a few swings could be seen, and little else. My father, sunk in a chair by my bed, looked up and gazed at me in silence. I smiled at him, and he broke into tears. Fermín, who was sleeping like a baby in the corridor, and Bea, who was holding his head on her lap, heard my father's loud, wailing sobs and came into the room. I remember that Fermín was white and thin like the backbone of a fish. They told me that the blood running through my veins was his, that I'd lost all mine, and that my friend had been spending days stuffing himself with meat sandwiches in the hospital's canteen to breed more red blood corpuscles, in case I should need them. Perhaps that explains why I felt wiser and less like Daniel. I remember there was a forest of flowers and that in the afternoon—or perhaps two minutes later, I couldn't say—a whole cast of people filed through the room, from Gustavo Barceló and his niece Clara to Bernarda and my friend Tomás, who didn't dare look me in the eye and who, when I embraced him, ran off to weep in the street. I vaguely remember Don Federico, who came along with Merceditas and Don Anacleto, the high-school teacher. I particularly remember Bea, who looked at me without saying a word while all the others dissolved into cheers and thanks to the heavens, and I remember my father, who had slept on that chair for seven nights, praying to a God in whom he did not believe.

When the doctors ordered the entire committee to vacate the room and leave me to have a rest I did not want, my father came up to me for a moment and told me he'd brought my pen, the Victor Hugo fountain pen, and a notebook, in case I wanted to write. From the doorway Fermín announced that he'd consulted with the whole staff of doctors in the hospital and they had assured him I would not have to do my military service. Bea kissed me on the forehead and took my father with her to get some fresh air, because he hadn't been out of that room for over a week. I was left alone, weighed down by exhaustion, and I gave in to sleep, staring at the pen case on my bedside table.

I was woken up by footsteps at the door. I waited to see my father at the end of the bed, or perhaps Dr. Mendoza, who had never taken his eyes off me, convinced that my recovery was the result of a miracle. The visitor went around the bed and sat on my father's chair. My mouth felt dry. Julián Carax put a glass of water to my lips, holding my head while I moistened them. His eyes spoke of farewell, and looking into them was enough for me to understand that he had never discovered the true identity of Penélope. I can't remember his exact words, or the sound of his voice. I do know that he held my hand and I felt as if he were asking me to live for him, telling me I would never see him again. What I have not forgotten is what I told him. I told him to take that pen, which had always been his, and write again.

When I woke again, Bea was cooling my forehead with a cloth dampened with eau de cologne. Startled, I asked her where Carax was. She looked at me in confusion and told me that Carax had disappeared in the storm eight days before, leaving a trail of blood on the snow, and that everyone had given him up for dead. I said that wasn't true, he'd been right there, with me, only a few seconds ago. Bea smiled at me without saying anything. The nurse who was taking my pulse slowly shook her head and explained that I'd been asleep for six hours, that she'd been sitting at her desk by the door to my room all that time, and that certainly nobody had come into my room.

That night, when I was trying to get to sleep, I turned my head on my pillow and noticed that the pen case was open. The pen was gone.

1956

B
EA AND
I
WERE MARRIED IN THE
C
HURCH OF
S
ANTA
A
NA THREE
months later. Mr. Aguilar, who still spoke to me in monosyllables and would go on doing so until the end of time, had given me his daughter's hand in view of the impossibility of obtaining my head on a platter. Bea's disappearance had done away with his anger, and now he seemed to live in a state of perpetual shock, resigned to the fact that his grandson would soon call me Dad and that life, in the shape of a rascal stitched back together after a bullet wound, should rob him of his girl—a girl who, despite his bifocals, he still saw as the child in her first-communion dress, not a day older.

A week before the ceremony, Bea's father turned up at the bookshop to present me with a gold tiepin that had belonged to his father and to shake hands with me.

“Bea is the only good thing I've ever done in my life,” he said. “Take care of her for me.”

My father went with him to the door and watched him walk away down Calle Santa Ana, with that sadness that softens men who are aware that they are growing old together.

“He's not a bad person, Daniel,” he said. “We all love in our own way.”

Dr. Mendoza, who doubted my ability to stay on my feet for more than half an hour, had warned me that the bustle of a wedding and all the preparations were not the best medicine for a man who had been on the point of leaving his heart in the operating room.

“Don't worry,” I reassured him. “They're not letting me do anything.”

I wasn't lying. Fermín Romero de Torres had set himself up as absolute dictator of the ceremony, the banquet, and all related matters. When the parish priest discovered that the bride was arriving pregnant to the altar, he flatly refused to perform the wedding and threatened to summon the spirits of the Holy Inquisition and make them cancel the event. Fermín flew into a rage and dragged him out of the church, shouting to all and sundry that he was unworthy of his habit and of the parish, and swearing that if the priest as much as raised an eyebrow, he was going to stir up such a scandal in the bishopric that at the very least he would be exiled to the Rock of Gibraltar to evangelize the monkeys. A few passersby clapped, and the flower vendor in the square gave Fermín a white carnation, which he went on to wear in his lapel until the petals turned the same color as his shirt collar. All set up and without a priest, Fermín went to San Gabriel's School, where he recruited the services of Father Fernando Ramos, who had not performed a wedding in his life and whose specialty was Latin, trigonometry, and gymnastics, in that order.

“You see, Your Reverence, the bridegroom is very weak, and I can't upset him again. He sees in you a reincarnation of the great glories of the Mother Church, there, up high, with Saint Thomas, Saint Augustine, and the Virgin of Fátima. He may not seem so, but the boy is, like me, extremely devout. A mystic. If I now tell him that you've failed me, we may well have to celebrate a funeral instead of a wedding.”

“If you put it like that.”

From what they told me later—because I don't remember it, and weddings always stay more clearly in the memory of others—before the ceremony Bernarda and Gustavo Barceló (following Fermín's detailed instructions) softened up the poor priest with muscatel wine to rid him of his stage fright. When the time came for Father Fernando to officiate, wearing a saintly smile and a pleasantly rosy complexion, he chose, in a breach of protocol, to replace the reading of I don't know which Letter to the Corinthians with a love sonnet, the work of a poet called Pablo Neruda. Some of Mr. Aguilar's guests identified him as a confirmed communist and a Bolshevik, while others looked in the missal for those verses of intense pagan beauty, wondering whether this was already one of the first effects of the impending Ecumenical Council.

The night before the wedding, Fermín told me he had organized a bachelor party to which only he and I were invited.

“I don't know Fermín. I don't really like these—”

“Trust me.”

On the night of the crime, I followed Fermín meekly to a foul hovel on Calle Escudillers, where the stench of humanity coexisted with the most potent odor of refried food on the entire Mediterranean coast. A lineup of ladies with their virtue for rent and a lot of mileage on the clock greeted us with smiles that would only have excited a student of dentistry.

“We've come for Rociíto,” Fermín informed a pimp whose sideburns bore a surprising resemblance to Cape Finisterre.

“Fermín,” I whispered, terrified. “For heaven's sake…”

“Have faith.”

Rociíto arrived in all her glory—which I reckoned to amount to around 175 pounds, not counting the feather shawl and a skeleton-tight red viscose dress—and took stock of me from head to toe.

“Hi, sweetheart. I thought you was older, to tell the God's honest truth.”

“This is not the client,” Fermín clarified.

I then understood the nature of the situation, and my fears subsided. Fermín never forgot a promise, especially if it was I who had made it. The three of us went off in search of a taxi that would take us to the Santa Lucía Hospice. During the journey Fermín, who, in deference to my delicate health and my fiancé status, had offered me the front seat, was sitting in the back with Rociíto, taking in her attributes with obvious relish.

“You're a dish fit for a pope, Rociíto. This egregious ass of yours is the Revelation According to Botticelli.”

“Oh, Mr. Fermín, since you got yourself a girlfriend, you've forgotten me, you rogue.”

“You're too much of a woman for me, Rociíto, and now I'm monogamous.”

“Nah! Good ole Rociíto will cure that for you with some good rubs of penicillin.”

We reached Calle Moncada after midnight, escorting Rociíto's heavenly body, and slipped her into the hospice by the back door—the one used for taking out the deceased through an alleyway that looked and smelled like hell's esophagus. Once we had entered the shadows of the Tenebrarium, Fermín proceeded to give Rociíto his final instructions while I tried to find the old granddad to whom I'd promised a last dance with Eros before Thanatos settled accounts with him.

“Remember, Rociíto, the old geezer is probably as deaf as a post, so speak to him in a loud voice, clear and dirty, with sauciness, the way you know how. But don't get too carried away either. We don't want to give him heart failure and send him off to kingdom come before his time.”

“No worries, pumpkin. I'm a professional.”

I found the recipient of those rented favors in a corner of the first floor, the wise hermit still barricaded behind walls of loneliness. He raised his eyes and stared at me, confused.

“Am I dead?”

“No. You're very much alive. Don't you remember me?”

“I remember you as well as I remember my first pair of shoes, young man, but seeing you like this, looking so pale, I thought it might be a vision from beyond. Don't hold it against me. Here one loses what you outsiders call discernment. So this isn't a vision?”

“No. The vision is waiting for you downstairs, if you'll do the honors.”

I led the grandpa to a gloomy cell, which Fermín and Rociíto had decorated festively with some candles and a few puffs of perfume. When his eyes rested on the abundant beauty of our Andalusian Venus, the old man's face lit up with intimations of paradise.

“May God bless you all.”

“And may you live to see it,” said Fermín, as he signaled to the siren from Calle Escudillers to start displaying her wares.

I saw her take the old man with infinite delicacy and kiss the tears that fell down his cheeks. Fermín and I left the scene to grant them their deserved intimacy. In our winding journey through that gallery of despair, we encountered Sister Emilia, one of the nuns who managed the hospice. She threw us a venomous look.

“Some patients are telling me you've brought in a hooker. Now they also want one.”

“Most Illustrious Sister, who do you take us for? Our presence here is strictly ecumenical. This young lad, who tomorrow will be a man in the eyes of the Holy Mother Church, and I, have come to inquire after the patient Jacinta Coronado.”

Sister Emilia raised an eyebrow. “Are you related?”

“Spiritually.”

“Jacinta died two weeks ago. A gentleman came to visit her the night before. Is he a relative of yours?”

“Do you mean Father Fernando?”

“He wasn't a priest. He said his name was Julián. I can't remember his last name.”

Fermín looked at me, dumbstruck.

“Julián is a friend of mine,” I said.

Sister Emilia nodded. “He was with her for a few hours. I hadn't heard her laugh for years. When he left, she told me they'd been talking about the old days, when they were young. She said that man had brought news of her daughter, Penélope. I didn't know Jacinta had a daughter. I remember, because that morning Jacinta smiled at me, and when I asked her why she was so happy, she said she was going home, with Penélope. She died at dawn, in her sleep.”

Rociíto concluded her love ritual a short while later, leaving the old man merrily exhausted and in the hands of Morpheus. As we were leaving, Fermín paid her double, but Rociíto, who was crying from the sight of those poor, helpless people, forsaken by God and the devil, insisted on handing her fees to Sister Emilia so that they could all be given a meal of hot chocolate and sweet buns, because, she said, that was something that always made her forget the sorrows of life.

“I'm ever so sentimental. Look at that poor old soul, Mr. Fermín…. All he wanted was to be hugged and stroked. Breaks your heart, it does….”

We put Rociíto into a taxi with a good tip and walked up Calle Princesa, which was deserted and strewn with mist.

“We ought to get to bed, because of tomorrow,” said Fermín.

“I don't think I'll be able to get any sleep.”

We set off toward La Barceloneta. Before we knew it, we were walking along the breakwater until the whole city, shining with silence, spread out at our feet like the greatest mirage in the universe, emerging from the pool of the harbor waters. We sat on the edge of the jetty to gaze at the sight.

“This city is a sorceress, you know, Daniel? It gets under your skin and steals your soul without you knowing it.”

“You sound like Rociíto, Fermín.”

“Don't laugh, it's people like her who make this lousy world a place worth visiting.”

“Whores?”

“No. We're all whores, sooner or later. I mean good-hearted people. And don't look at me like that. Weddings turn me to jelly.”

We remained there embracing that special silence, gazing at the reflections on the water. After a while dawn tinged the sky with amber, and Barcelona woke up. We heard the distant bells from the basilica of Santa María del Mar, just emerging from the mist on the other side of the harbor.

“Do you think Carax is still there, somewhere in the city?” I asked.

“Ask me another question.”

“Do you have the rings?”

Fermín smiled. “Come on, let's go. They're waiting for us, Daniel. Life is waiting for us.”

 

She wore an ivory-white dress and held the world in her eyes. I barely remember the priest's words or the faces of the guests, full of hope, who filled the church on that March morning. All that remains in my memory is the touch of her lips and, when I half opened my eyes, the secret oath I carried with me on my skin and would remember all the days of my life.