The Shadow of the Wind (62 page)

He had lost his lips, but the doctors thought that the vocal cords had not suffered permanent damage and that the burns on his tongue and larynx had healed months earlier. They assumed that Julian didn't say anything because his mind was gone. One afternoon, six months after the fire, when he and I were alone in the room, I bent over him and kissed him on the brow.  .

'I love you,' I said.

A bitter, harsh sound emerged from the doglike grimace that was now his mouth. His eyes were red with tears. I wanted to dry them with a handkerchief, but he repeated that sound.

'Leave me,' he said.

'Leave me.'

Two months after the warehouse fire, the publishing firm had gone bankrupt. Old Cabestany, who died that year, had predicted that his son would manage to ruin the company within six months. An unrepentant optimist to the last. I tried to find work with another publisher, but the war did away with everything. They all said that hostilities would soon cease and things would improve. But there were still two years of war ahead, and worse was yet to come. One year after the fire, the doctors told me that they had done all that could be done in a hospital. The situation was difficult, and they needed the room. They recommended that Julian be taken to a sanatorium like the Hospice of Santa Lucia, but I refused. In October 1937 I took him home. He hadn't uttered a single word since that 'Leave me'.

Every day I told him that I loved him. I set him up in the armchair by the window, wrapped in blankets. I fed him with fruit juices, toast, and milk - when there was any to be found. Every day I read to him for a couple of hours. Balzac, Zola, Dickens . .. His body was beginning to fill out and soon after returning home, he began to move his hands and arms. He tilted his neck. Sometimes, when I got back, I found the blankets on the floor, and objects that had been knocked over. One day I found him crawling on the floor. Then, a year and a half after the fire, I woke up in the middle of a stormy night and found that someone was sitting on the bed stroking my hair. I smiled at him, hiding my tears.

He had managed to find one of my mirrors, although I'd hidden them all. In a broken voice, he told me he'd been transformed into one of his fictional monsters, into Lain Coubert. I wanted to kiss him, to show him that his appearance didn't disgust me, but he wouldn't let me. He would hardly allow me to touch him. Day by day he was getting his strength back. He would prowl around the house while I went out in search of something to eat. The savings Miquel had left me kept us afloat, but soon I had to begin selling jewellery and old possessions. When there was no other alternative, I took the Victor Hugo pen I had bought in Paris and went out to sell it to the highest bidder. I found a shop behind the Military Government buildings where they took in that sort of merchandise. The manager did not seem impressed by my solemn oath that the pen had belonged to Victor Hugo, but he admitted it was a marvellous piece of its kind and agreed to pay me as much as he could, bearing in mind these were times of great hardship.

When I told Julian that I'd sold it, I was afraid he would fly into a rage. All he said was that I'd done the right thing, that he'd never deserved it. One day, one of the many when I'd gone out to look for work, I returned to find that Julian wasn't there. He didn't come back until daybreak. When I asked him where he'd been, he just emptied the pockets of his coat (which had belonged to Miquel) and left a fistful of money on the table. From then on he began to go out almost every night. In the dark, concealed under a hat and scarf, with gloves and a raincoat, he was just one more shadow. He never told me where he went, and he almost always brought back money or jewellery. He slept in the mornings, sitting upright in his armchair, with his eyes open. Once I found a penknife in one of his pockets. It was a double-edged knife, with an automatic spring. The blade was marked with dark stains.

It was then that I began to hear stories in town about some individual who was going around at night, smashing bookshop windows and burning books. Other times the strange vandal would slip into a library or a collector's study. He always took two or three volumes, which he would then burn. In February 1938 I went to a secondhand bookshop to ask whether it was possible to find any books by Julian Carax on the market. The manager said it wasn't: someone had been making them disappear. He had owned a couple himself and had sold them to a very strange person, a man who hid his face and whose voice he could barely understand.

'Until recently there were a few copies left in private collections, here and in France, but a lot of collectors are beginning to get rid of them. They're frightened,' he said, 'and I don't blame them.'

More and more, Julian would vanish for whole days at a time. Soon his absences lasted a week. He always left and returned at night, and he always brought back money. He never gave any explanations, or if he did, they were meaningless. He told me he'd been in France: Paris, Lyons, Nice. Occasionally letters arrived from France addressed to Lain Coubert. They were always from secondhand booksellers, or from collectors. Someone had located a lost copy of Julian Carax's works. Like a wolf, he would disappear for a few days, then return.

It was during one of those absences that I came across Fortuny, the hatter, wandering about in the cathedral cloister, lost in his thoughts. He still remembered me from the day I'd gone with Miquel to inquire after Julian, two years before. He took me to a corner and told me confidentially that he knew that Julian was alive, somewhere, but he suspected that his son wasn't able to get in touch with us for some reason he couldn't quite figure out. 'Something to do with that cruel man Fumero.' I told him that I felt the same. Wartime was turning out to be very profitable for Fumero. His loyalties shifted from month to month, from the anarchists to the communists, and from them to whoever came his way. He was called a spy, a henchman, a hero, a murderer, a conspirator, a schemer, a saviour, a devil. Little did it matter. They all feared him. They all wanted him on their side. Perhaps because he was so busy with the intrigues of wartime Barcelona, Fumero seemed to have forgotten Julian. Probably, like the hatter, he imagined that Julian had already escaped and was out of his reach.

Senor Fortuny asked me whether I was an old friend of his son's, and I said I was. He asked me to tell him about Julian, 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 Julian'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. Whether through pity or spite, I lied as best I could. I told him I thought that Julian 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 goodbye, 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 Bogota with a prestigious doctor, he said. She ran her own music school and often wrote asking after Julian.

'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, are you religious?'

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

'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 of 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 human being, but all I could 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 the hatter and I were also linked by the hope of recovering Julian, I felt a growing affection for him and became his only friend. Unbeknownst to Julian, I often called on him at the apartment in 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 touched. He spent hours reminiscing about Julian's childhood, about how they worked together in the hat shop, and he would show me photographs. He would take me to Julian's room, which he kept as immaculate as a museum, and bring out old notebooks and everyday objects without ever realizing that he'd already shown them to me before, that he'd told me all those stories on a previous visit. He seemed to be reconstructing a past that had never existed. One of those Thursdays, as I walked up the stairs, I ran into a doctor who had just been to see 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 his 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 destroys mankind.

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

It was the devil who had taken Julian 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 Julian 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. Julian 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 into which we had descended.

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

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 dully, 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 even worse. When the storm broke, there was no compassion.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all remain silent 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 nightmare that will pass. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what really happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour everything they left behind.

By then Julian 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 rumours, 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 in the cells of Montjuic Castle - his preferred method a pistol shot to 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 has lived 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 was the sort of peace that haunts prisons and cemeteries, a shroud of silence and shame that rots the soul. There were no guiltless hands or innocent looks. Those of us who were there, all without exception, will take the secret with us to the grave.