The Shadow of the Wind (11 page)

'What are these scars from?' I asked. 'Cuts?'

Dr Baro shook his head again, without looking up. He found a blanket amid the wreckage and covered his patient with it. 'Burns. This man has been tortured,' he explained. 'These marks are from a soldering iron.'

Fermin slept for two days. When he awoke, he could not remember anything; he just thought he'd woken up in a dark cell, that was all. He felt so ashamed of his behaviour that he went down on his knees to beg for Dona Encarna's forgiveness. He swore he would paint the pension for her and, knowing she was very devout, promised she would have ten masses said for her in the Church of Belen.

'What you have to do is get better and not frighten me like that again. I'm too old for that sort of thing.'

My father paid for the damages and begged Dona Encarna to give Fermin another chance. She gladly agreed. Most of her guests were dispossessed people who were alone in the world, like her. Once she had got over the fright, she felt an even greater affection for Fermin and made him promise that he would take the tablets Dr Baro had prescribed.

'For you, Dona Encarna, I'd swallow a brick if need be.'

In time we all pretended we'd forgotten what had happened, but never again did I take the stories about Inspector Fumero lightly. After that incident we would take Fermin with us almost every Sunday for an afternoon snack at the Novedades Cafe, so as not to leave him on his own. Then we'd walk up to the Femina Cinema, on the corner of Calle Diputacion and Paseo de Gracia. One of the ushers was a friend of my father's, and he would let us sneak in through the fire exit on the ground floor during the newsreel, always when the Generalissimo was in the act of cutting the ribbon to inaugurate some new reservoir, which really got on Fermin's nerves.

'What a disgrace,' he would say indignantly.

'Don't you like the cinema, Fermin?'

'Between you and me, this business of the seventh art leaves me cold. As far as I can see, it's only a way of feeding the mindless and making them even more stupid. Worse than football or bullfights. The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it's much the same.'

Fermin's attitude changed radically the day he discovered Carole Lombard.

'What breasts, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what breasts!' he exclaimed in the middle of the film, beside himself. 'Those aren't tits, they're two schooners!'

'Shut up, you degenerate, or I'll call the manager,' muttered a voice straight from the confessional, a few rows behind us. 'People have no shame. What a country of pigs we live in.'

'You'd better lower your voice, Fermin,' I advised him.

Fermin Romero de Torres wasn't listening to me. He was lost in the gentle swell of that miraculous bosom, with an enraptured smile and unblinking eyes. Later, walking back along Paseo de Gracia, I noticed that our bibliographic detective was still in a trance.

'I think we're going to have to find you a woman,' I said. 'A woman will brighten up your life, you'll see.'

Fermin sighed, his mind still dwelling on charms that seemed to defy the laws of gravity.

'Do you speak from experience, Daniel?' he asked in all innocence.

I just smiled, knowing that my father was watching me.

After that day Fermin Romero de Torres took to going to the movies every Sunday. My father preferred to stay at home reading, but Fermin would not miss a single double feature. He'd buy a pile of chocolates and sit in row seventeen, where he would devour them while he waited for the appearance of that day's diva. As far as he was concerned, plot was superfluous, and he didn't stop talking until some well-endowed lady filled the screen.

'I've been thinking about what you said the other day, about finding a woman for me,' said Fermin Romero de Torres. 'Perhaps you're right. In the pension there's a new lodger, an ex-seminarist from Seville with plenty of spirit, who brings in some impressive young ladies every now and then. I must say, the race has improved no end. I don't know how the lad manages it, because he's not much to look at; perhaps he renders them senseless with prayers. He's got the room next to mine, so I can hear everything, and, judging by the sound effects, the friar must be a real artist. lust shows what a uniform can do. Tell me, what sort of women do you like, Daniel?'

'I don't know much about them, honestly.'

'Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't have to know how it works to get a shock. Come on, out with it. How do you like them? People might not agree with me, but I think a woman should have a feminine shape, something you can get your hands on. You, on the other hand, look like you might be partial to the skinny type, a point of view I fully respect, don't misunderstand me.'

'Frankly, I don't have much experience with women. None, to be precise.'

Fermin Romero de Torres looked at me carefully, intrigued by this revelation.

'I thought that what happened that night, you know, when you were beaten up...'

'If only everything hurt as little as a blow to the face . . .'

Fermin seemed to read my mind, and smiled supportively. 'Don't let that upset you, then. With women the best part is the discovery. There's nothing like the first time, nothing. You don't know what life is until you undress a woman the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot, sweet potato on a winter's night.'

A few seconds later, Veronica Lake made her grand entrance onto the scene, and Fermin was transported to another plane. Taking advantage of a reel in which Miss Lake was absent, Fermin announced that he was going to pay a visit to the sweet stall in the foyer to replenish his stocks. After months of starvation, my friend had lost all sense of proportion, but, due to his metabolism, he never quite lost that hungry, squalid postwar look. I was left alone, barely following the action on the screen. I would lie if I said I was thinking of Clara. I was thinking only of her body, trembling under the music teacher's charges, glistening with sweat and pleasure. My gaze left the screen, and only then did I notice a spectator who had just come in. I saw his silhouette moving to the centre of the stalls, six rows in front of me. He sat down. Cinemas are full of lonely people, I thought. Like me.

I tried to concentrate on picking up the thread of the story. The hero, a cynical but good-hearted detective, was telling a secondary character why women like Veronica Lake were the ruin of all sensible males and why all one could do was love them desperately and perish, betrayed by their double dealings. Fermin Romero de Torres, who was becoming an adept film scholar, called this genre 'the praying mantis paradigm'. According to him, its permutations were nothing but misogynist fantasies for constipated office clerks or pious women shrivelled with boredom who dreamed about turning to a life of vice and unbridled lechery. I smiled as I imagined the asides my friend the critic would have made had he not gone to his meeting with the sweet stall. But the smile froze on my face. The spectator who sat six rows in front of me had turned around and was staring at me. The projector's misty beam bored through the darkness of the hall, a slim cloud of flickering light that revealed only outlines and blots of colour. I recognized Coubert, the faceless man, immediately. His steely look, shining eyes with no eyelids; his smile as he licked his non-existent lips in the dark. I felt cold fingers gripping my heart. Two hundred violins broke out on screen, there were shots, shouts, and the scene dissolved. For a moment the hall plunged into utter darkness, and I could hear only my own heartbeat hammering in my temples. Slowly a new scene glowed on the screen, replacing the darkness of the room with a haze of blue and purple. The man without a face had disappeared. I turned and caught a glimpse of a silhouette walking up the aisle and passing Fermin, who was returning from his gastronomic safari. He moved into the row, took his seat, and handed me a praline chocolate.

'Daniel, you're as white as a nun's buttock. Are you all right?' he asked, giving me a worried look.

A mysterious breath of air wafted through the hall.

'It smells odd,' Fermin remarked. 'Like a rancid fart, from a councilman or a lawyer.'

'No. It smells of burned paper.'

'Go on. Have a lemon Sugus sweet - it cures everything.'

'I don't feel like one.'

'Keep it, then, you never know when a Sugus sweet might get you out of a pickle.'

I put the sweet in my jacket pocket and drifted through the rest of the film without paying any attention to Veronica Lake or to the victims of her fatal charms. Fermin Romero de Torres was engrossed in the show and the chocolates. When the lights went on at the end of the film, I felt as if I were waking from a bad dream and was tempted to imagine that the man in the stalls had been a mere illusion, a trick of memory. But his brief glance in the dark had been enough to convey his message. He had not forgotten me, or our pact.

12

The first effect of Fermin's arrival soon became apparent: I discovered I had much more free time. When Fermin was not out hunting some exotic volume to satisfy a customer's request, he spent his time organizing stocks in the bookshop, dreaming up marketing strategies, polishing the shop sign and windows till they sparkled, or buffing up the spines of the books with a rag and a bit of alcohol. Given this windfall, I decided to devote my leisure time to a couple of pursuits I had lately put aside: attempting to unravel the Carax mystery and, above all, spending more time with my friend Tomas Aguilar, whom I greatly missed.

Tomas was a thoughtful, reserved boy whom other children feared because his vaguely thuggish features gave him a grave and threatening look. He had a wrestler's build, gladiator's shoulders, and a steely, penetrating gaze. We had met many years before in the course of a fistfight, during my first week at the Jesuit school in Calle Caspe. His father had come to pick him up after lessons, accompanied by a conceited girl who turned out to be Tomas's sister. I had the brilliant idea of making some tasteless remark about her, and before I could blink, Tomas had thrown himself on me and showered me with a deluge of blows that left me smarting for a few weeks. Tomas was twice my size, strength, and ferocity. During our schoolyard duel, surrounded by boys who were thirsty for a bloody fight, I lost a tooth but gained an improved sense of proportion. I refused to tell my father or the priests who had inflicted such a thundering beating on me. Neither did I volunteer the fact that the father of my adversary had watched the thumping with an expression of sheer pleasure, joining in the chorus with the other schoolchildren.

'It was my fault,' I said, closing the subject.

Three weeks later Tomas came up to me during the break. I was paralysed with fear. He is coming to finish me off, I thought. I began to stammer, but soon I understood that all he wanted to do was apologize for the thrashing, because he knew the fight had been uneven and unfair.

'I'm the one who should say sorry for picking on your sister,' I said. 'I would have done it the other day, but you'd given me such a hammering, I couldn't speak.'

Tomas looked down, ashamed of himself. I gazed at that shy and quiet giant who wandered around the classrooms and school corridors like a lost soul. All the other children - me included - were scared stiff of him, and nobody spoke to him or dared look him in the eye. With his head down, almost shaking, he asked me whether I'd like to be his friend. I said I would. He held out his hand, and I shook it. His handshake hurt, but I didn't flinch. That afternoon he invited me to his house for an after-school snack and showed me his collection of strange gadgets made from bits of scrap metal, which he kept in his room.

'I made them,' he explained proudly.

I was incapable of understanding how they worked or even what they were supposed to be, but I didn't say a word. I just nodded in admiration. It seemed to me that this oversized, solitary boy had constructed his own tin companions and I was the first person he was introducing them to. It was his secret. I shared mine. I told him about my mother and how much I missed her. When my voice broke, Tomas hugged me, without saying anything. We were ten years old. From that day on, Tomas Aguilar became my best - and I his only - friend.

Despite his aggressive looks, Tomas was a peaceful and good-hearted person whose appearance discouraged confrontations. He stammered quite a bit, especially when he spoke to anyone who wasn't his mother, his sister, or me, which was hardly ever. He was fascinated by outlandish inventions and mechanical devices, and I soon discovered that he carried out autopsies on all manner of instruments, from gramophones to adding machines, in order to discover their secrets. When he wasn't with me or working for his father, Tomas spent most of his time secluded in his room, devising incomprehensible contraptions. His intelligence was matched by his lack of practicality. His interest in the real world centred on details such as the synchronization of traffic lights in Gran Via, the mysteries of the illuminated fountains of Montjuic, or the clockwork souls of the automatons at the Tibibdabo amusement park.