The Shadow of the Wind (20 page)

As I returned to the station, I pictured Julian Carax walking down that same road, gazing at those same solemn facades that had hardly changed since then, perhaps even waiting to board the blue tram that tiptoed up to heaven. When I reached the foot of the avenue, I took out the photograph of Penelope Aldaya smiling in the courtyard of the family mansion. Her eyes spoke of an untroubled soul and the promise of the future. 'Penelope, who loves you.'

I imagined Julian Carax at my age, holding that image in his hands, perhaps under the shade of the same tree that now sheltered me. I could almost see him smiling confidently, contemplating a future as wide and luminous as that avenue, and for a moment I thought there were no more ghosts there than those of absence and loss, and that the light that smiled on me was borrowed light, only real as long as I could hold it in my eyes, second by second.

18

When I got back home, I realized that Fermin or my father had already opened the bookshop. I went up to the apartment for a moment to have a quick bite. My father had left some toast and jam and a Thermos flask of strong coffee on the dining-room table for me. I polished it all off and was down again in ten minutes, reborn. I entered the bookshop through the door in the back room that adjoined the entrance hall of the building and went straight to my cupboard. I put on the blue apron I usually wore to protect my clothes from the dust on boxes and shelves. At the bottom of the cupboard, I kept an old tin biscuit box, a treasure chest of sorts. There I stored a menagerie of useless bits of rubbish that I couldn't bring myself to throw away: watches and fountain pens damaged beyond repair, old coins, marbles, wartime bullet cases I'd found in Laberinto Park and fading postcards of Barcelona from the turn of the century. Still floating among all those bits and pieces was the old scrap of newspaper on which Isaac Montfort had written down his daughter Nuria's address, the night I went to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books to hide The Shadow of the Wind. I examined it in the dusty light that filtered between shelves and piled-up boxes, then closed the tin box and put the address in my wallet. Having resolved to occupy both mind and hands with the most trivial job I could find, I walked into the shop.

'Good morning,' I announced.

Fermin was classifying the contents of various parcels that had arrived from a collector in Salamanca, and my father was struggling to decipher a German catalogue of Lutheran apocrypha.

'And may God grant us an even better afternoon,' sang Fermin - a veiled reference, no doubt, to my meeting with Bea.

I didn't grant him the pleasure of an answer. Instead I turned to the inevitable monthly chore of getting the account book up to date, checking receipts and order forms, collections and payments. The sound of the radio orchestrated our serene monotony, treating us to a selection of hit songs by celebrated crooner Antonio Machin, who was quite fashionable at the time. Caribbean rhythms tended to get on my father's nerves, but he tolerated the tropical soundscape because the tunes reminded Fermin of his beloved Cuba. The scene was repeated every week: my father pretended not to hear, and Fermin would abandon himself to a vague wiggling in time to the danzdn, punctuating the commercial breaks with anecdotes about his adventures in Havana. The shop door was ajar, and a sweet aroma of fresh bread and coffee wafted through, lifting our spirits. After a while our neighbour Merceditas, who was on her way back from doing her shopping in Boqueria Market, stopped by the shop window and peered round the door.

'Good morning, Senor Sempere,' she sang.

My father blushed and smiled at her. I had the feeling that he liked Merceditas, but his monkish manners confined him to an impregnable silence. Fermin ogled her out of the corner of his eye, keeping the tempo with his gentle hip swaying and licking his lips as if a Swiss roll had just walked in through the door. Merceditas opened a paper bag and gave us three shiny apples. I imagined she still fancied the idea of working in the bookshop and made little effort to hide her dislike for Fermin, the usurper.

'Aren't they beautiful? I saw them and said to myself, These are for the Semperes,' she said in an affected tone. 'I know you intellectuals like apples, like that Isaac with his gravity thing, you know.'

'Isaac Newton, pumpkin,' Fermin specified.

Merceditas looked angrily at him. 'Hello, Mr Smarty-pants. You can be grateful that I've brought one for you, too, and not a sour grapefruit, which is what you deserve.'

'But, woman, coming from your nubile hands, this offering, this fleshy fruit of original sin, ignites my—'

'Fermin, please,' interrupted my father.

'Yes, Senor Sempere,' said Fermin obediently, beating a retreat.

Merceditas was on the point of shooting something back at Fermin when we heard an uproar in the street. We all fell silent, listening expectantly. We could hear indignant cries outside, followed by a surge of murmuring. Merceditas carefully put her head round the door. We saw a number of shopkeepers walk by looking uncomfortable and swearing under their breath. Soon Don Anacleto Olmo appeared - a resident of our block and unofficial spokesman for the Royal Academy of Language in the neighbourhood. Don Anacleto was a secondary-school teacher with a degree in Spanish literature and a handful of other Humanities, and he shared an apartment on the first floor with seven cats. When he was not teaching, he moonlighted as a blurb writer for a prestigious publishing firm, and it was rumoured that he also composed erotic verse that he published under the saucy alias of 'Humberto Peacock'. While among friends Don Anacleto was an unassuming, genial fellow, in public he felt obliged to act the part of declamatory poet, and the affected purple prose of his speech had won him the nickname of 'the Victorian'.

That morning the teacher's face was pink with distress, and his hands, in which he held his ivory cane, were almost shaking. All four of us stared at him.

'Don Anacleto, what's the matter?' asked my father.

'Franco has died, please say he has,' prompted Fermin.

'Shut up, you beast,' Merceditas cut in. 'Let the doctor talk.'

Don Anacleto took a deep breath, regained his composure, and, with his customary majesty, unfolded his account of what had happened.

'Dear friends, life is the stuff of drama, and even the noblest of the Lord's creatures can taste the bitterness of destiny's capricious and obstinate ways. Last night, in the small hours, while the city enjoyed the well-deserved sleep of all hardworking people, Don Federico Flavia i Pujades, a well-loved neighbour who has so greatly contributed to this community's enrichment and solace in his role as watchmaker, only three doors down from this bookshop, was arrested by the State Police.'

I felt my heart sink.

'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!' remarked Merceditas.

Fermin puffed with disappointment, for it was clear that the dictator remained in perfect health.

Well on his way now, Don Anacleto took a deep breath and prepared to go on:

'According to a reliable account revealed to me by sources close to Police Headquarters, last night, shortly after midnight, two bemedalled undercover members of the Crime Squad caught Don Federico clad in the lush, licentious costume of a diva and singing risque variety songs on the stage of some dive in Calle Escudillers, where he was allegedly entertaining an audience mostly made up of cerebrally deficient members of the public. These godforsaken creatures, who had eloped that same afternoon from the sheltering premises of a hospice belonging to a religious order, had pulled down their trousers in the frenzy of the show and were dancing about with no restraint, clapping their hands, with their privates in full view, and drooling.'

Merceditas made the sign of the cross, alarmed by the salacious turn events were taking.

'On learning of what had transpired, the pious mothers of some of those poor souls made a formal complaint on the grounds of public scandal and affront to the most basic code of morality. The press, that nefarious vulture that feeds on misfortune and dishonour, did not take long to pick up the scent of carrion. Thanks to the wretched offices of a professional informer, not forty minutes had elapsed since the arrival of the two members of the police when Kiko Calabuig appeared on the scene. Calabuig, ace reporter for the muckraking daily El Caso, was determined to uncover whatever deplorable vignettes were necessary and to leave no shady stone unturned in order to spice up his lurid report in time for today's edition. Needless to say, the spectacle that took place in those premises is described with tabloid viciousness as horrifying and Dantesque, in twenty-four-point headlines.'

'This can't be right,' said my father. 'I thought Don Federico had learned his lesson.'

Don Anacleto gave a priestly nod. 'Yes, but don't forget the old sayings: "The leopard cannot change his spots," and "Man cannot live by bromide alone. . . ." And you still haven't heard the worst.'

'Then, please, sire, could you get to the frigging point? Because with all this metaphorical spin and flourish, I'm beginning to feel a fiery bowel movement at the gates,' Fermin protested.

'Pay no attention to this animal. I love the way you speak. It's like the voice on the newsreel, Dr Anacleto,' interposed Merceditas.

'Thank you, child, but I'm only a humble teacher. So, back to what I was saying, without further delay, preambles or frills. It seems that the watchmaker, who at the time of his arrest was going by the nom de guerre of "Lady of the Curls", had already been arrested under similar circumstances on a couple of occasions - which were registered in the annals of crime by the guardians of law and order.'

'Criminals with a badge, you mean,' Fermin spat out.

'I don't get involved in politics. But I can tell you that, after knocking poor Don Federico off the stage with a well-aimed bottle, the two officers led him to the police station in Via Layetana. With a bit of luck, and under different circumstances, things would just have ended up with some joke cracking and perhaps a couple of slaps in the face and other minor humiliations, but, by great misfortune, it so happened that the noted Inspector Fumero was on duty last night.'

'Fumero,' muttered Fermin. The very mention of his nemesis made him shudder.

'The one and only. As I was saying, the champion of urban safety, who had just returned from a triumphant raid on an illegal betting and beetle-racing establishment on Calle Vigatans, was informed about what had happened by the anguished mother of one of the missing boys and the alleged mastermind behind the escapade, Pepet Guardiola. At that the famous inspector, who, it appears, had knocked back some twelve double shots of brandy since suppertime, decided to intervene in the matter. After examining the aggravating factors at hand, Fumero proceeded to inform the sergeant on duty that so much faggotry (and I cite the word in its starkest literal sense, despite the presence of a young lady, for its documentary relevance to the events in question) required a lesson, and that what the watchmaker - that is to say, our Don Federico Flavia i Pujades - needed, for his own good and that of the immortal souls of the Mongoloid children, whose presence was incidental but a deciding factor in the case, was to spend the night in a common cell, down in the lower basement of the institution, in the company of a select group of thugs. As you probably know, this cell is famous in the criminal world for its inhospitable and precarious sanitary conditions, and the inclusion of an ordinary citizen in the list of guests is always cause for celebration, for it adds spice and novelty to the monotony of prison life.'

Having reached this point, Don Anacleto proceeded to sketch a brief but endearing portrait of the victim, whom, of course, we all knew well.

'I don't need to remind you that Senor Flavia i Pujades has been blessed with a fragile and delicate personality, all goodness of heart and Christian charity. If a fly finds its way into his shop, instead of smashing it with a slipper, he'll open the door and windows wide so that the insect, one of God's creatures, is swept back by the draught into the ecosystem. I know that Don Federico is a man of faith, always very devout and involved in parish activities, but all his life he has had to live with a hidden compulsion, which, on very rare occasions, has got the better of him, sending him off into the streets dolled up as a tart. His ability to mend anything from wristwatches to sewing machines is legendary, and as a person he is well loved by every one of us who knew him and frequented his establishment, even by those who did not approve of his occasional night escapades sporting a wig, a comb and a flamenco dress.'