The Shadow of the Wind (33 page)

Without giving me a second to answer, she turned around and walked hurriedly off towards the Ramblas. I was left holding the card, my words still hanging on my lips, my eyes following her until her silhouette melted into the shadows that preceded the storm. I opened the card. Inside, in blue handwriting, was an address I knew well.

Avenida del Tibidabo, 32

27

The storm didn't wait until nightfall to show its teeth. The first flashes of lightning caught me by surprise shortly after taking a bus on Line 22. As we went round Plaza Molina and started up Calle Balmes, the city was already beginning to fade behind a curtain of liquid velvet, reminding me that I hadn't even thought of taking an umbrella with me.

'Now that's what I call courage,' said the conductor when I asked for the stop.

It was already ten past four when the bus left me in the middle of nowhere - somewhere at the end of Calle Balmes - at the mercy of the storm. Opposite, Avenida del Tibidabo disappeared in a watery mirage. I counted up to three and started to run. Minutes later, soaked to the bone and shivering, I stopped under a doorway to get my breath back. I scrutinized the rest of the route. The storm's icy blast blurred the ghostly outline of mansions and large, rambling houses veiled in the mist. Among them rose the dark and solitary tower of the Aldaya mansion, anchored among the swaying trees. I pushed my soaking hair away from my eyes and began to run toward it, crossing the deserted avenue.

The small door encased within the gates swung in the wind. Beyond it, a path wound its way up to the house. I slipped in through the door and made my way across the property. Through the undergrowth I could make out the pedestals of statues that had been knocked down. As I neared the mansion, I noticed that one of the statues, the figure of an avenging angel, had been dumped into the fountain that was the centrepiece of the garden. Its blackened marble shone, ghostlike, beneath the sheet of water that flowed over the edge of the bowl. The hand of the fiery angel emerged from the water; an accusing finger, as sharp as a bayonet, pointing towards the front door of the house. The carved oak door seemed to be ajar. I pushed it and ventured a few steps into a cavernous entrance hall, its walls flickering with the gentle light of a candle.

'I thought you weren't coming,' said Bea.

The corridor was entombed in shadows, and Bea's silhouette stood out against the pallid light of a gallery that opened up beyond. She was sitting on a chair against the wall, a candle at her feet.

'Close the door,' she told me without getting up. 'The key is in the lock.'

I obeyed. The lock creaked with a deathly echo. I heard Bea's footsteps approaching me from behind and felt her touch on my soaking clothes.

'You're trembling. Is it fear or cold?'

'I haven't decided yet. Why are we here?'

She smiled in the dark and took my hand. 'Don't you know? I thought you would have guessed. . . .'

'This was the Aldayas' house, that's all I know. How did you manage to get in, and how did you know. . . ?'

'Come on, we'll light a fire to warm you up.'

She led me through the corridor to the gallery, which presided over the inner courtyard of the house. The marble columns and naked walls of the sitting room crept up to the coffered ceiling, which was falling to pieces. You could make out the spaces where paintings and mirrors had once covered the walls, and there were marks on the marble floor where furniture had stood. At one end of the room was a fireplace laid with a few logs. A pile of old newspaper stood by the poker. The air from the fireplace smelled of recent flames and charcoal. Bea knelt down by the hearth and started to place a few sheets of newspaper among the logs. She pulled out a match and lit them, quickly conjuring up a crown of flames. I imagined she was thinking that I must be dying of curiosity and impatience, so I decided to adopt a nonchalant air, making it very clear that if she wanted to play games with me, she had every chance of losing. But she wore a triumphant smile. Perhaps my trembling hands did not help my acting.

'Do you often come here?' I asked.

'This is the first time. Intrigued?'

'Vaguely.'

She spread out a clean blanket that she took out of a canvas bag. It smelled of lavender.

'Come on, sit here, by the fire. You might catch pneumonia, and it would be my fault.'

The heat from the blaze revived me. Bea gazed silently at the flames, bewitched.

'Are you going to tell me the secret?' I finally asked.

Bea sighed and moved to one of the chairs. I remained glued to the fire, watching the steam rise from my clothes like a fleeing soul.

'What you call the Aldaya mansion has, in fact, got its own name. The house is called "The Angel of Mist", but hardly anyone knows this.

My father's firm has been trying to sell the property for fifteen years, but without any luck. The other day, while you were telling me the story of Julian Carax and Penelope Aldaya, I didn't think of it. Later that night, at home, I put two and two together and remembered I'd occasionally heard my father talk about the Aldaya family, and about this house in particular. Yesterday I went over to my father's office, and his secretary, Casasus, told me the story of the house. Did you know that this wasn't their official residence but one of their summer houses?'

I shook my head.

'The Aldayas' main house was a mansion that was knocked down in 1925 to erect a block of apartments, on the site where Calle Bruch and Calle Mallorca cross today. The building had been designed by Puig i Cadafalch and commissioned by Penelope and Jorge's grandfather, Simon Aldaya, in 1896, when that area was nothing more than fields and irrigation channels. The eldest son of the patriarch Simon, Don Ricardo Aldaya, bought this summer residence at the turn of the century from a rather bizarre character - at a ridiculous price, because the house had a bad reputation. Casasus told me it was cursed and that even the vendors didn't dare show people around and would dodge the issue with any old pretext. . . .'

28

That afternoon, as I warmed myself by the fire, Bea told me the story of how The Angel of Mist had come into the possession of the Aldaya family. It had all the makings of a lurid melodrama; something that could well have come from the pen of Julian Carax. The house was built in 1899 by the architectural partnership of Nauli, Martorell i Bergada, for a prosperous and extravagant Catalan financier called Salvador Jausa, who was to live in it for only a year. The tycoon, an orphan since the age of six and of humble origins, had amassed most of his fortune in Cuba and Puerto Rico. People said that he was one of the many shady figures behind the plot that led to the fall of Cuba and the war with the United States, in which the last of the colonies were lost. He brought back rather more than a fortune from the New World: with him were an American wife - a fragile damsel from Philadelphia's high society who didn't speak a word of Spanish - and a mulatto maid who had been in his service since his first years in Cuba and who travelled with a caged macaque in harlequin dress, and seven trunks of luggage. At first they moved into a few rooms in the Hotel Colon, while they waited to acquire a residence that would suit the tastes and desires of Jausa.

Nobody doubted for a moment that the maid - an ebony beauty endowed with eyes and a figure that, according to the society pages, could make heart rates soar - was in fact his lover, his guide to innumerable illicit pleasures. It was assumed, moreover, that she was a witch and a sorceress. Her name was Marisela, or that's what Jausa called her. Her presence and her mysterious air soon became the favourite talking point at the social gatherings that wellborn ladies held to sample sponge fingers, and kill time and the autumn blues. Unconfirmed rumours circulated at these tea parties that the woman fornicated on top of the male, that is to say, rode him like a dog on heat, which violated at least five of six recognized mortal sins. In consequence, more than one person wrote to the bishopric asking for a special blessing and protection for the untainted, immaculate souls of all respectable families in Barcelona. And to crown it all, Jausa had the audacity to go out for a ride in his carriage on Sundays, in the middle of the morning, with his wife and Marisela, parading this Babylonian spectacle of depravity in front of the eyes of any virtuous young man who might happen to be strolling along Paseo de Gracia on his way to the eleven o'clock mass. Even the newspapers noted the haughty look of the strapping woman, who gazed at the Barcelona public 'as a queen of the jungle might gaze at a collection of pygmies'.

Around that time Catalan modernism was all the rage in Barcelona, but Jausa made it quite clear to the architects he had engaged to build his new home that he wanted something different. In his book 'different' was the highest praise. Jausa had spent years strolling past the row of neo-Gothic extravagances that the great tycoons of the American industrial age had erected on Fifth Avenue's Mansion Row in New York City. Nostalgic for his American days of glory, the financier refused to listen to any argument in favour of building in accordance with the fashion of the moment, just as he had refused to buy a box in the Liceo, which was de rigueur, labelling the opera house a Babel for the deaf, a beehive of undesirables. He wanted his home to be far from the city, in the still relatively isolated area of Avenida del Tibidabo. He wanted to gaze at Barcelona from a distance, he said. The only company he sought was a garden filled with statues of angels, which, according to his instructions (conveyed by Marisela), must be placed on each of the points of a six-point star - no more, no less. Resolved to carry out his plans, and with his coffers bursting with money with which to satisfy his every whim, Salvador Jausa sent his architects to New York for three months to study the exhilarating structures built to house Commodor Vanderbilt, the Astors, Andrew Carnegie, and the rest of the fifty golden families. He instructed them to assimilate the style and techniques of the Stanford, White & McKim firms, and warned them not to bother knocking on his door with a project that would please what he called 'pork butchers and button manufacturers'.

A year later the three architects turned up at his sumptuous rooms at the Hotel Colon to submit their proposal. Jausa, in the company of the Cuban Marisela, listened to them • in silence and, at the end of the presentation, asked them what it would cost to complete the work in six months. Frederic Martorell, the leading member of the architectural partnership, cleared his throat and, out of decorum, wrote down a figure on a piece of paper and handed it to the tycoon. The latter, without even blinking, wrote out a cheque for the total amount and dismissed the delegation with a vague gesture. Seven months later, in July 1900, Jausa, his wife, and the maid Marisela moved into the house. By August the two women would be dead and the police would find a dazed Salvador Jausa naked and handcuffed to the armchair in his study. The report made by the sergeant in charge of the case remarked that all the walls in the house were bloodstained, that the statues of the angels surrounding the garden had been mutilated - their faces painted like tribal masks - and that traces of black candles had been found on the pedestals. The inquiry lasted eight months. By then Jausa had fallen silent.

The police investigations concluded that by all indications, Jausa and his wife had been poisoned by some herbal extract that had been administered to them by Marisela, in whose rooms various bottles of the lethal substance had been found. For some reason Jausa had survived the poison, although the aftermath had been terrible, for he gradually lost his power of speech and his hearing, part of his body was paralysed, and he suffered pains so horrendous they condemned him to live the rest of his days in constant agony. Senora Jausa had been discovered in her bedroom, lying on her bed with nothing on but her jewels, one of which was a diamond bracelet. The police believed that once Marisela had committed the crime, she had slashed her own wrists with a knife and had wandered about the house spreading her blood on the walls of the corridors and rooms until she collapsed in her attic room. The motive, according to the police, had been jealousy. It seems that the tycoon's wife was pregnant at the time of her death. Marisela, it was said, had sketched a skeleton on the woman's naked belly with hot red wax. The case, like Salvador Jausa's lips, was sealed forever a few months later. Barcelona's high society observed that nothing like this had ever happened in the history of the city, and that the likes of rich colonials and other rabble arriving from across the pond was ruining the moral fibre of the country. Behind closed doors many were delighted that the eccentricities of Salvador Jausa had come to an end. As usual, they were mistaken: they had only just begun.