The Shadow of the Wind (54 page)

'How many days are you going to be in Paris?' he asked.

My business with Gallimard would take me about two or three days, I said. My first meeting was that afternoon. I told him I'd thought of taking a couple of days off to get to know the city before returning to Barcelona.

'Paris requires more than two days,' said Julian. 'It won't listen to reason.'

'I don't have any more time, Julian. Senor Cabestany is a generous employer, but everything has a limit.'

'Cabestany is a pirate, but even he knows that you can't see Paris in two days, or in two months, or even in two years.'

'I can't spend two years in Paris, Julian.'

He looked at me for a long while, without speaking, and then he smiled. 'Why not? Is there someone waiting for you?'

The dealings with Gallimard and my courtesy calls to various publishers with whom Cabestany did business took up three whole days, just as I had foreseen. Julian had assigned me a guide and protector, a young boy called Herve who was barely thirteen and knew the city intimately. Herve would accompany me from door to door, making sure I knew which cafes to stop at for a bite, which streets to avoid, which sights to take in. He would wait for me for hours at the door of the publishers' offices without losing his smile or accepting any tips. Herve spoke an amusing broken Spanish, which he mixed with overtones of Italian and Portuguese.

'Signore Carax, he already pay, with tuoda generosidade for meus servicios...'

From what I gathered, Herve was the orphan of one of the ladies at Irene Marceau's establishment, in whose attic he lived. Julian had taught him to read, write, and play the piano. On Sundays he would take him to the theatre or a concert. Herve idolized Julian and seemed prepared to do anything for him, even guide me to the end of the world if necessary. On our third day together, he asked me whether I was Signore Carax's girlfriend. I said I wasn't, that I was only a friend on a visit. He seemed disappointed.

Julian spent most nights awake, sitting at his desk with Kurtz on his lap, going over pages of his work or simply staring at the cathedral towers silhouetted in the distance. One night, when I couldn't sleep either because of the noise of the rain pattering on the roof, I went into the sitting room. We looked at one another without saying a word, and Julian offered me a cigarette. For a long time we stared silently at the rain. Later, when the rain stopped, I asked him who P was.

'Penelope,' he answered.

I asked him to talk to me about her, about those fourteen years of exile in Paris. In a whisper, in the half-light, Julian told me Penelope was the only woman he had ever loved.

One night, in the winter of 1921, Irene Marceau had found Julian wandering in the Paris streets, unable to remember his name and coughing up blood. All he had on him were a few coins and some folded sheets of paper with writing on them. Irene read them and thought she'd come across some famous author who had drunk too much, and that perhaps a generous publisher would reward her when he recovered consciousness. That, at least, was her version, but Julian knew she'd saved him out of compassion. He spent six months recovering in an attic room in Irene's brothel. The doctors warned Irene that if that man poisoned himself again, they would not be held responsible. He had ruined his stomach and his liver and was going to have to spend the rest of his days eating only milk, cottage cheese, and fresh bread. When Julian was able to speak again, Irene asked him who he was.

'Nobody,' answered Julian.

'Well, nobody is living here at my expense. What can you do?'

Julian said he could play the piano.

'Prove it.'

Julian sat at the drawing-room piano and, facing a rapt audience of fifteen-year-old prostitutes in their underwear, he played a Chopin nocturne. They all clapped except for Irene, who told him that what she had just heard was music for the dead and they were in the business of the living. Julian played her a ragtime tune and a couple of pieces by Offenbach.

'That's better. Let's keep it upbeat.'

His new job earned him a living, a roof, and two hot meals a day.

He survived in Paris thanks to Irene Marceau's charity, and she was the only person who encouraged him to keep on writing. Her favourite books were romantic novels and biographies of saints and martyrs, which intrigued her enormously. In her opinion Julian's problem was that his heart was poisoned; that was why he could only write those stories full of horror and darkness. But, despite her objections, it was thanks to Irene that Julian found a publisher for his first novels. She was the one who had provided him with the attic in which he hid from the world; the one who dressed him and took him out to get some sun and fresh air, who bought him books and made him go to mass with her on Sundays, followed by a stroll through the Tuileries. Irene Marceau kept him alive without asking for anything in return except his friendship and the promise that he would continue writing. In time she would allow him, occasionally, to take one of her girls up to the attic, even if they were only going to sleep hugging each other. Irene joked that the girls were almost as lonely as he was, and all they wanted was some affection.

'My neighbour, Monsieur Darcieu, thinks I'm the luckiest man in the universe,' he told me.

I asked him why he had never returned to Barcelona in search of Penelope. He fell into a long, deep silence, and when I looked at his face in the dark, I saw it was lined with tears. Without quite knowing what I was doing, I knelt down next to him and hugged him. We remained like that, embracing, until dawn caught us by surprise. I no longer know who kissed whom first, or whether it matters. I know I found his lips and let him caress me without realizing that I, too, was crying and didn't know why. That dawn, and all the ones that followed in the two weeks I spent with Julian, we made love to one another on the floor, never saying a word. Later, sitting in a cafe or strolling through the streets, I would look into his eyes and know, without any need to question him, that he still loved Penelope. I remember that during those days I learned to hate that seventeen-year-old girl (for Penelope was always seventeen to me) whom I had never met and who now haunted my dreams. I invented excuses for cabling Cabestany to prolong my stay. I no longer cared whether I lost my job or the grey existence I had left behind in Barcelona. I have often asked myself whether my life was so empty when I arrived in Paris that I fell into Julian's arms - like Irene Marceau's girls, who, despite themselves, craved for affection. All I know is that those two weeks I spent with Julian were the only time in my life when I felt, for once, that I was myself; when I understood with the hopeless clarity of what cannot be explained that I would never be able to love another man the way I loved Julian, even if I spent the rest of my days trying.

One day Julian fell asleep in my arms, exhausted. The previous afternoon, as we passed by a pawnshop, he had stopped to show me a fountain pen that had been on display there for years. According to the pawnbroker, it had once belonged to Victor Hugo. Julian had never owned even a fraction of the means to buy that pen, but he would stop and look at it every day. I dressed quietly and went down to the pawnshop. The pen cost a fortune, which I didn't have, but the pawnbroker said that he'd accept a cheque in pesetas on any Spanish bank with a branch in Paris. Before she died, my mother had promised me she would save up to buy me a wedding dress. Victor Hugo's pen took care of that, veil and all, and although I knew it was madness, I have never spent any sum of money with more satisfaction. When I left the shop with the fabulous case, I noticed that a woman was following me. She was very elegant, with silvery hair and the bluest eyes I have ever seen. She came up to me and introduced herself. She was Irene Marceau, Julian's patron. Herve, my guide, had spoken to her about me. She only wanted to meet me and ask me whether I was the woman Julian had been waiting for all those years. I didn't have to reply. Irene nodded in sympathy and kissed my cheek. I watched her walking away down the street, and at that moment I understood that Julian would never be mine. I went back to the attic with the pencase hidden in my bag. Julian was awake and waiting for me. He undressed me without saying anything, and we made love for the last time. When he asked me why I was crying, I told him they were tears of joy. Later, when Julian went down to buy some food, I packed my bags and placed the case with the pen on his typewriter. I put the manuscript of the novel in my suitcase and left before Julian returned. On the landing I came upon Monsieur Darcieu, the old conjuror who read the palms of young ladies in exchange for a kiss. He took my left hand and gazed at me sadly.

'Vous avez du poison au coeur, mademoiselle?

When I tried to pay him his fee, he shook his head gently, and instead it was he who kissed my hand.

I got to the Gare d'Austerlitz just in time to catch the twelve o'clock train to Barcelona. The ticket inspector who sold me the ticket asked me whether I was feeling all right. I nodded and shut myself up in the compartment. The train was already leaving when I looked out the window and caught a glimpse of Julian's silhouette on the platform, in the same place I'd seen him for the first time. I closed my eyes and didn't open them again until we had lost sight of the station and that bewitching city to which I could never return. I arrived in Barcelona the following morning, as day was breaking. It was my twenty-fourth birthday, and I knew that the best part of my life was already behind me.

2

After I returned to Barcelona, I let some time pass before visiting Miquel Moliner again. I needed to get Julian out of my head, and I realized that if Miquel were to ask me about him, I wouldn't know what to say. When we did meet again, I didn't need to tell him anything. Miquel just looked me in the eyes and knew. He seemed to me thinner than before my trip to Paris; his face had an almost unhealthy pallor, which I attributed to the enormous workload with which he punished himself. He admitted that he was going through financial difficulties. He had spent almost all the money from his inheritance on his philanthropic causes, and now his brothers' lawyers were trying to evict him from the home, claiming that a clause in old Moliner's will specified that he could live there only providing he kept it in good condition and could prove he had the financial means for the upkeep of the property. Otherwise the Puertaferrissa mansion would pass into the custody of his other brothers.

'Even before dying, my father sensed that I was going to spend his money on all the things he most detested in life, down to the last centimo.'

Miquel's income as a newspaper columnist and translator was far from enough to maintain that sort of residence.

'Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to.'

I suspected that he was beginning to drink in secret. Sometimes his hands shook. Every Sunday I went over to see him and made him come out with me and get away from his desk and his encyclopaedias. I knew it hurt him to see me. He acted as if he didn't remember that he'd offered to marry me and I'd refused him, but at times I'd catch him gazing at me with a look of mingled yearning and defeat. My sole excuse for submitting him to such cruelty was purely selfish: only Miquel knew the truth about Julian and Penelope Aldaya.

During those months I spent away from Julian, Penelope Aldaya became a spectre who stole my sleep and invaded my thoughts. I could still remember the expression of disappointment on Irene Marceau's face when she realized I was not the woman Julian had been waiting for. Penelope Aldaya, treacherously absent, was too powerful an enemy for me. She was invisible, so I imagined her as perfect. Next to her I was unworthy, vulgar, all too real. I had never thought it possible to hate someone so much and so despite myself- someone I didn't even know, and had never seen in my life. I suppose I thought that if I met her face to face, if I could prove to myself that she was flesh and blood, her spell would break and Julian would be free again. And I with him. I wanted to believe that it was only a matter of time and patience. Sooner or later Miquel would tell me the truth. And the truth would liberate me.

One day, as we strolled through the cathedral cloister, Miquel once again hinted at his interest in me. I looked at him and saw a lonely man, devoid of hope. I knew what I was doing when I took him home and let myself be seduced by him. I knew I was deceiving him and that he knew, too, but had nothing else in the world. That is how we became lovers, out of desperation. I saw in his eyes what I would have wanted to see in Julian's. I felt that by giving myself to him I was taking revenge on Julian and Penelope and on everything that had been denied to me. Miquel, who was ill with desire and loneliness, knew that our love was a farce, but even so he couldn't let me go. Every day he drank more heavily and often could hardly make love to me. He would then joke bitterly that, after all, we'd turned into the perfect married couple in record time. We were hurting one another through spite and cowardice. One night, almost a year after I had returned from Paris, I asked him to tell me the truth about Penelope. Miquel had been drinking, and he became violent, as I'd never seen him before. In his rage he insulted me and accused me of never having loved him, of being a vulgar whore. He tore my clothes off me, shredding them in the process, and when he tried to force himself on me, I lay down, offering my body without resistance, crying quietly to myself. Miquel broke down and begged me to forgive him. How I wished I were able to love him and not Julian, to be able to choose to remain by his side. But I couldn't. We embraced in the dark, and I asked his forgiveness for all the pain I had caused him. He then told me that if it mattered so much to me, he would tell me the truth about Penelope Aldaya. It was another one of my mistakes.