The Shadow of the Wind (58 page)

That lunchtime I decided to go home and speak to him. Before I opened the door of the apartment, I heard voices filtering from inside. Miquel was arguing with someone. At first I assumed it was someone from the newspaper, but then I thought I caught Julian's name in the conversation. I heard footsteps approaching the door, and I ran up to hide on the attic landing. From there I was able to catch a glimpse of the visitor.

A man dressed in black, with somewhat nondescript features and thin lips, like an open scar. His eyes were black and expressionless, fish eyes. Before he disappeared down the stairs, he looked up into the darkness. I leaned against the wall, holding my breath. The visitor remained there for a few moments, as if he could smell me, licking his lips with a doglike grin. I waited for his steps to fade away completely before I left my hiding place and went into the apartment. A smell of camphor drifted in the air. Miquel was sitting by the window, his arms hanging limply on either side of the chair. His lips trembled. I asked him who that man was and what he wanted.

'It was Fumero. He came with news of Julian.'

"What does he know about Julian?'

Miquel looked at me, more dispirited than ever. 'Julian is getting married.'

The news left me speechless. I fell into a chair, and Miquel took my hands. He seemed tired and spoke with difficulty. Before I was able to open my mouth, he began to give me a summary of the events Fumero had related to him, and what could be inferred from them. Fumero had made use of his contacts in the Paris police to discover Julian Carax's whereabouts and keep a watch on him. This could have taken place months or even years earlier, Miquel said. What worried him wasn't that Fumero had found Carax - that was just a question of time - but that he should have decided to tell Miquel about it now, together with some bizarre news about an improbable marriage. The wedding, it seemed, was going to take place in the early summer of 1936. All that was known about the bride was her name, which in this case was more than sufficient: Irene Marceau, the owner of the club where Julian had worked as a pianist for years.

'I don't understand,' I murmured. 'Julian is marrying his patron?'

'Exactly. This isn't a wedding. It's a contract.'

Irene Marceau was twenty-five or thirty years older than Julian. Miquel suspected she had decided on the marriage so that she could transfer her assets to Julian and secure his future.

'But she already helps him. She always has done.'

'Perhaps she knows she's not going to be around forever,' Miquel suggested.

The echo of those words cut us both to the quick. I knelt down next to him and held him tight, biting my lips because I didn't want him to see me cry.

'Julian doesn't love this woman, Nuria,' he said, thinking that was the cause of my sorrow.

'Julian doesn't love anyone but himself and his damned books,' I muttered.

I looked up to find Miquel wearing the wise smile of an old child.

'And what does Fumero hope to gain by bringing this out into the open now?'

It didn't take us long to find out. Two days later a ghostlike, hollow-eyed Jorge Aldaya turned up at our home, inflamed with anger. Fumero had told him that Julian was going to marry a rich woman in a splendid, romantic ceremony. Aldaya had spent days obsessing over the thought that the man responsible for his misfortunes was now clothed in glamour, sitting astride a fortune, while his had disappeared. Fumero had not told him that Irene Marceau, despite being a woman of some means, was the owner of a brothel and not a princess in some fairy tale. He had not told him that the bride was thirty years older than Carax and that, rather than a marriage, this was an act of charity towards a man who had reached the end of the road. He had not told him when or where the wedding was going to take place. All he had done was sow the seeds of a fantasy that was devouring what little energy remained in Jorge's wizened, polluted body.

'Fumero has lied to you, Jorge,' said Miquel.

'And you, king of liars, you dare accuse your brother!' cried a delirious Aldaya.

There was no need for Aldaya to disclose his thoughts. In a man so withered, they could easily be read beneath the scrawny skin that covered his haunted face. Miquel saw Fumero's game clearly. After all, he was the one who had shown him how to play chess twenty years earlier in San Gabriel's school. Fumero had the strategy of a praying mantis and the patience of the immortals. Miquel sent Julian a warning note.

When Fumero decided the moment was right, he had taken Aldaya aside and told him Julian was getting married in three days' time. Since he was a police officer, he explained, he couldn't get involved in this sort of thing. But Aldaya, as a civilian, could go to Paris and make sure that the wedding in question never took place. How? a feverish Aldaya would ask, smouldering with hatred. By challenging him to a duel on the very day of his wedding. Fumero even supplied the weapon with which Jorge was convinced he would perforate the stony heart that had ruined the Aldaya dynasty. The report from the Paris police would later state that the weapon found at his feet was faulty and could never have done more than what it did: blow up in Jorge's hands. Fumero already knew this when he handed it to him in a case on the platform of the Estacion de Francia. He knew perfectly well that even if fever, stupidity, and blind anger didn't prevent Aldaya from killing Julian Carax in a duel, the weapon he carried almost certainly would. It wasn't Carax who was destined to die in that duel, but Aldaya.

Fumero also knew that Julian would never agree to confront his old friend, dying as Aldaya was, reduced to nothing but a whimper. That is why Fumero carefully coached Aldaya on every step he must take. He would have to admit to Julian that the letter Penelope had written to him years ago, announcing her wedding and asking him to forget her, was a lie. He would have to disclose that it was he, Jorge Aldaya, who had forced his sister to write that string of lies while she cried in despair, protesting her undying love for Julian. He would have to tell Julian that she had been waiting for him, with a broken soul and a bleeding heart, ever since then, dying of loneliness. That would be enough. Enough for Carax to pull the trigger and shoot him in the face. Enough for him to forget any wedding plans and to think of nothing else but returning to Barcelona in search of Penelope. And, once in Barcelona, his cobweb, Fumero would be waiting for him.

7

Julian Carax crossed the French border a few days before the start of the Civil War. The first and only edition of The Shadow of the Wind had left the press two weeks earlier, bound for the anonymity of its predecessors. By then Miquel could barely work: although he sat in front of the typewriter for two or three hours a day, weakness and fever prevented him from coaxing more than a feeble trickle of words out onto the paper. He had lost several of his regular columns due to missed deadlines. Other papers were fearful of publishing his articles after receiving anonymous threats. He had only one daily column left in the Diario de Barcelona, which he signed under the name of 'Adrian Maltes'. The spectre of the war could already be felt in the air. The country stank of fear. With nothing to occupy him, and too weak to complain, Miquel would go down into the square or walk up to Avenida de la Catedral, always carrying with him one of Julian's books as if it were an amulet. The last time the doctor had weighed him, he was only eight stone thirteen pounds. We listened to the news of the uprising in Morocco on the radio, and a few hours later a colleague from Miquel's newspaper came round to tell us that Cansinos, the editor in chief, had been murdered with a bullet to the neck, opposite the Canaletas cafe, two hours earlier. Nobody dared remove the body, which was still lying there, staining the pavement with a web of blood.

The brief but intense days of initial terror soon arrived. General Goded's troops set off along the Diagonal and Paseo de Gracia towards the centre, where the shooting began. It was a Sunday, and a lot of people had still come out onto the streets thinking they would spend the day picnicking along the road to Las Planas. The blackest days of the war in Barcelona, however, were still two years away. Shortly after the start of the skirmish, General Goded's troops surrendered, due to a miracle or to poor communication between the commanders. Lluis Companys's government seemed to have regained control, but what really happened would become obvious in the next few weeks.

Barcelona had passed into the hands of the anarchist unions. After days of riots and street fighting, rumours began to circulate that the four rebel generals had been executed in Montjuic Castle shortly after the surrender. A friend of Miquel's, a British journalist who was present at the execution, said that the firing squad was made up of seven men but that at the last moment dozens of militiamen joined the party.

When they opened fire, the bodies were riddled with so many bullets that they collapsed into unrecognizable pieces and had to be put into the coffins in an almost liquid state. There were those who wanted to believe that this was the end of the conflict, that the fascist troops would never reach Barcelona and the rebellion would be extinguished along the way.

We learned that Julian was in Barcelona on the day of Goded's surrender, when we received a letter from Irene Marceau in which she told us that Julian had killed Jorge Aldaya in a duel, in Pere Lachaise cemetery. Even before Aldaya had expired, an anonymous call had alerted the police to the event. Julian was forced to flee from Paris immediately, pursued by the police, who wanted him for murder. We had no doubt as to who had made that call. We waited anxiously to hear from Julian so that we could warn him of the danger that stalked him and protect him from a worse trap than the one laid out for him by Fumero: the discovery of the truth. Three days later Julian still had not appeared. Miquel did not want to share his anxiety with me, but I knew perfectly well what he was thinking. Julian had come back for Penelope, not for us.

'What will happen when he finds out the truth?' I kept asking.

'We'll make sure he doesn't,' Miquel would answer.

The first thing he was going to discover was that the Aldaya family had disappeared. He would not find many places where he could start looking for Penelope. We made a list, and began our own expedition. The mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo was just an empty property, locked away behind chains and veils of ivy. A flower vendor, who sold bunches of roses and carnations on the opposite corner, said he only remembered seeing one person approaching the house recently, but that was almost an old man, with a bit of a limp.

'Frankly, he seemed pretty nasty. I tried to sell him a carnation for his lapel, and he told me to piss off, saying there was a war on and it was no time for flowers.'

He hadn't seen anyone else. Miquel bought some withered roses from him and, just in case, gave him the phone number of the editorial department at the Diario de Barcelona. The man could leave a message there if, by chance, anyone should turn up looking like the person we'd described. Our next stop was San Gabriel's, where Miquel met up with Fernando Ramos, his old school companion.

Fernando was now a Latin and Greek teacher and had been ordained a priest. His heart sank when he saw Miquel looking so frail. He told us Julian had not come to see him, but he promised to get in touch with us if he did, and would try to hold him back. Fumero had been there before us, he confessed with alarm, and had told him that, in times of war, he'd do well to be careful.

'He said a lot of people were going to die very soon, and uniforms -soldiers' or priests' - would be no defence against the bullets. . . .'

Fernando Ramos admitted that it wasn't clear which unit or group Fumero belonged to, and he hadn't wanted to ask him either. I find it impossible to describe to you those first days of the war in Barcelona, Daniel. The air seemed poisoned with fear and hatred. People eyed one another suspiciously, and the streets held a silence that put knots in your stomach. Every day, every hour, fresh rumours and gossip circulated. I remember one night when Miquel and I were walking home down the Ramblas. They were completely deserted. Miquel looked at the buildings, glimpsing faces hidden behind closed shutters, noticing how they scanned the shadows of the street. He said he could feel the knives being sharpened behind those walls.

The following day we went to the Fortuny hat shop, without much hope of finding Julian there. One of the residents in the building told us that the hatter was terrified by the upheavals of the last few days and had locked himself up in the shop. No matter how much we knocked, he wouldn't open the door. That afternoon there had been a shoot-out only a block away, and the pools of blood were still fresh on the pavement. A dead horse still lay there, at the mercy of stray dogs that were tearing open its bullet-ridden stomach, while a group of children watched and threw stones at them. We only managed to see the hatter's frightened face though the grille of the door. We told him we were looking for his son, Julian. The hatter replied that his son was dead and told us to leave or he'd call the police. We left the place feeling disheartened.