The Whispering City (10 page)

But he still kept his old typewriter, a majestic Underwood. Ana was surprised to see it without its protective cover on a small low table beside the desk. That was another of the pieces of furniture that the family had refused to abandon and, along with a bookshelf and her father’s chair, almost completely filled the small interior room he called his office, which in the other flats in the building must have been a utility room. She left the copy of
La Vanguardia
, open to the page with her article, on the leather blotter, another of the surviving castaways from the family’s economic shipwreck. The two silver inkwells, on the other hand, had been pawned several years earlier while her father was still in jail.

Her father arrived punctually. He was surprised to see her. Ana ate with them every Sunday, but she hadn’t come for lunch on weekdays since she had moved into the flat that had been her grandfather’s, on Riera Alta Street.

‘I left something on your desk,’ was Ana’s reply to her father’s inquisitive look. ‘Something good,’ she added, so as not to alarm him.

Like so many others, he had learned that often news wasn’t cheery.

Before going into his office, Andreu Martí opened the door to Grandfather’s room and greeted him as he did every day; sometimes he got a response and other times, only the silence that announced that he wouldn’t be leaving his room that day.

‘Father, I’m home. I brought you two new “Coyotes”.’

Grandfather, like her father and brother after him, had been a journalist, but now he read nothing but comic books and adventure stories. On Sundays her father sometimes managed to coax him out of the house to go to the second-hand market in the San Antonio district to buy copies of
TBO
,
the
Coyote
, the
Masked Warrior
or books by Salgari, Verne or the
Just William
collection. He never bought
War Deeds
, because it made him anxious.

Ana heard her grandfather’s voice, although she couldn’t make out the words; her father responded and her grandfather’s voice replied. Then came the sound of the door closing and her father’s footsteps heading to the next room.

Meanwhile, she helped her mother set the table.

‘So you’re sticking to your guns,’ her mother said without looking at her.

Ana took advantage of the fact that she was fetching the napkins from a drawer of the bureau to pretend she hadn’t heard.

‘Should I take out the plain ones?’

‘Yes, the plain ones. What did Gabriel say about you publishing a crime piece?’

‘Nothing yet. I still haven’t told him; I’ll talk to him on Sunday.’

She distributed the napkins without looking up, as if doing so demanded all her attention.

‘What? You did it without his permission?’

‘I don’t need his permission to do my job,’ she replied, her gaze still lowered.

Her mother snorted, and she couldn’t help echoing her with a huff. Separated by the table, they both stopped in their movements. Patricia Noguer opened her mouth to begin her next reproach, but the rage that began to show in her daughter’s eyes made her change not her opinion, but at least her strategy, and with a plaintive voice she added, ‘I can’t wait for him to finish his studies, come back from abroad and marry you, so you’ll abandon these silly dreams!’

She could have been cruel and reminded her mother that Gabriel, after his stay abroad, still had two years, two long years, before he finished medical school, and that there was no promising that they could marry after that either. Perhaps she could have added that she wasn’t sure she wanted to, that frankly she didn’t miss him much. Or she could have thrown the last napkin onto the table and left, as she’d done on other occasions. She didn’t. Not today. Not with her article sitting on her father’s desk.

But she could have, and her mother knew as much, so she held her tongue, swallowing the rest of her laments and reproaches and simply pointing to the napkin Ana still held in her hand like an indecisive boxing coach who’s not sure if he should throw in the towel or let the fight continue.

‘Fold it well, this isn’t a charity soup kitchen,’ her mother said.

For her, the soup kitchen was the antechamber to hell, like all those places you don’t arrive at but rather fall into. The only way to avoid them, despite the family’s precarious situation, was to keep up appearances with exacting discipline. They never ate in the kitchen, always in the dining room, and while there were fewer silver settings, they still had to be properly placed.

When she had entered the house she’d seen a basket with clothes for the children of the welfare service. In reality the basket contained only two or three items of clothing – the rest was stuffed with newspaper – but her mother wanted to go out onto the street with an overflowing basket, like before, when she and all the friends she no longer saw prided themselves on taking several bags of clothes for the ‘poor’. The poor are always those who don’t have what you do, even if it’s only three old jackets.

No, it wasn’t the soup kitchen. Ana folded the napkin carefully. Her mother changed the subject and began to tell her that a relative, on her side, the Noguer side, had died. She nodded without paying the slightest attention as her mother told her when and where the funeral would be. She was really more interested in making sure that the silver settings were placed at the proper distance. Spoon, which meant there’d be soup. Knife and fork.

‘What’s for the second course?’

‘Stewed meat.’

Stewed meat for a weekday lunch? Where had she got that from?

It seemed the day was filled with successes, large and small. Her mother had bought meat, her grandfather was coming out of his room to eat and she had published her article. She heard the sound of a door opening. It wasn’t the exasperatingly slow creak of her grandfather’s; it was her father turning a handle before giving a vigorous pull. But his steps headed to the bedroom, not the dining room. Father had to change for lunch: another of the appearances kept up in that house.

In her parents’ bedroom, behind the door of the large wardrobe, hid the shrine that her mother had erected to her dead son. The firstborn son,
l’hereu
, dead at twenty-seven, executed by firing squad in prison in 1943. There her mother prayed for forgiveness for her Red son, for her daughter-in-law exiled in France with a grandson they wouldn’t get to see grow up. As her father changed for lunch, he saw the photos of Ángel.

Soon she heard the bedroom door again.

The fact that her father hadn’t immediately come to congratulate her after reading the article had already somewhat diminished her expectations. That he still went by Grandfather’s room to ask him not to be late reduced them a bit further, although not enough to avoid her disappointment when her expectant look was met with nothing more than a curt, ‘Good, maybe a little formulaic. Have they paid you yet?’

‘No.’

‘How are you doing for money, Aneta? Do you need anything? Are you up to date with your rent?’

Her father was taking advantage of her mother being in the kitchen. She avoided his questions, pretending she heard noises in the hallway.

‘I think Grandfather’s coming.’

Her father approached her and whispered, ‘Don’t mention your article during the meal. It’s better if Grandfather doesn’t read it or even know about it.’

11

Abel Mendoza, on the other hand, read it several times.

After fleeing Mariona’s house that Sunday, he had travelled across the entire city to take refuge, once again, in Mercedes’s bed.

He got to Hospital Street, in the Barrio Chino, at eight in the evening and was surprised to find the door to the house locked. He knocked but there was no movement inside. Then he saw the police notice warning that the establishment would remain closed for two weeks by order of the judge. Why did he have to find the doors locked that day?

He knocked one more time, out of pure obstinacy.

A bang and the creaking of hinges made him look up. Mercedes’s head peeped out of a first-floor window, framed by a cloud of tousled black curls.

‘Can’t you read, you dolt? You must be really horny… Oh! Hello, Abel! Wait, I’m coming down.’

She hurried him inside, afraid that the watchman might see them and tell the police that he saw a client entering in defiance of the temporary shutdown order.

Mercedes, despite her youth – twenty-four according to her papers, two fewer according to her mother – was already the madam’s right-hand woman, which gave her the privilege of being a kind of gatekeeper and having her own room. A room that customers didn’t have access to; only the men whom she allowed in. One of them was Abel.

Mercedes – never call her Merche and never, ever Merceditas – had let him take refuge in her bed on many of his stays in Barcelona. Abel’s visits were a luxury for Mercedes, whose regular clients didn’t usually provide her with memorable moments: ‘It’s well known that the poor are not big on attention to detail in lovemaking.’

It was a phrase she had learned from the madam.

With the place shut down, the owner had gone to spend a few days at her family’s house in Vic, and had left Mercedes in charge of the empty building.

Mercedes was very grateful to the owner, who had picked her up on the street before the family she was working for delivered her to the Foundation for the Protection of Women so that she could be locked up in a refuge for ‘fallen’ women. They were willing to make a large donation to rid themselves of the ‘lost woman’ who had got knocked up by the boss. No impropriety from a client could compare to what she’d heard you could expect from the wardens in the internment centres. Mercedes was grateful, and loyal.

As they went up to her room, she told him why they’d been closed down.

‘Thank goodness the inspection didn’t happen on the owner’s niece’s first day on the job.’

‘Underage?’

Mercedes nodded.

‘Twelve.’

‘Twelve? Just a girl!’

‘It was with a big boss from Social.’

‘But twelve years old…’

‘If they want girls, we give them girls. There are some people you can’t say no to.’

‘But…’

‘Look, we all win. Her parents, who need the money; the client, who needs a hairless pussy and us, because the last thing we need are problems.’

‘But what about the girls?’

‘They have to put up with it, just like we all do! Their turn will come.’

She opened the door and they went in.

Mercedes’s room was kept almost as white as a convent cell. White sheets, white curtains, white pillows, white upholstery on the armchairs. On a dresser rested a photo of her parents, who still lived in a town in the Extremadura region. There was also some sort of little altar with a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary filled with holy water and topped with a screw-on crown against which leaned a photo of her son, Alvarito, whom her parents were raising.

‘A couple of girls ended up in jail because they challenged the policemen who came to close the place down. We got shut down for two weeks, and a fine.’

‘Why?’

‘Formalities. We don’t register customers the way we’re supposed to.’

‘That was the reason?’

‘Partly, but the truth is that one of the inspectors has a thing for the new girl, the one from Majorca, and he wants too many freebies.’

‘Two weeks isn’t so bad.’

‘You think we eat air? Or love?’

‘You must have something stashed away…’

‘If I did I wouldn’t tell you about it.’

‘I don’t want money, just a bed and a roof over my head.’

‘Well, you should have said so. I can give you a bed and a roof, but only at night. We can’t have a man around during the day; they might think we aren’t meeting the terms of the ban.’

‘That’s fine.’

It was fine for both of them. They had met on one of Abel’s visits to the brothel, and Mercedes had offered him a bed any time he was in Barcelona on one of his business matters, whatever they might be; she didn’t seem too curious. She didn’t seem too curious about anything Abel did outside of her room, for that matter. A fortune teller had predicted that the man of her life would arrive by ship, so he wasn’t the one, but, while she was waiting, she had to have a good guy in her bed every once in a while, and practise having a boyfriend who would take her out for a bite to eat or a drink.

As for Abel, he was happy not to have to spend the night in a boarding house. That way, the time he spent in Barcelona didn’t appear in any registers.

‘Abelín, you must be the son of nobility,’ Mercedes said on Tuesday morning, stretching ostentatiously. And she added, in a version of the madam’s phrase, ‘What art! What attention to detail!’

Then, as she had done on Monday, she put him out on the street. Abel had another day of wandering the city before him. He was still dazed, directionless, overwhelmed by everything that had happened, first at home, then in Barcelona, at Mariona’s house.

Since Mercedes had given him a little money in the end, he went into a barber’s shop and paid extra for a nice lotion after his shave.

‘But nothing that makes me smell like a queer.’

It threatened rain. He went into a tavern, El Cocodrilo on San Ramón Street. He had been in once before, with Mercedes.

It was a day when he had got quite a bit of money from Mariona, and he was feeling generous.

‘Come on, let’s go and have a vermouth. Where do you want me to take you?’

He had expected Mercedes to say, ‘Take me to the Rigat in Plaza Cataluña, or one of the outdoor tables in Calvo Sotelo Square,’ but her universe ended at the border surrounding the Barrio Chino.

‘Let’s go to El Cocodrilo.’

So that was where they went to drink their vermouth, surrounded by stevedores, prostitutes and local families. They were unified by their Sunday clothes and dignified by their clean shoes. Abel looked at them that day somewhat nostalgically, as if they were the remnants of a world he would soon abandon.