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“All the better, because you’re not invited.”
“I’m serious.”
“Me, too. Please stop and leave me here.”
“We’ll be in Colón in two minutes.”
“I don’t care. This car smells of death, like you. Let me out.”
Palacios slowed down and stopped on the hard shoulder. I got out of the car and banged the door shut, eluding Palacios’s eyes. I waited for him to leave, but the police officer didn’t drive off. I turned around and saw him lowering the car window. I thought I read honesty, even pain, in his face, but I refused to believe it.
“Nuria Monfort died in my arms, Daniel,” he said. “I think her last words were a message for you.”
“What did she say?” I asked, my voice gripped by an icy cold. “Did she mention my name?”
“She was delirious, but I think she was referring to you. At one point she said there were worse prisons than words. Then, before dying, she asked me to tell you to let her go.”
I looked at him without understanding. “To let who go?”
“Someone called Penélope. I imagined she must be your girlfriend.”
Palacios looked down and set off into the twilight. I remained there, staring disconcertedly at the lights of the car as they disappeared into the blue-and-red dusk. Then I walked on toward Paseo de Colón, repeating to myself those last words of Nuria Monfort but finding no meaning to them. When I reached the square called Portal de la Paz, I stopped next to the pleasure boats’ dock to gaze at the port. I sat on the steps that disappeared under the murky water, in the same place where, on a night that was now in the distant past, I had met Laín Coubert, the man without a face.
“There are worse prisons than words,” I murmured.
Only then did I understand that the message from Nuria Monfort was not meant for me. It wasn’t I who had to let Penélope go. Her last words hadn’t been for a stranger, bu
t for a man she had loved in silence for twenty years: Julián Carax.
·44·
NIGHT WAS FALLING WHEN I REACHED PLAZA DE SAN FELIPE Neri. The bench on which I had first caught sight of Nuria Monfort stood at the foot of a streetlamp, empty and tattooed by penknives with names of lovers, with insults and promises. I looked up to the windows of Nuria Monfort’s home on the third floor and noticed a dim, flickering copper light. A candle.
I entered the gloomy foyer and groped my way up the stairs. My hands shook when I reached the third-floor landing. A sliver of reddish light ran under the frame of the half-open door. I placed my hand on the doorknob and remained there motionless, listening. I thought I heard a whisper, a choked voice coming from within. For a moment I thought that if I opened that door, I’d find her waiting for me on the other side, smoking by the balcony, her legs tucked under her, leaning against the wall, anchored in the same place where I’d left her. Gently, fearing I might disturb her, I opened the door and went into the apartment. In the dining room, the balcony curtains swayed. A figure was sitting by the window, unmoving, holding a burning candle in its hands. I couldn’t make out the face against the light, but a bright pearl slid down its skin, shining like fresh resin, then falling on the figure’s lap. Isaac Monfort turned, his face streaked with tears.
“I didn’t see you this afternoon at the funeral,” I said.
He shook his head, drying his tears with the back of his lapel.
“Nuria wasn’t there,” he murmured after a while. “The dead never go to their own funeral.”
He looked around him, as if his daughter was in that room, sitting next to us in the dark, listening to us.
“Do you know that I’ve never been in this house?” he asked. “Whenever we met, it was always Nuria who came to me. ‘It’s easier for you, Father,’ she would say. ‘Why go up all those stairs?’ I’d always say to her, ‘All right, if you don’t invite me, I won’t go,’ and she’d answer, ‘I don’t need to invite you to my home, Father. One only invites strangers. You can come whenever you like.’ In over fifteen years, I didn’t go to see her once. I always told her she’d chosen a bad neighborhood. Not enough light. An old building. She would just nod in agreement. Like when I used to tell her she’d chosen a bad life. Not much future. A jobless husband. It’s funny how we judge others and don’t realize the extent of our disdain until they are no longer there, until they are taken from us. They’re taken from us because they’ve never been ours….”
The old man’s voice, deprived of its veil of irony, faltered and seemed almost as weary as his look.
“Nuria loved you very much, Isaac. Don’t doubt it for an instant. And I know she also felt loved by you,” I said.
Old Isaac shook his head again. He smiled, but his silent tears did not stop falling. “Perhaps she loved me, in her own way, as I loved her, in mine. But we didn’t know one another. Perhaps because I never allowed her to know me, or I never took any steps toward getting to know her. We spent our lives like two strangers who see each other every single day and greet one another out of politeness. And I think she probably died without forgiving me.”
“Isaac, I can assure you—”
“Daniel, you’re young and you try hard, but even though I’ve had a bit to drink and I don’t know what I’m saying, you still haven’t learned to lie well enough to fool an old man whose heart has been broken by misfortune.”
I looked down.
“The policeman says that the man who killed her is a friend of yours,” Isaac ventured.
