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Miquel Moliner went away without knowing that the letter in question had ended up in the hands of the caretaker and that many years later, you, Daniel, would find it and read the words Penélope had meant for Julián, this time straight from her heart: words that he never received.
When Miquel left the Fortuny hat shop, one of the residents in the block of apartments, who identified herself as Viçenteta, went up to him and asked him whether he was looking for Sophie. Miquel said he was and told her he was a friend of Julián’s.
Viçenteta informed him that Sophie was staying in a boardinghouse hidden in a small street behind the post office building, waiting for the departure of the boat that would take her to America. Miquel went to that address, where he found a narrow, miserable staircase almost devoid of light and air. At the top of the dusty spiral of sloping steps, he found Sophie Carax, in a damp, dark, fourth-floor room. Julián’s mother was facing the window, sitting on the edge of a makeshift bed on which two closed suitcases were lying like coffins containing her twenty-two years in Barcelona.
When she read the letter signed by Penélope that Jorge Aldaya had given Miquel, Sophie shed tears of anger.
“She knows,” she murmured. “Poor kid, she knows….”
“Knows what?” asked Miquel.
“It’s my fault,” said Sophie. “It’s my fault.”
Miquel held her hands, without understanding. Sophie didn’t dare meet his eyes.
“Julián and Penélope are brother and sister,” she whispered.
·3·
YEARS BEFORE BECOMING ANTONI FORTUNY’S SLAVE, SOPHIE CARAX had been a woman who made a living from her talents. She was only nineteen when she arrived in Barcelona in search of a promised job that never materialized. Before dying, her father had obtained the necessary references for her to go into the service of the Benarenses, a prosperous family of merchants from Alsace who had established themselves in Barcelona.
“When I die,” he urged her, “go to them, and they’ll take you in like a daughter.”
The warm welcome she received was part of the problem. Monsieur Benarens indeed received her with open arms—all too open, in the opinion of his wife. Madame Benarens gave Sophie one hundred pesetas and turned her out of the house, not without showing some pity toward her and her bad luck.
“You have your whole life ahead of you, but I have only this miserable, lewd husband.”
A music school on Calle Diputación agreed to give Sophie work as a private music and piano tutor. In those days it was considered desirable for gi
rls of well-to-do families to be taught proper social graces and a smattering of music for the drawing room, where the polonaise was less dangerous than conversation or questionable literature. That is how Sophie Carax began her visits to palatial mansions, where starched, silent maids would lead her to the music rooms. There the hostile offspring of the industrial aristocracy would be waiting for her, to laugh at her accent, her shyness, or her lowly position—the fact that she could read music didn’t alter that. Gradually Sophie learned to concentrate on that tiny number of pupils who rose above the status of perfumed vermin and to forget the rest of them.
At about that time, Sophie met a young hatter (for so he liked to be referred to, with professional pride) called Antoni Fortuny, who seemed determined to court her, whatever the price. Antoni Fortuny, for whom Sophie felt a warm friendship and nothing else, did not take long to propose to her, an offer Sophie refused—and kept refusing, a dozen times a month. Every time they parted, Sophie hoped she wouldn’t see him again, because she didn’t want to hurt him. The hatter, brushing aside her refusals, stayed on the offensive, inviting her to dance, take a stroll, or have a hot chocolate with sponge fingers on Calle Canuda. Being alone in Barcelona, Sophie found it difficult to resist his enthusiasm, his company, and his devotion. She only had to look at Antoni Fortuny to know that she would never be able to love him. Not the way she dreamed she would love somebody one day. But she found it hard to cast aside the image of herself that she saw reflected in the hatter’s besotted eyes. Only in them did she see the Sophie she would have wished to be.
And so, through need or through weakness, Sophie continued to entertain the hatter’s advances, in the belief that one day he would meet a girl who would return his affection and his life would take a more rewarding course. In the meantime, being desired and appreciated was enough to alleviate her loneliness and the longing she felt for everything she had left behind. She saw Antoni on Sundays, after mass. The rest of the week was taken up by her music lessons. Her favorite pupil was a highly talented girl called Ana Valls, the daughter of a prosperous manufacturer of textile machinery who had built his fortune from nothing, by dint of great efforts and sacrifices, mostly other people’s. Ana expressed her desire to become a great composer and would make Sophie listen to small pieces she composed, imitating motifs by Grieg and Schumann—not without skill. Although Mr. Valls was convinced that women were incapable of creating anything but knitted garments or crocheted bedspreads, he approved of his daughter’s becoming a competent interpreter on the keyboard, for he had plans of marrying her off to some heir with a good surname, and he knew that refined people liked to discover unusual qualities in marriageable girls, besides submissiveness and the fecundity of youth.
It was in the Valls residence that Sophie met one of Mr. Valls’s greatest benefactors and financial godfathers: Don Ricardo Aldaya, inheritor of the Aldaya empire, by then already the great white hope of the Catalan oligarchy of the end of the century. A few months earlier, Don Ricardo Aldaya had married a rich heiress, a dazzling beauty with an unpronounceable name, attributes that wagging tongues held to be true, despite the fact that her newlywed husband seemed to see no beauty in her at all and never bothered to mention her name. It had been a match between families and banks, not any sentimental nonsense, said Mr. Valls, for whom it was very clear that one thing was the bed and the other the head.
Sophie had only to exchange one look with Don Ricardo Aldaya to know she was doomed. Aldaya had wolfish eyes, hungry and sharp, the eyes of a man who knew where and when to strike. He kissed her hand slowly, caressing her knuckles with his lips. Just as the hatter exuded kindness and warmth, Don Ricardo radiated cruelty and power. His canine smile made it clear that he could read her thoughts and desires and found them laughable. Sophie felt for him that species of contempt that is awakened in us by the things we most desire without knowing it. She immediately told herself she would not see him again, would stop teaching her favorite pupil if that was what it took to avoid any future encounters with Ricardo Aldaya. Nothing had ever terrified her so much as sensing that animality under her own skin, the prey’s instinctive recognition of her predator, dressed in elegant linen. It took her only a few seconds to make up a flimsy excuse for leaving the room, to the puzzlement of Mr. Valls, the amusement of Aldaya, and the dejection of little Ana, who understood people even better than she did music and knew she had irretrievably lost her teacher.
A week later Sophie saw Don Ricardo Aldaya waiting for her at the entrance of the music school on Calle Diputación, smoking and leafing through a newspaper. They exchanged glances, and, without saying a word, he led her to a building two blocks away. It was a new building, still uninhabited. They went up to the first floor. Don Ricardo opened the door and ushered her in. Sophie entered the apartment, a maze of corridors and galleries, bare of any furniture, paintings, lamps, or any other object that might have identified it as a dwelling. Don Ricardo Aldaya shut the door, and they looked at each other.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about you all week. Tell me you haven’t done the same and I’ll let you go, and you won’t ever see me again,” said Ricardo.
Sophie shook her head.
Their secret meetings lasted ninety-six days. They met in the afternoons, always in that empty apartment on the corner of Diputación and Rambla de Cataluña. Tuesdays and Thursdays at three. Their meetings never lasted more than an hour. Sometimes Sophie stayed on alone once Aldaya had left, crying or shaking in a corner of the bedroom. Then, when Sunday came, Sophie looked desperately into the hatter’s eyes for traces of the woman who was disappearing, yearning for both devotion and deception. The hatter didn’t see the marks on her skin, the cuts and burns that peppered her body. The hatter didn’t see the despair in her smile, in her meekness. The hatter didn’t see anything. Perhaps for that reason, she accepted his promise of marriage. By then she already suspected that she was carrying Aldaya’s child, but was afraid of telling him, almost as much as she was afraid of losing him. Once again it was Aldaya who saw in Sophie what she was incapable of admitting. He gave her five hundred pesetas and an address on Calle Platería and ordered her to get rid of the baby. Sophie refused. Don Ricardo Aldaya slapped her until her ears bled, then threatened to have her killed if she dared mention their meetings or admit that the child was his. When Sophie told the hatter that some thugs had assaulted her in Plaza del Pino, he believed her. When she told him she wanted to be his wife, he believed her. On the day of her wedding, someone erroneously sent a funeral wreath to the church. Everyone laughed nervously when they saw the florist’s mistake. All except Sophie, who knew perfectly well that Don Ricardo Aldaya had not forgotten her on her wedding day.
·4·
SOPHIE CARAX NEVER IMAGINED THAT YEARS LATER SHE WOULD SEE
Ricardo again (a mature man by now, heading up the family empire, and a father of two), nor that he would return to meet the boy he had wished to erase with five hundred pesetas.
“Perhaps it’s because I’m growing old,” he explained, “but I want to get to know this kid and give him the opportunities in life that a son of my flesh and blood deserves. It had not crossed my mind to think of him in all these years, and now, strangely enough, I’m unable to think of anything else.”
Ricardo Aldaya had decided that he couldn’t see himself in his firstborn, Jorge. The boy was weak, reserved, and lacked his father’s steadfast spirit. He lacked everything, except the right surname. One day Don Ricardo had woken up in the maid’s bed feeling that his body was getting old, that God had removed His blessing. Seized with panic, he ran to look at himself naked in the mirror and felt that the mirror was lying. That man was not Ricardo Aldaya.
He now wanted to find the man who had been stolen from him. For years he had known about the hatter’s son. Nor had he forgotten Sophie, in his own way. Don Ricardo Aldaya never forgot anything. The moment had arrived to meet the boy. It was the first time in fifteen years that he had come across someone who wasn’t afraid of him, who dared to defy him and even laugh at him. He recognized gallantry in the child, the silent ambition that fools can’t see but is there all the same. God had given him back his youth. Sophie, only an echo of the woman he remembered, didn’t even have the strength to come between them. The hatter was just a buffoon, a spiteful and resentful yokel whose complicity Aldaya counted on buying. He decided to tear Julián away from that stifling world of mediocrity and poverty and open the doors of his financial paradise to him. He would be educated in San Gabriel’s School, would enjoy all the privileges of his class, and would be initiated into the pursuits his father had chosen for him. Don Ricardo wanted a successor worthy of himself. Jorge would always live in the shadow of his entitlements, hiding from his mediocrity in creature comforts. Penélope, the beautiful Penélope, was a woman, and therefore a treasure, not a treasurer. Julián, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time. Don Ricardo estimated that within ten years he would have stamped his image on the boy. Never, in all the time Julián spent with the Aldayas as one of the family (as the chosen one, even), did it occur to Don Ricardo that the only thing Julián wanted from him was Penélope. It didn’t occur to him for an instant that Julián secretly despised him, that his affection was a sham, only a pretext to be close to Penélope. To possess her wholly and utterly. They did resemble each other in that.
