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A few months went by without any news from either Julián or Aldaya. Miquel was still writing regular pieces for the press in Barcelona and Madrid. He worked without pause, sitting at the typewriter and pouring out what he considered drivel to feed commuters on the tram. I kept my job at the publishing house, perhaps because that was where I felt closest to Julián. He had sent me a brief note saying he was working on a new novel, called The Shadow of the Wind, which he hoped to finish within a few months. The letter made no mention at all of what had happened in Paris. The tone was colder and more distant than before. But my attempts at hating him were unsuccessful. I began to believe that Julián was not a man, he was an illness.
Miquel had no illusions about my feelings. He offered me his affection and devotion without asking for anything in exchange except my company and perhaps my discretion. No reproach or complaint ever passed his lips. In time I came to feel an immense tenderness for him, beyond the friendship that had brought us together and the compassion that had later doomed us. Miquel opened a savings account in my name, into which he deposited almost all the income he earned from his journalism. He never said no to an article, a review, or a gossip column. He wrote under three different pseudonyms, fourteen or sixteen hours a day
. When I asked him why he worked so hard, he just smiled or else he said that if he didn’t do anything, he’d be bored. There were never any deceits between us, not even wordless ones. Miquel knew he would die soon.
“You must promise that if anything happens to me, you’ll take that money and get married again, that you’ll have children, and that you’ll forget us all, starting with me.”
“And who would I marry, Miquel? Don’t talk nonsense.”
Sometimes I’d catch him looking at me with a gentle smile, as if the very sight of my presence were his greatest treasure. Every afternoon he would come to meet me on my way out of the office, his only moment of leisure in the whole day. He feigned strength, but I saw how he stooped when he walked, and how he coughed. He would take me for a snack or to look at the shop windows on Calle Fernando, and then we’d go back home, where he would continue working until well after midnight. I silently blessed every minute we spent together, and every night he would fall asleep embracing me, while I hid the tears caused by the anger I felt at having been incapable of loving that man the way he loved me, incapable of giving him what I had so pointlessly abandoned at Julián’s feet. Many a night I swore to myself that I would forget Julián, that I would devote the rest of my life to making that poor man happy and returning to him some small part of what he had given me. I was Julián’s lover for two weeks, but I would be Miquel’s wife the rest of my life. If some day these pages should reach your hands and you should judge me, as I have judged myself when writing them, looking at my reflection in this mirror of curses and remorse, remember me like this, Daniel.
The manuscript of Julián’s last novel arrived toward the end of 1935. I don’t know whether out of spite or out of fear, I handed it to the printer without even reading it. Miquel’s last savings had financed the edition in advance, months earlier, so Cabestany, who at the time was already having health problems, paid little attention. That week the doctor who was attending Miquel came to see me at the office, looking very concerned. He told me that if Miquel didn’t slow down and give himself some rest, there was little left he could do to help him fight the tuberculosis.
“He should be in the mountains, not in Barcelona breathing in clouds of bleach and charcoal. He’s not a cat with nine lives, and I’m not a nanny. Make him listen to reason. He won’t pay any attention to me.”
That lunchtime I decided to go home and speak to him. Before I opened the door of the apartment, I heard voices leaking out from inside. Miquel was arguing with someone. At first I assumed it was someone from the newspaper, but then I thought I caught Julián’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.
It was a man dressed in black, with somewhat indifferent 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 Julián.”
“What does he know about Julián?”
Miquel looked at me, more dispirited than ever. “Julián 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 Julián 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 of 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 Julián had worked as a pianist for years.
“I don’t understand,” I murmured. “Julián is marrying his patron?”
“Exactly. This isn’t a wedding. It’s a contract.”
Irene Marceau was twenty-five or thirty years older than Julián. Miquel suspected she had decided on the marriage so that she could transfer her assets to Julián and secure his future.
“But she already helps him. She always has.”
“Perhaps she knows she’s not going to be around forever,” Miquel suggested.
The echo of those words cut us to the quick. I knelt down next to him and held him tight. I bit my lips because I didn’t want him to see me cry.
“Julián doesn’t love this woman, Nuria,” he said, thinking that was the cause of my sorrow.
“Julián 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 from bringing all this out into the open now?”
It didn’t take long for us 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 Julián was going to marry a rich woman in a ceremony of romantic splendor. Aldaya had spent days obsessed with the thought that the man responsible for his misfortunes was now clothed in glitter, sitting astride a fortune, while his had been lost. 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 a fairy tale. He had not told him that the bride was thirty years older than Carax and that, rather than a real marriage, this was an act of charity toward 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 be read like words beneath the scrawny skin that covered his haunted face. Miquel saw Fumero’s game clearly. He 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 Julián a warning note.
When Fumero decided the moment was right, he took Aldaya aside and told him Julián was getting married in three days’ time. Since he was a police officer, he explained, he couldn’t get involved in this sort of matter. But Aldaya, as a civilian, could go to Paris and make sure that the wedding in question would never take place. How? a feverish Aldaya would ask, smoldering with hatred. Challenging him to a duel on the very day of his wedding. Fumero even supplied him with 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 Estación de Francia. He knew perfectly well that even if fever, stupidity, and blind anger didn’t prevent Aldaya from killing Julián Carax in a duel with pistols at dawn after a sleepless night, the weapon he carried would. It wasn’t Carax who had to die in Père Lachaise cemetery, but Aldaya.
Fumero also knew that Julián would never agree to confront his old friend, dying as Aldaya was, reduced to a whimper. That is why Fumero carefully coached Aldaya on every s
