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“The house is locked. Nobody has lived here for years,” Miquel added. “Come, help me get down, and let’s get out of here.”
Carax climbed down the wall. When he clutched Miquel with both hands, he felt his friend’s wasted body under the loose clothes. There seemed to be no flesh or muscle left. Once they were on the other side, Carax supported Miquel by the armpits, so that he was almost carrying him, and they walked off together into the darkness of Calle Román Macaya.
“What is wrong with you?” whispered Carax.
“It’s nothing. Some fever. I’m getting better.”
Miquel already gave off the smell of illness, and Julián asked no further questions. They went down León XIII until they reached Paseo de San Gervasio, where they saw the lights of a café. They sought refuge at a table in the back of the room, away from the entrance and the windows. A couple of regulars sat at the bar, smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio. The waiter, a man with a waxy pallor and downcast eyes, took their order. Warm brandy, coffee, and whatever food was available.
Miquel didn’t eat at all. Carax, obviously starving, ate for the two of them. The two friends looked at each other in the sticky light of the café, spellbound. The last time they had seen each other face-to-face, they were half the age they were now. They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they’d been dealt or to the way they had played them.
“I’ve never thanked you for everything you’ve done for me during these years, Miquel.”
“Don’t begin now. I did what I had to do and what I wanted to do. There’s nothing to thank me for.”
“How’s Nuria?”
“As you left her.”
Carax looked down.
“We got married months ago. I don’t know whether she wrote to tell you.”
Carax’s lips froze, and he shook his head slowly.
“You have no right to reproach her for anything, Julián.”
“I know. I have no right to anything.”
“Why didn’t you come to us for help, Julián?”
“I didn’t want to get you into trouble.”
“That is out of your hands now. Where have you been all this time? We thought the ground had swallowed you.”
“Almost. I’ve been home. In my father’s apartment.”
Miquel stared at him in amazement. Julián went on to explain how, when he arrived in Barcelona, unsure where to go, he had set off toward his childhood home, fearing there would be nobody left there. The doors of the hat shop were still open, and an old-looking man, with no hair and no fire in his eyes, languished behind the counter. Julián hadn’t wanted to go in, or let him know he’d returned, but Antoni Fortuny had raised his eyes and looked at the stranger on the other side of the window. Their eyes met. Much as Julián wanted to run away, he was paralyzed. He saw tears welling up in the hatter’s eyes, saw him drag himself to the door and come out into the street, speechless. Without uttering a word, he led his son into the shop and pulled down the metal grille. Once the outer world had been sealed off, he embraced him, trembling and howling with grief.
Later the hatter explained that the police had been around asking after Julían two days earlier. Someone called Fumero—a man with a bad reputation, of whom it was said that only a month before he’d been in the pay of General Goded’s fascist thugs and was now making out to be friends with the anarchists—had told him that Julián Carax was on his way to Barcelona, that he’d cold-bloodedly murdered Jorge Aldaya in Paris, and that he was sought for a number of other crimes, a catalog that the hatter didn’t bother to listen to. Fumero trusted that, if by some remote and improbable chance his prodigal son made an appearance there, the hatter would see fit to do his duty as a citizen and report him. Fortuny told him that of course they could count on his help, though secretly it irritated him that a snake like Fumero should assume such baseness in him. No sooner had the sinister cortege left the shop than the hatter set off toward the cathedral chapel where he had first met Sophie. There he prayed to his saint, begging him to guide his son back home before it was too late. Now that Julián had arrived, he warned him of the danger that hung over him.
“Whatever you have come to do in Barcelona, son, let me do it for you while you hide in the apartment. Your room is just as you left it and is yours for however long you may need it.”
Julián admitted that he’d returned to look for Penélope Aldaya. The hatter swore he would find her and that, once they had been reunited, he would help them both flee to a safe place, far from Fumero, far from the past, far from everything.
For days Julián hid in the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio while the hatter combed the city looking for some sign of Penélope. He spent the days in his old room, which, as his father had promised, was unchanged, though now everything seemed smaller, as if objects had shrunk with time. Many of his old notebooks were still there, pencils he remembered sharpening the week he left for Paris, books waiting to be read, the boy’s clean clothes in the closets. The hatter told Julián that Sophie had left him shortly after his escape, and although for years he didn’t hear from her, she wrote to him at last from Bogotá, where she had been living for some time with another man. They corresponded regularly, “always talking about you,” the hatter admitted, “because it’s the only thing that binds us.” When he spoke those words, it seemed to Julián that the hatter had put off falling in love with his wife until after he had lost her.
“One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julián, even if one isn’t aware of it.”
The hatter, who seemed caught up in a race against time to disentangle a whole life of misfortunes, had no doubt that Penélope was that love in his son’s life. Without realizing it, he thought that if he helped him recover her, perhaps he, too, would recover some part of what he had lost, that void that weighed on his bones like a curse.
Despite his determination, and much to his despair, the hatter soon discovered that there was no trace of Penélope Aldaya, or of her family, in the whole of Barcelona. A man of humble origins, who had had to work all his life to stay solvent, the hatter had never doubted the staying power of money and social station, but fifteen years of ruin and destitution had been sufficient to remove mansions, industries, and the very footprints of a dynasty from the face of the earth. When the name Aldaya was mentioned, there were many who had heard of it but very few who remembered its significance.
The day Miquel Moliner and I went to the hat shop and asked after Julián, the hatter was certain we were two of Fumero’s henchmen. But nobody was going
to snatch his son from him again. This time God Almighty could descend from the heavens, the same God who had ignored the hatter’s prayers all his life, and he would gladly pull out His eyes if He dared push Julián away again.
The hatter was the man whom the flower vendor remembered seeing a few days before, prowling around the Aldaya mansion. What the flower vendor interpreted as “pretty nasty” was only the intensity that comes to those who, better late than never, have found a purpose in life and try to make up for lost time. Unfortunately, the Lord once again disregarded the hatter’s pleadings. Having crossed the threshold of despair, the old man was still unable to find what he needed for his son’s salvation, for his own salvation: some sign of the girl. How many lost souls do You need, Lord, to satisfy Your hunger? the hatter asked. God, in His infinite silence, looked at him without blinking.
