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“What is it, Julián?”
He didn’t reply. He was gazing, mesmerized, at the mouth of a narrow corridor that led toward the kitchen area. I walked over to him and looked into the shadows that were being pushed aside by the blue flame of the lighter. The door at the end of the corridor was bricked up, a wall of red bricks roughly laid with mortar that bled out of the corners. I couldn’t quite understand what it meant, but I felt an icy cold taking my breath away
. Julián was slowly getting closer. All the other doors in the corridor—in the whole house—were open, their locks and doorknobs gone.
“Julián, please, let’s go….”
The impact of his fist on the brick wall drew a hollow echo on the other side. I thought I saw his hands trembling when he placed the lighter on the floor and gestured for me to move back a few steps.
“Julián…”
The first kick brought down a rain of red dust. Julián charged again. I thought I could hear his bones breaking, but Julián was unperturbed. He banged against the wall again and again, with the rage of a prisoner forcing his way out to freedom. His fists and his arms were bleeding when the first brick broke and fell onto the other side. In the dark, with bloodstained fingers, Julián began struggling to enlarge the gap. He panted, exhausted, possessed by a fury of which I would never have thought him capable. One by one the bricks loosened and the wall came down. Julián stopped, covered in a cold sweat, his hands flayed. He picked up the lighter and placed it on the edge of one of the bricks. A wooden door, carved with angel motifs, rose up on the other side. Julián stroked the wood reliefs, as if he were reading a hieroglyphic. The door yielded to the pressure of his hands.
A glutinous darkness came at us from the other side. A little farther back, the form of a staircase could be discerned. Black stone steps descended until they were lost in shadows. Julián turned for a moment, and I met his eyes. I saw fear and despair in them, as if he could sense what lay beyond. I shook my head, begging him without speaking not to go down. He turned back, dejected, and plunged into the gloom. I looked through the brick frame and saw him lurching down the steps. The flame flickered, now just a breath of transparent blue.
“Julián?”
All I got was silence. I could see Julián’s shadow, motionless, at the bottom of the stairs. I went through the brick hole and walked down the steps. The room was rectangular, with marble walls. It exuded an intense, penetrating chill. The two tombstones were covered with a veil of cobwebs that fell apart like rotten silk with the flame from the lighter. The white marble was scored with black tears of dampness that looked like blood dripping out of the clefts left by the engraver’s chisel. They lay side by side, like chained maledictions.
PENÉLOPE ALDAYA
DAVID ALDAYA
1902–1919
1919
·11·
I HAVE OFTEN PAUSED TO THINK ABOUT THAT MOMENT OF SILENCE AND tried to imagine what Julián must have felt when he discovered that the woman for whom he had been waiting seventeen years was dead, their child gone with her, and that the life he had dreamed about, the very breath of it, had never existed. Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice. In Julián’s case that certainty came to him in a matter of seconds. For a moment I thought he was going to rush up the stairs and flee from that accursed place, that I would never see him again. Perhaps it would have been better that way.
I remember that the flame from the lighter slowly went out, and I lost sight of his silhouette. My hands searched for him in the shadows. I found him trembling, speechless. He could barely stand, and he dragged himself into a corner. I hugged him and kissed his forehead. He didn’t move. I felt his face with my fingers, but there were no tears. I thought that perhaps, unconsciously, he had known it all those years, that perhaps the encounter was necessary for him to face the truth and set himself free. We had reached the end of the road. Julián would now understand that nothing held him in Barcelona any longer and that we could leave, go far away. I wanted to believe that our luck was about to change and that Penélope had finally forgiven us.
I looked for the lighter on the floor and lit it again. Julián was staring vacantly, indifferent to the blue flame. I held his face in my hands and forced him to look at me. I found lifeless, empty eyes, consumed by anger and loss. I felt the venom of hatred spreading slowly through his veins, and I could read his thoughts. He hated me for having deceived him. He hated Miquel for having wished to give him a life that now felt like an open wound. But above all he hated the man who had caused this calamity, this trail of death and misery: himself. He hated those filthy books to which he had devoted his life and about which nobody cared. He hated every stolen second and every breath.
He looked at me without blinking, the way one looks at a stranger or some unknown object. I kept shaking my head, slowly, my hands searching his hands. Suddenly he moved away roughly and stood up. I tried to grab his arm, but he pushed me against the wall. I saw him go silently up the stairs, a man I no longer knew. Julián Carax was dead. By the time I stepped out into the garden, there was no trace of him. I climbed the wall and jumped down onto the other side. The desolate streets seemed to bleed in the rain. I shouted out his name, walking down the middle of the deserted avenue. Nobody answered my call. It was almost four in the morning when I got home. The apartment was full of smoke and the stench of burned paper. Julián had been there. I ran to open the windows. I found a small case on my desk with the pen I had bought him years ago in Paris, the fountain pen I had paid a fortune for on the pretense it once had belonged to Victor Hugo. The smoke was oozing from the central-heating boiler. I opened the hatch and saw that Julián had thrown into it copies of his novels. I could just about read the titles on the leather spines. The rest had turned to cinders. I looked on my bookshelves: all of his books were gone.
Hours later, when I went to the publishing house in the middle of the morning, Álvaro Cabestany called me into his office. His father hardly ever came by anymore; the doctors said his days were numbered—as was my time at the firm. Cabestany’s son informed me that a gentleman called Laín Coubert had turned up, early that morning, saying he was interested in acquiring our entire stock of Julián Carax’s novels. The publisher’s son told him he had a warehouse full of them in the Pueblo Nuevo district, but as there was such a demand for them, he insisted on a higher price than Coubert was offering. Coubert had not taken the bait and had marched out. Now Álvaro Cabestany wanted me to find this person called Laín Coubert and accept his offer. I told that fool that Laín Coubert didn’t exist; he was a character in one of Carax’s novels. That he wasn’t in the least interested in buying his books; he only wanted to know where we stored them. Old Mr. Cabestany was in the habit of keeping a copy of every book published by his firm in his office library, even the works of Julián Carax: I slipped into the room, unnoticed, and took them.
That evening I visited my father in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and hid them where nobody, especially Julián, would ever find them. Night had fallen when I left the building. I wandered off down the Ramblas and from there to La Barceloneta, where I made for the beach, looking for the spot where I had gone to gaze at the sea with Julián. The pyre of flames from the Pueblo Nuevo warehouse was visible in the distance, its amber trail spilling over the sea and spirals of smoke rising to the sky like serpents of light. When the firefighters managed to extinguish the flames shortly before daybreak, there was nothing left, just the brick-and-metal skeleton that held up the vault. There I found Lluís Carbó, who had been the night watchman for ten years. He stared in disbelief at the smoldering ruins. His eyebrows and the hairs on his arms were singed, and his skin shone like wet bronze. It was he who told me that the blaze had started shortly after midnight and had devoured tens of thousands of books, until dawn came and he was faced with a river of ashes. Lluís still held a handful of books he had managed to save, some of Verdaguer’s collected poems and two volumes of the History of the French Revolution. That was all that had survived. Various members of the union had arrived to help the firefighters. One of them told me the firefighters found a burned body in the debris. At first they had assumed that the man was dead, but then one of them noticed he was still breathing, and they had taken him to the nearby Hospital del Mar.
I recognized him by his eyes. The fire had eaten away his skin, his hands, and his hair. The flames had torn off his clothes, and his whole body was a raw wound that oozed beneath his bandages. They had confined him to a room of his own at the end of a corridor, with a view of the beach, and had numbed him with morphine while they waited for him to die. I wanted to hold his hand, but one of the nurses warned me that there was almost no flesh under the bandages. The fire had cut away his eyelids. The nurse who found me, collapsed on the floor crying, asked me whether I knew who he was. I said I did: he was my husband. When a priest appeared to administer the last rites over him, I frightened him off with my screams. Three days later Julián was still alive. The doctors said it was a miracle, that his will to stay alive gave him a strength no medicine could offer. They were wrong. It was not a will to live. It was hatred. A week later, when they saw that this death-bitten body refused to expire, he was officially admitted under the name of Miquel Moliner. He would remain there for eleven months. Always in silence, with burning eyes, without rest.
I went to the hospital every day. Soon the nurses began to treat me less formally and invite me to lunch with them in their hall. They were all women who were on their own, strong women waiting for their men to return from the front. Some did. They taught me how to clean Julián’s wounds, how to change his bandages, how to change the sheets and make a bed with an inert body lying on it. They also taught me to lose all hope of ever seeing the man who had once been held by those bones. Three months later we removed his face bandages. Julián was a skull. He had no lips or cheeks. It was a featureless face, the charred remains of a doll. His eye sockets had become larger and now dominated his expression. The nurses would not admit it to me, but they were revolted by his appearance, almost afraid. The doctors had told me that, as the wounds healed, a sort of purplish, rep
tilelike skin would slowly form. Nobody dared to comment on his mental state. Everyone assumed that Julián—Miquel—had lost his mind in the blaze, and that he had survived thanks to the obsessive care of a wife who stood firm where so many others would have fled in terror. I looked into his eyes and knew that Julián was still in there, alive, tormenting himself, waiting.
He had lost his lips, but the doctors thought that the vocal cords had not suffered permanent damage and that the burns on his tongue and larynx had healed months earlier. They assumed that Julián didn’t say anything because his mind was gone. One afternoon, six months after the fire, when he and I were alone in the room, I bent over him and kissed him on the brow.
“I love you,” I said.
A bitter, harsh sound emerged from the doglike grimace that was now his mouth. His eyes were red with tears. I wanted to dry them with a handkerchief, but he repeated that sound.
“Leave me,” he said.
“Leave me.”
Two months after the warehouse fire, the publishing firm had gone bankrupt. Old Cabestany, who died that year, had predicted that his son would manage to ruin the company within six months. An unrepentant optimist to the last. I tried to find work with another publisher, but the war did away with everything. They all said that hostilities would soon cease and things would improve. But there were still two years of war ahead, and worse was yet to come. One year after the fire, the doctors told me that they had done all that could be done in a hospital. The situation was difficult, and they needed the room. They recommended that Julián be taken to a sanatorium like the Hospice of Santa Lucía, but I refused. In October 1937 I took him home. He hadn’t uttered a single word since that “Leave me.”
