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“He’ll kill you first, you son of a bitch.”
Fumero spit in my face and let me go. I thought he was going to beat me up, but I heard his steps as he walked away down the corridor. I rose to my feet, trembling, and wiped the blood off my face. I could smell that man’s hand on my skin, but this time I recognized the stench of fear.
They kept me in that room, in the dark and with no water, for six hours. Night had fallen when they let me out. It was raining hard and the streets shimmered with steamy heat. When I got home, I found a sea of debris. Fumero’s men had been there. Among the fallen furniture and the drawers and bookshelves thrown on the floor, I saw my clothes all torn to shreds and Miquel’s books destroyed. On my bed I found a pile of feces and on the wall, written with excrement, I read the word WHORE.
I ran to the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio, making a thousand detours and ensuring that none of Fumero’s henchmen had followed me to the door on Calle Joaquín Costa. I crossed the roof terraces—they were flooded with the rain—and saw that the front door of the apartment was still locked. I went in cautiously, but the echo of my footsteps told me it was empty. Julián was not there. I waited for him, sitting in the dark dining room, listening to the storm, until dawn. When the morning mist licked the balcony shutters, I went up to the roof terrace and gazed at the city, crushed under a leaden sky. I knew that Julián would not return there. I had already lost him forever.
I saw him again two months later. I had gone into a cinema at night, alone, feeling incapable of returning to my cold, empty apartment. Halfway through the film, some stupid romance between a Romanian princess eager for adventure and a handsome American reporter immune to untidy hair, a man sat down next to me. It wasn’t the first time. In those days cinemas were crawling with anonymous men who reeked of loneliness, urine, and eau de cologne, wielding their sweaty, trembling hands like tongues of dead flesh. I was about to get up and warn the usher when I recognized Julián’s wrinkled profile. He gripped my hand tightly, and we remained like that, looking at the screen without seeing it.
“Did you kill Sanmartí?” I murmured.
“Does anyone miss him?”
We spoke in whispers, under the attentive gaze of the solitary men who were dotted around the orchestra, green with envy at the apparent success of their shadowy rival. I asked him where he’d been hiding, but he didn’t reply.
“There’s another copy of The Shadow of the Wind,” he murmured. “Here, in Barcelona.”
“You’re wrong, Julián. You destroyed them all.”
“All but one. It seems that someone more clever than I am hid it in a place where I would never be able to find it. You.”
That’s how I first came to hear about you, Daniel. Some bigmouthed bookseller called Gustavo Barceló had been boasting to a group of collectors about having located a copy of The Shadow of the Wind. The world of rare books is like an echo chamber. In less than two months, Barceló was receiving offers for the book from collectors in London, Paris, and Rome. Julián’s mysterious flight from Paris after a bloody duel and his rumored death in the Spanish Civil War had conferred on his works an undreamed-of market value. The black legend of a faceless individual who searched for them in every bookshop, library, and private collection and then burned them only added to the interest and the price. “We have the circus in our blood,” Barceló would say.
Julián, who continued to pursue the shadow of his own words, soon picked up the rumor. This is how he learned that Gustavo Barceló didn’t have the book: apparently the copy belonged to a boy who had discovered it by chance and who, fascinated by the novel and its mysterious author, refused to sell it and guarded it as his most precious possession. That boy was you, Daniel.
“For heaven’s sake, Julián, don’t say you’re going to harm a child…” I whispered, not quite sure of his intentions.
Julián then told me that all the books he’d stolen and destroyed had been snatched from people who felt nothing for them, from people who just did business with them or kept them as curiosities. Because you refused to sell the book at any price and tried to rescue Carax from the recesses of the past, you awoke a strange sympathy in him, and even respect. Unbeknownst to you, Julián observed you and studied you.
“Perhaps, if he ever discovers who I am and what I am, he, too, will decide to burn the book.”
Julián spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
“Who is this boy?”
“His name is Daniel. He’s the son of a bookseller whose shop, on Calle Santa Ana, Miquel used to frequent. He lives with his father in an apartment above the shop. He lost his mother when he was very young.”
“You sound as if you were speaking about yourself.”
“Perhaps. This boy reminds me of myself.”
“Leave him alone, Julián. He’s only a kid. His only crime has been to admire you.”
“That’s not a crime, it’s a misconception. But he’ll get over it. Perhaps then he’ll return the book to me. When he stops admiring me and begins to understand me.”
A minute before the end of the film, Julián stood up and left. For months we saw each other like that, in the dark, in cinemas or alleyways, at midnight. Julián always found me. I felt his silent presence without seeing him and was always vigilant. Sometimes he mentioned you. Every time I heard him talk about you, I sensed a rare tenderness in his voice that confused him, a tenderness that, for years now, I had thought lost. I found out that he’d returned to the Aldaya mansion and that he now lived there, halfway between a ghost and a beggar, watching over Penélope’s remains and those of their son. It was the only place that he still felt was his. There are worse prisons than words.
I went there once a month to make sure he was all right, or at least alive. I would jump over the tumbled-down wall in the back of the property, which couldn’t be seen from the street. Sometimes I’d find him there, other times Julián had disappeared. I left food for him, money, books…. I would wait for him for hours, until it got dark. A few times I ventured to explore the rambling old house. That is how I discovered that he’d destroyed the tombstones in the crypt and taken out the coffins. I no longer thought Julián was mad, nor did I view that desecration as a monstrous act, just a tragic one. When I did find him there we spoke for hours, sitting by the fire. Julián confessed that he had tried to write again but was unable to. He vaguely remembered his books as if they were the work of some other person that he’d happened to read. The pain of his attempts to write was visible. I discovered that he burned the pages he had written feverishly while I was not there. Once, taking advantage of his absence, I rescued a pile of them from the ashes. They spoke about you. Julián had once told me that a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise. For some time now, Julián had been wondering whether he’d gone out of his mind. Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist on convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality? Julián observed you, watched you grow, and wondered who you were. He wondered whether your presence was perhaps a miracle, a pardon he had to win by teaching you not to make his own mistakes. More than once I asked myself whether Julián hadn’t reached the conclusion that you, in that twisted logic of his universe, had become the son he had lost, a blank page on which to restart a story that he could not invent but could remember.
Those years in the old mansion went by, and Julián became increasingly watchful of you, of your progress. He talked to me about your friends, about a woman called Clara with whom you had fallen in love, about your father, a man he admired and esteemed, about your friend Fermín, and about a girl in whom he wanted to see another Penélope—your Bea. He spoke about you as if yo
u were his son. You were both looking for each other, Daniel. He wanted to believe that your innocence would save him from himself. He had stopped chasing his books, stopped wanting to destroy them. He was learning to see the world again through your eyes, to recover the boy he had once been, in you. The day you came to my apartment for the first time, I felt I already knew you. I feigned distrust so I could hide the fear you inspired in me. I was afraid of you, of what you might discover. I was afraid of listening to Julián and starting to believe, as he did, that we were all bound together in a strange chain of destiny, afraid of recognizing in you the Julián I had lost. I knew that you and your friends were investigating our past, that sooner or later you would discover the truth, but I hoped that it would be in due course, when you were able to understand its meaning. And I knew that sooner or later you and Julián would meet. That was my mistake. Because someone else knew it, someone who sensed that, in time, you would lead him to Julián: Fumero.
I understood what was happening when there was no turning back, but I never lost hope that you would lose the trail, that you would forget about us, or that life, yours and not ours, would take you far away, to safety. Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either. Hope is cruel, and has no conscience. For a long time, Fumero has been watching me. He knows I’ll fall, sooner or later. He’s not in a hurry. He lives to avenge himself. On everyone and on himself. Without vengeance, without anger, he would melt away. Fumero knows that you and your friends will take him to Julián. He knows that after almost fifteen years, I have no more strength or resources. He has watched me die for years, and he’s only waiting for the moment when he will deal me the last blow. I have never doubted that I will die by his hand. Now I know the moment is drawing near. I will give these pages to my father, asking him to make sure they reach you if anything should happen to me. I pray to that God who never crossed my path that you will never have to read them, but I sense that my fate, despite my wishes and my vain hopes, is to hand you this story. Yours, despite your youth and your innocence, is to set it free.
WHEN YOU READ THESE WORDS, THIS PRISON OF MEMORIES, IT WILL mean that I will no longer be able to say good-bye to you as I would have wished, that I will not be able to ask you to forgive us, especially Julián, and to take care of him when I am no longer there to do so. I know I cannot ask anything of you, but I can ask you to save yourself. Perhaps so many pages have managed to convince me that whatever happens, I will always have a friend in you, that you are my only hope, my only real hope. Of all the things that Julián wrote, the one I have always felt closest to my heart is that so long as we are being remembered, we remain alive. As so often happened to me with Julián, years before meeting him, I feel that I know you and that if I can trust in someone, that someone is you. Remember me, Daniel, even if it’s only in a corner and secretly. Don’t let me go.
Nuria Monfort
