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A week before the ceremony, Bea’s father turned up at the bookshop to present me with a gold tiepin that had belonged to his father and to shake hands with me.
“Bea is the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. “Take care of her for me.”
My father went with him to the door and watched him walk away down Calle Santa Ana, with that sadness that softens men who are aware that they are growing old together.
“He’s not a bad person, Daniel,” he said. “We all love in our own way.”
Dr. Mendoza, who doubted my ability to stay on my feet for more than half an hour, had warned me that the bustle of a wedding and all the preparations were not the best medicine for a man who had been on the point of leaving his heart in the operating room.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “They’re not letting me do anything.”
I wasn’t lying. Fermín Romero de Torres had set himself up as absolute dictator of the ceremony, the banquet, and all related matters. When the parish priest discovered that the bride was arriving pregnant to the altar, he flatly refused to perform the wedding and threatened to summon the spirits of the Holy Inquisition and make them cancel the event. Fermín flew into a rage and dragged him out of the church, shouting to all and sundry that he was unworthy of his habit and of the parish, and swearing that if the priest as much as raised an eyebrow, he was going to stir up such a scandal in the bishopric that at the very least he would be exiled to the Rock of Gibraltar to evangelize the monkeys. A few passersby clapped, and the flower vendor in the square gave Fermín a white carnation, which he went on to wear in his lapel until the petals turned the same color as his shirt collar. All set up and without a priest, Fermín went to San Gabriel’s School, where he recruited the services of Father Fernando Ramos, who had not performed a wedding in his life and whose specialty was Latin, trigonometry, and gymnastics, in that order.
“You see, Your Reverence, the bridegroom is very weak, and I can’t upset him again. He sees in you a reincarnation of the great glories of the Mother Church, there, up high, with Saint Thomas, Saint Augustine, and the Virgin of Fátima. He may not seem so, but the boy is, like me, extremely devout. A mystic. If I now tell him that you’ve failed me, we may well have to celebrate a funeral instead of a wedding.”
“If you put it like that.”
From what they told me later—because I don’t remember it, and weddings always stay more clearly in the memory of others—before the ceremony Bernarda and Gustavo Barceló (following Fermín’s detailed instructions) softened up the poor priest with muscatel wine to rid him of his stage fright. When the time came for Father Fernando to officiate, wearing a saintly smile and a pleasantly rosy complexion, he chose, in a breach of protocol, to replace the reading of I don’t know which Letter to the Corinthians with a love sonnet, the work of a poet called Pablo Neruda. Some of Mr. Aguilar’s guests identified him as a confirmed communist and a Bolshevik, while others looked in the missal for those verses of intense pagan beauty, wondering whether this was already one of the first effects of the impending Ecumenical Council.
The night before the wedding, Fermín told me he had organized a bachelor party to which only he and I were invited.
“I don’t know Fermín. I don’t really like these—”
“Trust me.”
On the night of the crime, I followed Fermín meekly to a foul hovel on Calle Escudillers, where the stench of humanity coexisted with the most potent odor of refried food on the entire Mediterranean coast. A lineup of ladies with their virtue for rent and a lot of mileage on the clock greeted us with smiles that would only have excited a student of dentistry.
“We’ve come for Rociíto,” Fermín informed a pimp whose sideburns bore a surprising resemblance to Cape Finisterre.
“Fermín,” I whispered, terrified. “For heaven’s sake…”
“Have faith.”
Rociíto arrived in all her glory—which I reckoned to amount to around 175 pounds, not counting the feather shawl and a skeleton-tight red viscose dress—and took stock of me from head to toe.
“Hi, sweetheart. I thought you was older, to tell the God’s honest truth.”
“This is not the client,” Fermín clarified.
I then understood the nature of the situation, and my fears subsided. Fermín never forgot a promise, especially if it was I who had made it. The three of us went off in search of a taxi that would take us to the Santa Lucía Hospice. During the journey Fermín, who, in deference to my delicate health and my fiancé status, had offered me the front seat, was sitting in the back with Rociíto, taking in her attributes with obvious relish.
“You’re a dish fit for a pope, Rociíto. This egregious ass of yours is the Revelation According to Botticelli.”
“Oh, Mr. Fermín, since you got yourself a girlfriend, you’ve forgotten me, you rogue.”
“You’re too much of a woman for me, Rociíto, and now I’m monogamous.”
“Nah! Good ole Rociíto will cure that for you with some good rubs of penicillin.”
We reached Calle Moncada after midnight, escorting Rociíto’s heavenly body, and slipped her into the hospice by the back door—the one used for taking out the deceased through an alleyway that looked and smelled like hell’s esophagus. Once we had entered the shadows of the Tenebrarium, Fermín proceeded to give Rociíto his final instructions while I tried to find the old granddad to whom I’d promised a last dance with Eros before Thanatos settled accounts with him.
“Remember, Rociíto, the old geezer is probably as deaf as a post, so speak to him in a loud voice, clear and dirty, with sauciness, the way you know how. But don’t get too carried away either. We don’t want to give him heart failure and send him off to kingdom come before his time.”
“No worries, pumpkin. I’m a professional.”
I found the recipient of those rented favors in a corner of the first floor, the wise hermit still barricaded behind walls of loneliness. He raised his eyes and stared at me, confused.
“Am I dead?”
