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Fermín sighed, his mind still dwelling on charms that seemed to overcome the laws of gravity.
“Do you speak from experience, Daniel?” he asked in all innocence.
I just smiled, knowing that my father was watching me.
After that day Fermín Romero de Torres took to going to the movies every Sunday. My father preferred to stay at home reading, but Fermín would not miss a single double feature. He’d buy a pile of chocolates and sit in row seventeen, where he would devour them while he waited for the appearance of that day’s diva. As far as he was concerned, plot was superfluous, and he didn’t stop talking until some well-endowed lady filled the screen.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day, about finding a woman for me,” said Fermín Romero de Torres. “Perhaps you’re right. In thepensión there’s a new lodger, an ex-seminarist from Seville with plenty of spirit, who brings in some impressive young ladies every now and then. I must say, the race has improved no end. I don’t know how the lad manages it, because he’s not much to look at; perhaps he renders them senseless with prayers. He’s got the room next to mine, so I can hear everything, and, judging by the sound effects, the friar must be a real artist. Just shows what a uniform can do. Tell me, what sort of women do you like, Daniel?”
“I don’t know much about them, honestly.”
“Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it’s like electricity: you don’t have to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers. Come on, out with it. How do you like them? People might not agree with me, but I think a woman should have a feminine shape, something you can get your hands on. You, on the other hand, look like you might be partial to the skinny type, a point of view I fully respect, don’t misunderstand me.”
“Frankly, I don’t have much experience with women. None, to be precise.”
Fermín Romero de Torres looked at me carefully, intrigued by this revelation.
“I thought that what happened that night, you know, when you were beaten up…”
“If only everything hurt as little as a blow to the face…”
Fermín seemed to read my mind, and smiled supportively. “Don’t let that upset you, then. With women the best part is the discovery. There’s nothing like the first time, nothing. You don’t know what life is until you undress a woman the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot sweet potato on a winter’s night.”
A few seconds later, Veronica Lake made her grand entrance onto the scene, and Fermín was transported to another plane. Taking advantage of a reel in which Miss Lake was absent, Fermín announced that he was going to pay a visit to the candy stand in the foyer to replenish his stocks. After months of starvation, my friend had lost all sense of proportion, but, due to his metabolism, he never quite lost that hungry, squalid postwar look. I was left alone, barely following the action on the screen. I would lie if I said I was thinking of Clara. I was thinking only of her body, trembling under the music teacher’s charges, glistening with sweat and pleasure. My gaze left the screen, and only then did I notice a spectator who had just come in. I saw his silhouette moving to the center of the orchestra, six rows in front of me. He sat down. Cinemas are full of lonely people, I thought. Like me.
I tried to concentrate on picking up the thread of the story. The hero, a cynical but good-hearted detective, was telling a secondary character why women like Veronica Lake were the ruin of all sensible males and why all one could do was love them desperately and perish, betrayed by their double dealings. Fermín Romero de Torres, who was becoming an adept film scholar, called this genre “the praying mantis paradigm.” According to him, its permutations were nothing but misogynist fantasies for constipated office clerks, for pious women shriveled with boredom who dreamed about turning to a life of vice and unbridled lechery. I smiled as I imagined the asides my friend the critic would have made had he not gone to his meeting with the candy stand. But the smile froze on my face. The spectator who sat six rows in front of me had turned around and was staring at me. The projector’s misty beam bored through the darkness of the hall, a slim cloud of flickering light that revealed only outlines and blots of color. I recognized Coubert, the faceless man, immediately. His steely look, his shining eyes with no eyelids; his smile as he licked his nonexistent lips in the dark. I felt cold fingers gripping my heart. Two hundred violins broke out on-screen, there were shots and shouts, and the scene dissolved. For a moment the hall plunged into utter darkness, and I could only hear my own heartbeat hammering in my temples. Slowly a new scene glowed on the screen, replacing the darkness of the room with a haze of blue and purple. The man without a face had disappeared. I turned and caught a glimpse of a silhouette walking up the aisle and passing Fermín, who was returning from his gastronomic safari. He moved into the row, took his seat, and handed me a praline chocolate.
“Daniel, you’re as white as a nun’s buttock. Are you all right?” he asked, giving me a worried look.
A mysterious breath of air wafted through the hall.
“It smells odd,” Fermín remarked. “Like a rancid fart, from a councilman or a lawyer.”
“No. It smells of burned paper.”
“Go on. Have a lemon Sugus candy—it cures everything.”
“I don’t feel like one.”
“Keep it, then, you never know when a Sugus candy might get you out of a pickle.”
I put the sweet in my jacket pocket and drifted through the rest of the film without paying any attention to Veronica Lake or to the victims of her fatal charms. Fermín Romero de Torres was engrossed in the show and the chocolates. When the lights went on at the end of the film, I felt myself to be waking from a bad dream and was tempted to imagine that the man in the theater had been a mere illusion, a trick of memory. But his brief glance in the dark had been enough to convey his message. He had not forgotten me, or our pact.
·12·
THE FIRST EFFECT OF FERMÍN’S ARRIVAL SOON BECAME APPARENT: I discovered I had much more free time. When Fermín was not out hunting some exotic volume to satisfy a customer’s request, he spent his time organizing stocks in the bookshop, dreaming up marketing strategies, polishing the shop sign and windows till they sparkled, or buffing up the spines of the books with a rag and a bit of alcohol. Given this windfall, I decided to devote my leisure time to a couple of pursuits I had lately put aside: attempting to unravel the Carax mystery and, above all, spending more time with my friend Tomás Aguilar, whom I greatly missed.
Tomás was a thoughtful, reserved boy whom other children feared because his vaguely thuggish features gave him a grave and threatening look. He had a wrestler’s build, gladiator’s shoulders, and a steely, penetrating gaze. We had met many years before in the course of a fistfight, during my first week at the Jesuit school on Calle Caspe. His father had come to pick him up after classes, accompanied by a conceited girl who turned out to be Tomás’s sister. I had the brilliant idea of making some tasteless remark about her and before I could blink, Tomás had thrown himself on me and was showering me with a deluge of blows that left me smarting for a few weeks. Tomás was tw
ice my size, strength, and ferocity. During our school-yard duel, surrounded by boys who were thirsty for a bloody fight, I lost a tooth but gained an improved sense of proportion. I refused to tell my father or the priests who had inflicted such a thundering beating on me. Neither did I volunteer the fact that the father of my adversary had watched the thumping with an expression of sheer pleasure, joining in the chorus with the other schoolchildren.
“It was my fault,” I said, closing the subject.
Three weeks later Tomás came up to me during the break. I was paralyzed with fear. He is coming to finish me off, I thought. I began to stammer, but soon I understood that all he wanted to do was apologize for the thrashing, because he knew the fight had been uneven and unfair.
“I’m the one who should say I’m sorry, for picking on your sister,” I said. “I would have done it the other day, but you did my mouth in before I could speak.”
Tomás looked down, ashamed of himself. I gazed at that shy and quiet giant who wandered around the classrooms and school corridors like a lost soul. All the other children—me included—were scared stiff of him, and nobody spoke to him or dared look him in the eye. With his head down, almost shaking, he asked me whether I’d like to be his friend. I said I would. He held out his hand, and I shook it. His handshake hurt, but I didn’t flinch. That afternoon he invited me to his house for an after-school snack and showed me his collection of strange gadgets made from bits of scrap metal, which he kept in his room.
