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“Hello?”
A few seconds passed, and no answer came. I continued to leaf through the order book.
I heard slow footsteps in the shop.
“Fermín? Father?”
No answer. I thought I heard a stifled laugh, and I shut the order book. Perhaps some client had ignored the CLOSED sign. I was about to go and serve whoever it was when I heard the sound of several books falling from the shelves. I swallowed. Grabbing hold of a letter opener, I slowly moved toward the door of the back room. I didn’t dare call out a second time. Soon I heard the steps again, walking away. The doorbell sounded, and I felt a draft of air from the street. I peered into the shop. There was no one there. I ran to the front door and double-locked it, then took a deep breath, feeling ridiculous and cowardly. I was returning to the back room when I noticed a piece of paper on the counter. As I got closer, I realized it was a photograph, an old studio picture of the sort that were printed on thick cardboard. The edges were burned, and the smoky image seemed to have charcoal finger marks over it. I examined it under the lamp. The photograph showed a young couple smiling at the camera. He didn’t look much older than seventeen or eighteen, with light-colored hair and delicate, aristocratic features. She may have been a bit younger than him, one or two years at the most. She had pale skin and a finely chiseled face framed by short black hair. She looked intoxicated with happiness. The man had his arm around her waist, and she seemed to be whispering something to him in a teasing way. The image conveyed a warmth that drew a smile from me, as if I had recognized two old friends in those strangers. Behind them I could make out an ornate shop window, full of old-fashioned hats. I concentrated on the couple. From their clothes I could guess that the picture was at least twenty-five or thirty years old. It was an image full of light and hope, rich with the promise that exists only in the eyes of the young. Fire had destroyed almost all of the area surrounding the photograph, but one could still discern a stern face behind the old-style counter, a suggestion of a ghostly figure behind the letters engraved on the glass.
SONS OF ANTONIO FORTUNY
Established in 1888
The night I returned to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Isaac had told me that Carax used his mother’s surname, not his father’s, which was Fortuny. Carax’s father had a hat shop on Ronda de San Antonio. I looked again at the portrait of that couple and knew for sure that the young man was Julián Carax, smiling at me from the past, unable to see the flames that were closing in on him.
City of Shadows
1954
·14·
THE FOLLOWING MORNING FERMÍN CAME TO WORK BORNE ON the wings of Cupid, smiling and whistling boleros. In any other circumstances, I would have inquired about his outing with Bernarda, but that day I was not in the mood for his poetic outbursts. My father had arranged to have an order of books delivered to Professor Javier Velázquez at eleven o’clock in his study at the university. The very mention of the professor made Fermín wince, so I offered to take the books myself.
“That sorry specimen is both pedantic and corrupt. A fascist buttock polisher,” Fermín declared, raising his fist and striking the pose he reserved for his avenging moods. “With the pitiful excuse of his professorship and final exams, he would even have it off with Gertrude Stein, given the chance.”
“Calm down, Fermín. Velázquez pays well, always in advance, and besides, he recommends us to everyone,” my father said.
“That’s money stained with the blood of innocent virgins,” Fermín protested. “For the life o
f God, I hereby swear that I have never lain with an underage woman, and not for lack of inclination or opportunities. Bear in mind that what you see today is but a shadow of my former self, but there was a time when I cut as dashing a figure as they come. Yet even then, just to be on the safe side, or if I sensed that a girl might be overly flighty, I would not proceed without seeing some form of identification or, failing that, a written paternal authorization. One has to maintain certain moral standards.”
My father rolled his eyes. “It’s pointless to argue with you, Fermín.”
“Well, if I’m right, I’m right.”
Sensing a debate brewing, I picked up the parcel, which I had prepared the night before—a couple of Rilkes and an apocryphal essay attributed to a disciple of Darwin claiming Spaniards came from a more evolved simian ancestor than their French neighbors. As the door closed behind me, Fermín and my father were deep in argument about ethics.
It was a magnificent day; the skies were electric blue, and a crystal breeze carried the cool scent of autumn and the sea. I will always prefer Barcelona in October. It is when the spirit of the city seems to stroll most proudly through the streets, and you feel all the wiser after drinking water from the old fountain of Canaletas—which, at this time of year only, doesn’t taste of chlorine. I was walking along briskly, dodging bootblacks, pen pushers returning from their midmorning coffee, lottery vendors, and a whole ballet of street sweepers who seemed to be polishing the streets with paintbrushes, unhurriedly and with a pointillist’s strokes. Barcelona was already beginning to fill up with cars in those days, and when I reached the traffic lights at the crossing with Calle Balmes, I noticed a brigade of gray office clerks in gray raincoats staring as hungrily at a bloodred Studebaker sedan as they would ogle a music-hall siren in a negligee. I went on up Balmes toward Gran Vía, negotiating traffic lights, cars, and even motorcycles with sidecars. In a shop window, I saw a Philips poster announcing the arrival of a new messiah, the TV set. Some predicted that this peculiar contraption was going to change our lives forever and turn us all into creatures of the future, like the Americans. Fermín Romero de Torres, always up to date on state-of-art technology, had already prophesied a grimmer outcome.
“Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.”
Professor Velázquez’s office was on the second floor of the Literature Faculty, in Plaza Universidad, at the end of a gallery paved with hypnotic chessboard tiling and awash in powdery light that spilled down onto the southern cloister. I found the professor at the door of a lecture room, pretending to be listening to a female student while considering her spectacular figure. She wore a dark red suit that drew attention to her waistline and revealed classically proportioned calves covered in fine nylon stockings. Professor Velázquez enjoyed a reputation as a Don Juan, and there were those who considered that the sentimental education of a respectable young lady was never complete without a proverbial weekend in some small hotel on the Sitges promenade, reciting Alexandrines tête-à-tête with the distinguished academic.
My commercial instincts advised me against interrupting his conversation, so I decided to kill time by conjuring up an X ray of the pupil. Perhaps the brisk walk had raised my spirits, or perhaps it was just my age, not to mention the fact that I spent more time among muses that were trapped in the pages of old books than in the company of girls of flesh and bone—who always seemed to me beings of a far lower order than Clara Barceló. Whatever the reason, as I cataloged each and every detail of her enticing and exquisitely clad anatomy—which I could see only from the back, but which in my mind I had already visualized in its full glory—I felt a vaguely wolfish shiver run down my spine.
“Why, here’s Daniel,” cried Professor Velázquez. “Thank goodness it’s you, not that madman who came last time, the one with the bullfighter’s name. He seemed drunk to me, or else eminently certifiable. He had the nerve to ask me whether I knew the etymology of the word ‘prick,’ in a sarcastic tone that was quite out of place.”
“It’s just that the doctor has him under some really strong medication. Something to do with his liver.”
“No doubt because he’s smashed all day,” said Velázquez. “If I were you, I’d call the police. I bet you he has a file. And God, how his feet stank—there are lots of shitty leftists on the loose who haven’t seen a bathtub since the Republic fell.”
I was about to come up with some other plausible excuse for Fermín when the student who had been talking to Professor Velázquez turned around, and it was as if the world had stopped spinning. She smiled at me, and my ears went up in flames.
“Hello, Daniel,” said Beatriz Aguilar.
I nodded at her, tongue-tied. I realized I’d been drooling over my best friend’s sister, Bea. The one woman I was completely terrified of.
“Oh, so you know each other?” asked Velázquez, intrigued.
