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“How do you think? Because his father told me.”
I nodded slowly. “I see. Did he say what he died of?”
“Quite frankly, the old man never gave me any details. Once, not long after Julián left, a letter arrived for him, and when I mentioned it to his father, he told me his son had died and if anything else came for him, I should throw it away. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Mr. Fortuny lied to you. Julián didn’t die in 1919.”
“Say that again?”
“Julián lived in Paris until at least 1935, and then he returned to Barcelona.”
The caretaker’s face lit up. “So Julián is here, in Barcelona? Where?”
I nodded again, hoping that by doing so she would be encouraged to tell me more.
“Holy Mary…what wonderful news. Well, if he’s still alive, that is. He was such a sweet child, a bit strange and given to daydreaming, that’s true, but there was something about him that won you over. He wouldn’t have been much good as a soldier, you could tell that a mile off. My Isabelita really liked him. Imagine, for a time I even thought they’d end up getting married. Kid stuff…May I see that photograph again?”
I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth. “It’s strange, you know, it’s as if he were here right now…and that mean old bastard saying he was dead. I must say, I wonder why God sends some people into this world. And what happened to Julián in Paris? I’m sure he got rich. I always thought Julián would be wealthy one day.”
“Not exactly. He became a writer.”
“He wrote stories?”
“Something like that.”
“For the radio? Oh, how lovely. Well, it doesn’t surprise me, you know. As a child he used to tell stories to the kids in the neighborhood. In the summer sometimes my Isabelita and her cousins would go up to the roof terrace at night and listen to him. They said he never told the same story twice. But it’s true that they were all about dead people and ghosts. As I say, he was a bit of an odd child. Although, with a father like that, the odd thing was that he wasn’t completely nuts. I’m not surprised that his wife left him in the end, because he really was nasty. Listen: I never meddle in people’s affairs, everything’s fine by me, but that man wasn’t a good person. In a block of apartments, nothing’s secret in the end. He beat her, you know? You always heard screams coming from their apartment, and more than once the police had to come around. I can understand that sometimes a husband has to beat his wife to get her to respect him, I’m not saying they shouldn’t; there’s a lot of tarts about, and young girls are not brought up the way they used to be. But this one, well, he liked to beat her for the hell of it, if you see what I mean. The only friend that poor woman had was a young girl, Viçenteta, who lived in four-two. Sometimes the poor woman would take shelter in Viçenteta’s apartment,
to get away from her husband’s beatings. And she told her things….”
“What sort of things?”
The caretaker took on a confidential manner, raising an eyebrow and glancing sideways right and left. “Like the kid wasn’t the hatter’s.”
“Julián? Do you mean to say Julián wasn’t Mr. Fortuny’s son?”
“That’s what the Frenchwoman told Viçenteta, I don’t know whether out of spite or heaven knows why. The girl told me years later, when they didn’t live here anymore.”
“So who was Julián’s real father?”
“The Frenchwoman never said. Perhaps she didn’t even know. You know what foreigners are like.”
“And do you think that’s why her husband beat her?”
“Goodness knows. Three times they had to take her to the hospital, do you hear? Three times. And the swine had the nerve to tell everyone that she was the one to blame, that she was a drunk and was always falling about the house from drinking so much. But I don’t believe that. He quarreled with all the neighbors. Once he even went to the police to report my late husband, God rest his soul, for stealing from his shop. As far as he was concerned, anyone from the south was a layabout and a thief, the pig.”
“Did you say you recognized the girl who is next to Julián in the photograph?”
The caretaker concentrated on the image once again. “Never seen her before. Very pretty.”
“From the picture it looks like they were a couple,” I suggested, trying to jog her memory.
She handed it back to me, shaking her head. “I don’t know anything about photographs. As far as I know, Julián never had a girlfriend, but I imagine that if he did, he wouldn’t have told me. It was hard enough to find out that my Isabelita had got involved with that fellow…. You young people never say anything. And us old folks don’t know how to stop talking.”
“Do you remember his friends, anyone special who came around here?”
The caretaker shrugged her shoulders. “Well, it was such a long time ago. Besides, in the last years Julián was hardly ever here, you see. He’d made a friend at school, a boy from a very good family, the Aldayas—now, that’s saying something. Nobody talks about them now, but in those days it was like mentioning the royal family. Lots of money. I know because sometimes they would send a car to fetch Julián. You should have seen that car. Not even Franco would have one like it. With a chauffeur, and all shiny. My Paco, who knew about cars, told me it was arolsroi, or something like that. Fit for an emperor.”
“Do you remember the name of that friend?”
