AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Is this room on the front of the house?” I asked.
The caretaker shook her head. “It has a small window, for ventilation. It looks out over the yard.”
I pushed the door inward. An impenetrable well of darkness opened up before us. The meager light from behind crept ahead, barely able to scratch at the shadows. The window overlooking the yard was covered with pages of yellowed newspaper. I tore them off, and a needle of hazy light bored through the darkness.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” murmured the caretaker.
The room was infested with crucifixes. They hung from the ceiling, dangling from the ends of strings, and they covered the walls, hooked on nails. There were dozens of them. You could sense them in every corner, carved with a knife on the wooden furniture, scratched on the floor tiles, painted red on the mirrors. The footprints that had led us to the doorway could now be traced in the dust around the naked bed, just a skeleton of wires and worm-eaten wood. At one end of the room, under the window, stood a closed rolltop desk, crowned by a trio of metal crucifixes. I opened it with care. There was no dust in the joins of the wooden slats, from which I inferred that the desk had been opened quite recently. It had six drawers. The locks had been forced open. I inspected them one by one. Empty.
I knelt down by the desk and fingered the scratches that covered the wood, imagining Julián Carax’s hands making those doodles, hieroglyphics whose meaning had been obscured by time. In the desk, I noticed a pile of notebooks and a vase filled with pencils and pens. I took one of the notebooks and glanced at it. Drawings and single words. Mathematical exercises. Unconnected phrases, quotes from books. Unfinished poems. All the notebooks looked the same. Some drawings were repeated page after page, with slight variations. I was struck by the figure of a man who seemed to be made of flames. Another might have been an angel or a reptile coiled around a cross. Rough sketches hinted at a fantastic rambling house, woven with towers and cathedral-like arches. The strokes were confident and showed a certain facility. Young Carax appeared to be a draftsman of some promise, but none of the drawings were more than rough sketches.
I was about to put the last notebook back in its place without looking at it when something slipped out from its pages and fell at my feet. It was a photograph in which I recognized the same girl who appeared in the other picture—the one taken at the foot of that building. The girl was posed in a luxurious garden, and beyond the treetops, just visible, was the shape of the house I had seen sketched in the drawings of the adolescent Carax. I recognized it immediately. It was the villa called “The White Friar,” on Avenida del Tibidabo. On the back of the photograph was an inscription that simply said:
Penélope, who loves you
I put it in my pocket, closed the desk, and smiled at the caretaker.
“Seen enough?” she asked, anxious to leave the place.
“Almost,” I replied. “Before, you said that soon after Julián left for Paris, a letter came for him, but his father told you to throw it away….”
The caretaker hesitated for a moment, and then she nodded. “I put the letter in the drawer of the cabinet in the entrance hall, in case the Frenchwoman should come back one day. It must still be there.”
We went down to the cabinet and opened the top drawer. An ocher-colored envelope lay on top of a collection of stopped watches, buttons, and coins that had ceased being legal tender twenty years ago. I picked up the envelope and examined it.
“Did you read it?”
“What do you take me for?”
“I meant no offense. It would have been quite natural, under the circumstances, if you thought that Julián was dead….”
The caretaker shrugged, looked down, and started walking toward the door. I took advantage of that moment to put the letter in the inside pocket of my jacket.
“Look, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression,” said the caretaker.
“Of course not. What did the letter say?”
“It was a love letter. Like the stories on the radio, only sadder, you know, because it sounded as if it was really true. Believe me, I felt like crying when I read it.”
“You’re all heart, Doña Aurora.”
“And you’re a devil.”
THAT SAME AFTERNOON, AFTER SAYING GOOD-BYE TO DOÑ A AURORA and promising that I would keep her up to date with my investigations on Julián Carax, I went along to see the administrator of the block of apartments. Mr. Molins had seen better days and now moldered away in a filthy first-floor office on Calle Floridablanca. Still, Molins was a cheerful and self-satisfied individual. His mouth was glued to a half-smoked cigar that seemed to grow out of his mustache. It was hard to tell whether he was asleep or awake, because he breathed like most people snore. His hair was greasy and flattened over his forehead, and he had mischievous piggy eyes. His suit wouldn’t have fetched more than ten pesetas in the Encantes Flea Market, but he made up for it with a gaudy tie of tropical colors. Judging by the appearance of the office, not much was managed anymore, except the bugs and cobwebs of a forgotten Barcelona.
“We’re in the middle of refurbishment,” he said apologetically.
To break the ice, I let drop the name of Doña Aurora, as if I were referring to some old friend of the family.
“When she was young, she was a real looker” was Molins’s comment. “With ag
e she’s gone on the heavier side, but then I’m not what I used to be either. You may not believe this, but when I was your age, I was an Adonis. Girls would go on their knees to beg for a quickie, or to have my babies. Alas, the twentieth century is for shit. What can I do for you, young man?”
I presented him with a more or less plausible story about a supposed distant relationship with the Fortunys. After five minutes’ chatter, Molins dragged himself to his filing cabinet and gave me the address of the lawyer who dealt with matters related to Sophie Carax, Julián’s mother.
“Let me see…José María Requejo. Fifty-nine, Calle León XIII. But we send the mail twice a year to a PO box in the main post office, on Vía Layetana.”
“Do you know Mr. Requejo?”
