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“Well, one night, years ago, when I accompanied Master Joanet. Only because he insisted, you know? I didn’t want to have anything to do with that place…. As I was saying, I heard something strange there. A sort of sobbing.”
The caretaker produced his own version of the noise to which he was referring. It sounded like someone with consumption humming a litany of folk songs.
“It must have been the wind,” I suggested.
“It must have, but I was scared shitless. Hey, you wouldn’t have another one of those sweets, would you?”
“Please accept a throat lozenge. They tone you up after a sweet.”
“Come on, then,” agreed the caretaker, putting out his hand to collect it.
I gave him the whole box. The strong taste of licorice seemed to loosen his tongue regarding the extraordinary tale of the Aldaya mansion.
“Between you and me, it’s some story. Once, Joanet, the son of Mr. Miravell, a huge guy, twice your size (he’s on the national handball team, that should give you some idea)…Anyhow, some mates of young Joanet had heard stories about the Aldaya house, and they roped him in. And he ropedme in, asking me to go with him—all that bragging, and he didn’t dare go on his own. Rich kids, what do you expect? He was determined to go in there at night, to show off in front of his girlfriend, and he nearly pisses himself. I mean, now you’re looking at it in the daylight, but at night the place looks quite different. Anyway, Joanet says he went up to the second floor (I refused to go in, of course—it can’t be lawful, even if the house has been abandoned for at least ten years), and he says there was something there. He thought he heard a sort of voice in one of the rooms, but when he tried to go in, the door shut in his face. What do you think of that?”
“I think it was a draft,” I said.
“Or something else,” the caretaker pointed out, lowering his voice. “The other day it was on the radio: the universe is full of mysteries. Imagine, they think they’ve found t
he Holy Shroud, the real one, bang in downtown Toledo. It had been sewn to a cinema screen, to hide it from the Muslims. Apparently they wanted to use it so they could say Jesus Christ was a black man. What do you make of that?”
“I am speechless.”
“Exactly. Mysteries galore. They should knock that building down and throw lime over the ground.”
I thanked him for the information and was about to turn down the avenue when I looked up and saw Tibidabo Mountain awakening behind the clouds of gauze. Suddenly I felt like taking the funicular up the hill to visit the old amusement park crowning its top and wander among its merry-go-rounds and the eerie automaton halls, but I had promised to be back in the bookshop on time.
As I returned to the station, I pictured Julián Carax walking down that same road, gazing at those same solemn façades that had hardly changed since then, perhaps even waiting to board the blue tram that tiptoed up to heaven. When I reached the foot of the avenue, I took out the photograph of Penélope Aldaya smiling in the courtyard of the family mansion. Her eyes spoke of an untroubled soul and an undisclosed future. “Penélope, who loves you.”
I imagined Julián Carax at my age, holding that image in his hands, perhaps in the shade of the same tree that now sheltered me. I could almost see him smiling confidently, contemplating a future as wide and luminous as that avenue, and for a moment I thought there were no more ghosts there than those of absence and loss, and that the light that smiled on me was borrowed light, real only as long as I could hold it in my eyes, second by second.
·18·
WHEN IGOT BACK HOME, I REALIZED THAT FERMÍN OR MY father had already opened the bookshop. I went up to the apartment for a moment to have a quick bite. My father had left some toast and jam and a thermos of strong coffee on the dining-room table for me. I polished it all off and was down again in ten minutes, reborn. I entered the bookshop through the door in the back room that adjoined the entrance hall of the building and went straight to my closet. I put on the blue apron I usually wore to protect my clothes from the dust on boxes and shelves. At the bottom of the cupboard, I kept an old tin cookie box, a treasure chest of sorts. There I stored a menagerie of useless bits of junk that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away: watches and fountain pens damaged beyond repair, old coins, marbles, wartime bullet cases I’d found in Laberinto Park, and fading postcards of Barcelona from the turn of the century. Still floating among all those bits and pieces was the old scrap of newspaper on which Isaac Monfort had written down his daughter Nuria’s address, the night I went to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books to hideThe Shadowof the Wind. I examined it in the dusty light that filtered between shelves and piled-up boxes, then closed the tin box and put the address in my wallet. Having resolved to occupy both mind and hands with the most trivial job that I could find, I walked into the shop.
“Good morning,” I announced.
Fermín was classifying the contents of various parcels that had arrived from a collector in Salamanca, and my father was struggling to decipher a German catalog of Lutheran apocrypha.
“And may God grant us an even better afternoon,” sang Fermín—a veiled reference, no doubt, to my meeting with Bea.
I didn’t grant him the pleasure of an answer. Instead I turned to the inevitable monthly chore of getting the account book up to date, checking receipts and order forms, collections and payments. The sound of the radio orchestrated our serene monotony, treating us to a selection of hit songs by the celebrated crooner Antonio Machín, quite fashionable at the time. Caribbean rhythms tended to get on my father’s nerves, but he tolerated the tropical soundscape because the tunes reminded Fermín of his beloved Cuba. The scene was repeated every week: my father pretended not to hear, and Fermín would abandon himself to a vague wiggling in time to thedanzón, punctuating the commercial breaks with anecdotes about his adventures in Havana. The shop door was ajar, and a sweet aroma of fresh bread and coffee wafted through, lifting our spirits. After a while our neighbor Merceditas, who was on her way back from doing her shopping in Boquería Market, stopped by the shop window and peered around the door.
“Good morning, Mr. Sempere,” she sang.
My father blushed and smiled at her. I had the feeling that he liked Merceditas, but his monkish manners confined him to an impregnable silence. Fermín ogled her out of the corner of his eye, keeping the tempo with his gentle hip swaying and licking his lips as if a Swiss roll had just walked in through the door. Merceditas opened a paper bag and gave us three shiny apples. I imagined she still fancied the idea of working in the bookshop and made little effort to hide her dislike for Fermín, the usurper.
“Aren’t they beautiful? I saw them and said to myself, these are for the Semperes,” she said in an affected tone. “I know you intellectuals like apples, like that Isaac of the gravity thing, you know.”
“Isaac Newton, pumpkin,” Fermín specified.
Merceditas looked angrily at him. “Hello, Mr. Smartmouth. You can be grateful that I’ve brought one for you, too, and not a sour grapefruit, which is what you deserve.”
“But, woman, coming from your nubile hands, this offering, this fleshy fruit of the original sin, ignites my—”
“Fermín, please,” interrupted my father.
“Yes, Mr. Sempere,” said Fermín obediently, beating a retreat.
