AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“He’ll get over it, Daniel. You’ll see. These things are common between friends.”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
·24·
FERMÍN AND I MET ON SUNDAY AT SEVEN-THIRTY IN THE MORNING at the Canaletas Café. Fermín treated me to a coffee and brioches whose texture, even with butter spread on them, bore some resemblance to pumice stone. We were served by a waiter who sported a fascist badge on his lapel and a pencil mustache. He didn’t stop humming to himself, and when we asked him the reason for his excellent mood, he explained that he’d become a father the day before. We congratulated him, and he insisted on giving us each a cigar to smoke during the day in honor of his firstborn. We said we would. Fermín kept looking at him out of the corner of his eye, frowning, and I suspected he was plotting something.
Over breakfast Fermín kicked off the day’s investigations with a general outline of the mystery.
“It all begins with the sincere friendship between two boys, Julián Carax and Jorge Aldaya, classmates since early childhood, like Don Tomás and yourself. For years all is well. Inseparable friends with a whole life before them, the works. And yet at some point a conflict arises that ruins this friendship. To paraphrase some drawing-room dramatists, the conflict bears a woman’s name: Penélope. Very Homeric. Do you follow me?”
The only thing that came to my mind was the last sentence spoken by Tomás the previous evening in the bookshop: “Don’t hurt my sister.” I felt nauseous.
“In 1919, Julián Carax sets off for Paris, Odysseus-fashion,” Fermín continued. “The letter, signed by Penélope, which he never receives, establishes that by then the young woman has been incarcerated in her own house, a prisoner of her family for reasons that are unclear, and that the friendship between Aldaya and Carax has ended. Moreover, according to Penélope, her brother, Jorge, has sworn that if he ever sees his old friend Julián again, he’ll kill him. Grim words to mark the end of a friendship. One doesn’t have to be Pasteur to deduce that the conflict is a direct consequence of the relationship between Penélope and Carax.”
A cold sweat covered my forehead. I could feel the coffee and the few mouthfuls of brioche I’d swallowed rising up my throat.
“All the same, we must assume that Carax never gets to know what happened to Penélope, because the letter doesn’t reach him. He vanishes from our sight into the mists of Paris, where he will lead a ghostly existence between his job as a pianist in a variety club and his disastrous career as a remarkably unsuccessful novelist. These years in Paris are a puzzle. All that remains of them today is a forgotten literary work that has virtually disappeared. We know that at some point he decides to marry a mysterious rich lady who is twice his age. The nature of such a marriage, if we are to go by what the witnesses say, seems more of an act of charity or friendship on behalf of an ailing lady than a love match. Whichever way you look at it, this patron of the arts, fearing for the financial future of her protégé, decides to leave him her fortune and bid farewell to this world with a roll in the hay to further her noble cause. Parisians are like that.”
“Perhaps it was a genuine love,” I suggested, in a tiny voice.
“Hey, Daniel, are you all right? You’re looking very pale, and you’re perspiring terribly.”
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“As I was saying. Love is a lot like pork: there?
??s loin steak and there’s bologna. Each has its own place and function. Carax had declared that he didn’t feel worthy of any love, and indeed, as I far as we know, no romances were recorded during his years in Paris. Of course, working in a bordello, perhaps his basic instinctive urges were satisfied by fraternizing with the employees of the firm, as if it were a perk of the job, so to speak. But this is pure speculation. Let us return to the moment when the marriage between Carax and his protectress is announced. That is when Jorge Aldaya reappears on the map of this murky business. We know he makes contact with Carax’s publisher in Barcelona to find out the whereabouts of the novelist. Shortly after, on the morning of his wedding day, Julián Carax fights a duel with an unknown person in Père Lachaise cemetery, and disappears. The wedding never takes place. From then on, everything becomes confused.”
Fermín allowed for a dramatic pause, giving me his conspiratorial look. “Supposedly Carax crosses the border and, with yet another show of his proverbial sense of timing, returns to Barcelona in 1936 at the very outbreak of the Civil War. His activities and whereabouts in Barcelona during these weeks are hazy. We suppose he stays in the city for about a month and that during this time he doesn’t contact any of his acquaintances. Neither his father nor his friend Nuria Monfort. Then he is found dead in the street, struck down by a bullet. It is not long before a sinister character makes his appearance on the scene. He calls himself Laín Coubert—a name he borrows from the last novel by Julián Carax—who, to cap it all, is none other than the Prince of Darkness. The supposed Lucifer states that he is prepared to obliterate what little is left of Carax and destroy his books forever. To round off the melodrama, he appears as a faceless man, disfigured by fire. A rogue from a gothic operetta in whom, just to confuse matters more, Nuria Monfort believes she recognizes the voice of Jorge Aldaya.”
“Let me remind you that Nuria Monfort lied to me,” I said.
“True. But even if Nuria Monfort lied to you, she might have done it more by omission and perhaps to disassociate herself from the facts. There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite. Listen, are you sure you’re all right? Your face is the color of goat cheese.”
I shook my head and dashed to the toilet.
I threw up my breakfast, my dinner, and a good amount of the anger I was carrying with me. I washed my face with freezing water from the sink and looked at my reflection in the blurry mirror on which someone had scrawled SHITHEAD FASCISTS with a wax crayon. When I got back to the table, I realized that Fermín was at the bar, paying the bill and discussing football with the waiter who had served us.
“Better?” he asked.
I nodded.
“That was a drop in your blood pressure,” said Fermín. “Here. Have a Sugus candy, they cure everything.”
On the way out of the café, Fermín insisted that we should take a taxi as far as San Gabriel’s School and leave the subway for another day, arguing that the morning was as bright as a political mural and that tunnels were for rats.
“A taxi up to Sarriá will cost a fortune,” I protested.
“The ride’s on the Cretins’ Savings Bank,” Fermín put in quickly. “The proud patriot back there gave me the wrong change, and we’re in business. And you’re not up to traveling underground.”
Equipped with ill-gotten funds, we positioned ourselves on a corner at the foot of Rambla de Cataluña and waited for a cab. We had to let a few go by, because Fermín stated that, since he so rarely traveled by car, he wanted to get into a Studebaker at the very least. It took us a quarter of an hour to find a vehicle to his liking, which Fermín hailed by waving his arms about like a windmill. Fermín insisted on traveling in the front seat, which gave him the chance to get involved in a discussion with the driver about Joseph Stalin, who was the taxi driver’s idol and distant spiritual guide.
“There have been three great figures in this century: La Pasionaria, bullfighter extraordinaire Manolete, and Joseph Stalin,” the driver proclaimed, getting ready to unload upon us a life of the saintly comrade.
I was riding comfortably in the backseat, paying little attention to the tedious speech, with the window open and enjoying the fresh air. Delighted to be driving around in a Studebaker, Fermín encouraged the cabdriver’s chatter, occasionally punctuating his emotive biography of the Soviet leader with matters of doubtful historic interest.
“I’ve heard he’s been suffering badly from prostate trouble ever since he swallowed the pip of a loquat, and now he can only pee if someone hums ‘The Internationale’ for him,” he put in.
