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IT WAS ALMOST MIDMORNING WHEN WE REACHED PASEO DE LA BONANOVA, wrapped in our own thoughts. I had little doubt that Fermín’s were largely devoted to the sinister appearance of Inspector Fumero in the story. I glanced over at him and noticed that he seemed consumed by anxiety. A veil of dark-red clouds bled across the sky, punctured by splinters of light the color of fallen leaves.
“If we don’t hurry, we’re going to get caught in a downpour,” I said.
“Not yet. Those clouds look like nighttime, like a bruise. They’re the sort that wait.”
“Don’t tell me you’re also a cloud expert, Fermín.”
“Living in the streets has unexpected educational side effects. Listen, just thinking about this Fumero business has stirred my juices. Would you object to a stop at the bar in Plaza de Sarriá to polish off two well-endowed omelette sandwiches, plus trimmings?”
We set off toward the square, where a knot of old folks hovered around the local pigeon community, their lives reduced to a ritual of spreading crumbs and waiting. We found ourselves a table near the entrance, and Fermín proceeded to wolf down the two sandwiches, his and mine, a pint of beer, two chocolate bars, and a triple coffee heavily laced with rum and sugar. For dessert he had a Sugus candy. A man sitting at the next table glanced at Fermín over his newspaper, probably thinking the same thing I was.
“I don’t see how you fit it all in, Fermín.”
“In my family we’ve always had a speedy metabolism. My sister Jesusa, may God rest her soul, was capable of eating a six-egg omelette with blood sausage in the middle of the afternoon and then tucking in like a Cossack at night. Poor thing. She was just like me, you know? Same face and same classic figure, rather on the lean side. A doctor from Cáceres once told my mother that the Romero de Torres family was the missing link between man and the hammerhead, for ninety percent of our organism is cartilage, mainly concentrated in the nose and the outer ear. Jesusa was often mistaken for me in the village, because she never grew breasts and began to shave before me. She died of consumption when she was twenty-two, a virgin to the end and secretly in love with a sanctimonious priest who, when he met her on the street, always said, ‘Hello, Fermín, you’re
becoming quite a dashing young man.’ Life’s ironies.”
“Do you miss them?”
“The family?”
Fermín shrugged his shoulders, caught in a nostalgic smile.
“What do I know? Few things are more deceptive than memories. Look at the priest…. And you? Do you miss your mother?”
I looked down. “A lot.”
“Do you know what I remember most about mine?” Fermín asked. “Her smell. She always smelled clean, like a loaf of sweet bread. It didn’t matter if she’d spent the day working in the fields or was wearing the same old rags she’d worn all week. She always smelled of the best things in this world. Mind you, she was pretty uncouth. She would swear like a trooper, but she smelled like a fairy-tale princess. Or at least that’s what I thought. What about you? What is it you remember most about your mother, Daniel?”
I hesitated for a moment, clawing at the words that my lips couldn’t shape.
“Nothing. For years now I haven’t been able to remember my mother. I can’t remember what her face was like, or her voice or her smell. I lost them on the day I discovered Julián Carax, and they haven’t come back.” Fermín watched me cautiously, considering his reply. “Don’t you have a photograph of her?”
“I’ve never wanted to look at them,” I said.
“Why not?”
I’d never told anyone this, not even my father or Tomás. “Because I’m afraid. I’m afraid of looking for a photograph of my mother and discovering that she’s a stranger. You probably think that’s nonsense.”
Fermín shook his head. “And is that why you believe that if you manage to unravel the mystery of Julián Carax and rescue him from oblivion, the face of your mother will come back to you?”
I looked at him. There was no irony or judgment in his expression. For a moment Fermín Romero de Torres seemed to me the wisest and most lucid man in the universe.
“Perhaps,” I said without thinking.
At noon on the dot, we got on a bus that would take us back downtown. We sat in the front, just behind the driver, a circumstance Fermín used as an excuse to hold a discussion with the man about the many advances, both technical and cosmetic, that he had noticed in public transportation since the last time he’d used it, circa 1940—especially with regard to signposting, as was borne out by the notice that readSPITTING AND FOUL LANGUAGE ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. Fermín looked briefly at the sign and decided to acknowledge it by energetically clearing his throat of phlegm. This granted us a sharp look of disapproval from of a trio of saintly ladies who traveled like a commando unit in the back of the bus, each one armed with a missal.
“You savage!” murmured the bigot on the eastern flank, who bore a remarkable likeness to the official portrait of Il Duce, but with curls.
“There they go,” said Fermín. “Three saints has my Spain. Saint Holier-than-thou, Saint Holyshit, and Saint Holycow. Between us all, we’ve turned this country into a joke.”
“You can say that again,” agreed the driver. “We were better off with the Republic. To say nothing of the traffic. It stinks.”
A man sitting in the back of the bus laughed, enjoying the exchange of views. I recognized him as the same fellow who had sat next to us in the bar. His expression seemed to suggest that he was on Fermín’s side and that he wanted to see him get merciless with the diehards. We exchanged a quick glance. He gave me a friendly smile and returned to his newspaper. When we got to Calle Ganduxer, I noticed that Fermín had curled up in a ball under his raincoat and was having a nap with his mouth open, an expression of bliss and innocence on his face.
The bus was gliding through the wealthy domains of Paseo de San Gervasio when Fermín suddenly woke up. “I’ve been dreaming about Father Fernando,” he told me. “Except that in my dream he was dressed as the center forward for Real Madrid and he had the league cup next to him, shining like the Holy Grail.”
“I wonder why?” I asked.
