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The heat from the blaze revived me. Bea gazed silently at the flames, bewitched.
“Are you going to tell me the secret?” I finally asked.
Bea sighed and sat on one of the chairs. I remained glued to the fire, watching the steam rise from my clothes like a fleeing soul.
“What you call the Aldaya mansion has in fact got its own name. The house is called ‘The Angel of Mist,’ but hardly anyone knows this. My father’s firm has been trying to sell this property for fifteen years without any luck. The other day, while you were telling me the story of Julián Carax and Penélope Aldaya, I didn’t think of it. Later, at home that night, I put two and two together and remembered I’d occasionally heard my father talk about the Aldaya family, and about this house in particular. Yesterday I went over to my father’s office, and his secretary, Casasús, told me the story of the house. Did you know that in fact this wasn’t their official residence but one of their summer houses?”
I shook my head.
“The Aldayas’ main house was a mansion that was knocked down in 1925 to erect a
block of apartments, on the site where Calle Bruch and Calle Mallorca cross today. The building had been designed by Puig i Cadafalch and commissioned by Penélope and Jorge’s grandfather Simón Aldaya, in 1896, when that area was no more than fields and irrigation channels. The eldest son of the patriarch Simón, Don Ricardo Aldaya, bought this summer residence at the turn of the century from a rather bizarre character—at a ridiculous price, because the house had a bad name. Casasús told me it was cursed and that even the sellers didn’t dare show it and would dodge the issue with any old pretext….”
·28·
THAT AFTERNOON, AS I WARMED MYSELF BY THE FIRE, BEA TOLD ME the story of how The Angel of Mist had come into the possession of the Aldaya family. It had all the makings of a lurid melodrama that could well have come from the pen of Julián Carax. The house was built in 1899 by the architectural partnership of Naulí, Martorell i Bergadà, for a prosperous and extravagant Catalan financier called Salvador Jausà, who would live in it for only a year. The tycoon, an orphan since the age of six and of humble origins, had amassed most of his fortune in Cuba and Puerto Rico. People said that he was one of the many shady figures behind the plot that led to the fall of Cuba and the war with the United States, in which the last of the colonies were lost. He brought back rather more than a fortune from the New World: with him were an American wife—a fragile damsel from Philadelphia high society who didn’t speak a word of Spanish—and a mulatto maid who had been in his service since his first years in Cuba and who traveled with a caged macaque in harlequin dress and seven trunks of luggage. At first they moved into a few rooms in the Hotel Colón, while they waited to acquire a residence that would suit the tastes and desires of Jausà.
Nobody doubted in the least that the maid—an ebony beauty endowed with eyes and a figure that, according to the society pages, could make heart rates soar—was in fact his lover, the guide to innumerable illicit pleasures.
It was assumed, moreover, that she was a witch and a sorceress. Her name was Marisela, or that’s what Jausà called her. Her presence and her air of mystery soon became the favorite talking point at gatherings that wellborn ladies held to sample sponge fingers and kill time and the autumn blues. Unconfirmed rumors circulated at these tea parties that the woman, like a vision from hell, fornicated on top of the male, that is to say, rode him like a mare in heat, which violated at least five of six recognized mortal sins. In consequence, more than one person wrote to the bishopric asking for a special blessing and protection for the untainted, immaculate souls of all respectable families in Barcelona. And to crown it all, Jausà had the audacity to go out for a ride in his carriage on Sundays, in the middle of the morning, with his wife and with Marisela, parading this Babylonian spectacle of depravity in front of the eyes of any virtuous young man who might happen to be strolling along Paseo de Gracia on his way to the eleven o’clock mass. Even the newspapers noted the haughty look of the strapping woman, who gazed at the Barcelona public “as a queen of the jungle might gaze at a collection of pygmies.”
Around that time the fever of Catalan modernism was raging in Barcelona, but Jausà made it quite clear to the architects he had engaged to build his new home that he wanted something different. In his book “different” was the highest praise. Jausà had spent years strolling past the row of neo-Gothic extravagances that the great tycoons of the American industrial age had erected on Fifth Avenue’s Mansion Row in New York City. Nostalgic for his American days of glory, the financier refused to listen to any argument in favor of building in accordance with the fashion of the moment, just as he had refused to buy a box in the Liceo, which was de rigueur, labeling the opera house a Babel for the deaf, a beehive of undesirables. He wanted his home to be far from the city, in the still relatively isolated area of Avenida del Tibidabo. He wanted to gaze at Barcelona from a distance, he said. The only company he sought was a garden filled with statues of angels, which, according to his instructions (conveyed by Marisela), must be placed on each of the points of a six-point star—no more, no less. Resolved to carry out his plans, and with his coffers bursting with money with which to satisfy his every whim, Salvador Jausà sent his architects to New York for three months to study those exhilarating structures built to house Commodore Vanderbilt, the Astors, Andrew Carnegie, and the rest of the fifty golden families. He instructed them to assimilate the style and techniques of the Stanford, White & McKim firm and strongly warned them not to bother to knock on his door with a project that would please what he called “pork butchers and button manufacturers.”
A year later the three architects turned up at his sumptuous rooms at the Hotel Colón to submit their proposal. Jausà, in the company of the Cuban Marisela, listened to them in silence and, at the end of the presentation, asked them what it would cost to carry out the work in six months. Frederic Martorell, the leading member of the architectural partnership, cleared his throat and, out of decorum, wrote down a figure on a piece of paper and handed it to the tycoon. The latter, without even blinking, wrote out a check for the total sum and dismissed the delegation with a vague gesture. Seven months later, in July 1900, Jausà, his wife, and the maid Marisela moved into the house. By August the two women would be dead and the police would find a dazed Salvador Jausà naked and handcuffed to the armchair in his study. The report made by the sergeant in charge of the case remarked that all the walls in the house were bloodstained, that the statues of the angels surrounding the garden had been mutilated—their faces painted like tribal masks—and that traces of black candles had been found on the pedestals. The inquiry lasted eight months. By then Jausà had fallen silent.
The police investigations concluded that by all indications Jausà and his wife had been poisoned by some herbal extract that had been administered to them by Marisela, in whose rooms various bottles of the lethal substance had been found. For some reason Jausà had survived the poison, although the aftermath had been terrible, for he gradually lost his power of speech and his hearing, part of his body was paralyzed, and he suffered pains so horrendous they condemned him to live the rest of his days in constant agony. Mrs. Jausà had been discovered in her bedroom, lying on her bed with nothing on but her jewels, one of which was a diamond bracelet. The police believed that once Marisela had committed the crime, she had slashed her own wrists with a knife and had wandered about the house spreading her blood on the walls of the corridors and rooms until she collapsed in her attic room. The motive, according to the police, had been jealousy. It seems that the tycoon’s wife was pregnant at the time of her death. Marisela, it was said, had sketched a skeleton on the woman’s naked belly with hot red wax. The case, like Salvador Jausà’s lips, was sealed forever a few months later. Barcelona’s high society observed that nothing like this had ever happened in the history of the city, and that the likes of rich colonials and other rabble arriving from across the pond was ruining the moral fiber of the country. Behind closed doors many were delighted that the eccentricities of Salvador Jausà had come to an end. As usual, those people were mistaken: they had just begun.
The police and Jausà’s lawyers were responsible for closing the file on the case, but the nabob Jausà wanted to continue. It was at this point that he met Don Ricardo Aldaya—by then a rich industrialist with a colorful reputation for his womanizing and his leonine temper—who offered to buy the property off him with the intention of knocking it down and reselling for a healthy profit: the value of land in that area was soaring. Jausà did not agree to sell, but he invited Ricardo Aldaya to visit the house and observe what he called a scientific and spiritual experiment. No one had entered the property since the investigation had ended. What Aldaya witnessed in the house left him speechless. Jausà had completely lost his mind. The dark shadow of Marisela’s blood still covered the walls. Jausà had summoned an inventor, a pioneer in the technological novelty of the moment, the cinematograph. His name was Fructuós Gelabert, and he’d agreed to Jausà’s demands in exchange for funds with which to build a film studio
in the Vallés region, for he felt sure that, during the twentieth century, moving pictures would supplant organized religion. Apparently Jausà was convinced that the spirit of Marisela had remained in the house. He asserted that he could feel her presence, her voice, her smell, and even her touch in the dark. When they heard these stories, Jausà’s servants immediately fled in search of less stressful employment, in neighboring Sarriá, where there were plenty more mansions and families incapable of filling up a bucket of water or darning their own socks.
Jausà, left on his own, sank further into his obsession with his invisible specters. He decided that the answer to his woes lay in making the invisible visible. He had already had a chance to see some of the results of the invention of cinematography in New York, and he shared the opinion of the deceased Marisela that the camera swallowed up souls. Following this line of reasoning, he commissioned Fructuós Gelabert to shoot yards and yards of film in the corridors of The Angel of Mist, in search of signs and visions from the other world. Despite the cinematographer’s noble efforts, the scientific pursuit of Jausà’s phantoms proved futile.
Everything changed when Gelabert announced that he’d received a new type of sensitive film material straight from the Thomas Edison factory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The new stock made it possible to shoot in extremely low light conditions—below candlelight—something unheard of at the time. Then, in circumstances that were never made clear, one of the assistants in Gelabert’s laboratory had accidentally poured some sparkling Xarelo wine from the Penedés region into the developing tray. As a result of the chemical reaction, strange shapes began to appear on the exposed film. This was the film Jausà wanted to show Don Ricardo Aldaya the night he invited him to his ghostly abode at number 32, Avenida del Tibidabo.
When Aldaya heard this, he supposed that Gelabert was afraid of losing Jausà’s funding and had resorted to such an elaborate ruse to keep his patron’s interest alive. Whatever the truth, Jausà had no doubt about the reliability of the results. Moreover, where others saw shapes and shadows, he saw revenants. He swore he could see the silhouette of Marisela materializing under a shroud, a shadow that then mutated into a wolf and walked upright. Alas, all Ricardo Aldaya could see during the screening were large stains. He also maintained that both the film itself and the technician who operated the projector stank of wine and other entirely earthly spirits. Nonetheless, being a sharp businessman, the industrialist sensed that he could turn the situation to his advantage. A mad millionaire who was alone and obsessed with capturing ectoplasms on film constituted an ideal victim. So Aldaya agreed with him and encouraged him to continue with his enterprise. For weeks Gelabert and his men shot miles of film that they then developed in different tanks, using chemical solutions of developing liquids diluted with exotic liqueurs, red wine blessed in the Ninot parish church, and all kinds of cava from the Tarragona vineyards. Between screenings, Jausà transferred powers, signed authorizations, and conferred the control of his financial reserves to Ricardo Aldaya.
Jausà vanished one November night of that year during a storm. Nobody knew what had become of him. Apparently he was exposing one of Gelabert’s special rolls of film himself when he met with an accident. Don Ricardo Aldaya asked Gelabert to recover the roll. After viewing it in private, Aldaya opted to set fire to it personally. Then, with the help of a very generous check, he suggested to the technician that he should forget all about the incident. By then Aldaya was already the owner of most of the properties of the vanished Jausà. There were those who said that the deceased Marisela had returned to take Jausà with her to hell. Others pointed out that a beggar, who greatly resembled the deceased millionaire, was seen for a few months afterward on the grounds of Ciudadela Park, until a black carriage with drawn curtains ran over him in the middle of the day, without bothering to stop. The stories spread: the dark legend of the rambling mansion, like the invasion of Cuban music in the city’s dance halls, could not be contained.
A few months later, Don Ricardo Aldaya moved his family to the house in Avenida del Tibidabo, where, two weeks after their arrival, the couple’s youngest child, Penélope, was born. To celebrate the occasion, Aldaya renamed the house “Villa Penélope.” The new name, however, never stuck. The house had its own character and proved immune to the influence of its new owners. The recent arrivals complained about noises and banging on the walls at night, sudden putrid smells and freezing drafts that seemed to roam through the house like wandering sentinels. The mansion was a compendium of mysteries. It had a double basement, with a sort of crypt, as yet unused, on the lower level. On the higher floor, a chapel was dominated by a large polychrome figure of Christ crucified, which the servants thought looked disturbingly like Rasputin—a very popular character in the press of the time. The books in the library were constantly appearing rearranged or turned back to front. There was a room on the third floor, a bedroom that was never used because of the unaccountable damp stains that showed up on the walls and seemed to form blurry faces, where fresh flowers would wilt in just a few minutes and one could always hear the drone of flies, although it was impossible to see them.
The cooks swore that certain items, such as sugar, disappeared from the larder as if by magic and that the milk took on a red hue at every new moon. Occasionally they found dead birds or small rodents at the door of some of the rooms. Other times things went missing, especially jewels and buttons from clothes kept in cupboards and drawers. Sometimes the missing objects would mysteriously reappear, months later, in remote corners of the house or buried in the garden. But usually they were never seen again. Don Ricardo was of the opinion that these incidents were but pranks and nonsense. In his view a week’s fasting would have curbed his family’s fears. What he didn’t regard so philosophically were the thefts of his dear wife’s jewelry. More than five maids were sacked when different items from the lady’s jewelry box disappeared, though they all cried their hearts out, swearing they were innocent. Those in the know tended to think there was no mystery involved: the explanation lay in Don Ricardo’s regrettable habit of slipping into the bedrooms of the younger maids at midnight for playful extramarital purposes. His reputation in this field was almost as notorious as his fortune, and there were those who said that at the rate his exploits were taking place, the illegitimate children he left behind would organize their own union.
The fact was that not only jewels disappeared. In time the family lost its joie de vivre entirely. The Aldaya family was never happy in the house that had been acquired through Don Ricardo’s dark arts of negotiation. Mrs. Aldaya pleaded constantly with her husband to sell the property and move them to a home in the town or even return to the residence that Puig i Cadafalch had built for Grandfather Simón, the patriarch of the clan. Ricardo Aldaya flatly refused. Since he spent most of his time traveling or in the family’s factories, he saw no problem with the house. On one occasion little Jorge disappeared for eight hours inside the mansion. His mother and the servants looked for him desperately, but without success. When he reappeared, pale and dazed, he said he’d been in the library the whole time, in the company of a mysterious black woman who had been showing him old photographs and had told him that all the females in the family would die in that house to atone for the sins of the males. The mysterious lady even revealed to little Jorge the date on which his mother would die: April 12, 1921. Needless to say, the so-called black lady was never found, but years later, on April 12, 1921, at first light, Mrs. Aldaya would be discovered lifeless on her bed. All her jewels had disappeared. When the pond in the courtyard was drained, one of the servant boys found them in the mud at the bottom, next to a doll that had belonged to her daughter, Penélope.
A week later Don Ricardo Aldaya decided to get rid of the house. By then his financial empire was already in its death throes, and there were those who insinuated that it was all due to that accursed house, which brought misfortune to whoever occupied it. Others, the more cautious ones, simply asserted that Aldaya had never understood the changing trends of the market and that all he had accomplished during his lifetime was to ruin the robust business created by the patriarch Simón. Ricardo Aldaya announced that he was leaving Barcelona and moving with his family to Argentina, where his textile industries were allegedly doing splendidly. Many believed he was fleeing from failure and shame.
In 1922 The Angel of Mist was put up for sale at a ridiculously low price. At first there was a strong interest in buying it, as much for its notoriety as for the growing prestige of the neighborhood, but none of the potential buyers made an offer after visiting the house. In 1923 the mansion was closed. The deed was transferred to a real-estate company high up on the long list of Aldaya’s creditors, so that it could arrange for its sale or demolition. The house was on the market for years, but the firm was unable to find a buyer. The said company, Botell i Llofré S. L., went bankrupt in 1939 when its two partners were sent to prison on unknown charges. After the unexplained fatal accident that befell both men in the San Viçens jail in 1940, the company was taken over by a financial group, among whose shareholders were three fascist generals and a Swiss banker. This company’s executive director turned out to be a certain Mr. Aguilar, father of Tomás and Bea. Despite all their efforts, none of Mr. Aguilar’s salesmen were able to place the house, not even by offering it far beneath its already low asking price. Nobody had been back on the property for over ten years.
“Until today,” said Bea quietly, withdrawing into herself for a moment. “I wanted to show you this place, you see? I wanted to give you a surprise. I told myself I had to bring you here, because this was part of your story, of the story of Carax and Penélope. I borrowed the key from my father’s office. Nobody knows we’re here. It’s our secret. I wanted to share it with you. And I was asking myself whether you’d come.”
“You knew I would.”
She smiled as she nodded. “I believe that nothing happens by chance. Deep down, things have their secret plan, even though we don’t understand it. Like you finding that novel by Julián Carax in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books or the fact that you and I are here now, in this house that belonged to the Aldayas. It’s all part of something we cannot comprehend, something that owns us.”
While she spoke, my hand had slipped awkwardly down to Bea’s ankle and was sliding toward her knee. She watched it as if she were watching an insect climbing up her leg. I asked myself what Fermín would have done at that moment. Where was his wisdom when I most needed it?
“Tomás says you’ve never had a girlfriend,” said Bea, as if that explained me.
