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“He comes because he’s very fond of you, Jacinta. Because he remembers how well you looked after him and how you fed him when he was a child. He’s told us all about that. Do you remember, Jacinta? Do you remember those days, when you went to collect Jorge from school, do you remember Fernando and Julián?”
“Julián…”
She dragged out that whispered word, but her smile betrayed her.
“Do you remember Julián Carax, Jacinta?”
“I remember the day Penélope told me she was going to marry him….”
Fermín and I looked at each other in astonishment.
“Marry? When was that, Jacinta?”
“The day she saw him for the first time. She was thirteen and didn’t know who he was or what he was called.”
“Then how did she know she was going to marry him?”
“Because she’d seen him. In dreams.”
As a child, María Jacinta Coronado was convinced that the world ended on the outskirts of Toledo and that beyond the town limits there was nothing but darkness and oceans of fire. Jacinta had got that idea from a dream she had during a fever that had almost killed her when she was four years old. The dreams began with that mysterious fever, which some blamed on the sting of a huge red scorpion that appeared in the house one day and was never seen again, and others on the evil designs of a mad nun who crept into houses at night to pois
on children and who, years later, was to be garroted reciting the Lord’s Prayer backward with her eyes popping out of their sockets, while a red cloud spread over the town and discharged a storm of dead cockroaches. In her dreams Jacinta perceived the past and the future and, at times, saw revealed to her the secrets and mysteries of the old streets of Toledo. One of the characters she would see repeatedly in her dreams was someone called Zacarías, an angel who was always dressed in black and who was accompanied by a dark cat with yellow eyes whose breath smelled of sulfur. Zacarías knew everything: he had predicted the day and the hour of her uncle Benancio’s death—the hawker of ointments and holy water. He had revealed the place where her mother, a sanctimonious churchgoer, hid a bundle of letters from an ardent medical student with few financial resources but a solid knowledge of anatomy, and in whose bedroom in the alleyway of Santa María she had discovered the doors of paradise in advance. Zacarías had announced to Jacinta that there was something evil fixed in her stomach, a dead spirit that wished her ill, and that she would know the love of only one man: an empty, selfish love that would break her soul in two. He had augured that in her lifetime she would behold the death of everything she most loved, and that before she reached heaven, she would visit hell. On the day of her first period, Zacarías and his sulfuric cat disappeared from her dreams, but years later Jacinta would remember the visits of the black angel with tears in her eyes, because all his prophecies had come true.
So when the doctors diagnosed that she would never be able to have children, Jacinta wasn’t surprised. Nor was she surprised, although she almost died of grief, when her husband of three years announced that he was going to leave her because she was like a wasteland that produced no fruit, because she wasn’t a woman. In the absence of Zacarías (whom she took for an emissary of the heavens, for, whether or not he was dressed in black, he was still a luminous angel and the best-looking man she had ever seen or dreamed of ), Jacinta spoke to God on her own, hiding in corners, without seeing Him or expecting Him to bother with a reply, because there was a lot of pain in the world and her troubles were, in the end, only small matters. All her monologues with God dealt with the same theme: she wanted only one thing in life, to be a mother, to be a woman.
One day, while she was praying in the cathedral, a man, whom she recognized as Zacarías, came up to her. He was dressed as he always was and held his malicious cat on his lap. He did not look a single day older and still sported magnificent nails, like the nails of a duchess, long and pointed. The angel admitted that he was there because God didn’t plan to answer her prayers. But he told her not to worry because, one way or another, he would send her a child. He leaned over her, murmured the word “Tibidabo,” and kissed her very tenderly on the lips. At the touch of those fine, honeyed lips, Jacinta had a vision: she would have a daughter without further knowledge of a man (which, judging from the three years of bedroom experience with her husband, who insisted on doing his thing while covering her head with a pillow and mumbling “Don’t look, you slut,” was a relief ). This girl would come to her in a very faraway city, trapped between a moon of mountains and a sea of light, a city filled with buildings that could exist only in dreams. Later Jacinta was unable to tell whether Zacarías’s visit had been another of her dreams or whether the angel had really come to her in Toledo Cathedral, with his cat and his scarlet manicured nails. What she didn’t doubt for a moment was the truth of those predictions. That very afternoon she consulted with the parish deacon, who was a well-read man and had seen the world (it was said that he had gone as far as Andorra and that he spoke a little Basque). The deacon, who claimed not to know the angel Zacarías among the winged legions of the heavens, listened attentively to Jacinta’s vision. After much consideration of the matter, and going by the description of some sort of cathedral that, in the words of the clairvoyant, sounded like a large hair comb made of melting chocolate, the wise man said, “Jacinta, what you’ve seen is Barcelona, the great enchantress, and the Expiatory Temple of the Sagrada Familia….” Two weeks later, armed with a bundle of clothes, a missal, and her first smile in five years, Jacinta was on her way to Barcelona, convinced that everything the angel had described to her would come true.
Months of great hardships passed before Jacinta would find a permanent job in one of the stores of Aldaya and Sons, near the pavilions of the old 1888 Universal Exhibition in Ciudadela Park. The Barcelona of her dreams had changed into a sinister, hostile city, full of closed palaces, full of factories that poured forth a foggy breath, poisoning the skin with coal and sulfur. Jacinta knew from the start that this city was a woman, cruel and vain; she learned to fear her and never look her in the eye. She lived alone in a pensión in the Ribera quarter, where her pay barely afforded her a miserable room with no windows, whose only source of light came from the candles she stole from the cathedral. She kept these alight all night to scare away the rats that had already gnawed at the ears and fingers of a six-month-old baby, the child of Ramoneta—a prostitute who rented the room next door and the only friend Jacinta had managed to make in Barcelona in eleven months. That winter it rained almost every day, and the rain was blackened by soot. Soon Jacinta began to fear that Zacarías had deceived her, that she had come to that terrible city to die of cold, of misery and oblivion.
Jacinta was prepared to survive. She went to the store every day before dawn and did not come out until well after nightfall. There Don Ricardo Aldaya happened to notice her looking after the daughter of one of the foremen, who had fallen ill with consumption. When he saw the dedication and the tenderness that the young girl exuded, he decided to take her home with him to look after his wife, who was pregnant with what would be his firstborn. Jacinta’s prayers had been answered. That night Jacinta saw Zacarías again in her dreams. The angel was no longer dressed in black. He was naked, and his skin was covered in scales. He didn’t have his cat with him anymore, but a white snake coiled around his torso. His hair had grown down to his waist, and his smile, the honeyed smile she had kissed in Toledo Cathedral, was now lined with triangular, serrated teeth, like those she’d seen in some of the deepsea fish that thrashed their tails in the fish market. Years later the young woman would reveal this vision to an eighteen-year-old Julián Carax, recalling how the day she left the pensión in the Ribera quarter and moved to the Aldaya mansion, she was told that her friend Ramoneta had been stabbed to death in the doorway the night before and that Ramoneta’s baby had died of cold in her arms. When they heard the news, the guests at the pensión came to blows, shouting and scratching over the meager belongings of the dead woman. The only thing they left was what had been Ramoneta’s greatest treasure: a book. Jacinta recognized it, because often, at night, Ramoneta had asked her to read her one or two pages. She herself had never learned to read.
Four months later Jorge Aldaya was born, and although Jacinta was to offer him all the affection that the mother never knew how to give him, or never wished to—for she was an ethereal lady, Jacinta thought, who always seemed trapped in her own reflection in the mirror—the governess realized that this was not the child Zacarías had promised her. During those years Jacinta gave up her youth and became a different woman. The other Jacinta had been left behind in the pensión of the Ribera quarter, as dead as Ramoneta. Now she lived in the shadow of the Aldayas’ luxuries, far from that dark city that she had come to hate so much and into which she did not venture, not even on her monthly day off. She learned to live through others, through a family that sat on top of a fortune the size of which she could scarcely conceive. She lived in the expectation of that child, who would be female, like the city, and to whom she would give all the love with which God had poisoned her soul. Sometimes Jacinta asked herself whether that dreamy peace that filled her days, that absence of consciousness, was what some people called happiness, and she wanted to believe that God, in His infinite silence, had, in His way, answered her prayers.
Penélope Aldaya was born in the spring of 1902. By then Don Ricardo
Aldaya had already bought the house on Avenida del Tibidabo, that rambling mansion that Jacinta’s fellow servants were convinced lay under the influence of some powerful spell, but which Jacinta did not fear, because she knew that what others took to be magic was nothing more than a presence that only she could capture in dreams: the shadow of Zacarías, who hardly resembled the man she remembered and who now only manifested himself as a wolf walking on his two hind legs.
Penélope was a fragile child, pale and slender. Jacinta saw her grow like a flower in winter. For years she watched over her every night, personally prepared every one of her meals, sewed her clothes, was by her side when she went through her many illnesses, when she said her first words, when she became a woman. Mrs. Aldaya was one more figure in the scenery, a prop that came on- and offstage according to the dictates of decorum. Before going to bed, she would come and say good night to her daughter and tell her she loved her more than anything in the world, that she was the most important thing in the universe to her. Jacinta never told Penélope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words. Secretly Jacinta despised Mrs. Aldaya, that vain, empty creature who grew old in the corridors of the mansion, weighed down by the jewels with which her husband—who for years had set anchor in foreign ports—kept her quiet. She hated her because, of all women, God had chosen her to give birth to Penélope while her own womb, the womb of the true mother, remained barren. In time, as if the words of her husband had been prophetic, Jacinta even lost her womanly shape. She grew thin and austere in appearance, she wore the look of tired skin and tired bone. Her breasts withered until they were but scraps of skin, her hips were like the hips of a boy, and her flesh, hard and angular, didn’t even catch the eye of Don Ricardo Aldaya, who only needed to sense a hint of liveliness to set him off in a frenzy—as all the maids in the house and in the houses of his close friends knew only too well. Better this way, thought Jacinta. She had no time for nonsense.
All her time was for Penélope. She read to her, she accompanied her everywhere, she bathed her, dressed her, undressed her, combed her hair, took her out for walks, put her to bed and woke her up. But above all she spoke to her. Everyone took her for a batty nurse, a spinster with nothing in her life other than her job in the house, but nobody knew the truth: Jacinta was not only Penélope’s mother, she was her best friend. From the moment the girl began to speak and articulate her thoughts, which was much sooner than Jacinta remembered in any other child, they shared their secrets and their lives.
The passing of time only strengthened this union. When Penélope reached adolescence, they were already inseparable friends. Jacinta saw Penélope blossom into a woman whose beauty and radiance were evident to more eyes than just hers. When that mysterious boy called Julián came to the house, Jacinta noticed that from the very first moment a current flowed between him and Penélope. They were joined by a bond, similar to the one that joined her to Penélope, but also different. More intense. Dangerous. At first she thought she would come to hate the boy, but soon she realized that she did not hate Julián Carax and would never be able to. As Penélope fell under Julián’s spell, she, too, allowed herself to be dragged into it and in time desired only what Penélope desired. Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.
Many months of wistful looks and longings would pass before Julián Carax and Penélope were able to be alone. Their lives were ruled by chance. They met in corridors, they looked at each other from opposite ends of the table, they brushed silently against each other, they felt each other’s absence. They exchanged their first words in the library of the house on Avenida del Tibidabo one stormy afternoon when “Villa Penélope” was suddenly filled with the dim light of candles—only a few seconds stolen from the darkness in which Julián thought he saw in the girl’s eyes the certainty that they both felt the same, that the same secret was devouring them. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody but Jacinta, who saw with growing anxiety the game of furtive glances that Penélope and Julián were playing in the shadow of the Aldayas. She feared for them.
By then Julián had begun to have sleepless nights, writing stories for Penélope from midnight to dawn. Then, after going up to the house on Avenida del Tibidabo with any old excuse, he would look for the moment when he could slip into Jacinta’s room and give her his pages so that she, in turn, could give them to the girl. Sometimes Jacinta would hand him a note that Penélope had written for him, and he would spend days rereading it. That game went on for months. While time brought them no good fortune, Julián did whatever was necessary to be close to Penélope. Jacinta helped him, to see Penélope happy, to keep that light glowing. Julián, for his part, felt that the casual innocence of the beginning was now fading and it was necessary to start giving way. That is how he began to lie to Don Ricardo about his plans for the future, to fake an enthusiasm for a career in banking and finance, to feign an affection and an attachment for Jorge Aldaya that he did not feel, in order to justify his almost constant presence in the house on Avenida del Tibidabo; to say only what he knew others wanted to hear him say, to read their looks and their hopes, to put aside honesty and sincerity, to feel that he was selling his soul away in pieces, and to fear that if he ever did come to deserve Penélope, there would be nothing left of the Julián who saw her the first time. Sometimes Julián would wake up at dawn, burning with anger, longing to tell the world his real feelings, to face Don Ricardo Aldaya and tell him he had no interest whatsoever in his fortune, his opportunities for the future, or his company; that he only wanted his daughter, Penélope, and was thinking of taking her as far away as possible from that empty, shrouded world in which her father had imprisoned her. The light of day dispelled his courage.
There were times when Julián opened his heart to Jacinta, who was beginning to love the boy more than she would have wished. She would often leave Penélope for a moment and, with the pretext of going to collect Jorge from school, would see Julián and deliver Penélope’s messages to him. That is how she met Fernando, who, many years later, would be her only remaining friend while she awaited death in the hell of Santa Lucía—the hell that had been prophesied by the angel Zacarías. Sometimes the nurse would mischievously take Penélope with her to the school and facilitate a brief encounter between the two youngsters, watching a love grow between them such as she had never known, which had been denied to her. It was also about this time that Jacinta noticed the somber and disturbing presence of that quiet boy whom everyone called Francisco Javier, the son of the caretaker at San Gabriel’s. She would catch him spying on them, reading their gestures from afar and devouring Penélope with his eyes.
Jacinta kept a photograph of Julián and Penélope taken by Recasens, the official portrait photographer of the Aldayas, by the door of the hat shop in Ronda de San Antonio. It was an innocent image, taken at midday in the presence of Don Ricardo and of Sophie Carax. Jacinta always carried it with her. One day, while she was waiting for Jorge outside the school, the governess absentmindedly left her bag by one of the fountains, and, when she went back for it, found young Fumero prowling around the area, looking at her nervously. That night she looked for the photograph but couldn’t find it and was certain that the boy had stolen it. On another occasion, a few weeks later, Francisco Javier Fumero went up to Jacinta and asked her whether she could give Penélope something from him. When Jacinta asked what this thing was, the boy pulled out a piece of cloth in which he had wrapped what looked like a figure carved in pinewood. Jacinta recognized Penélope in the figure and felt a shiver. Before she was able to say anything, the boy left. On her way back to the house on Avenida del Tibidabo, Jacinta threw the figure out of the car window, as if it were a piece of stinking carrion. More than once Jacinta was to wake up at dawn, covered in sweat, plagued by nightmares in which that boy with a troubled look threw himself on Penélope with the cold and indifferent brutality of some strange insect.
Some afternoons, when Jacinta went to fetch Jorge and he was late, the governess would talk to Julián. He, too, was beginning to love that severe-looking woman. Soon, when a problem cast a shadow over his life, she and Miquel Moliner were always the first, and sometimes the last, to know. Once Julián told Jacinta he had seen his mother and Don Ricardo Aldaya talking in the fountain courtyard while they waited for the pupils to come out. Don Ricardo seemed to be enjoying Sophie’s company, and Julián felt a little uneasy, because he was aware of the magnate’s reputation as a Don Juan and of his voracious appetite for the delights of the female sex—with no distinction of class or condition—to which only his saintly wife seemed immune. “I was telling your mother how much you like your new school,” Don Ricardo told him. When he said good-bye to them, Don Ricardo gave them a wink and walked off laughing boisterously. His mother was quiet during the journey home, clearly offended by the comments Don Ricardo Aldaya had made to her.
Sophie was suspicious of Julián’s growing bond with the Aldayas and the way he had abandoned his old neighborhood friends and his family. She was not alone. Whereas his mother showed her displeasure in sadness and silence, the hatter displayed bitterness and spite. His initial enthusiasm about the widening of his clientele to include the flower of Barcelona society had evaporated. He hardly ever saw his son now and soon had to employ Quimet, a local boy and one of Julián’s former friends, as a helper and apprentice in the shop. Antoni Fortuny was a man who felt he could talk openly only about hats. He locked his deeper feelings in the prison of his heart for months on end, until they became hopelessly embittered. He grew ever more bad-tempered and irritable. He found fault with everything—from the efforts of poor Quimet to learn the trade to Sophie’s attempts to make light of Julián’s seeming abandonment of them.
“Your son thinks he’s someone because those rich guys treat him like a performing monkey,” he’d say in a depressed tone, fu
ll of resentment.
