The Shadow of the Wind (10 page)

'Listen, I think it's best if I go away and leave you,' he stammered.

My father took him gently by the arm. 'Not at all, my son has told me you're going to have lunch with us.'

The beggar looked at us amazed, terrified.

'Why don't you come up to our home and have a nice hot bath?' said my father. 'Afterwards, if that's all right, we could walk down to Can Sole for lunch.'

Fermin Romero de Torres mumbled something unintelligible. Still smiling, my father led him towards the front door and practically had to drag him up the stairs to the apartment while I closed the shop. By dint of honeyed words and underhand tactics, we managed to remove his rags and get him into the bath. With nothing on, he looked like a wartime photograph and trembled like a plucked chicken. Deep marks showed on his wrists and ankles, and his trunk and back were covered with terrible scars that were painful to see. My father and I exchanged horrified looks but made no comment.

The beggar allowed himself to be washed like a child, frightened and shivering. While I searched for clean clothes, I could hear my father's voice talking to him without pause. I found him a suit that my father no longer wore, an old shirt, and some underwear. From the pile of clothes the beggar had taken off, not even the shoes could be rescued. I chose a pair that my father seldom put on because they were too small for him. Then I wrapped the rags in newspaper, including a pair of trousers that were the colour and consistency of smoked ham, and shoved them in the bin. When I returned to the bathroom, my father was shaving Fermin in the bathtub. Pale and smelling of soap, he looked twenty years younger. From what I could see, the two had already struck up a friendship. It may have been the effects of the bath salts, but Fermin Romero de Torres was on overdrive.

'Believe me, Senor Sempere, if fate hadn't led me into the world of international intrigue, what I would have gone for, what was closest to my heart, was Humanities. As a child I felt the call of poetry and wanted to be a Sophocles or a Virgil, because tragedy and dead languages give me goose pimples. But my father, God rest his soul, was a pigheaded man without much vision. He'd always wanted one of his children to join the Civil Guard, and none of my seven sisters would have qualified for that, despite the facial-hair problem that characterized all the women on my mother's side of the family. On his deathbed my father made me swear that if I didn't succeed in wearing the Civil Guard's three-cornered hat, at least I would become a civil servant and abandon all my literary ambitions. I'm rather old-fashioned, and I believe that a father, however dim-witted, should be obeyed, if you see what I mean. Even so, don't imagine that I set aside all intellectual pursuits during my years of adventure. I've read a great deal, and can recite some of the best fragments of La Divina Commedia from memory.'

'Come on, chief, put these clothes on; your erudition is beyond any doubt,' I said, coming to my father's rescue.

When Fermin Romero de Torres came out of the bath, sparkling clean, his eyes beamed with gratitude. My father wrapped him up in a towel, and the beggar laughed from the sheer pleasure of feeling clean fabric brushing his skin. I helped him into his change of clothes, which proved to be about ten sizes too big. My father removed his belt and handed it to me to put around him.

'You look very dashing,' said my father. 'Doesn't he, Daniel?'

'Anyone might mistake you for a film star.'

'Come off it. I'm not what I used to be. I lost my Herculean muscles in prison, and since then . . .'

'Well, I think you look like Charles Boyer, at least in build,' objected my father. 'Which reminds me: I wanted to propose something to you.'

'For you, Senor Sempere, I would kill if I had to. Just say the name, and I'll get rid of the man before he knows what's hit him.'

'It won't come to that. What I wanted to offer you was a job in the bookshop. It consists of looking for rare books for our clients. It's almost like literary archaeology, and it would be just as important for you to know the classics as basic black-market techniques. I can't pay you much at present, but you can eat at our table and, until we find you a good pension, you can stay here with us, in the apartment, if that's all right with you.'

The beggar looked at both of us, dumbfounded.

'What do you say?' asked my father. 'Will you join the team?'

I thought he was going to say something, but at that moment Fermin Romero de Torres burst into tears.

With his first wages, Fermin Romero de Torres bought himself a glamorous hat and a pair of galoshes and insisted on treating me and my father to a dish of bull's tail, which was served on Mondays in a restaurant a couple of blocks away from the Monumental bull ring. My father had found him a room in a pension in Calle Joaquin Costa, where, thanks to the friendship between our neighbour Merceditas and the landlady, we were able to avoid filling in the guest form required by the police, thus removing Fermin Romero de Torres from under the nose of Inspector Fumero and his henchmen. Sometimes I thought about the terrible scars that covered his body and felt tempted to ask him about them, fearing that perhaps Inspector Fumero might have something to do with them. But there was a look in the eyes of that poor man that made me think it was better not to bring up the subject. Perhaps he would tell us one day, when he felt the time was right. Every morning, at seven on the dot, Fermin waited for us by the shop door with a smile on his face, neatly turned out and ready to work an unbroken twelve-hour shift, or even longer. He had discovered a passion for chocolate and Swiss rolls - which did not lessen his enthusiasm for the great names of Greek tragedy - and this meant he had put on a little weight, which was welcome. He shaved like a young swell, combed his hair back with brilliantine, and was growing a pencil moustache to look fashionable. Thirty days after emerging from our bathtub, the ex-beggar was unrecognizable. But despite his spectacular change, where Fermin Romero de Torres had really left us open-mouthed was on the battlefield. His sleuthlike instincts, which I had attributed to delirious fantasies, proved surgically precise. He could solve the strangest requests in a matter of days, even hours. Was there no title he didn't know, no stratagem for obtaining it at a good price that didn't occur to him? He could talk his way into the private libraries of duchesses on Avenida Pearson and horse-riding dilettantes, always adopting fictitious identities, and would depart with the said books as gifts or bought for a pittance.

The transformation from beggar into model citizen seemed miraculous, like one of those stories that priests from poor parishes love to tell to illustrate the Lord's infinite mercy - stories that invariably sound too good to be true, like the ads for hair-restorer lotions that were plastered over the trams.

Three and a half months after Fermin started work in the bookshop, the telephone in the apartment on Calle Santa Ana woke us up one Sunday at two o'clock in the morning. It was Fermin's landlady. In a voice choked with anxiety, she explained that Senor Romero de Torres had locked himself in his room and was shouting like a madman, banging on the walls and swearing that if anyone dared come in, he would slit his own throat with a broken bottle.

'Don't call the police, please. We'll be right there.'

Rushing out, we made our way towards Calle Joaquin Costa. It was a cold night, with an icy wind and tar-black skies. We hurried past the two ancient hospices - Casa de la Misericordia and Casa de Piedad -ignoring the looks and words that came from dark doorways smelling of charcoal. Soon we reached the corner of Calle Ferlandina. Joaquin Costa lay there, a gap in the rows of blackened beehives, blending into the darkness of the Raval quarter. The landlady's eldest son was waiting for us downstairs.

'Have you called the police?' asked my father.

'Not yet,' answered the son.

We ran upstairs. The pension was on the second floor, the staircase a spiral of grime scarcely visible in the ochre light shed by naked bulbs that hung limply from a bare wire. Dona Encarna, the ladylady, the widow of a Civil Guard corporal, met us at the door wrapped in a light blue dressing gown, crowned with a matching set of curlers.

'Look here, Senor Sempere, this is a decent house. I have more offers than I can take, and I don't need to put up with this kind of thing,' she said as she guided us through a dark corridor that reeked of ammonia and damp.

'I understand,' mumbled my father.

Fermin Romero de Torres's screams could be heard tearing at the walls at the end of the corridor. Several drawn and frightened faces peeped around half-open doors - boarding-house faces fed on watery soup.

'And the rest of you, off to sleep, for fuck's sake! This isn't a variety show at the Molino!' cried Dona Encarna furiously.

We stopped in front of the door to Fermin's room. My father rapped gently with his knuckles.

'Fermin? Are you there? It's Sempere.'

The howl that pierced the walls chilled me. Even Dona Encarna lost her matronly composure and put her hands on her heart, hidden under the many folds of her ample chest.

My father called again. 'Fermin? Come on, open the door.'

Fermin howled again, throwing himself against the walls, yelling obscenities at the top of his voice. My father sighed.

'Dona Encarna, do you have a key to this room?'

'Well, of course.'

'Give it to me, please.'

Dona Encarna hesitated. The other guests were peering into the corridor again, white with terror. Those shouts must have been heard from the army headquarters.

'And you, Daniel, run and find Dr Baro. He lives very close, in number twelve Riera Alta.'

'Listen, wouldn't it be better to call a priest? He sounds to me as if he's possessed,' suggested Dona Encarna.

'No. A doctor will do fine. Come on, Daniel. Run. And you, please give me that key.'

Dr Baro was a sleepless bachelor who spent his nights reading Zola and looking at 3-D pictures of young ladies in racy underwear to relieve his boredom. He was a regular customer at my father's bookshop, and, though he described himself as a second-rate quack, he had a better eye for reaching the right diagnosis than most of the smart doctors with elegant practices in Calle Muntaner. Many of his patients were old whores from the neighbourhood or poor wretches who could barely afford to pay him, but he would see them all the same. I heard him say repeatedly that the world was God's chamber pot and that his sole remaining wish was for Barcelona's football team to win the league, once and for all, so that he could die in peace. He opened the door in his dressing gown, smelling of wine and flaunting an unlit cigarette.

'Daniel?'

'My father sent me. It's an emergency.'

When we returned to the pension, we found Dona Encarna sobbing with fear and the other guests turned to the colour of old candle wax. My father was holding Fermin Romero de Torres in his arms in a corner of the room. Fermin was naked, crying and shaking. The room was a wreck, the walls stained with something that could have been either blood or excrement - I couldn't tell. Dr Baro quickly took in the situation and gestured to my father to lay Fermin on the bed. They were helped by Dona Encarna's son, a would-be boxer. Fermin moaned and thrashed about as if some vermin were devouring his insides.

'But for goodness' sake, what's the matter with this poor man? What's wrong with him?' groaned Dona Encarna from the door, shaking her head.

The doctor took his pulse, examined his pupils with a torch and, without saying a word, proceeded to prepare an injection from a bottle he carried in his bag.

'Hold him down. This will make him sleep. Daniel, help us.'

Between the four of us, we managed to immobilize Fermin, who jerked violently when he felt the stab of the needle in his thigh. His muscles tensed like steel cables, but after a few seconds his eyes clouded over and his body went limp.

'Be careful, that man's not very strong, and anything could kill him,' said Dona Encarna.

'Don't worry. He's only asleep,' said the doctor as he examined the scars that covered Fermin's starved body.

I saw him shake his head slowly. 'Bastards,' he mumbled.