The Shadow of the Wind (35 page)

Almost trembling, I faced her impenetrable eyes.

'Why are you telling me this?'

'Because I want you to tell me whether I should send it or not. That's why I've asked you to come here today, Daniel.'

I examined the envelope that she twirled in her hand like a playing card.

'Look at me,' she said.

I raised my eyes and met her gaze. I didn't know what to answer. Bea lowered her eyes and walked away towards the end of the gallery. A door led to the marble balustrade that opened onto the inner courtyard of the house. I watched her silhouette fade into the rain. I went after her and stopped her, snatching the envelope from her hands. The rain beat down on her face, sweeping away the tears and the anger. I led her back into the mansion to the heat of the blaze. She avoided my eyes. I took the envelope and threw it into the flames. We watched the letter breaking up among the hot coals and the pages evaporating in spirals of smoke, one by one. Bea knelt down next to me, with tears in her eyes. I embraced her and felt her breath on my throat.

'Don't let me fall, Daniel,' she murmured.

The wisest man I ever knew, Fermin Romero de Torres, once told me that there was no experience in life comparable to the first time you undress a woman. For all this wisdom, though he had not lied to me, he hadn't told me the complete truth either. He hadn't told me anything about that strange trembling of the hands that turned every button, every zip, into a superhuman challenge. Nor had he told me about that bewitchment of pale, tremulous skin, that first brush of the lips, or about the mirage that seemed to shimmer from every pore of the skin. He didn't tell me any of that because he knew that the miracle happened only once, and when it did, it spoke in a language of secrets that, were they disclosed, would vanish again forever. A thousand times I've wanted to recover that first afternoon with Bea in the rambling house on Avenida del Tibidabo, when the sound of the rain washed the whole world away with it. A thousand times I've wished to return and lose myself in a memory from which I can rescue only one image stolen from the heat of the flames: Bea, naked and glistening with rain, lying by the fire, with open eyes that have followed me since that day. I leaned over her and passed the tips of my fingers over her belly. Bea lowered her eyelids and smiled, confident and strong.

'Do what you like to me,' she whispered.

She was seventeen, her entire life shining before her.

29

Darkness enveloped us in shadow as we left the mansion. The storm was receding, now barely an echo of cold rain. I wanted to return the key to Bea, but her eyes told me she wanted me to be the one to keep it. We strolled down towards Paseo de San Gervasio hoping to find a taxi or a bus. We walked in silence, holding hands and hardly looking at one another.

'I won't be able to see you again until Tuesday,' said Bea in a tremulous voice, as if she suddenly doubted my desire to see her again.

'I'll be waiting for you here,' I said.

I took for granted that all my meetings with Bea would take place between the walls of that rambling old house, that the rest of the city did not belong to us. It even seemed to me that the firmness of her touch decreased as we moved away, that her strength and warmth diminished with every step we took. When we reached the avenue, we realized that the streets were almost deserted.

'We won't find anything here,' said Bea. 'We'd better go down along Balmes.'

We started off briskly down Calle Balmes, walking under the trees to shelter from the drizzle. It seemed to me that Bea was quickening her pace at every step, almost dragging me along. For a moment I thought that if I let go of her hand, Bea would start to run. My imagination, still intoxicated by her touch and her taste, burned with a desire to corner her on a bench, to seek her lips and recite a predictable string of nonsense that would have made anyone within hearing burst out laughing, anyone but me. But Bea was withdrawing into herself again, fading a world away from me.

'What's the matter?' I murmured.

She gave me a broken smile, full of fear and loneliness. I then saw myself through her eyes: just an innocent boy who thought he had conquered the world in an hour but didn't realize he could lose it again in an instant. I kept on walking, without expecting an answer. Waking up at last. Soon we heard the rumble of traffic, and the air seemed to ignite with the heat from the streetlamps and traffic lights. They made me think of invisible walls.

'We'd better separate here,' said Bea, letting go of my hand.

The lights from a taxi rank could be seen on the corner, a procession of glow-worms.

'As you wish.'

Bea leaned over and brushed my cheek with her lips. Her hair still smelled of candle wax.

'Bea,' I began, almost inaudibly. 'I love you. . . .'

She shook her head but said nothing, sealing my lips with her hand as if my words were wounding her.

'Tuesday at six, all right?' she asked.

I nodded again. I saw her leave and disappear into a taxi, almost a stranger. One of the drivers, who had followed the exchange as if he were an umpire, observed me with curiosity. 'What do you say? Shall we head for home, chief?'

I got into the taxi without thinking. The taxi driver's eyes examined me through the mirror. I lost sight of the car that was taking Bea away, two dots of light sinking into a well of darkness.

I didn't manage to get to sleep until dawn cast a hundred tones of dismal grey on my bedroom window. Fermin woke me up, throwing tiny pebbles at my window from the church square. I put on the first thing I could find and ran down to open the door for him. Fermin was full of the insufferable enthusiasm of the early bird. We pushed up the shop grilles and hung up the open sign.

'Look at those rings under your eyes, Daniel. They're as big as a building site. May we assume the owl got the pussycat to go out to sea with him?'

I went to the back room, put on my blue apron and handed Fermin his, or rather threw it at him angrily. Fermin caught it in mid-flight, with a sly smile.

'The owl drowned, period. Happy?' I snapped.

'Intriguing metaphor. Have you been dusting off your Verlaine, young man?'

‘I stick to prose on Monday mornings. What do you want me to tell you?'

'I'll leave that up to you. The number of estocadas or the laps of honour.'

'I'm not in the mood, Fermin.'

'O youth, flower of fools! Well, don't get irritated with me. I have fresh news concerning our investigation on your friend Julian Carax.'

'I'm all ears.'

He gave me one of his cloak-and-dagger looks, one eyebrow raised.

'Well, it turns out that yesterday, after leaving Bernarda back home with her virtue intact but a nice couple of well-placed bruises on her backside, I was assailed by a fit of insomnia - due to the evening's erotic arousals - which gave me the pretext to walk down to one of the information centres of Barcelona's underworld, i.e., the tavern of Eliodoro Salfuman, aka "Coldprick", situated in a seedy but rather colourful establishment in Calle Sant Jeroni, pride of the Raval quarter.'

'The abridged version, Fermin, for goodness' sake.'

'Coming. The fact is that once I was there, ingratiating myself with some of the usual crowd, old chums from troubled times of yore, I began to make inquiries about this Miquel Moliner, the husband of your Mata Hari Nuria Monfort, and a supposed inmate at the local penitential.'

'Supposed?'

'With a capital S. There are no slips at all 'twixt cup and lip in this case, if you see what I mean. I know from experience that when it comes to the census of the prison population, my informants in Coldprick's tabernacle are much more accurate than the pencil pushers in the law courts. I can guarantee, Daniel, my friend, that nobody has heard mention of the name Miquel Moliner as an inmate, visitor, or any other living soul in the prisons of Barcelona for at least ten years.'

'Perhaps he's serving in some other prison.'

'Yes. Alcatraz, Sing Sing, or the Bastille. Daniel, that woman lied to you.'

'I suppose she did.'

'Don't suppose; accept it.'

'So what now? Miquel Moliner is a dead end.'

'Or this Nuria is very crafty.'

'What are you suggesting?'

'At the moment we must explore other avenues. It wouldn't be a bad idea to call on the good nanny in the story the priest foisted on us yesterday morning.'

'Don't tell me you think that the governess has vanished too.'

'No, but I do think it's time we stopped fussing about and knocking on doors as if we were begging for alms. In this line of business, you have to go in through the back door. Are you with me?'

'You know that I worship the ground you walk on.'

'Well, then, start dusting your altar-boy costume. This afternoon, as soon as we've closed the shop, we're going to make a charitable visit to the old lady in the Hospice of Santa Lucia. And now tell me, how did it go yesterday with the young filly? Don't be secretive. If you hold back, may you sprout virulent pimples.'

I sighed in defeat and made my confession, down to the last detail. At the end of my narrative, after listing what I was sure were just the existential anxieties of a moronic schoolboy, Fermin surprised me with sudden heartfelt hug.

'You're in love,' he mumbled, full of emotion, patting me on the back. 'Poor kid.'

That afternoon we left the bookshop precisely at closing time, a move that earned us a steely look from my father, who was beginning to suspect that we were involved in some shady business, with all this coming and going. Fermin mumbled something incoherent about a few errands that needed doing, and we quickly disappeared. I told myself that sooner or later I'd have to reveal at least part of all this mess to my father; which part, exactly, was a different question.

On our way, with his usual flair for tales, Fermin briefed me on where we were heading. The Santa Lucia hospice was an institution of dubious reputation housed within the ruins of an ancient palace on Calle Moncada. The legend surrounding the place made it sound like a cross between purgatory and a morgue, with sanitary conditions worse than either. The story was, to say the very least, peculiar. Since the eleventh century, the palace had been home to, among other things, various well-to-do families, a prison, a salon for courtesans, a library of forbidden manuscripts, a barracks, a sculptor's workshop, a sanatorium for plague sufferers, and a convent. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was practically crumbling to bits, the palace had been turned into a museum exhibiting circus freaks and other atrocities by a bombastic impresario who called himself Laszlo de Vicherny, Duke of Parma and private alchemist to the House of Bourbon. His real name turned out to be Baltasar Deulofeu i Carallot, the bastard son of a salted-pork entrepreneur and a fallen debutante, who was mostly known for his escapades as a professional gigolo and con artist.

The man took pride in owning Spain's largest collection of human foetuses in different stages of deformity, preserved in jars of embalming fluid, and somewhat less pride in his even larger collection of warrants issued by some of Europe's and America's finest law-enforcement agencies. Among other attractions, 'The Tenebrarium' (as Deulofeu had renamed the palace), offered seances, necromancy, fights (with cocks, rats, dogs, big strapping women, imbeciles, or some combination of the above), as well as betting, a brothel that specialized in cripples and freaks, a casino, a legal and financial consultancy, a workshop for love potions, regional folklore and puppet shows, and parades of exotic dancers. At Christmas a Nativity play was staged, sparing no expense, and featuring the troupe from the museum and the entire collection of prostitutes. Its fame reached the far ends of the province.

The Tenebrarium was a roaring success for fifteen years, until it was discovered that Deulofeu had seduced the wife, the daughter, and the mother-in-law of the military governor of the province within a single week. The blackest infamy descended on the place and its owner. Before Deulofeu was able to flee the city and don another of his multiple identities, a band of masked thugs seized him in the backstreets of the Santa Maria quarter and proceeded to hang him and set fire to him in the Ciudadela Park, leaving his body to be devoured by the wild dogs that roamed the area. After two decades of neglect, during which time nobody bothered to remove the collection of horrors belonging to the ill-fated Laszlo, The Tenebrarium was transformed into a charitable institution under the care of an order of nuns.