The Shadow of the Wind (68 page)

I collapsed then, unable to keep my eyes focused any longer. A white light flooded my pupils and Bea's face receded from me. I closed my eyes and felt her hands on my cheeks and the breath of her voice begging God not to take me, whispering in my ear that she loved me and wouldn't let me go. All I remember is that at that moment a strange peace enveloped me and took away the pain of the slow fire that burned inside me. I saw myself and Bea - an elderly couple - walking hand in hand through the streets of Barcelona, that bewitched city. I saw my father and Nuria Monfort placing white roses on my grave. I saw Fermin crying in Bernarda's arms, and my old friend Tomas, who had fallen silent forever. I saw them the way you see strangers from a train that is moving away too fast. It was then, almost without realizing it, that I remembered my mother's face, a face I had lost so many years before, as if an old cutting had suddenly fallen out of the pages of a book. Her light was all that came with me as I descended.

POSTMORTEM 27 NOVEMBER 1955

The room was white, a shimmer of sheets, gauzy curtains and bright sunshine. From my window I could make out a blue sea. One day someone would try to convince me that you cannot see the sea from the Corachan Clinic; that its rooms are not white or ethereal, and that the sea that November was like a leaden pond, cold and hostile; that it went on snowing every day of that week until all of Barcelona was buried in three feet of snow, and that even Fermin, the eternal optimist, thought I was going to die again.

I had already died before, in the ambulance, in the arms of Bea and Lieutenant Palacios, who ruined his uniform with my blood. The bullet, said the doctors, who spoke about me thinking that I couldn't hear them, had destroyed two ribs, had brushed my heart, had severed an artery, and had come out at full speed through my side, dragging with it everything it had encountered on the way. My heart had stopped beating for sixty-four seconds. They told me that when I returned from my excursion to eternity, I opened my eyes and smiled before losing consciousness again.

I didn't come round until eight days later. By then the newspapers had already published the news of Francisco Javier Fumero's death during a struggle with an armed gang of criminals and the authorities were busy trying to find a street or an alleyway they could rename in memory of the distinguished police inspector. His was the only body found in the old Aldaya mansion. The bodies of Penelope and her son were never discovered.

I awoke at dawn. I remember the light, like liquid gold, pouring over the sheets. It had stopped snowing, and somebody had exchanged the sea outside my window for a white square from which a few swings could be seen, and little else. My father, sunk in a chair by my bed, looked up and gazed at me in silence. I smiled at him, and he burst into tears. Fermin, who was sleeping like a baby in the corridor, and Bea, who was holding his head on her lap, heard my father's loud wailing and came into the room. I remember that Fermin looked white and thin, like the backbone of a fish. They told me that the blood running through my veins was his, that I'd lost all mine, and that my friend had been spending days stuffing himself with meat sandwiches in the hospital's canteen to breed more red blood corpuscles, in case I should need them. Perhaps that explains why I felt wiser and less like Daniel. I remember there was a forest of flowers and that in the afternoon - or perhaps two minutes later, I couldn't say - a whole cast of people filed through the room, from Gustavo Barcelo and his niece Clara to Bernarda and my friend Tomas, who didn't dare look me in the eye and who, when I embraced him, ran off to weep in the street. I vaguely remember Don Federico, who came along with Merceditas and Don Anacleto, the schoolteacher. I particularly remember Bea, who looked at me without saying a word while all the others dissolved into cheers and thanks to the heavens, and I remember my father, who had slept on that chair for seven nights, praying to a God in whom he did not believe.

When the doctors ordered the entire committee to vacate the room and leave me to have a rest I did not want, my father came up to me for a moment and told me he'd brought my pen, the Victor Hugo fountain pen, and a notebook, in case I wanted to write. From the doorway Fermin announced that he'd consulted the whole staff of doctors in the hospital and they had assured him I would not have to do my military service. Bea kissed me on the forehead and took my father with her to get some fresh air, because he hadn't been out of that room for over a week. I was left alone, weighed down by exhaustion, and I gave in to sleep, staring at the pen case on my bedside table.

I was woken up by footsteps at the door. I waited to see my father at the end of the bed, or perhaps Dr Mendoza, who had never taken his eyes off me, convinced that my recovery was the result of a miracle. The visitor went round the bed and sat on my father's chair. My mouth felt dry. Julian Carax put a glass of water to my lips, holding my head while I moistened them. His eyes spoke of farewell, and looking into them was enough for me to understand that he had never discovered the true identity of Penelope. I can't remember his exact words, or the sound of his voice. I do know that he held my hand and I felt as if he were asking me to live for him, telling me I would never see him again. What I have not forgotten is what I told him. I told him to take that pen, which had always been his, and to write again.

When I woke again, Bea was cooling my forehead with a cloth dampened with eau de cologne. Startled, I asked her where Carax was. She looked at me in confusion and told me that Carax had disappeared in the storm eight days before, leaving a trail of blood on the snow, and that everyone had given him up for dead. I said that wasn't true, he'd been right there, with me, only a few seconds ago. Bea smiled at me without saying anything. The nurse who was taking my pulse slowly shook her head and explained that I'd been asleep for six hours, that she'd been sitting at her desk by the door all that time, and that certainly nobody had come into my room.

That night, when I was trying to get to sleep, I turned my head on my pillow and noticed that the pen case was open. The pen was gone.

THE WATERS OF MARCH 1956

Bea and I were married in the church of Santa Ana three months later. Senor Aguilar, who still spoke to me in monosyllables and would go on doing so until the end of time, had given me his daughter's hand in view of the impossibility of obtaining my head on a platter. Bea's disappearance had done away with his anger, and now he seemed to live in a state of perpetual shock, resigned to the fact that his grandson would soon call me Dad and that life, in the shape of a rascal stitched back together after a bullet wound, had robbed him of his girl - a girl who, despite his bifocals, he still saw as the child in her first-communion dress, not a day older.

A week before the ceremony, Bea's father turned up at the bookshop to present me with a gold tiepin that had belonged to his father and to shake hands with me.

'Bea is the only good thing I've ever done in my life,' he said. 'Take care of her for me.'

My father went with him to the door and watched him walk away down Calle Santa Ana, with that sadness that softens men who are aware that they are growing old together.

'He's not a bad person, Daniel,' he said. 'We all love in our own way.'

Dr Mendoza, who doubted my ability to stay on my feet for more than half an hour, had warned me that the bustle of a wedding and all the preparations were not the best medicine for a man who had been on the point of leaving his heart in the operating room.

'Don't worry,' I reassured him. 'They're not letting me do anything.'

I wasn't lying. Fermin Romero de Torres had set himself up as absolute dictator over the ceremony, the banquet, and all related matters. When the parish priest discovered that the bride was arriving pregnant at the altar, he flatly refused to perform the wedding and threatened to summon the spirits of the Holy Inquisition and make them cancel the event. Fermin flew into a rage and dragged him out of the church, shouting to all and sundry that he was unworthy of his habit and of the parish, and swearing that if the priest as much as raised an eyebrow, he was going to stir up such a scandal in the bishopric that at the very least he would be exiled to the Rock of Gibraltar to evangelize the monkeys. A few passers-by clapped, and the flower vendor in the square gave Fermin a white carnation, which he went on to wear in his lapel until the petals turned the same colour as his shirt collar. All ready to go but lacking a priest, Fermin went to San Gabriel's school, where he recruited the services of Father Fernando Ramos, who had not performed a wedding in his life and whose specialty was Latin, trigonometry, and gymnastics, in that order.

'You see, Your Reverence, the bridegroom is very weak, and I can't upset him again. He sees in you a reincarnation of the great glories of the Mother Church, there, up high, with St Thomas, St Augustine, and the Virgin of Fatima. He may not seem so, but the boy is, like me, extremely devout. A mystic. If I have to tell him that you've failed me, we may well have to celebrate a funeral instead of a wedding.'

'If you put it like that.'

From what they told me later - because I don't remember it, and weddings always stay more clearly in the memory of others - before the ceremony Bernarda and Gustavo Bercelo (following Fermin's detailed instructions) softened up the poor priest with muscatel wine to rid him of his stage fright. When the time came for Father Fernando to officiate, wearing a saintly smile and a pleasantly rosy complexion, he chose, in a breach of protocol, to replace the reading of I don't know which Letter to the Corinthians with a love sonnet, the work of a poet called Pablo Neruda. Some of Senor Aguilar's guests identified said poet as a confirmed communist and a Bolshevik, while others looked in the missal for those verses of intense pagan beauty, wondering whether this was one of the first effects of the impending Ecumenical Council.

The night before the wedding, Fermin told me he had organized a bachelor party to which only he and I were invited.

'I don't know Fermin. I don't really like them—'

'Trust me.'

On the night of the crime, I followed Fermin meekly to a foul hovel in Calle Escudillers, where the stench of humanity coexisted with the most potent odour of refried food on the entire Mediterranean coast. A line-up of ladies with their virtue for rent - and a lot of mileage on the clock - greeted us with smiles that would only have excited a student of dentistry.

'We've come for Rociito,' Fermin informed a pimp whose sideburns bore a surprising resemblance to Cape Finisterre.

'Fermin,' I whispered, terrified. 'For heaven's sake . . .'

'Have faith.'

Rociito arrived in all her glory - which I reckoned to amount to around thirteen stone, not counting the feather shawl and a skeleton-tight red viscose dress - and examined me from head to toe.

'Hi, sweetheart. I thought you was older, to tell the God's honest truth.'

'This is not the client,' Fermin clarified.

I then understood the nature of the situation, and my fears subsided. Fermin never forgot a promise, especially if it was I who had made it. The three of us went off in search of a taxi that would take us to the Santa Lucia Hospice. During the journey Fermin, who, in deference to my delicate health and my status as fiance, had offered me the front seat, was sitting in the back with Rociito, taking in her attributes with obvious relish.

'You're a dish fit for a pope, Rociito. That egregious ass of yours is the Revelation According to Botticelli.'

'Oh, Senor Fermin, since you got yourself a girlfriend, you've forgotten me, you rogue.'

'You're too much of a woman for me, Rociito, and now I'm monogamous.'

'Nah! Good ole Rociito will cure that for you with some good rubs of penicillin.'

We reached Calle Moncada after midnight, escorting Rociito's heavenly body, and slipped her into the hospice by the back door - the one used for taking out the deceased through an alleyway that looked and smelled like hell's oesophagus. Once we had entered the shadows of The Tenebrarium, Fermin proceeded to give Rociito his final instructions while I tried to find the old granddad to whom I'd promised a last dance with Eros before Thanatos settled accounts with him.

'Remember, Rociito, the old geezer's probably as deaf as a post, so speak to him in a loud voice, clear and dirty, saucy, the way you know how. But don't get too carried away either. We don't want to give him heart failure and send him off to kingdom come before his time.'

'No worries, pumpkin. I'm a professional.'