“You’re going to need a new wardrobe, Julián. There are a lot of morons out there who only go by appearances…. I’ll tell Jacinta to take care of that; you don’t have to worry about it. And it’s almost best if you don’t mention it to your father, in case it annoys him. Look, here comes Jorge. Jorge, I want you to meet a wonderful kid who is going to be your new classmate. Julián Fortu—”
“Julián Carax,” he corrected.
“Julián Carax,” repeated a satisfied Aldaya. “I like the sound of it. This is my son Jorge.”
Julián held out his hand, and Jorge Aldaya shook it. His touch was lukewarm, unenthusiastic, and his face had a pale, chiseled look that came from having grown up in that doll-like world. His clothes and shoes seemed to Julián like something out of a novel. His eyes gave off an air of bravado and arrogance, of disdain and sugary politeness. Julián smiled at him openly, reading insecurity, fear, and emptiness under that shell of vanity and complacency.
“Is it true you haven’t read any of these books?”
“Books are boring.”
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you,” answered Julián.
Don Ricardo Aldaya laughed again. “Well, I’ll leave you two alone so you can get to know each other. Julián, you’ll see that although he seems spoiled and conceited, underneath that mask Jorge isn’t as stupid as he looks. He has something of his father in him.”
Aldaya’s words seemed to fall like knives on the boy, though he didn’t let his smile fade at all. Julián regretted his answer and felt sorry for him.
“You must be the hatter’s son,” said Jorge, without malice. “My father talks about you a lot these days.”
“It’s the novelty. I hope you don’t hold that against me. Under this mask of a know-it-all meddler, I’m not such an idiot as I seem.”
Jorge smiled at him. Julián thought he smiled the way people smile who have no friends, with gratitude.
“Come, I’ll show you the rest of the house.”
They left the library behind them and went off toward the main door and the gardens. When they crossed the hall with the staircase, Julián looked up and glimpsed a figure ascending the stairs with a hand on the banister. He felt as if he were caught up in a vision. The girl must have been about twelve or thirteen and was escorted by a mature woman, small and rosy-cheeked, who had the air of a governess. The girl wore a blue satin dress. Her hair was the color of almonds, and the skin on her shoulders and slim neck seemed translucent. She stopped at the top of the stairs and turned around briefly. For a second their eyes met, and she offered him the ghost of a smile. Then the governess put her arms around the girl’s shoulders and led her to the entrance of a corridor into which they both disappeared. Julián looked down and he fixed his eyes on Jorge’s again.
“That’s Penélope, my sister. You’ll meet her later. She’s a bit nutty. She spends all day reading. Come on, I want to show you the chapel in the basement. The cooks say it’s haunted.”
Julián followed the boy meekly, but he cared little about anything else. Now he understood. He had dreamed about her countless times, on that same staircase, with that same blue dress and that same movement of her ash-gray eyes, without knowing who she was or why she smiled at him. When he went out into the garden, he let himself be led by Jorge as far as the coach houses and the tennis courts that stretched out beyond. Only then did he turn around to look back and saw her in her window on the second floor. He could barely make out her shape, but he knew she was smiling at him and that somehow she, too, had recognized him.
That fleeting glimpse of Penélope Aldaya at the top of the staircase remained with him during his first weeks at San Gabriel’s School. His new world was not all to his liking: the pupils of San Gabriel’s behaved like haughty, arrogant princes, while their teachers were like docile and learned servants. The first friend Julián made there, apart from Jorge Aldaya, was a boy called Fernando Ramos, the son of one of the cooks at the school, who would never have imagined he would end up wearing a cassock and teaching in the same classrooms in which he himself had grown up. Fernando, whom the rest nicknamed “Kitchen Sweep,” and whom they treated like a servant, was alert and intelligent but had hardly any friends among the schoolboys. His only companion was an eccentric boy called Miquel Moliner, who in time would become the best friend Julián ever made at the school. Miquel Moliner, who had too much brain and too little patience, enjoyed teasing his teachers by questioning all their statements, using clever arguments in which he displayed both ingenuity and a poisonous bite. The rest feared his sharp tongue and considered him a member of some other species. In a way this was not entirely mistaken, for despite his bohemian traits and the unaristocratic tone he affected, Miquel was the son of a businessman who had become obscenely rich through the manufacture of arms.
“Carax, isn’t it? I’m told your father makes hats,” he said when Fernando Ramos introduced them.
“Julián for my friends. I’m told yours makes cannons.”
“He just sells them, actually. The only thing he knows how to make is money. My friends, among whom I count only Nietzsche and Fernando here, call me Miquel.”
Miquel Moliner was a sad boy. He suffered from an unhealthy obsession with death and all matters funereal, a field to whose consideration he dedicated much of his time and talent. His mother had died three years earlier as a result of a strange domestic accident, which some foolish doctor had dared describe as suicide. It was Miquel who had discovered the shining body under the water of the well, in the summer mansion the family had in Argentona. When they pulled her out with ropes, they found that the pockets of the dead woman’s coat were filled with stones. There was also a letter written in German, the mother’s native tongue, but Mr. Moliner, who had never bothered to learn the language, burned it that same afternoon without allowing anyone to read it. Miquel Moliner saw death everywhere—in fallen leaves, in birds that had dropped out of their nests, in old people, and in the rain, which swept everything away. He was exceptionally talented at drawing and would often become distracted for hours with charcoal sketches in which a lady, whom Julián took to be his mother, always appeared against a background of mist and deserted beaches.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Miquel?”
“I’ll never grow up,” he would answer enigmatically.
His main interest, apart from sketching and contradicting every living soul, was the works of a mysterious Austrian doctor who, in years to come, would become famous: Sigmund Freud. Thanks to his deceased mother, Miquel Moliner read and wrote perfect German, and he owned a number of books by the Viennese doctor. His favorite field was the interpretation of dreams. He was in the habit of asking people what they had dreamed, and he would then make a diagnosis. He always said he was going to die young and that he didn’t mind. Julián believed that, by thinking so much about death, he had ended up finding more sense in it than in life.
“The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián,” he would say. “Except my dreams.”
Besides Fernando Ramos, Moliner, and Jorge Aldaya, Julián also befriended a shy and rather unsociable boy called Javier, the only son of the caretakers of San Gabriel’s, who lived in a modest house stationed at the entrance to the school gardens. Javier, who, like Fernando, was considered by the rest of the boys to be no more than an irritating lackey, prowled about alone in the gardens and courtyards of the compound. From so much wandering around the school, he ended up knowing every nook and cranny of the building, from the tunnels in the basements to the passages up to the towers, and all kinds of hiding places that nobody remembered anymore. They were his secret world and his refuge. He always carried with him a penknife he had removed from one of his father’s drawers, and he liked to carve wooden figures with it, which he kept in the school dovecote. His father, Ramón, the caretaker, was a veteran from the Cuban War, where he had lost a hand and (it was rumored maliciously) his right testicle, as a result of a pellet shot from Theodore Roosevelt himself in the raid of the Bay of Cochinos. Convinced that idleness was the mother of all evils, “Ramón Oneball” (as the schoolboys nicknamed him) set his son the task of gathering up in a sack all fallen leaves from the pine grove and the courtyard around the fountains. Ramón was a good man, rather coarse and fatally given to choosing bad company, most notably his wife. Ramón Oneball had married a strapping, dim-witted woman with delusions of grandeur and the looks of a scullion, who was wont to dress skimpily in front of her son and the other boys, a habit that gave rise to no end of mirth and ridicule. Her Christian name was María Craponcia, but she called herself Yvonne, because she thought it more elegant. Yvonne used to question her son about the possibilities of social advancement that his friends would provide, for she believed that he was making connections with the elite of Barcelona society. She would ask him about the fortune of this or that one, imagining herself dressed in the best silks and bein
g received for tea in the great salons of good society.
Javier tried to spend as little time as possible in the house and was grateful for the jobs his father gave him, however hard they might be. Any excuse was good in order to be alone, to escape into his secret world and carve his wooden figures. When the schoolboys saw him from afar, some would laugh or throw stones at him. One day Julián felt so sorry for him when he saw how a stone had gashed his forehead and knocked him onto a pile of rubble that he decided to go to his aid and offer him his friendship. At first Javier thought that Julián was coming to finish him off while the others fell about laughing.
“My name is Julián,” he said, stretching out his hand. “My friends and I were about to go and play chess in the pine grove, and I wondered whether you’d like to join us.”
“I don’t know how to play chess.”