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“There’s a hotel two blocks away. Clean, affordable, and respectable. I took the liberty of making a reservation.”
I thought about it but was afraid of offending him.
“I’ll be fine here, so long as it’s not a bother for you, or for Kurtz.”
Kurtz and Julián exchanged glances. Julián shook his head, and the cat imitated him. I hadn’t noticed how alike they looked. Julián insisted on letting me have his bedroom. He hardly slept, he explained, and would set himself up in the sitting room on a folding bed, lent to him by his neighbor, Monsieur Darcieu—an old conjuror who read young ladies’ palms in exchange for a kiss. That first night I slept right through, exhausted after the journey. I woke up at dawn and discovered that Julián had gone out. Kurtz was asleep on top of his master’s typewriter. He snored like a mastiff. I went up to the desk and saw the manuscript of the new novel that I had come to collect.
THE CATHEDRAL THIEF
On the first page, as in all Julián’s other novels, was the handwritten dedication:
For P
I was tempted to start reading. I was about to pick up the second page when I noticed that Kurtz was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. I shook my head the way I’d seen Julián do. The cat, in turn, shook his head, and I put the pages back in their place. After a while Julián appeared, bringing with him freshly baked bread, a thermos of coffee, and some cheese. We had breakfast by the balcony. Julián spoke incessantly but avoided my eyes. In the light of dawn, he seemed to me like an aged child. He had shaved and put on what I imagined must be his only decent outfit, a cream-colored cotton suit that looked worn but elegant. I listened to him as he talked about the mysteries of Notre-Dame and about a ghostly barge that was said to cleave the waters of the Seine at night, gathering up the souls of desperate lovers who had ended their lives by jumping into the frozen waters. I listened to a thousand and one magic tales he invented as he went along just to keep me from asking him any questions. I watched him silently, nodding, searching in him for the man who had written the books I knew almost by heart from so much rereading, the boy whom Miquel Moliner had described to me so often.
“How many days are you going to be in Paris?” he asked.
My business with Gallimard would take me about two or three days, I said. My first meeting was that afternoon. I told him I’d thought of taking a couple of days off to get to know the city before returning to Barcelona.
“Paris requires more than two days,” said Julián. “It won’t listen to reason.”
“I don’t have any more time, Julián. Mr. Cabestany is a generous employer, but everything has a limit.”
“Cabestany is a pirate, but even he knows that one can’t see Paris in two days, or in two months, or even in two years.”
“I can’t spend two years in Paris, Julián.”
For a long while, he looked at me without speaking, and then he smiled. “Why not? Is someone waiting for you?”
The dealings with Gallimard and my courtesy calls to various other publishers with whom Cabestany had agreements took up three whole days, just as I had foreseen. Julián had assigned me a guide and protector, a young boy called Hervé who was barely thirteen and knew the city intimately. Hervé would accompany me from door to door, making sure I knew which cafés to stop at for a bite, which streets to avoid, which sights to take in. He would wait for me for hours at the door of the publishers’ offices without losing his smile or accepting any tips. Hervé spoke an amusing broken Spanish, which he mixed with overtones of Italian and Portuguese.
“Signore Carax, he already pay, with tuoda generosidade for meus serviçios….”
From what I gathered, Hervé was the orphan of one of the ladies at Irene Marceau’s establishment, in whose attic he lived. Julián had taught him to read, write, and play the piano. On Sundays he would take him to the theater or a concert. Hervé idolized Julián and seemed prepared to do anything for him, even guide me to the end of the world if necessary. On our third day together, he asked me whether I was the girlfriend of Signore Carax. I said I wasn’t, that I was only a friend on a visit. He seemed disappointed.
Julián spent most nights awake, sitting at his desk with Kurtz on his lap, going through pages or simply staring at the cathedral towers silhouetted in the distance. One night, when I couldn’t sleep either because of the noise of the rain pattering on the roof, I went into the sitting room. We looked at each other without saying a word, and Julián offered me a cigarette. For a long time we stared silently at the rain. Later, when the rain stopped, I asked him who P was.
“Penélope,” he answered.
I asked him to talk to me about her, about those fourteen years of exile in Paris. In a whisper, in the half-light, Julián told me Penélope was the only woman he had ever loved.
ONE NIGHT, IN THE WINTER OF 1921, IRENE MARCEAU FOUND JULIÁN wandering in the Paris streets, unable to remember his name and coughing up blood. All he had on him were a few coins and some folded sheets of paper with writing on them. Irene read them and thought she’d come across some famous author who had drunk too much, and that perhaps a generous publisher would reward her when he recovered consciousness. That, at least, was her version, but Julián knew she’d saved him out of compassion. He spent six months recovering in an attic room of Irene’s brothel. The doctors warned Irene that if that man poisoned himself again, they would not be held responsible for him. He had ruined his stomach and his liver and was going to have to spend the rest of his days eating only milk, cottage cheese, and fresh bread. When Julián was able to speak again, Irene asked him who he was.
“Nobody,” answered Julián.
“Well, nobody lives at my expense. What can you do?”
Julián said he could play the piano.
“Prove it.”
Julián sat at the drawing-room piano and, facing a rapt audience of fifteen-year-old prostitutes in underwear, played a Chopin nocturne. They all clapped except for Irene, who told him that what she had just heard was music for the dead and they were in the business of the living. Julián played her a ragtime tune and a couple of pieces by Offenbach.
“That’s better. Let’s keep it upbeat.”
His new job earned him a living, a roof, and two hot meals a day.