When his wife told him she’d discovered Julián and Penélope naked in unequivocal circumstances, his entire world went up in flames. Horror
at this treason, the rage of knowing that he had been unspeakably affronted, outwitted at his own game, humiliated and stabbed in the back by the one person he had learned to adore as the image of himself—all these feelings assailed him with such fury that nobody was able to understand the magnitude of his pain. When the doctor who came to examine Penélope confirmed that the girl had been deflowered and that she was possibly pregnant, Don Ricardo’s soul dissolved into the thick, viscous liquid of blind hatred. He saw his own hand in Julián’s hand, the hand that had plunged the dagger deep into his heart. He didn’t know it yet, but the day he ordered Penélope to be locked up in the third-floor bedroom was the day he began to die. Everything he did from then on was only the final agony of his self-destruction.
In collaboration with the hatter, whom he had so deeply despised, he arranged Julián’s removal from Barcelona and his entry into the army, where Aldaya had given orders that he should meet with an “accidental” death. He forbade that anyone—doctors, servants, even members of the family, except himself and his wife—should see Penélope during the months when the girl remained imprisoned in that room that smelled of illness and death. By then Aldaya’s partners had secretly withdrawn their support and were maneuvering behind his back to seize his power, using the fortune that he himself had made available to them. By then the Aldaya empire was silently crumbling, at secret board meetings in Madrid, in hushed corridors, in Geneva banks. Julián, as Aldaya should have suspected, had escaped. Deep down he secretly felt proud of the boy, even though he wished him dead. Julián had done what he would have done in his place. Someone else would pay for Julián’s actions.
Penélope Aldaya gave birth to a stillborn baby boy on September 26, 1919. If a doctor had been able to examine her, he would have said that the baby had already been in danger for some days and must be delivered by cesarean. If a doctor had been present, perhaps he would have been able to stop the hemorrhage that took Penélope’s life, while she shrieked and scratched at the locked door, on the other side of which her father wept in silence and her mother cowered staring at her husband. If a doctor had been present, he would have accused Don Ricardo Aldaya of murder, for there was no other word that could describe the scene within that dark, bloodstained cell. But there was nobody there, and when at last they opened the door and found Penélope lying dead in a pool of her own blood, hugging a shining, purple-colored baby, nobody was capable of uttering a single word. The two bodies were buried in the basement crypt, with no ceremony or witnesses. The sheets and the afterbirth were thrown into the boilers, and the place was sealed with a brick wall.
When Jorge Aldaya, drunk with guilt and shame, told Miquel Moliner what had happened, Miquel decided to send Julián the letter, signed by Penélope, in which she declared that she didn’t love him, begged him to forget her, and announced a fictitious wedding. He preferred to have Julián believe that lie and rebuild his life in the shadow of a betrayal than have to present him with the truth. When, two years later, Mrs. Aldaya died, there were those who blamed her death on the curse that lay on the mansion, but her son, Jorge, knew that what had killed her was the fire that raged inside her, Penélope’s screams and her desperate banging on that door that hammered incessantly in her head. By then the family had already fallen from grace, and the Aldaya fortune was collapsing like a sand castle, swept away by a combination of greed and revenge. Secretaries and accountants devised the flight to Argentina, the beginning of a new, more modest, business. The important thing was to get away. Away from the specters that scurried through the corridors of the Aldaya mansion, as they had always done.
They departed one dawn of 1926, traveling under false names on board the ship that would take them across the Atlantic to the port of La Plata. Jorge and his father shared a cabin. Old Aldaya, foul smelling and dying, could barely stand up. The doctors whom he had not permitted to see Penélope feared him too much to tell him the truth, but he knew that death had boarded the ship with them, and that his body, which God had begun to steal from him on the morning he decided to look for his son Julián, was wasting away. Throughout that long crossing, sitting on the deck, shivering under the blankets and facing the ocean’s infinite emptiness, he knew that he would never see land. Sometimes, sitting in the stern, he would watch the school of sharks that had been following them since they left Tenerife. He heard one of the officers say that such a sinister escort was normal in transatlantic cruises. The beasts fed on the animal remains that the ship left in its wake. But Don Ricardo thought otherwise. He was convinced that those devils were following him. You’re waiting for me, he thought, seeing in them God’s true face. It was then he approached his son Jorge, whom he had so often despised and whom he now saw as his last resort, and made him swear he would carry out his dying wish. “You will find Julián Carax and you’ll kill him. Swear that you will.”
One dawn, two days before reaching Buenos Aires, Jorge woke up and saw that his father’s berth was empty. He went out to look for him; the deck was deserted, bathed in mist and spray. He found his father’s dressing gown, still warm, abandoned in the stern of the ship. The ship’s wake disappeared into a cloud of scarlet, a stain on the calm waters, as if the ocean itself were bleeding. It was then he noticed that the sharks had stopped following them. He saw them, in the distance, their dorsal fins flapping as they danced in a circle. During the remainder of the crossing, no passenger sighted the school of dogfish again.
When Jorge Aldaya disembarked in Buenos Aires and the customs officer asked him whether he was traveling alone, he nodded in assent. He had been traveling alone for a long time.
·5·
Ten years after disembarking in Buenos Aires, Jorge Aldaya, or the spent force he had become, returned to Barcelona. The misfortunes that had started to eat away at the Aldaya family in the Old World had only grown in Argentina. Jorge was left on his own to face the world, a fight for which he had neither his father’s strength nor his composure. Jorge had reached Buenos Aires with a numb heart, shot through with remorse. America, he would later say, by way of apology or epitaph, is a mirage, a land of savage predators, and he’d been educated into the privileges and frivolous refinements of Old Europe—a dead continent held together by inertia. In only a few years, he lost everything, starting with his reputation and ending with the gold watch his father had given him for his first communion. Thanks to the watch, he was able to buy himself a return ticket. The man who came back to Spain was almost a beggar, a bundle of bitterness and failure, poisoned by the memory of what he felt had been snatched from him and the hatred for the person on whom he blamed his ruin: Julián Carax.
The promise he had made to his father was still branded on his mind. As soon as he arrived, he tried to pick up Julián’s trail, only to discover that, like him, Carax also seemed to have vanished from Barcelona. It was then, through chance or fate, that he encountered a familiar character from his youth. After a prominent career in reformatories and state prisons, Francisco Javier Fumero had joined the army, attaining the rank of lieutenant. There were many who envisaged him as a future general, but a murky scandal caused his expulsion from the army. Even then his reputation outlasted his rank. He was talked about a great deal, but above all he was feared. Francisco Javier Fumero, that shy, disturbed boy who once gathered dead leaves from the courtyard at San Gabriel’s, was now a murderer. It was rumored that he killed off notorious characters for money, that he dispatched political figures on request. Fumero was said to be death itself.
Aldaya and he recognized each other instantly through the haze of the Novedades Café. Aldaya was ill, stricken by a strange fever that he blamed on the insects of South American jungles. “There, even the mosquitoes are sons of bitches,” he complained. Fumero listened to him with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. He revered mosquitoes and all insects in general. He admired their discipline, their fortitude and organization. There was no laziness in them, no irreverence or racial degeneration. His favorite species were spiders, blessed w
ith that rare science for weaving a trap in which they awaited their prey with infinite patience, knowing that sooner or later the prey would succumb, through stupidity or slackness. In his opinion society had a lot to learn from insects. Aldaya was a clear case of moral and physical ruin. He had aged noticeably and looked shabby, with no muscle tone. Fumero couldn’t bear people with no muscle tone. They nauseated him.
“Javier, I feel dreadful,” Aldaya pleaded. “Could you help me out for a few days?”
Fumero agreed to take Jorge Aldaya to his home. He lived in a gloomy apartment in the Raval quarter, on Calle Cadena, in the company of numerous insects stored in pharmacy jars, and half a dozen books. Fumero detested books as much as he loved insects, but those were no ordinary volumes: they were the novels of Julián Carax published by Cabestany. Two prostitutes lived in the apartment opposite—a mother and daughter duo who allowed themselves to be pinched and burned with cigars when business was slow, especially at the end of the month. Fumero paid them to take care of Aldaya while he was away at work. He had no desire to see him die. Not yet.
Francisco Javier Fumero had joined the Crime Squad. There was always work there for qualified personnel capable of confronting the most awkward situations, the sorts of situations that needed to be solved discreetly so that respectable citizens could continue living in blissful ignorance. Words to that effect had been said to him by Lieutenant Durán, a man given to solemn pronouncements, under whose command Fumero had joined the police force.
“Being a policeman isn’t a job, it’s a mission,” Durán would proclaim. “Spain needs more balls and less chatter.”
Unfortunately, Lieutenant Durán was soon to die in a lamentable accident during a police raid in the district of La Barceloneta: in the confusion of an encounter with a group of anarchists, he fell through a skylight, and plunged five floors to his death. Everyone agreed that Spain had lost a great man, a national hero with a vision of the future, a thinker who did not fear action. Fumero took over his post with pride, knowing that he had done the right thing by pushing him, for Durán was getting too old for the job. Fumero found old men revolting—as he did crippled men, Gypsies, and queers—whether or not they had muscle tone. Sometimes God made mistakes. It was the duty of every upright citizen to correct these small failings and keep the world looking presentable.
In March 1932, a few weeks after their meeting in the Novedades Café, Jorge Aldaya began to feel better and opened his heart to Fumero. He begged forgiveness for the way he had treated him in their school days. With tears in his eyes, he told him his whole story, without omitting anything. Fumero listened silently, nodding, taking it in, all the while wondering whether he should kill Aldaya then and there, or wait. He wondered whether Aldaya would be so weak that the blade would meet only a tepid resistance from that stinking flesh, softened by indolence. He decided to postpone the vivisection. He was intrigued by the story, especially insofar as it concerned Julián Carax.
He knew, from the information he obtained at the publishing house, that Carax lived in Paris, but Paris was a very large city, and nobody in Cabestany’s company seemed to know the exact address. Nobody except for a woman called Monfort, who kept it to herself. Fumero had followed her two or three times on her way out of the office, without her realizing. He had even traveled in a tram at half a yard’s distance from her. Women never noticed him, and if they did, they turned their faces the other way, pretending not to have seen him. One night, after following her right up to her front door in Plaza de San Felipe Neri, Fumero went back to his home and masturbated furiously; as he did so, he imagined himself plunging his knife into that woman’s body, an inch or so at a time, slowly, methodically, his eyes fixed on hers. Maybe then she would deign to give him Carax’s address and treat him with the respect due to a police officer.
Julián Carax was the only person whom Fumero had failed to kill once he’d made up his mind. Perhaps because he had been Fumero’s first, and it takes time to master your game. When Fumero heard that name again, he smiled in a way his neighbors, the prostitutes, found so frightening: without blinking, and slowly licking his upper lip. He could still remember Carax kissing Penélope Aldaya in the large mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo. His Penélope. His had been a pure love, a true love, like the ones you saw in movies. Fumero was very keen on movies and went to the cinema at least twice a week. It was in a cinema that he had understood that Penélope had been the love of his life. The rest, especially his mother, had been nothing but tarts. As he listened to the last snippets of Aldaya’s story, he decided that, after all, he was not going to kill him. In fact, he was pleased that fate had reunited them. He had a vision, like the ones in the films he so enjoyed: Aldaya was going to hand him the others on a platter. Sooner or later they would all end up ensnared in his web.
·6·
IN THE WINTER OF 1934, THE MOLINER BROTHERS FINALLY MANAGED to evict Miquel from the house on Calle Puertaferrissa, which still remains empty and in a derelict state. All they wanted was to see him on the street, shorn of what little he had left, his books and the freedom and independence that offended them and filled them with such deep hatred. He didn’t tell me anything or come to me for help. I only discovered he’d become a virtual beggar when I went to look for him in what had been his home and found his brothers’ hired legal thugs drawing up an inventory of the property and selling off the few objects that had belonged to him. Miquel had already been spending a few nights in a pensión on Calle Canuda, a dismal, damp hovel that looked and smelled like a brothel. When I saw the room in which he was confined, a sort of coffin with no windows and a prisoner’s bunk, I grabbed hold of him and took him home. He couldn’t stop coughing, and he looked emaciated. He said it was a lingering cold, a spinster’s complaint that would go away when it got bored. Two weeks later he was worse.
As he always dressed in black, it took me some time to realize that those stains on his sleeves were bloodstains. I called a doctor, and after he examined Miquel, he asked me why I’d waited so long to call him. Miquel had tuberculosis. Bankrupt and ill, he now lived only for memories and regrets. He was the kindest and frailest man I had ever known, my only friend. We got married one cold February morning in a county court. Our honeymoon consisted of taking the bus up to Güell Park and gazing down on Barcelona—a little world of fog—from its sinuous terraces. We didn’t tell anyone we’d got married, not Cabestany, or my father, or Miquel’s family, who believed him to be dead. Eventually I wrote a letter to Julián, telling him about it, but I never mailed it. Ours was a secret marriage. A few months after the wedding, someone knocked on our door saying his name was Jorge Aldaya. He looked like a shattered man, and his face was covered in sweat despite the biting cold. When he saw Miquel again after more than ten years, Aldaya smiled bitterly and said, “We’re all cursed, Miquel. You, Julián, Fumero, and me.” The alleged reason for the visit was an attempt to make up with his old friend Miquel, who he hoped would now let him know how to get in touch with Julián Carax, because he had a very important message for him from his deceased father, Don Ricardo Aldaya. Miquel said he didn’t know where Carax was.
“We lost touch years ago,” he lied. “The last thing I heard was that he was living in Italy.”
Aldaya was expecting such an answer. “You disappoint me, Miquel. I had hoped that time and misfortune would have made you wiser.”
“Some disappointments honor those who inspire them.”
Shriveled up, on the verge of collapsing into a heap of bile, Aldaya laughed.
“Fumero sends you his most heartfelt congratulations on your marriage,” he said on his way to the door.
Those words froze my heart. Miquel didn’t wish to speak, but that night, while I held him close and we both pretended to fall asleep, I knew that Aldaya had been right. We were cursed.