tep he must take. He would have to admit to Julián that the letter Penélope had written to him years ago, announcing her wedding and asking him to forget her, was a lie. He would have to disclose that it was he, Jorge Aldaya, who had forced his sister to write that string of lies while she cried in despair, protesting her undying love for Julián. He would have to tell Julían that she had been waiting for him, with a broken soul and a bleeding heart, since then, dying of loneliness. That would be enough. Enough for Carax to pull the trigger and shoot him in the face. Enough for him to forget any wedding plan and think of nothing else but returning to Barcelona in search of Penélope. And, once in Barcelona, his cobweb, Fumero would be waiting for him.
·7·
JULIÁN CARAX CROSSED THE FRENCH BORDER A FEW DAYS BEFORE the start of the Civil War. The first and only edition of The Shadow of the Wind had left the press two weeks earlier, bound for the anonymity of its predecessors. By then Miquel could barely work: although he sat in front of the typewriter for two or three hours a day, weakness and fever prevented him from coaxing more than a feeble trickle of words out onto the paper. He had lost several of his regular columns due to missed deadlines. Other papers were fearful of publishing his articles after receiving anonymous threats. He had only one daily column left in the Diario de Barcelona, which he signed under the name of Adrián Maltés. The specter of the war could already be felt in the air. The country stank of fear. With nothing to occupy him, and too weak to complain, Miquel would go down into the square or walk up to Avenida de la Catedral, always carrying with him one of Julián’s books as if it were an amulet. The last time the doctor had weighed him, he was only 125 pounds. We listened to the news of the Morocco uprising on the radio, and a few hours later a colleague from Miquel’s newspaper came around to tell us that Cansinos, the editor in chief, had been murdered with a bullet in the neck, opposite the Canaletas Café, two hours earlier. Nobody dared remove the body, which was still lying there, staining the pavement with a web of blood.
The brief but intense days of initial terror were not long in coming. General Goded’s troops set off along the Diagonal and Paseo de Gracia toward the center, where the shooting began. It was Sunday, and a lot of people had still come out into the streets thinking they were going to spend the day picnicking along the road to Las Planas. The blackest days of the war in Barcelona, however, were still two years away. Shortly after the start of the skirmish, General Goded’s troops surrendered, due to a miracle or to poor communication between the commanders. Lluís Companys’s government seemed to have regained control, but what really happened would become obvious in the next few weeks.
Barcelona had passed into the hands of the anarchist unions. After days of riots and street fighting, rumors finally circulated that the four rebel generals had been executed in Montjuïc Castle shortly after the surrender. A friend of Miquel’s, a British journalist who was present at the execution, said that the firing squad was made up of seven men but that at the last moment dozens of militiamen joined the party. When they opened fire, the bodies were riddled with so many bullets that they collapsed in unrecognizable pieces and had to be put into the coffins in an almost liquid state. There were those who wanted to believe that this was the end of the conflict, that the fascist troops would never reach Barcelona and the rebellion would be extinguished along the way.
We learned that Julián was in Barcelona on the day of Goded’s surrender, when we got a letter from Irene Marceau in which she told us that Julián had killed Jorge Aldaya in a duel, in Père Lachaise cemetery. Even before Aldaya expired, an anonymous call had alerted the police to the event. Julián was forced to flee from Paris immediately, pursued by the police, who wanted him for murder. We had no doubts as to who had made that call. We waited anxiously to hear from Julián so that we could warn him of the danger that stalked him and protect him from a worse trap than the one laid out for him by Fumero: the discovery of the truth. Three days later Julián still had not appeared. Miquel did not want to share his anxiety with me, but I knew perfectly well what he was thinking. Julián had come back for Penélope, not for us.
“What will happen when he finds out the truth?” I kept asking.
“We’ll make sure he doesn’t,” Miquel would answer.
The first thing he was going to discover was that the Aldaya family had disappeared. He would not find many places where he could start looking for Penélope. We made a list of such places and began our own expedition. The mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo was just an empty property, closed away behind chains and veils of ivy. A flower vendor, who sold bunches of roses and carnations on the opposite corner, said he only remembered seeing one person approaching the house recently, but this was almost an old man, with a bit of a limp.
“Frankly, he seemed pretty nasty. I tried to sell him a carnation for his lapel, and he told me to piss off, saying there was a war on and it was no time for flowers.”
He hadn’t seen anyone else. Miquel bought some withered roses from him and, just in case, gave him the phone number of the editorial room at the Diario de Barcelona. The man could leave a message there if by chance anyone should turn up looking like the person we’d described. Our next stop was San Gabriel’s School, where Miquel met up with Fernando Ramos, his old school companion.
Fernando was now a Latin and Greek teacher and had been ordained a priest. His heart sank when he saw Miquel looking so frail. He told us Julián had not come to see him, but he promised to get in touch with us if he did, and try to hold him back. Fumero had been there before us, he confessed with alarm, and had told him that, in times of war, he’d do well to be watchful.
“He said a lot of people were going to die very soon, and uniforms—soldiers’ or priests’—weren’t going to stop the bullets….”
Fernando Ramos admitted that it wasn’t clear what unit or group Fumero belonged to, and he hadn’t wanted to ask him. I find it impossible to describe to you those first days of the war in Barcelona, Daniel. The air seemed poisoned with fear and hatred. People eyed one another suspiciously, and the streets smelled of a silence that knotted your stomach. Every day, every hour, fresh rumors and gossip circulated. I remember one night when Miquel and I were walking home down the Ramblas. They were completely deserted. Miquel looked at the buildings, glimpsing faces that hid behind closed shutters, noticing how they scanned the shadows of the street. He said he could feel the knives being sharpened behind those walls.
The following day we went to the Fortuny hat shop, without much hope of finding Julián there. One of the residents in the building told us that the hatter was terrified by the upheavals of the last few days and had locked himself up in the shop. No matter how much we knocked, he wouldn’t open the door. That afternoon there had been a shoot-out only a block away, and the pools of blood were still fresh on Ronda de San Antonio. A dead horse lay on the paving, at the mercy of stray dogs that were tearing open its bullet-ridden stomach, while a group of children watched and threw stones at them. We only managed to see the hatter’s frightened face through the grille of the door. We told him we were looking for his son, Julián. The hatter replied that his son was dead and told us to get out of there or he’d call the police. We left the place feeling disheartened.
For days we scoured cafés and shops, asking for Julián. We made inquiries in hotels and pensiones, in railway stations, in banks where he might have gone to change money—nobody remembered a man fitting Julián’s description. We feared that he might have fallen into Fumero’s clutches, and Miquel managed to get one of his colleagues from the newspaper, who had contacts in Police Headquarters, to find out whether Julián had been taken to jail. There was no sign of him. Two weeks went by, and it looked as if Julián had vanished into thin air.
Miquel hardly slept, hoping for news of his friend. One evening he returned from his usual afternoon walk with a bottle of port, of all things. The newspaper staff had presented it to him, he said, because he’d been told by the subeditor that his column was going to have to be canceled.
“They don’t want trouble, and I can understand.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Get drunk, for a start.”
Miquel drank barely half a glass, but I finished off almost the entire bottle without noticing, on an empty stomach. At around midnight I was overpowered by drowsiness and collapsed on the sofa. I dreamed that Miquel was kissing my forehead and covering me with a shawl. When I woke up, I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my head, which I recognized as the prelude to a fierce hangover. I went to look for Miquel, to curse the hour when he’d had the bright idea of getting me drunk, but I realized I was alone in the apartment. I went over to the desk and saw that there was a note on the typewriter in which he asked me not to be alarmed and to wait for him there. He’d gone out in search of Julián and would soon bring him home. He ended the note saying that he loved me. The note fell out of my hands. Then I noticed that before leaving, Miquel had removed his things from the desk, as if he wasn’t planning to use it anymore. I knew that I would never see him again.
·8·
THAT AFTERNOON THE FLOWER VENDOR HAD CALLED THE OFFICES of the Diario de Barcelona and left a message for Miquel saying he’d seen the man we had described to him prowling around the old mansion like a ghost. It was past midnight when Miquel reached number 32, Avenida del Tibidabo, a dark, deserted valley struck by darts of moonlight that filtered through the grove. Although he hadn’t seen him for seventeen years, Miquel recognized Julián by his light, almost catlike walk. His silhouette glided through the shadows of the garden, near the fountain. Julián had jumped over the garden wall and lay in wait by the house like a restless animal. Miquel could have called to him, but he preferred not to alert any possible witnesses. He felt that furtive eyes were spying on the avenue from the dark windows of neighboring mansions. He walked around the walls of the estate until he reached the part by the old tennis courts and the coach houses. There he noticed the crevices in the wall that Jul
ián must have used as steps, and the flagstones that had come loose on the top. He lifted himself up, almost out of breath, feeling an acute pain in his chest and experiencing periodic waves of blindness. He lay down on the wall, his hands shaking, and called Julián in a whisper. The silhouette that hovered by the fountain stood still, joining the rest of the statues. Miquel saw two shining eyes fixing on him. He wondered whether Julián would recognize him, after seventeen years and an illness that had taken away his very breath. The silhouette slowly came closer, wielding a long, shiny object in his right hand. A piece of glass.
“Julián…” Miquel murmured.
The figure stopped in its tracks. Miquel heard the piece of glass fall on the gravel. Julián’s face emerged from the shadows. A two-week stubble covered his features, which were sharper than they used to be.
“Miquel?”
Unable to jump down to the other side, or even climb back to the street, Miquel held out his hand to him. Julián hauled himself onto the wall and, holding his friend’s fist tightly with one hand, laid the palm of his other hand on his face. They gazed silently at one another for a long time, each sensing the wounds life had inflicted on the other.
“We must leave this place, Julián. Fumero is looking for you. That business with Aldaya was a trap.”
“I know,” murmured Carax in a monotone.