The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten 1)

EVERY DAY I TOLD HIM THAT I LOVED HIM. I SET HIM UP IN THE armchair by the window, wrapped in blankets. I fed him with fruit juices, toast, and milk—when there was any to be found. Every day I read to him for a couple of hours. Balzac, Zola, Dickens…His body was beginning to fill out. Soon after returning home, he began to move his hands and arms. He tilted his neck. Sometimes, when I got back, I found the blankets on the floor, and household objects that had been knocked over. One day I found him crawling on the floor. Then, a year and a half after the fire, I woke up in the middle of a stormy night and found that someone was sitting on the bed stroking my hair. I smiled at him, hiding my tears. He had managed to find one of my mirrors, although I’d hidden them all. In a broken voice, he told me he’d been transformed into one of his fictional monsters, into Laín Coubert. I wanted to kiss him, to show him that his appearance didn’t disgust me, but he wouldn’t let me. He would hardly allow me to touch him. Day by day he was getting his strength back. He would prowl around the house while I went out in search of something to eat. The savings Miquel had left me kept us afloat, but soon I had to start selling jewels and old possessions. When there was no other alternative, I took the Victor Hugo pen I had bought in Paris and went out to sell it to the highest bidder. I found a shop behind the Military Government buildings where they took in that sort of merchandise. The manager did not seem impressed by my solemn oath that the pen had belonged to Victor Hugo, but he admitted it was a marvelous work of its kind and agreed to pay me as much as he could, bearing in mind these were times of great hardship.

When I told Julián that I’d sold it, I was afraid he would fly into a rage. All he said was that I’d done the right thing, that he’d never deserved it. One day, one of the many when I’d gone out to look for work, I returned to find that Julián wasn’t there. He didn’t come back until daybreak. When I asked him where he’d been, he just emptied the pockets of his coat (which had belonged to Miquel) and left a fistful of money on the table. From then on he began to go out almost every night. In the dark, concealed under a hat and scarf, with gloves and a raincoat, he was just one more shadow. He never told me where he went, and he almost always brought back money or jewels. He slept in the mornings, sitting upright in his armchair, with his eyes open. Once I found a penknife in one of his pockets. It was a double-edged knife, with an automatic spring. The blade was marked with dark stains.

It was then that I began to hear stories in town about some individual who was going around smashing bookshop windows at night and burning books. Other times the strange vandal would slip into a library or a collector’s study. He always took two or three volumes, which he would burn. In February 1938 I went to a secondhand bookshop to ask whether it was possible to find any books by Julián Carax in the market. The manager said it wasn’t: someone had been making them disappear. He himself had owned a couple and had sold them to a very strange person, a man who hid his face and whose voice he could barely understand.

“Until recently there were a few copies left in private collections, here and in France, but a lot of collectors are beginning to get rid of them. They’re frightened,” he said, “and I don’t blame them.”

More and more, Julián would vanish for whole days at a time. Soon his absences lasted a week. He always left and returned at night, and he always brought money back. He never gave any explanations, and if he did, they were meaningless. He told me he’d been in France: Paris, Lyons, Nice. Occasionally letters arrived from France addressed to Laín Coubert. They were always from secondhand booksellers or from collectors. Someone had located a lost copy of Julián Carax’s works. Like a wolf, he would disappear for a few days, then return.

It was during one of those absences that I came across Fortuny, the hatter, wandering about in the cathedral cloister lost in his thoughts. He still remembered me from the day I’d gone with Miquel to inquire after Julián, two years before. He took me to a corner and told me confidentially that he knew that Julián was alive, somewhere, but he suspected that his son wasn’t able get in touch with us for some reason he couldn’t quite figure out. “Something to do with that cruel man Fumero.” I told him that I felt the same. Wartime was turning out to be very profitable for Fumero. His loyalties shifted from month to month, from the anarchists to the communists, and from them to whoever came his way. He was called a spy, a henchman, a hero, a murderer, a conspirator, a schemer, a savior, a devil. Little did it matter. They all feared him. They all wanted him on their side. Perhaps because he was so busy with the intrigues of a wartime Barcelona, Fumero seemed to have forgotten Julián. Probably, like the hatter, he imagined that Julián had already escaped and was out of his reach.

MR. FORTUNY ASKED ME WHETHER I WAS AN OLD FRIEND OF HIS SON’S, and I said I was. He asked me to tell him about Julián, about the man he’d become, because, he sadly admitted, he didn’t really know him. “Life separated us, you know?” He told me he’d been to all the bookshops in Barcelona in search of Julián’s novels, but they were unobtainable. Someone had told him that a madman was looking for them in every corner of the city and then burning them. Fortuny was convinced that the culprit was Fumero. I didn’t contradict him. I lied as best I could, I know not whether through pity or spite. I told him that I thought Julián had returned to Paris, that he was well, that I knew for a fact he was very fond of Fortuny the hatter, that he would come back to see him as soon as circumstances permitted. “It’s this war,” he complained, “it just rots everything.” Before we said good-bye, he insisted on giving me his address and that of his ex-wife, Sophie, with whom he was back in touch after many years of “misunderstandings.” Sophie now lived in Bogotá with a prestigious doctor, he said. She ran her own music school and often wrote asking after Julián.

“It’s the only thing that brings us together now, you see. Memories. We make so many mistakes in life, young lady, but we only realize this when old age creeps up on us. Tell me, do you have faith?”

I took my leave, promising to keep him and Sophie informed if I ever had news from Julián.

“Nothing would make his mother happier than to hear how he is. You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense,” the hatter concluded sadly. “That’s why you live longer.”

Despite the fact that I’d heard

so many appalling stories about him, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor old man. He had little else to do in life but wait for the return of his son. He seemed to live in the hope of recovering lost time through some miracle from the saints, whom he visited with great devotion at their chapels in the cathedral. I had become used to picturing him as an ogre, a despicable and resentful being, but all I was able to see before me was a kind man, blind to reality, confused like everybody else. Perhaps because he reminded me of my own father, who hid from everyone, including himself, in that refuge of books and shadows, or because, without his suspecting it, the hatter and I were also linked by the hope of recovering Julián, I felt a growing affection for him and became his only friend. Unbeknownst to Julián, I often called on him in the apartment on Ronda de San Antonio. The hatter no longer worked in his shop downstairs.

“I don’t have the hands, or the sight, or the customers…” he would say.

He waited for me almost every Thursday and offered me coffee, biscuits, and pastries that he scarcely tasted. He spent hours reminiscing about Julián’s childhood, about how they worked together in the hat shop, and he would show me photographs. He would take me to Julián’s room, which he kept as immaculate as a museum, and bring out old notebooks, insignificant objects that he adored as relics of a life that had never existed, without ever realizing that he’d already shown them to me before, that he’d told me all those stories on a previous visit. One of those Thursdays, as I walked up the stairs, I ran into a doctor who had just been to see Mr. Fortuny. I asked him how the hatter was, and he looked at me strangely.

“Are you a relative?”

I told him I was the closest the poor man had to one. The doctor then told me that Fortuny was very ill, that it was just a matter of months.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I could tell you it’s the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.”

The hatter was pleased to see me and confessed that he didn’t trust that doctor. Doctors are just second-rate witches, he said. All his life the hatter had been a man of profound religious beliefs, and old age had only reinforced them. He saw the hand of the devil everywhere. The devil, he said, clouds the mind and ruins mankind.

“Just look at this war, or look at me. Of course, now I’m old and weak, but as a young man I was a swine and a coward.”

It was the devil who had taken Julián away from him, he added.

“God gives us life, but the world’s landlord is the devil….”

And so we passed the afternoon, nibbling on stale sponge fingers and discussing theology.

I once told Julián that if he wanted to see his father again before he died, he’d better hurry up. It turned out that he, too, had been visiting the hatter, without his knowing: from afar, at dusk, sitting at the other end of a square, watching him grow old. Julián said he would rather the old man took with him the image of the son he had created in his mind during those years than the person he had become.

“You keep that one for me,” I said, instantly regretting my words.

He didn’t reply, but for a moment it seemed as if he could think clearly again and was fully aware of the hell in which we had become trapped.

The doctor’s prognosis did not take long to come true. Mr. Fortuny didn’t see the end of the war. He was found sitting in his armchair, looking at old photographs of Sophie and Julián.

The last days of the war were the prelude to an inferno. The city had lived through the combat from afar, like a wound that throbs drowsily, with months of skirmishes and battles, bombardments and hunger. The spectacle of murders, fights, and conspiracies had been corroding the city’s heart for years, but even so, many wanted to believe that the war was still something distant, a storm that would pass them by. If anything, the wait made the inevitable worse. When the storm broke, there was no compassion.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we’ve learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

By then Julián hardly had any books left to burn. His father’s death, about which we never spoke, had turned him into an invalid. The anger and hatred that had at first possessed him were spent. We lived on rumors, secluded. We heard that Fumero had betrayed all the people who had helped him advance during the war and was now in the service of the victors. It was said that he was personally executing his main allies and protectors in the cells of Montjuïc Castle—his preferred method a pistol shot in the mouth. The heavy mantle of collective forgetfulness seemed to descend around us the day the weapons went quiet. In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell. The weeks that followed the fall of Barcelona were indescribable. More blood was shed during those days than during the combat, but secretly, stealthily. When peace finally came, it smelled of the sort of peace that haunts prisons and cemeteries, a shroud of silence and shame that rots one’s soul and never goes away. There were no guiltless hands or innocent looks. Those of us who were there, all without exception, will take the secret with us to our grave.