“Move back,” he warned.
He threw a quick glance at Fumero, who was getting up with some difficulty, and then he looked at us—first a
t me and then at Carax. I could see horror and doubt in that look.
“I said move back.”
Carax paused and withdrew. Palacios observed us coldly, trying to work out what to do. His eyes rested on me.
“You, get out of here. This isn’t anything to do with you. Go.”
I hesitated for a moment. Carax nodded.
“No one’s leaving this place,” Fumero cut in. “Palacios, hand me your gun.”
Palacios didn’t answer.
“Palacios,” Fumero repeated, stretching out his blood-drenched hand, demanding the weapon.
“No,” mumbled Palacios, gritting his teeth.
Fumero, his maddened eyes filled with disdain and fury, grabbed Palacios’s gun and pushed him aside with a swipe of his hand. I glanced at Palacios and knew what was going to happen. Fumero raised the gun slowly. His hand shook, and the revolver shone with blood. Carax drew back a step at a time, in search of shadows, but there was no escape. The revolver’s barrel followed him. I felt all the muscles in my body burn with rage. Fumero’s deathly grimace, and the way he licked his lips like a madman, woke me up like a slap in the face. Palacios was looking at me, silently shaking his head. I ignored him. Carax had given up by now and stood motionless in the middle of the room, waiting for the bullet.
Fumero never saw me. For him only Carax existed and that bloodstained hand holding the revolver. I leaped upon him. I felt my feet rise from the ground, but I never regained contact with it. The world froze in midair. The blast of the shot reached me from afar, like the echo of a receding storm. There was no pain. The bullet went through my ribs. At first there was a blinding flash, as if a metal bar had hit me with indescribable force and propelled me through the air for a couple of yards, then knocked me down to the floor. I didn’t feel the fall, although I thought I saw the walls converging and the ceiling descending at great speed to crush me.
A hand held the back of my head, and I saw Julián Carax’s face bending over me. In my vision Carax appeared exactly as I’d imagined him, as if the flames had never torn off his features. I noticed the horror in his eyes, without understanding. I saw how he placed his hand on my chest, and I wondered what that smoking liquid was flowing between his fingers. It was then I felt that terrible fire, like the hot breath of embers, burning my insides. I tried to scream, but nothing surfaced except warm blood. I recognized the face of Palacios next to me, full of remorse, defeated. I raised my eyes and then I saw her. Bea was advancing slowly from the library door, her face suffused with terror and her trembling hands on her lips. She was shaking her head without speaking. I tried to warn her, but a biting cold was coursing up my arms, stabbing its way into my body.
Fumero was hiding behind the door. Bea didn’t notice his presence. When Carax leaped up and Bea turned, the inspector’s gun was already almost touching her forehead. Palacios rushed to stop him. He was too late. Carax was already there. I heard his faraway scream, which bore Bea’s name. The room lit up with the flash of the shot. The bullet went through Carax’s right hand. A moment later the man without a face was falling upon Fumero. I leaned over to see Bea running to my side, unhurt. I looked for Carax with eyes that were clouding over, but I couldn’t find him. Another figure had taken his place. It was Laín Coubert, just as I’d learned to fear him reading the pages of a book, so many years ago. This time Coubert’s claws sank into Fumero’s eyes like hooks and pulled him away. I managed to see the inspector’s legs as they were hauled out through the library door. I managed to see how his body shook with spasms as Coubert dragged him without pity toward the main door, saw how his knees hit the marble steps and the snow spit on his face, how the man without a face grabbed him by the neck and, lifting him up like a puppet, threw him into the frozen bowl of the fountain; I saw how the hand of the angel pierced his chest, spearing him, how the accursed soul was driven out like black vapor, falling like frozen tears over the mirror of water.
I collapsed then, unable to keep my eyes focused any longer. Darkness became tinted with a white light, and Bea’s face receded from me. I closed my eyes and felt her hands on my cheeks and the breath of her voice begging God not to take me, whispering in my ear that she loved me and wouldn’t let me go. All I remember is that I let that mirage go and that a strange peace enveloped me and took away the pain of the slow fire that burned inside me. I saw myself and Bea—an elderly couple—walking hand in hand through the streets of Barcelona, that bewitched city. I saw my father and Nuria Monfort placing white roses on my grave. I saw Fermín crying in Bernarda’s arms, and my old friend Tomás, who had fallen silent forever. I saw them as one sees strangers from a train that is moving away too fast. It was then, almost without realizing, that I remembered my mother’s face, a face I had lost so many years before, as if an old cutting had suddenly fallen out of the pages of a book. Her light was all that came with me as I descended.
Postmortem
November 27, 1955
The room was white, a shimmer of sheets and curtains made of mist and bright sunshine. From my window I could make out a blue sea. One day someone would try to convince me that one cannot view the sea from the Corachán Clinic, that its rooms are not white or ethereal, and that the sea of that November was like a leaden pond, cold and hostile; that it went on snowing every day of that week until all of Barcelona was buried in three feet of snow, and that even Fermín, the eternal optimist, thought I was going to die again.
I had already died before, in the ambulance, in the arms of Bea and Lieutenant Palacios, who ruined his uniform with my blood. The bullet, said the doctors, who spoke about me thinking that I couldn’t hear them, had destroyed two ribs, had brushed my heart, had severed an artery, and had come out at full speed through my side, dragging with it everything it had encountered on the way. My heart stopped beating for sixty-four seconds. They told me that when I returned from my excursion to eternity, I opened my eyes and smiled before losing consciousness.
I didn’t come around until eight days later. By then the newspapers had already published the news of Francisco Javier Fumero’s death during a struggle with an armed gang of criminals, and the authorities were busy trying to find a street or an alleyway they could rename in memory of the distinguished police inspector. His was the only body found in the old mansion of the Aldayas. The bodies of Penélope and her son were never discovered.
I awoke at dawn. I remember the light, like liquid gold, pouring over the sheets. It had stopped snowing, and somebody had exchanged the sea outside my window for a white square from which a few swings could be seen, and little else. My father, sunk in a chair by my bed, looked up and gazed at me in silence. I smiled at him, and he broke into tears. Fermín, who was sleeping like a baby in the corridor, and Bea, who was holding his head on her lap, heard my father’s loud, wailing sobs and came into the room. I remember that Fermín was white and thin like the backbone of a fish. They told me that the blood running through my veins was his, that I’d lost all mine, and that my friend had been spending days stuffing himself with meat sandwiches in the hospital’s canteen to breed more red blood corpuscles, in case I should need them. Perhaps that explains why I felt wiser and less like Daniel. I remember there was a forest of flowers and that in the afternoon—or perhaps two minutes later, I couldn’t say—a whole cast of people filed through the room, from Gustavo Barceló and his niece Clara to Bernarda and my friend Tomás, who didn’t dare look me in the eye and who, when I embraced him, ran off to weep in the street. I vaguely remember Don Federico, who came along with Merceditas and Don Anacleto, the high-school teacher. I particularly remember Bea, who looked at me without saying a word while all the others dissolved into cheers and thanks to the heavens, and I remember my father, who had slept on that chair for seven nights, praying to a God in whom he did not believe.
When the doctors ordered the entire committee to vacate the room and leave me to have a rest I did not want, my father came up to me for a moment and told me he’d brought my pen, the Victor Hugo fo
untain pen, and a notebook, in case I wanted to write. From the doorway Fermín announced that he’d consulted with the whole staff of doctors in the hospital and they had assured him I would not have to do my military service. Bea kissed me on the forehead and took my father with her to get some fresh air, because he hadn’t been out of that room for over a week. I was left alone, weighed down by exhaustion, and I gave in to sleep, staring at the pen case on my bedside table.
I was woken up by footsteps at the door. I waited to see my father at the end of the bed, or perhaps Dr. Mendoza, who had never taken his eyes off me, convinced that my recovery was the result of a miracle. The visitor went around the bed and sat on my father’s chair. My mouth felt dry. Julián Carax put a glass of water to my lips, holding my head while I moistened them. His eyes spoke of farewell, and looking into them was enough for me to understand that he had never discovered the true identity of Penélope. I can’t remember his exact words, or the sound of his voice. I do know that he held my hand and I felt as if he were asking me to live for him, telling me I would never see him again. What I have not forgotten is what I told him. I told him to take that pen, which had always been his, and write again.
When I woke again, Bea was cooling my forehead with a cloth dampened with eau de cologne. Startled, I asked her where Carax was. She looked at me in confusion and told me that Carax had disappeared in the storm eight days before, leaving a trail of blood on the snow, and that everyone had given him up for dead. I said that wasn’t true, he’d been right there, with me, only a few seconds ago. Bea smiled at me without saying anything. The nurse who was taking my pulse slowly shook her head and explained that I’d been asleep for six hours, that she’d been sitting at her desk by the door to my room all that time, and that certainly nobody had come into my room.
That night, when I was trying to get to sleep, I turned my head on my pillow and noticed that the pen case was open. The pen was gone.
The Waters of March
1956
BEA AND I WERE MARRIED IN THE CHURCH OF SANTA ANA THREE months later. Mr. Aguilar, who still spoke to me in monosyllables and would go on doing so until the end of time, had given me his daughter’s hand in view of the impossibility of obtaining my head on a platter. Bea’s disappearance had done away with his anger, and now he seemed to live in a state of perpetual shock, resigned to the fact that his grandson would soon call me Dad and that life, in the shape of a rascal stitched back together after a bullet wound, should rob him of his girl—a girl who, despite his bifocals, he still saw as the child in her first-communion dress, not a day older.