The Shadow of the Wind (61 page)

We went up to the third floor, where a narrow corridor led to the south wing of the house. Here the ceilings were much lower and the doors smaller. It was the floor for the servants' living quarters. The last room, I knew without Julian having to tell me, had been Jacinta Coronado's bedroom. Julian approached it slowly, fearfully. That had been the last place he'd seen Penelope, where he had made love to a girl barely seventeen years old, and who, months later, would bleed to death in that same cell. I wanted to stop him, but Julian had reached the doorway and was looking absently inside. I peered into the room with him. It was just a cubicle stripped of all ornamentation. The marks where a bed had once stood were still visible beneath the flood of dust that covered the floorboards. A tangle of black stains snaked across the middle of the room. Julian stared at the emptiness for almost a minute, disconcerted. I could see from his look that he hardly recognized the place, that the sight of it seemed like a cruel trick. I took his arm and led him back to the stairs.

'There's nothing here, Julian,' I murmured. 'The family sold everything before leaving for Argentina.'

Julian nodded weakly. We walked down the stairs again, and when we reached the ground floor, Julian made his way to the library. The shelves were empty, the fireplace choked with rubble. The walls, a deathly pale, flickered in the breath of the flame. Creditors and usurers had managed to remove every last bit of it, most of which must be lost in the twisted heaps of some junkyard by now.

'I've come back for nothing,' Julian mumbled.

Better this way, I thought. I was counting the seconds that separated us from the door. If I managed to get him away from there, we might still have a chance. I let Julian absorb the ruin of that place, purging his memories.

'You had to return and see it again,' I said. 'Now you know there's nothing here. It's just a large old, uninhabited house, Julian. Let's go home.'

He looked at me, pale-faced, and nodded. I took his hand, and we went along the passageway that led to the exit. The chink of outdoor light was only half a dozen yards away. I could smell the weeds and the drizzle in the air. Then I felt I was losing Julian's hand. I stopped and turned to see him standing motionless, his eyes staring into the darkness.

'What is it, Julian?'

He didn't reply. He was gazing, mesmerized, at the mouth of a narrow corridor that led towards the kitchen area. I walked over to him and looked into the shadows. The door at the end of the corridor was bricked up, a wall of red bricks laid roughly with mortar that bled out of the corners. I couldn't quite understand what it meant, but I felt an icy cold that took my breath away. Julian was slowly getting closer. All the other doors in the corridor - in the whole house - were open, their locks and doorknobs gone. All except this one.

'Julian, please, let's go. . . .'

The impact of his fist on the brick wall drew a hollow echo on the other side. I thought I saw his hands trembling when he placed the lighter on the floor and gestured for me to move back a few steps.

'Julian ...'

The first kick brought down a rain of red dust. Julian charged again. I thought I could hear his bones breaking, but Julian was unperturbed. He banged against the wall again and again, with the rage of a prisoner forcing his way out to freedom. His fists and his arms were bleeding when the first brick broke and fell onto the other side. In the dark, with bloodstained fingers, Julian struggled to enlarge the gap. He panted, exhausted, possessed by a fury of which I would never have thought him capable. One by one, he loosened the bricks and the wall came down. Julian stopped, covered in a cold sweat, his hands flayed. He picked up the lighter and placed it on the edge of one of the bricks. A wooden door, carved with angel motifs, rose up on the other side. Julian stroked the wooden reliefs, as if he were reading a hieroglyph. The door yielded to the pressure of his hands.

A glutinous darkness came at us from the other side. A little further back, the form of a staircase could be discerned. Black stone steps descended until they were lost in shadows. Julian turned for a moment, and I met his eyes. I saw fear and despair in them, as if he could sense what lay beyond. I shook my head, begging him without speaking not to go down. He turned back, dejected, and plunged into the gloom. I looked through the brick frame and saw him lurching down the steps. The flame flickered, now just a breath of transparent blue.

'Julian?'

All I got was silence. I could see Julian's shadow, motionless at the bottom of the stairs. I went through the brick hole and walked down the steps. The room was rectangular, with marble walls. It exuded an intense, penetrating chill. The two tombstones were covered with a veil of cobwebs that fell apart like rotten silk with the flame from the lighter. The white marble was scored with black tears of dampness that looked like blood dripping out of the clefts left by the engraver's chisel. They lay side by side, like maledictions, chained together.

PENELOPE ALDAYA            DAVID ALDAYA

1902-1919                  1919

11

I have often paused to think about that moment of silence and tried to imagine what Julian must have felt when he discovered that the woman he had been waiting seventeen years for was dead, their child gone with her, and that the life he had dreamed about, the very breath of it, had never existed. Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice it. In Julian's case that certainty came to him in a matter of seconds. For a moment I thought he was going to rush up the stairs and flee from that accursed place, and that I would never see him again. Perhaps it would have been better that way.

I remember that the flame from the lighter slowly went out, and I lost sight of his silhouette. My hands searched for him in the shadows and I found him trembling, speechless. He could barely stand, and he dragged himself into a corner. I hugged him and kissed his forehead. He didn't move. I felt his face with my fingers, but there were no tears. I thought that perhaps, unconsciously, he had known it all those years, that perhaps the encounter was necessary for him to face the truth and set himself free. We had reached the end of the road. Julian would now understand that nothing held him in Barcelona any longer and that we could leave, go far away. I wanted to believe that our luck was about to change and that Penelope had finally forgiven us.

I looked for the lighter on the floor and lit it again. Julian was staring vacantly, indifferent to the blue flame. I held his face in my hands and forced him to look at me. I found lifeless, empty eyes, consumed by anger and loss. I felt the venom of hatred spreading slowly through his veins, and I could read his thoughts. He hated me for having deceived him. He hated Miquel for having wished to give him a life that now felt like an open wound. But above all he hated the man who had caused this calamity, this trail of death and misery: himself. He hated those filthy books to which he had devoted his life and about which nobody cared. He hated every stolen second.

He looked at me without blinking, the way one looks at a stranger or some foreign object. I kept shaking my head, slowly, my hands searching his hands. Suddenly he moved away, roughly, and stood up. I tried to grab his arm, but he pushed me against the wall. I saw him go silently up the stairs, a man I no longer knew. Julian Carax was dead. By the time I stepped out into the garden, there was no trace of him. I climbed the wall and jumped down onto the other side. The desolate streets seemed to bleed in the rain. I shouted out his name, walking down the middle of the deserted avenue. Nobody answered my call. It was almost four in the morning when I got home. The apartment was full of smoke and the stench of burned paper. Julian had been there. I ran to open the windows. I found a small case on my desk with the pen I had bought for him years ago in Paris, the fountain pen I had paid a fortune for on the pretence it once had belonged to Victor Hugo. The smoke was oozing from the central-heating boiler. I opened the hatch and saw that Julian had thrown copies of his novels into it. I could just about read the titles on the leather spines; the rest had turned to cinders. I looked on my bookshelves: all of his books were gone.

Hours later, when I went to the publishing house in the middle of the morning, Alvaro Cabestany called me into his office. His father hardly ever came by anymore; the doctors said his days were numbered - as was my time at the firm. Cabestany's son informed me that a gentleman called Lain Coubert had turned up early that morning, saying he was interested in acquiring our entire stock of Julian Carax's novels. The publisher's son told him we had a warehouse full of them in the Pueblo Nuevo district, but as there was such a demand for them, he insisted on a higher price than Coubert was offering. Coubert had not taken the bait and had marched out. Now Alvaro Cabestany wanted me to find this person called Lain Coubert and accept his offer. I told the fool that Lain Coubert didn't exist; he was a character in one of Carax's novels. That he wasn't in the least interested in buying his books; he only wanted to know where we stored them. Old Senor Cabestany was in the habit of keeping a copy of every book published by his firm in his office library, even the works of Julian Carax. I slipped into the room, unnoticed, and took them.

That evening I visited my father in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and hid them where nobody, especially Julian, would ever find them. Night had fallen when I left the building. I wandered off down the Ramblas and from there to La Barceloneta, where I made for the beach, looking for the spot where I had gazed at the sea with Julian. The pyre of flames from the Pueblo Nuevo warehouse was visible in the distance, its amber trail spilling out over the sea and spirals of smoke rising to the sky like serpents of light. When the fire-fighters managed to extinguish the flames shortly before daybreak, there was nothing left, just the brick-and-metal skeleton that held up the vault. There I found Lluis Carbo, who had been the night watchman for ten years. He stared in disbelief at the smouldering ruins. His eyebrows and the hairs on his arm were singed, and his skin shone like wet bronze. It was he who told me that the blaze had started shortly after midnight and had devoured tens of thousands of books, until dawn came and he was faced with a river of ashes. Lluis still held a handful of books he had managed to save, some of Verdaguer's collected poems and two volumes of the History of the French Revolution. That was all that had survived. Various members of the union had arrived to help the fire-fighters. One of them told me the fire-fighters found a burned body among the debris. At first they had assumed that the man was dead, but then one of them noticed he was still breathing, and they had taken him to the nearby Hospital del Mar.

I recognized him by his eyes. The fire had eaten away his skin, his hands, and his hair. The flames had torn off his clothes, and his whole body was a raw wound that oozed beneath his bandages. They had confined him to a room on his own at the end of a corridor, with a view of the beach, and had numbed him with morphine while they waited for him to die. I wanted to hold his hand, but one of the nurses warned me that there was almost no flesh under the bandages. The fire had cut away his eyelids. The nurse who found me collapsed on the floor, crying, asked me whether I knew who he was. I said I did: he was my husband. When a priest appeared to administer the last rites over him, I frightened him off with my screams. Three days later Julian was still alive. The doctors said it was a miracle, that his will to live gave him a strength no medicine could offer. They were wrong. It was not a will to live. It was hatred. A week later, when they saw that this death-bitten body refused to expire, he was officially admitted under the name of Miquel Moliner. He would remain there for eleven months. Always in silence, with burning eyes, without rest.

I went to the hospital every day. Soon the nurses began to treat me less formally and invited me to lunch with them in their hall. They were all women who were on their own, strong women waiting for their men to return from the front. Some did. They taught me how to clean Julian's wounds, how to change his bandages, how to change the sheets and make a bed with an inert body lying on it. They also taught me to lose all hope of ever seeing the man who had once been held by those bones. Three months later we removed his face bandages. Julian was a skull. He had no lips or cheeks. It was a featureless face, the charred remains of a doll. His eye sockets had become larger and now dominated his face. The nurses would not admit it to me, but they were revolted by his appearance, almost afraid. The doctors had told me that, as the wounds healed,   a sort of purplish, reptile like skin would slowly form. Nobody dared to comment on his mental state. Everyone assumed that Julian - Miquel - had lost his mind in the blaze, and that he had survived thanks to the obsessive care of a wife who stood firm where so many others would have fled in terror. I looked into his eyes and knew that Julian was still in there, alive, tormenting himself, waiting.