The Whispering City (8 page)

Hernán still had three of the seven years he’d been sentenced to for stealing a Singer sewing machine from a warehouse, time that Carmiña had used to put together a trousseau by means of petty theft from the hotel.

That day she wanted to let her boyfriend know that they already had a complete set of bed linen, with two sheets and pillowcases.

‘Carmiña, you know that’s a crime, and that you could end up in jail like your boyfriend, don’t you?’

Ana told her the same thing each time, but mostly to feel that she had fulfilled her moral obligation. This time, after having seen the treatment Castro had meted out to Mariona Sobrerroca’s maid, she feared for what would happen to Carmiña if they caught her. As she pulled out a sheet of paper to begin the letter, she imagined Castro slapping the young woman.

‘Yes, ma’am. But you aren’t going to grass on me, are you?’

‘Of course not! What you tell me remains a professional secret,’ lied Ana, ‘like what clients tell priests or solicitors.’

‘Clients? Priests?’

‘You know what I mean.’

Carmiña nodded. Ana picked up her pen.

‘How should we put it this time?’

‘Put that the head of housekeeping gave me a bed set because she is very happy with my work.’

In Carmiña’s letters, her thefts were disguised as gifts from her boss when they were textiles, or from the cafeteria supervisor when they were dishes, or from the owner of the hotel when they were other things, such as an ashtray, a pitcher and other decorative ornaments she’d managed to take without, for the moment, arousing suspicion.

‘And that I’m going to have them embroidered with our initials.’

This was how she had erased the monograms that had once proclaimed the towels, bathrobe and sheets to be the property of the Hotel Majestic.

‘The sheets and the pillowcases are embroidered too?’

‘Of course. It’s the Majestic.’

‘Well, you can leave the H for Hernán.’

‘No. It wouldn’t look right. They’re machine-embroidered, and you can tell the difference.’

Carmiña had her dignity. Or perhaps she was aware of the irony that Hernán was in prison for trying to steal sewing machines.

‘You’re right.’

Ana wrote.

Ana had tried several times to convince Carmiña that such formalities weren’t necessary in a letter to her boyfriend, but she insisted on them so it would be clear that it was a serious letter, a proper letter.

She read it over and crossed out the part about the ‘Spanish woman’.

She didn’t want to go too far. The letter had to get through the prison censors, but it was enough, in her opinion, that the news she was transmitting was inane, and at the end she put the obligatory repetitions of ‘long live the Caudillo’.

She read it to Carmiña.

‘Do you want me to add anything else?’

‘Put something nice. Something sweet and nice. Don’t make me say it, it really embarrasses me.’

Since she couldn’t think of any verse she could camouflage into prose, she put a piece of a bolero by Antonio Machín, with a few changes:

She showed it to Carmiña, who read it slowly, excited when she reached the end. She approved it. Ana wrote a clean version on the paper Carmiña had brought with her.

Carmiña left, after paying her for her work, with the handwritten letter – you don’t type love letters – folded carefully and placed inside an envelope. Ana watched her go, thinking that when she sealed the envelope perhaps she would shed a couple of tears onto the paper that was already scented with a few drops of perfume she’d stolen from a hotel guest. Hernán didn’t realise it, but he had sniffed some of the world’s most expensive perfumes.

The stalls to Ana’s right and left were also occupied. From the one to her right she could hear the voice of Oleguer Pons, a retired man who spent his days in the National Library of Catalonia reading history books and who earned a few coins writing letters.

Oleguer Pons was lucky to have been born a lefty (although in school he hadn’t been allowed to write that way) because a stay in the police headquarters on the Vía Layetana had rendered his right hand useless. To make him confess to the whereabouts of his son, an underground militant in the Communist Party, the police had hung him from a pipe by his wrists with handcuffs for two days. He held out, as did one of his wrists. The right wrist was contorted and twisted inward for ever.

But Oleguer Pons – called by the Castilian version of his name, Olegario, during the two weeks they’d held him in the Social Investigation Brigade prison cell – remembered when he was released that his hands had been tied on another occasion. In school, the teacher had tied his left hand to the back of the chair with string to keep him from writing with it. Which is why, when the bruises disappeared from his left wrist, he needed only a week of practice to develop lovely handwriting with that hand. Since he couldn’t go back to work, now that he was crippled and had a police record, he survived by writing postcards and invitations for a printing house and helping people with their letters near the Library of Catalonia.

Oleguer was reading a letter to someone. It seemed as though it was something difficult, because the woman interrupted him frequently to ask, ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘How do you expect me to know, woman?’

Ana resisted the temptation to look over. As much as she had been exaggerating when she’d explained the secrecy of her profession to Carmiña, she did believe that her work was subject to an ethic that demanded discretion. Besides, she was going to find out anyway, since old Oleguer didn’t share her reservations and enjoyed talking about his work. He was also more in need of conversation than she was, and clung to the few chances he had, even when it was telling her about the letters he had read or written that day. He didn’t talk about his deformed hand. They had discussed it once, and that was enough.

She thought that if they had a lull at the same time, she would tell Pons about her article, but she decided not to tell him that she had been at Vía Layetana and worked with the police inspector. Perhaps it would be better to stick to their customers and their stories, as always. Now that she thought about it, most of the conversations they had were about other people’s lives. But this time she felt like talking about herself, about her article, about Sanvisens congratulating her on it, about getting up early to go to a kiosk and buy a copy, turning the pages with nervous fingers and finding it there, her article.

She pulled a book out of her bag, an edition of
Nada
by Carmen Laforet that she had bought second-hand at the Cervantes Bookshop. She had read about five pages, when, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a familiar figure approaching her stall; it was the unmistakable silhouette of another of her regulars, Pepe ‘The Spider’, a slight man in his thirties, barely five feet tall spread out over thin legs, a narrow torso and a pair of skinny arms in which all the muscles seemed to have been replaced by tendons. With them he could climb up any wall that had even the slightest texture. Pepe the Spider was a cat burglar. And illiterate.

For more than a year now, The Spider had come once a week for Ana to write a letter to the girlfriend he had back in his village in the province of Seville and to read him her response to the previous letter. He always turned up, except for those three weeks when he had had to disappear because he was a suspect in a break-in at a house in San Gervasio. That was four months ago.

‘Every time there’s some break-in that involves climbing, they nick me, even though I had nothing to do with it. And once I’m there, they shave my head. You don’t know how much it hurts to have them take all this off.’ The Spider pointed to his hair, rough as a brush.

‘Why do they do it?’

‘Because they can,’ The Spider lamented as he explained to Ana the reason for his absence.

When he could allow himself to be seen on the streets again, he brought three letters from his girlfriend for Ana to read. He had them sent to an ironmonger’s on the street where he lived. It was a precaution in case they ever sent him down for a long stretch, so that his girlfriend’s letters wouldn’t end up in just anybody’s hands. The shop assistant there was an old friend of his from his village.

The Spider’s girlfriend, Azucena, knew how to read, but she too had someone write her letters for her. Ana didn’t dare ask her client, but she assumed it was a woman.

‘Is there a school in your village?’

‘Of course. I didn’t go, but there is one.’

‘And is the teacher there a man or a woman?’

‘A woman. Why?’

‘Just curious.’

Perhaps the teacher was the author of the letters that The Spider received. In any case, they were definitely written by a woman. Not only because of the style, with fragments such as, ‘Today I pick up my pen to write to you’ and ‘I am at a loss for words to show the depth of my appreciation for the effort I know you are making so that we can marry soon’, but for one sound reason: a woman wouldn’t dictate her love letters to a man, no matter how prosaic they were and how filled with cliché. That was also her experience as a writer and reader of letters. For love letters, both men and women preferred that the scrivener be a woman.

She read The Spider his letter. The man could barely hold back his tears when Azucena sent him greetings from his family. Then he explained to Ana what she should write to his girlfriend.

‘Tell her that I will soon be able to bring her here.’

When he’d finished, he said, ‘Can you give me this one on credit, Señorita Ana? I’ll pay for it next week, I swear.’

‘Yes, all right.’

The Spider left happily with his letter in an envelope and, thought Ana, with a scheme for some burglary in his head, if he was thinking of bringing his girlfriend to Barcelona.

‘One of these days a gust of wind will come and blow that one right away,’ said a voice from the booth to the right.

Oleguer Pons had also finished with his inquisitive client and was watching The Spider as he disappeared around a corner. Then, as Ana had expected, he told her about the contents of his client’s letter. She listened to it with the impatience of someone who knows that the story she has to tell, when it is her turn to speak, is going to be infinitely more interesting. And it was. Old Oleguer was the perfect listener: attentive, curious and enthusiastic. Ana went on in depth and then held out the copy of
La Vanguardia
that she had brought with her to show to her parents. Oleguer Pons read the text and told her, ‘The family tradition continues. Has your father or your grandfather seen it?’

No. Not yet. She was planning on going to their house later, for lunch. And taking them a copy of the newspaper. She was eager to see her family’s reaction to her first success.

All the same, she helped two more people with some official papers. Afterwards, she said goodbye to Oleguer Pons, closed the stall and headed to her parents’ house.

9

‘The taxi’s here.’

Calvet appeared in the doorway of Pablo’s office and started laughing when he saw his disconcerted expression.

‘We’re going to have lunch with Pla. I reserved a table at Siete Puertas. Weren’t we going to talk about your problem? Don’t tell me you forgot! I can’t believe that.’

No, of course he hadn’t forgotten. Since he’d been told about the lunch, the hours had both stretched on interminably and passed in a flash; now it seemed that the meeting with his bosses was catching him unprepared. Calvet went off, leaving the door open.

Pablo put on his jacket and went after him.

‘Calvet and Señor Pla have already gone downstairs,’ Maribel told him.

They hadn’t waited for him. Bad sign.

‘Bon appétit!’ said Maribel in farewell.

Siete Puertas was an expensive restaurant near the port. Was that a good sign? If they took him to eat there, surely they weren’t going to fire him. Or was that perhaps the last meal of a condemned man?

Pla and Calvet sat in the back seat of the taxi and closed the door, making it clear that he should sit beside the driver. Another bad sign. During the ride Calvet talked constantly. Pablo saw out of the corner of his eye how the lawyer accentuated each of his words with gestures that he drew in the air like Chinese calligraphy. Sometimes he talked about the traffic. ‘There are more and more cars in this city! Soon you won’t be able to cross the road.’

Or he commented on the building work being carried out for the Eucharistic Congress: ‘Did you know they are finally knocking down the rookeries on the Diagonal?’

Pla’s worrying silence was broken only when Calvet talked about the new Civil Governor, but it was nothing more than an approving grunt. ‘A hardliner, just what this city needs,’ added Calvet, not allowing himself to be disheartened by his boss’s reserve.

Pablo didn’t think that what the city needed was more of a hard line, but he was very careful not to state his opinion.

‘Noguer, I guess you must have noticed the change since they put one of the hardliners at the head of the CIB. Goyanes, the one who used to be in Social. A tough nut to crack.’

And he was. Since Commissioner Goyanes had been in the CIB, not only had the number of arrests for common crimes gone up, but the penalties handed down by the public prosecutor’s office were much harsher. Rumour had it that they had put one of the political officers into the CIB to keep an eye on the investigators so they wouldn’t ‘go easy’. Goyanes had the support of the Civil Government. The Commissioner, Governor Acedo Colunga, and his right-hand man, Sánchez-Herranz, were outsiders and, judging by their declarations, seemed convinced that they were in a city whose inhabitants were, to a man, potential criminals who had to be kept at bay.