The Shadow of the Wind (64 page)

'I'm very grateful, Senor Sanmarti, but Miquel is busy writing a novel at the moment, and I don't think he would be able to.'

Sanmarti would burst out laughing.

'A novel? Goodness, Nurieta . . . the novel is dead and buried. A friend of mine from New York was telling me only the other day. Americans are inventing something called television which will be like the cinema, only in your own home. There'll be no more need for books, or churches, or anything. Tell your husband to forget about novels. If at least he were well known, if he were a football player or a bullfighter .. . Look, how about getting into the Bugatti and going to eat a paella in Castelldefels so we can discuss all this? Come on, woman, you've got to make an effort. . . You know I'd like to help you. And your nice husband, too. You know only too well that in this country, without the right kind of friends, there's no getting anywhere.'

I began to dress like a pious widow or one of those women who seem to confuse sunlight with mortal sin. I went to work with my hair drawn back into a bun and no makeup. Despite my tactics, Sanmarti continued to shower me with lascivious remarks accompanied by his oily, putrid smile. It was a smile full of disdain, typical of those self-important imbeciles who hang like stuffed sausages from the top of all corporate ladders. I had two or three interviews for prospective jobs elsewhere, but sooner or later I would always come up against another version of Sanmarti. His type grew like a plague of fungi, thriving on the dung on which companies are built. One of them took the trouble to phone Sanmarti and tell him that Nuria Monfort was looking for work behind his back. Sanmarti summoned me to his office, wounded by my ingratitude. He put his hand on my cheek and tried to stroke it. His fingers smelled of tobacco and stale sweat. I went deathly pale.

'Come on, if you're not happy, all you have to do is tell me. What can I do to improve your work conditions? You know how much I appreciate you, and it hurts me to hear that you want to leave us. How about going out to dinner, you and me, to make up?'

I removed his hand from my face, unable to go on hiding the repugnance it caused me.

'You disappoint me, Nuria. I have to admit that you don't seem to be a team player, that you don't appear to believe in this company's business objectives anymore.'

Mercedes had already warned me that sooner or later something like this would happen. A few days afterwards, Sanmarti, whose grammar was no better than an ape's, started returning all the manuscripts that I corrected, alleging that they were full of errors. Practically every day I stayed on in the office until ten or eleven at night, endlessly redoing pages and pages with Sanmarti's crossings-out and comments.

'Too many verbs in the past tense. It sounds dead, lifeless. . . . The infinitive should not be used after a semicolon. Everyone knows that.'

Some nights Sanmarti would also stay late, secluded in his study. Mercedes tried to be there, but more than once he sent her home. Then, when we were left alone, he would come out of his office and wander over to my desk.

'You work too hard, Nuria. Work isn't everything. You need to enjoy yourself too. And you're still young. But youth passes, you know, and we don't always know how to make the most of it.'

He would sit on the edge of my table and stare at me. Sometimes he would stand behind me and remain there a couple of minutes. I could feel his foul breath on my hair. Other times he placed his hands on my shoulders.

'You're tense. Relax.'

I trembled, I wanted to scream or run away and never return to that office, but I needed the job and its miserly pay. One night Sanmarti started on his routine massage and then he began to fondle me.

'One of these days you're going to make me lose my head,' he moaned.

I leaped up, breaking free from his grasp, and ran towards the exit, grabbing my coat and bag. Behind me, Sanmarti laughed. At the bottom of the staircase, I ran straight into a dark figure.

'What a pleasant surprise, Senora Moliner

Inspector Fumero gave me one of his snakelike smiles. 'Don't tell me you're working for my good friend Sanmarti! Lucky girl He's at the top of his game, just like me. So tell me, how's your husband?'

I knew that my time was up. The following day, a rumour spread round the office that Nuria Monfort was a dyke - since she remained immune to Don Pedro Sanmartfs charms and his garlic breath - and that she was involved with Mercedes Pietro. More than one promising young man in the company swore that on a number of occasions he had seen that 'couple of sluts' kissing in the filing room. That afternoon, on her way out, Mercedes asked me whether she could have a quick word with me. She could barely bring herself to look at me. We went to the corner cafe without exchanging a single word. There Mercedes told me what Sanmarti had told her: that he didn't approve of our friendship, that the police had supplied him with a report on me, detailing my suspected communist past.

'I can't afford to lose this job, Nuria. I need it to take care of my son.'

She broke down crying, burning with shame and humiliation.

'Don't worry, Mercedes. I understand,' I said.

'This man, Fumero, he's after you, Nuria. I don't know what he has against you, but it shows in his face.' 'I know.'

The following Monday, when I arrived at work, I found a skinny man with greased-back hair sitting at my desk. He introduced himself as Salvador Benades, the new copy-editor.

'And who are you?'

Not a single person in the office dared look at me or speak to me while I collected my things. On my way down the stairs, Mercedes ran after me and handed me an envelope with a wad of banknotes and some coins.

'Nearly everyone has contributed whatever they could. Take it, please. Not for your sake, for ours.'

That night I went to the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio. Julian was waiting for me as usual, sitting in the dark. He'd written a poem for me, he said. It was the first thing he'd written in nine years. I wanted to read it, but I broke down in his arms. I told him everything, because I couldn't hold back any longer. Julian listened to me without speaking, holding me and stroking my hair. It was the first time in years that I felt I could lean on him. I wanted to kiss him because I was sick with loneliness, but Julian had no lips or skin to offer me. I fell asleep in his arms, curled up on the bed in his room, a child's bunk. When I woke up, Julian wasn't there. At dawn I heard his footsteps on the roof terrace and pretended I was still asleep. Later that morning I heard the news on the radio without realizing its significance. A body had been found sitting on a bench on Pasco del Borne. The dead man had his hands crossed over his lap and was staring at the basilica of Santa Maria del Mar. A flock of pigeons pecking at his eyes caught the attention of a local resident, who alerted the police. The corpse had had its neck broken. Senora Sanmarti identified it as her husband, Pedro Sanmarti Monegal. When the father-in-law of the deceased heard the news in his Banolas nursing home, he gave thanks to heaven and told himself he could now die in peace.

13

Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires. For years I had wanted to believe that Julian was still the man I had fallen in love with, or what was left of him. I had wanted to believe that we could manage to keep going with sporadic bursts of misery and hope. I had wanted to believe that Lain Coubert had died and returned to the pages of a book. We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

Sanmarti's murder opened my eyes. I realized that Lain Coubert was still alive, residing within Julian's burned body and feeding on his memory. He had found out how to get in and out of the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio through a window that gave onto the inner courtyard, without having to force open the door I locked every time I left him there. I discovered that Lain Coubert had been roaming through the city and visiting the old Aldaya mansion. I discovered that in his madness he had returned to the crypt and had broken the tombstones, that he had taken out the coffins of Penelope and his son. What have you done, Julian?

The police were waiting for me when I returned home, to interrogate me about the death of Sanmarti, the publisher. They took me to their headquarters where, after five hours of waiting in a dark office, Fumero arrived, dressed in black, and offered me a cigarette.

'You and I could be friends, Senora Moliner. My men tell me your husband isn't home.'

'My husband left me. I don't know where he is.'

He knocked me off the chair with a brutal slap in the face. I crawled into a corner, seized by fear. I didn't dare look up. Fumero knelt beside me and grabbed me by my hair.

'Try to understand this, you fucking whore: I'm going to find him, and when I do, I'll kill you both. You first, so he can see you with your guts hanging out. And then him, once I've told him that the other tart he sent to the grave was his sister.'

'He'll kill you first, you son of a bitch.'

Fumero spat in my face and let me go. I thought he was going to beat me up, but then I heard his steps as he walked away down the corridor. I rose to my feet, trembling, and wiped the blood off my face. I could smell that man's hand on my skin, but this time I recognized the stench of fear.

They kept me in that room, in the dark and with no water, for six hours. Night had fallen when they let me out. It was raining hard and the streets shimmered with steam. When I got home, I found a sea of debris. Fumero's men had been there. Among the fallen furniture and the drawers and bookshelves thrown on the floor, I found my clothes all torn to shreds and Miquel's books destroyed. On my bed I found a pile of faeces and on the wall, written in excrement, I read the word

WHORE.

I ran to the apartment in Ronda de San Antonio, making a thousand detours to ensure that none of Fumero's henchmen had followed me to the door in Calle Joaquin Costa. I crossed the roof terraces - they were flooded with the rain - and saw that the front door of the apartment was still locked. I went in cautiously, but the echo of my footsteps told me it was empty. Julian was not there. I waited for him, sitting in the dark dining room, listening to the storm, until dawn. When the morning mist licked the balcony shutters, I went up to the roof terrace and gazed at the city, crushed under a leaden sky. I knew that Julian would not return there. I had lost him forever.

I saw him again two months later. I had gone into a cinema at night, alone, feeling incapable of returning to my cold, empty apartment. Halfway through the film, some stupid romance between a Romanian princess eager for adventure and a handsome American reporter with perfect hair, a man sat down next to me. It wasn't the first time. In those days cinemas were crawling with anonymous men who reeked of loneliness, urine, and eau de cologne, wielding their sweaty, trembling hands like tongues of dead flesh. I was about to get up and warn the usher when I recognized Julian's wrinkled profile. He gripped my hand tightly, and we remained like that, looking at the screen without seeing it.

'Did you kill Sanmarti?' I murmured.

'Does anyone miss him?'

We spoke in whispers, under the attentive gaze of the solitary men who were dotted around the stalls, green with envy at the apparent success of their shadowy rival. I asked him where he'd been hiding, but he didn't reply.

'There's another copy of The Shadow of the Wind,' he murmured. 'Here, in Barcelona.'

'You're wrong, Julian. You destroyed them all.'

'All but one. It seems that someone more clever than I hid it in a place where I would never be able to find it. You.'

That's how I first came to hear about you. Some bigmouthed bookseller called Gustavo Barcelo had been boasting to a group of collectors about having located a copy of The Shadow of the Wind. The world of rare books is like an echo chamber. In less than two months, Barcelo was receiving offers for the book from collectors in London, Paris, and Rome. Julian's mysterious flight from Paris after a bloody duel and his rumoured death in the Spanish Civil War had conferred on his works an undreamed-of market value. The black legend of a faceless individual who searched for them in every bookshop, library, and private collection and then burned them only added to the interest and the price. 'We have the circus in our blood,' Barcelo would say.