The Whispering City (24 page)

They returned to the car and fetched the stockings from the glove compartment.

‘Are you sure they have no runs?’ asked Ana.

‘If you haven’t made any.’

They returned to the post office. Ana entered the building with the little packet in her bag and went straight to the PO box counter. The girl’s eyes were red; she had been crying. She still hiccuped a little as she spoke to her.

‘How can I help you?’

She ignored the question and said quietly, ‘What an ogre your boss is! All over nothing! And in front of everybody.’

The girl nodded with an afflicted expression. She was about to burst into tears again.

‘You’ve no idea how much I can relate to that,’ continued Ana. ‘I’m in a similar situation.’

The girl’s sorrow began to be tinged with curiosity.

Then she went into the most daring and perhaps the most contemptible part of her plan, a complex story of forbidden love worthy of a romance novel. A friendship via correspondence that had led to love. She added parental prohibition and the man’s sudden silence.

‘I’m afraid that my parents wrote to him and forbade him from writing to me any more. But if I knew the address that the post office box belongs to…’

The girl understood. ‘That is not allowed.’

‘I know. But it’s my only hope. There are things that are above the rules. If you can’t understand that, I don’t know who can.’

The girl hesitated.

‘I also have a little thank-you gift for you.’

She drew the tissue paper packet out of her bag, opened it carefully and showed her the stockings. The girl’s eyes sparkled.
She must
, thought Ana,
be
imagining her boyfriend’s response to seeing them on her
.

‘Which box is it?’

‘Number Thirteen.’

The girl’s face showed a sudden sorrowful expression that Ana didn’t know how to interpret. She left for a moment and returned with a little piece of paper on which she had written down the address.

‘Thank you.’

Ana handed her the stockings. She took them, thanked her and looked at her again sadly. She didn’t say goodbye; merely turned and went into the back room again. Ana supposed it was to examine her trophy in privacy.

29

‘I can’t see anyone. There’s uncollected post behind the door.’

Ana stood up. She had been looking through the letter slot. To keep it from making a noise when it closed, she lowered it slowly with her index finger. Then, as if to make full use of the finger she had already extended, she rang the bell.

They waited a moment.

‘The owner doesn’t seem to be at home,’ said Ana.

She covered her hand with her coat sleeve and turned the knob. Surprisingly, the door opened with a gentle creak. She turned towards Beatriz with triumphant eyes and disappeared into the house. Beatriz entered behind her, trying to stop her and to keep from stepping on the letters scattered across the floor.

‘What are you doing?’ she whispered. ‘What are you going to do if the owner comes back and finds us in his house?’

‘Talk to him.’

Ana knelt down, picked up one of the envelopes and showed it to her.

‘And his name is Abel Mendoza, by the way.’

‘Would you talk to someone who had entered your house like this?’

‘I’ll tell him I’m a journalist.’

‘Would you talk to a journalist who had entered your house like this?’

Ana didn’t reply.

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that this man could be Mariona’s killer?’

‘I haven’t stopped thinking about it since we discovered he existed, Beatriz.’

But she was already inside the house as she was saying these words.

‘Well, since we’re here, we can have a look around,’ conceded Beatriz. They continued speaking in whispers.

They had to turn on the light because the interior was darkened both by blinds and by thick curtains that reached the floor. They were in a hallway that had two doors on the left and another two on the right. It smelled of damp, mould, closed rooms. Beatriz took the first door on the right.

‘Don’t take off your gloves,’ Ana said.

She still wore her leather driving gloves, although they had parked the car a street away.

‘I should wear some too. I should have grabbed a pair from the glove compartment.’

Beatriz opened her bag and took out some cotton gloves. She tossed them to Ana. ‘I used them last week when I was in the manuscript section of the Library of Catalonia. See if they fit you.’

They flew towards Ana like a limp, rather awkward dove.

‘You still call it the Library of Catalonia, too?’

‘Of course.’

Fifteen minutes later they had covered all the rooms in the two-storey house. An old kitchen with a refrigerator even older than Beatriz’s. The dining room furniture was worn but clean. The upholstery on the armchair in the small adjoining parlour was darned, and the china plates and the crockery were piled up neatly behind the glazed doors of a display cabinet.

On the first floor there was a study, also small, whose window opened on to the Llobregat River, which flowed by a few metres away. One of the walls was taken up by an enormous wardrobe, disproportionate and rather absurd in that room. The rest of the space was filled with a desk, dominated by an old typewriter, shelves of books and an office cabinet used to store files and folders.

‘A good place to work,’ she said, acknowledging the place’s tranquillity. ‘“What a restful life has he who flees the noise of the world!”’

‘Fray Luis de León!’ interrupted Ana. ‘Am I right?’

Beatriz sat at the desk. On the polished wood surface, the rings from many cups of coffee and glasses of wine sketched a pattern whose only regularity was that it avoided the writing area. Yes, that was the desk he worked at. She opened one of the drawers. Inside they found perfectly organised piles of different types of paper, thick letter paper in various shades and also cheap writing paper. To the left of the desk there was a shelf with an old edition of the Royal Academy of Language’s dictionary, countless anthologies of love poems and romantic novels by Carmen de Icaza, Concha Linares… What does one write with a reference library like that? Obviously not a scholarly study on Spanish epic poetry.

She turned towards Ana.

‘I think he writes his Knight of the Rose letters here.’ She pointed out the bookshelf to her cousin. ‘He has everything he needs to write love letters: dictionaries, and little books like
Your Social Correspondence
by Teodoro Inclán and
The Words of Lovers
.
Love Letters to Touch the Heart
by Angelines Peñarroya del Río and the
Outline of Spanish Grammar
.’

‘In case his “beloved” minds errors.’

‘Some literary models. Look, here is a complete edition of Bécquer’s
Rhymes.
’

Beatriz got up from the desk, went over to the bookshelf and pulled out the volume.

‘In case his memory fails him as he’s writing and he forgets a verse. We don’t all have your incredible memory.’

Again Ana leaned over the filing cabinet she’d been fiddling with for a little while. She had pulled out a hairpin and was trying to pick the lock.

‘At last.’

She smiled victoriously. She went over to the bureau and lifted the rolltop cover; the wooden slats creaked a little, but it opened easily. Behind it were five neatly labelled folders. Ana grabbed the one whose spine read ‘Pi–Su’ and put it on the desk. Beatriz stood next to her as she opened it. Their eyes immediately fell on the archive page where it read ‘Sobrerroca, Mariona. Barcelona.’ Beside that, the address and a date. Inside the card file there were approximately twenty letters, some written on light violet paper; between them were very thin white sheets.

‘Copies. Made with carbon paper.’

Ana went through the sheets.

‘Here is their entire correspondence. It starts with the advertisement in
Mujer Actual
.’

She continued to page through.

‘Look, here is where he does his accounting.’

His expenses and income were listed in two columns.

‘Train to Barcelona. Two coffees and tea biscuits in the Mauri Bakery.’

‘That was their first meeting, the one with the white standard.’ Beatriz pointed to an entry that showed two coffees and two glasses of cognac at a place in Sants.

There were two more mentions of cafés; a meal in a restaurant. Then just train trips. Perhaps they were already meeting at Mariona’s house. Or she had started to take care of all the expenses.

The column of earnings showed fewer figures, but much higher ones. A thousand pesetas to get him out of a financial jam. Twenty thousand pesetas, investment in a plot of land.

‘I don’t make that in two years,’ said Ana.

‘The last entry is on 20 April, a week before Mariona was killed.’

The ‘Sobrerroca, Mariona’ file was only one of the many that filled the filing cabinet. They didn’t need to say out loud what that meant. Beatriz remembered Mariona Sobrerroca. The last image she had of her was the photo accompanying her obituary in
La Vanguardia
, a woman in her fifties, attractive, maybe a little plump. She had bought a lover, even though the payment was hidden beneath the euphemism of loans. It was one way to combat loneliness; there were worse ways.

Ana seemed more interested in the other aspect of the, what should she call it? business? She showed her the previous page in the archive. ‘Palau, Carlota’ it read. The address was in Tarragona, the date two years earlier. There was also an advertisement and a lot of correspondence. At the end, the list of income and expenses.

Beatriz calculated the earnings.

‘Nine thousand pesetas from Señora Palau.’

Ana checked the dates of the first and last letter.

‘This relationship lasted at least a year. And here is the previous page.’

Another woman from Barcelona. The components were repeated: the advertisement, the correspondence, the chart of income and expenses. And, they saw, the dates partly overlapped with those of the woman in Tarragona.

‘So he had two at once,’ said Beatriz.

‘At least. Now I understand why the girl at the PO box office looked at me with pity. She knew that Mendoza received letters from a lot of women.’

Ana pulled out another folder, the first one; she rested it on the cabinet and started to write down names and dates. Beatriz wanted to read the letters.

‘To this one, Carlota Palau, he also signed himself The Knight of the Rose and Octavian.’

She read the complete correspondence, the initial sounding out, the letters in which he set out the bait with which, evidently, he managed to reel her in and – the part that she was morbidly fascinated by – the skill with which he got rid of her.

‘He gently snuffed out the flame. In one letter he claims he can’t live without her and she, of course, is flattered. But then come the direct demands. He wants them to live together, to make their love public; he wants to meet her family, her friends, he wants to go to Mass with her on Sundays.’ Beatriz can’t hold back a giggle. ‘Too much for poor Carlota.’

‘You don’t think he said it seriously?’

‘No, not at all. If you look at the evolution of the correspondence and you compare it to the income chart, you can see that there is a certain correlation between the passion and the sums of money.’

Ana left the filing cabinet for a moment and went over to the desk to see what Beatriz was showing her.

‘Imagine if Carlota Palau had said yes.’

‘I don’t have that much imagination, a middle-class lady from the provinces marrying a young arriviste. It wouldn’t even work in a novel.’

‘And Mariona? What point was the relationship at?’

‘Judging by the letters, a crucial one.’

Beatriz went back to the correspondence; Ana, to another of the files.

Mendoza had cut out the ad that had brought them into contact and had glued it to a thick piece of paper along with its publication date. So he kept a meticulous record of everything he was doing; if he maintained several relationships simultaneously, he needed to do that in order to avoid mistakes. After the advert followed Mariona’s letter, very contained, feeling out the situation. The Knight of the Rose had responded with identical caution. He told her that he was looking for a cultured woman with experience of life. He gave the impression that he didn’t have much interest in young girls. ‘Butterflies that flutter in the sunlight, fleeting beauties, nothing more.’ Mariona had agreed to meet up, and she had suggested wearing a white silk scarf around her neck so he could recognise her.

Beatriz was pleased with herself. She had been right. She didn’t read Mendoza’s other letters; they were carbon copies of the ones Ana had showed her. She was interested in Mariona’s replies. She was clearly the one setting the pace and determining how far to take the frivolous allusions. If he were Hansel, she wrote in one of her letters, the only thing she wanted was to lick his lollipop. Beatriz already knew his response; his only desire was to lose himself in Little Red Riding Hood’s forest. Beatriz blushed with embarrassment over such direct and pitiful metaphors.

Fortunately Ana wanted to show her something. She went to stand beside her.

‘Look. It’s a reply to the same advert. And here, too.’

The correspondence that Mendoza had maintained with those other two women who had responded to the advert in
Mujer Actual
was relatively brief. In one of the letters they saw that he had noted in pencil ‘Not worth the trouble’. In another he put ‘Distrusting nature. Too much work’. The last letters before the next woman arrived were of farewell. The content was the same in both cases: the Knight of the Rose explained to them that he had to go to Argentina. The tone was adapted to the recipient. Sentimental and stuffed with romantic verses for one. For the other he had mostly used Quevedo and Lope de Vega to lament life’s ups and downs. Beatriz couldn’t help but be reminded of a fellow student at university who had been purged by the Regime and now made a living writing romance novels. He had chosen the wrong type of text; writing love letters was much more profitable. She put the letters to one side and looked out of the window. The view wasn’t bad: a garden surrounded by a low wall and behind that, the river. On the other side, fields that were beginning to burst into life. If the study were hers, she would have put the desk right in front of the window.