“Do you remember his friends, anyone special who came around here?”
The caretaker shrugged her shoulders. “Well, it was such a long time ago. Besides, in the last years Julián was hardly ever here, you see. He’d made a friend at school, a boy from a very good family, the Aldayas—now, that’s saying something. Nobody talks about them now, but in those days it was like mentioning the royal family. Lots of money. I know because sometimes they would send a car to fetch Julián. You should have seen that car. Not even Franco would have one like it. With a chauffeur, and all shiny. My Paco, who knew about cars, told me it was arolsroi, or something like that. Fit for an emperor.”
“Do you remember the name of that friend?”
“Listen: with a surname like Aldaya, there’s no need for first names, if you see what I mean. I also remember another boy, a bit of a scatterbrain, called Miquel. I think he was also a classmate. But don’t ask me for his surname or what he looked like.”
We seemed to have reached a dead end, and I feared that the caretaker would start losing interest. I decided to follow a hunch. “Is anyone living in the Fortuny apartment now?”
“No. The old man died without leaving a will, and his wife, as far as I know, is still in Buenos Aires and didn’t even come back for the funeral. Can’t blame her.”
“Why Buenos Aires?”
“Because she couldn’t find anywhere farther away, I guess. She left everything in the hands of a lawyer, a very strange man. I’ve never seen him, but my daughter Isabelita, who lives on the fifth floor, right underneath, says that sometimes, since he has the key, he comes at night and spends hours walking around the apartment and then leaves. Once she said that she could even hear what sounded like women’s high heels. What can I say…?”
“Maybe they were stilts,” I suggested.
She looked at me blankly. Obviously this was a serious subject for the caretaker.
“And nobody else has visited the apartment in all these years?”
“Once this very creepy individual came along, one of those people who never stop smiling, a giggler, but you could see him coming a mile off. He said he was in the Crime Squad. He wanted to see the apartment.”
“Did he say why?”
The caretaker shook her head.
“Do you remember his name?”
“Inspector something or other. I didn’t even believe he was a policeman. The whole thing stank, do you know what I mean? It smelled of something personal. I sent him packing and told him I didn’t have the keys to the apartment and if he wanted anything, he should call the lawyer. He said he’d come back, but I haven’t seen him around here anymore. Good riddance.”
“You wouldn’t by any chance have the name and address of the lawyer, would you?”
“You ought to ask the administrator of this building, Mr. Molins. His office is quite close, number twenty-eight, Floridablanca, first floor. Tell him I sent you—Señora Aurora, at your service.”
“I’m really grateful. So, tell me, Doña Aurora, is the Fortuny apartment empty, then?”
“No, not empty, because nobody has taken anything from there in all these years since the old man died. Sometimes it even smells. I’d say there are rats in the apartment, mark my words.”
“Do you think it would be possible to have a look? We might find something that tells us what really happened to Julián….”
“Oh no, I can’t do that. You must talk to Mr. Molins, he’s the one in charge.”
I smiled at her mischievously. “But you must have a master key, I imagine. Even if you told that guy you didn’t…Don’t tell me you’re not dying to see what’s in there.”
Doña Aurora looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“You’re a devil.”
THE DOOR GAVE WAY LIKE A TOMBSTONE, WITH A SUDDEN GROAN, exhaling dank, foul-smelling air from within. I pushed the front door inward, discovering a corridor that sank into darkness. The place was stuffy and reeked of damp. Spiraling threads of grime and dust hung from the ceiling like white hair. The broken floor tiles were covered by what looked like a layer of ash. I noticed what appeared to be footprints making their way into the apartment.
“Holy Mother of God!” mumbled the caretaker. “There’s more shit here than on the floor of a henhouse.”
“If you’d rather, I’ll go in on my own,” I said.
“That’s exactly what you’d like. Come on, you go ahead, I’ll follow.”
We closed the door behind us and waited by the entrance for a moment until our eyes became accustomed to the dark. I could hear the nervous breathing of the caretaker and noticed the sour smell of her sweat. I felt like a tomb robber, whose soul is poisoned by greed and desire.
“Hey, what’s that noise?” asked the caretaker in an anxious tone. Something fluttered in the dark, disturbed by our presence. I thought I glimpsed a pale shape flickering about at the end of the corridor.
“Pigeons,” I said. “They must have got in through a broken window and made a nest here.”
“Those ugly birds give me the creeps,” said the caretaker. “And they shit like there’s no tomorrow.”
“Relax, Doña Aurora, they only attack when they’re hungry.”
We ventured in a few steps till we reached the end of the corridor, where a dining room opened onto the balcony. Just visible was a shabby table covered with a tattered tablecloth that looked more like a shroud. Four chairs held a wake, together with a couple of grimy glass cabinets that guarded the tableware: an assortment of glasses and a tea set. In a corner stood the old upright piano that had belonged to Carax’s mother. The keys were dark with dirt, and the joins could hardly be seen under the film of dust. An armchair with a long, threadbare cover was slowly disintegrating next to the balcony. Beside it was a coffee table on which rested a pair of reading glasses and a Bible bound in pale leather and edged with gold, of the sort that used to be given as presents for a child’s first communion. It still had its bookmark, a piece of scarlet string.
“Look, that chair is where the old man was found dead. The doctor said he’d been there for two days. How sad to go like that, like a dog, all alone. Not that he didn’t have it coming, but even so…”
I went up to the chair where Mr. Fortuny had died. Next to the Bible was a small box containing black-and-white photographs, old studio portraits. I knelt down to examine them, almost afraid to touch them. I felt I was profaning the memories of a poor old man, but my curiosity got the better of me. The first print showed a young couple with a boy who could not have been more than four years old. I recognized him by his eyes.
“Look, there they are. Mr. Fortuny as a young man, and her…”
“Didn’t Julián have any brothers or sisters?”
The caretaker shrugged her shoulders and let out a sigh. “I heard rumors that she miscarried once because of the beatings her husband gave her, but I don’t know. People love to gossip, don’t they? But not me. All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake. My Isabelita had nightmares for a whole month. That child could be really morbid at times.”
I glanced at the kitchen. There was a broken pane in a small window overlooking an inner courtyard, and you could hear the nervous and hostile flapping of the pigeons’ wings on the other side.
“Do all the apartments have the same layout?” I asked.
“The ones that look onto the street do. But this one is an attic, so it’s a bit different. There’s the kitchen and a laundry room that overlooks the inside yard. Down this corridor there are three bedrooms, and a bathroom at the end. Properly decorated, they can look very nice, believe me. This one is similar to my Isabelita’s apartment—but of course right now it looks like a tomb.”
“Do you know which Julián’s room was?”
“The first door is the master bedroom. The seco
nd is a smaller room. It was probably that one, I’d say.”
I went down the corridor. The paint on the walls was falling off in shreds. At the end of the passage, the bathroom door was ajar. A face seemed to stare at me from the mirror. It could have been mine, or perhaps the face of the sister who lived there. As I got closer, it withdrew into darkness. I tried to open the second door.
“It’s locked,” I said.
The caretaker looked at me in astonishment. “These doors don’t have locks,” she said.
“This one does.”
“Then the old man must have had it put in, because all the other apartments…”
I looked down and noticed that the footprints in the dust led up to the locked door. “Someone’s been in this room,” I said. “Recently.”
“Don’t scare me,” said the caretaker.
I went up to the other door. It didn’t have a lock. It opened with a rusty groan when I touched it. In the middle stood an old four-poster bed, unmade. The sheets had turned yellowish, like winding sheets, and a crucifix presided over the bed. The room also contained a chest of drawers with a small mirror on it, a basin, a pitcher, and a chair. A wardrobe, its door ajar, stood against the wall. I went around the bed to a bedside table with a glass top, under which lay photographs of ancestors, funeral cards, and lottery tickets. On the table were a carved wooden music box and a pocketwatch, frozen forever at twenty past five. I tried to wind up the music box, but the melody got stuck after six notes. When I opened the drawer of the bedside table, I found an empty spectacle case, a nail clipper, a hip flask, and a medal of the Virgin of Lourdes. Nothing else.
“There must be a key to that room somewhere,” I said.
“The administrator must have it. Look, I think it’s best we leave.”
Suddenly I looked down at the music box. I lifted the cover and there, blocking the mechanism, I found a gold key. I took it out, and the music box resumed its tinkling. I recognized a tune by Ravel.
“This must be the key.” I smiled at the caretaker.
“Listen, if the room was locked, there must be a reason. Even if it’s just out of respect for the memory of—”
“If you’d rather, you can wait for me down in your apartment, Doña Aurora.”
“You’re a devil. Go on. Open up if you must.”
·16·
A BREATH OF COLD AIR WHISTLED THROUGH THE HOLE IN THE lock, licking at my fingers while I inserted the key. The lock that Mr. Fortuny had fitted in the door of his son’s unoccupied room was three times the size of the one on the front door. Doña Aurora looked at me apprehensively, as if we were about to open a Pandora’s box.
“Is this room on the front of the house?” I asked.
The caretaker shook her head. “It has a small window, for ventilation. It looks out over the yard.”
I pushed the door inward. An impenetrable well of darkness opened up before us. The meager light from behind crept ahead, barely able to scratch at the shadows. The window overlooking the yard was covered with pages of yellowed newspaper. I tore them off, and a needle of hazy light bored through the darkness.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” murmured the caretaker.
The room was infested with crucifixes. They hung from the ceiling, dangling from the ends of strings, and they covered the walls, hooked on nails. There were dozens of them. You could sense them in every corner, carved with a knife on the wooden furniture, scratched on the floor tiles, painted red on the mirrors. The footprints that had led us to the doorway could now be traced in the dust around the naked bed, just a skeleton of wires and worm-eaten wood. At one end of the room, under the window, stood a closed rolltop desk, crowned by a trio of metal crucifixes. I opened it with care. There was no dust in the joins of the wooden slats, from which I inferred that the desk had been opened quite recently. It had six drawers. The locks had been forced open. I inspected them one by one. Empty.
I knelt down by the desk and fingered the scratches that covered the wood, imagining Julián Carax’s hands making those doodles, hieroglyphics whose meaning had been obscured by time. In the desk, I noticed a pile of notebooks and a vase filled with pencils and pens. I took one of the notebooks and glanced at it. Drawings and single words. Mathematical exercises. Unconnected phrases, quotes from books. Unfinished poems. All the notebooks looked the same. Some drawings were repeated page after page, with slight variations. I was struck by the figure of a man who seemed to be made of flames. Another might have been an angel or a reptile coiled around a cross. Rough sketches hinted at a fantastic rambling house, woven with towers and cathedral-like arches. The strokes were confident and showed a certain facility. Young Carax appeared to be a draftsman of some promise, but none of the drawings were more than rough sketches.
I was about to put the last notebook back in its place without looking at it when something slipped out from its pages and fell at my feet. It was a photograph in which I recognized the same girl who appeared in the other picture—the one taken at the foot of that building. The girl was posed in a luxurious garden, and beyond the treetops, just visible, was the shape of the house I had seen sketched in the drawings of the adolescent Carax. I recognized it immediately. It was the villa called “The White Friar,” on Avenida del Tibidabo. On the back of the photograph was an inscription that simply said:
Penélope, who loves you
I put it in my pocket, closed the desk, and smiled at the caretaker.
“Seen enough?” she asked, anxious to leave the place.
“Almost,” I replied. “Before, you said that soon after Julián left for Paris, a letter came for him, but his father told you to throw it away….”
The caretaker hesitated for a moment, and then she nodded. “I put the letter in the drawer of the cabinet in the entrance hall, in case the Frenchwoman should come back one day. It must still be there.”
We went down to the cabinet and opened the top drawer. An ocher-colored envelope lay on top of a collection of stopped watches, buttons, and coins that had ceased being legal tender twenty years ago. I picked up the envelope and examined it.
“Did you read it?”
“What do you take me for?”
“I meant no offense. It would have been quite natural, under the circumstances, if you thought that Julián was dead….”
The caretaker shrugged, looked down, and started walking toward the door. I took advantage of that moment to put the letter in the inside pocket of my jacket.
“Look, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression,” said the caretaker.
“Of course not. What did the letter say?”
“It was a love letter. Like the stories on the radio, only sadder, you know, because it sounded as if it was really true. Believe me, I felt like crying when I read it.”
“You’re all heart, Doña Aurora.”
“And you’re a devil.”
THAT SAME AFTERNOON, AFTER SAYING GOOD-BYE TO DOÑ A AURORA and promising that I would keep her up to date with my investigations on Julián Carax, I went along to see the administrator of the block of apartments. Mr. Molins had seen better days and now moldered away in a filthy first-floor office on Calle Floridablanca. Still, Molins was a cheerful and self-satisfied individual. His mouth was glued to a half-smoked cigar that seemed to grow out of his mustache. It was hard to tell whether he was asleep or awake, because he breathed like most people snore. His hair was greasy and flattened over his forehead, and he had mischievous piggy eyes. His suit wouldn’t have fetched more than ten pesetas in the Encantes Flea Market, but he made up for it with a gaudy tie of tropical colors. Judging by the appearance of the office, not much was managed anymore, except the bugs and cobwebs of a forgotten Barcelona.
“We’re in the middle of refurbishment,” he said apologetically.
To break the ice, I let drop the name of Doña Aurora, as if I were referring to some old friend of the family.
“When she was young, she was a real looker” was Molins’s comment. “With ag
e she’s gone on the heavier side, but then I’m not what I used to be either. You may not believe this, but when I was your age, I was an Adonis. Girls would go on their knees to beg for a quickie, or to have my babies. Alas, the twentieth century is for shit. What can I do for you, young man?”
I presented him with a more or less plausible story about a supposed distant relationship with the Fortunys. After five minutes’ chatter, Molins dragged himself to his filing cabinet and gave me the address of the lawyer who dealt with matters related to Sophie Carax, Julián’s mother.
“Let me see…José María Requejo. Fifty-nine, Calle León XIII. But we send the mail twice a year to a PO box in the main post office, on Vía Layetana.”
“Do you know Mr. Requejo?”
“I’ve spoken to his secretary occasionally on the telephone. The fact is that all business with him is done by mail, and my secretary deals with that. And today she’s at the hairdresser’s. Lawyers don’t have time for face-to-face dealings anymore. There are no gentlemen left in the profession.”
There didn’t seem to be any reliable addresses left either. A quick glance at the street guide on the manager’s desk confirmed what I suspected: the address of the supposed lawyer, Mr. Requejo, didn’t exist. I told Mr. Molins, who took the news in as if it were a joke.
“Well, I’ll be dammed!” he said laughing. “What did I say? Crooks.”
The manager lay back in his chair and made another of his snoring noises.
“Would you happen to have the number of that PO box?”
“According to the index card it’s 2837, although I can’t read my secretary’s numbers. As I’m sure you know, women are no good at math. What they’re good for is—”
“May I see the card?”
“Sure. Help yourself.”
He handed me the index card, and I looked at it. The numbers were perfectly legible. The PO box was 2321. It horrified me to think of the accounting that must have gone on in that office.
“Did you have much contact with Mr. Fortuny during his lifetime?” I asked.