“I’ve read all of Julián’s novels.”
“Have you kept them?”
The priest shook his head.
“May I ask what you did with them?”
“Years ago someone came into my room and set fire to them.”
“Do you suspect anyone?”
“Of course. I suspect Fumero. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Fermín and I exchanged puzzled looks.
“Inspector Fumero? Why would he want to burn the books?”
“Who else would? During the last year we spent together in the school, Francisco Javier tried to kill Julián with his father’s shotgun. If Miquel hadn’t stopped him…”
“Why did he try to kill him? Julián had been his only friend.”
“Francisco Javier was obsessed with Penélope Aldaya. Nobody knew this. I don’t think even Penélope had noticed the existence of this boy. He kept the secret for years. Apparently he used to follow Julián secretly. I think one day he saw him kiss her. I don’t know. What I do know is that he tried to kill him in broad daylight. Miquel Moliner, who had never trusted Fumero, threw himself on him and stopped him at the last moment. The hole made by the bullet is still visible by the entrance. Every time I go past it, I remember that day.”
“What happened to Fumero?”
“He and his family were thrown out of the place. I think Francisco Javier was sent to a boarding school for a while. We heard no more about him until a couple of years later, when his mother died in a hunting accident. There was no such accident. Francisco Javier Fumero is a murderer.”
“If I were to tell you…” mumbled Fermín.
“It wouldn’t be a bad thing if one of you did tell me something, but something true for a change.”
“We can tell you that Fumero was not the person who burned your books.”
“Who was it, then?”
“In all likelihood it was a man whose face is disfigured by burns, who calls himself Laín Coubert.”
“Isn’t that the one…?”
I nodded. “The name of one of Carax’s characters. The devil.”
Father Fernando leaned back in his armchair, almost as confused as we were.
“What does seem increasingly clear is that Penélope Aldaya is at the center of all this business, and she’s the person we know least about,” Fermín remarked.
“I don’t think I’d be able to help you there. I hardly ever saw her, and then only from a distance, two or three times. What I know about her is what Julián told me, which wasn’t much. The only other person who I heard mention Penélope’s name a few times was Jacinta Coronado.”
“Jacinta Coronado?”
“Penélope’s governess. She had raised Jorge and Penélope. She loved them madly, especially Penélope. Sometimes she would come to the school to collect Jorge, because Don Ricardo Aldaya wanted his children to be watched over at all times by some member of his household. Jacinta was an angel. She had heard that both Julián and I came from modest families, so she would always bring us afternoon snacks because she thought we went hungry. I would tell her that my father was the cook and not to worry, for I was never without something to eat. But she insisted. Sometimes I’d wait and talk to her. She was the kindest person I’ve ever met. She had no children or any boyfriend that I knew of. She was alone in the world and had devoted her life to the Aldaya children. She simply adored Penélope. She still talks about her….”
“Are you still in touch with Jacinta?”
“I sometimes visit her in the Santa Lucía hospice. She doesn’t have anyone. For reasons that we cannot comprehend, the Good Lord doesn’t always reward us during our lifetime. Jacinta is now a very old woman and is as alone as she has always been.”
Fermín and I exchanged looks.
“What about Penélope? Hasn’t she ever visited Jacinta?”
Father Fernando’s eyes grew dark and impenetrable. “Nobody knows what happened to Penélope. That girl was Jacinta’s life. When the Aldayas left for America and she lost her, she lost everything.”
“Why didn’t they take her with them? Did Penélope also go to Argentina, with the rest of the Aldayas?” I asked.
The priest shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Nobody ever saw Penélope again or heard anything about her after 1919.”
“The year Carax left for Paris,” Fermín observed.
“You must promise me that you’re not going to bother this poor old lady and make her unearth painful memories.”
“Who do you take us for, Father?” asked Fermín with annoyance.
Suspecting that he would get no more from us, Father Fernando made us swear to him that we would keep him informed about any new discoveries we made. To reassure him, Fermín insisted on swearing on a New Testament that lay on the priest’s desk.
“Leave the Gospels alone. Your word is enough for me.”
“You don’t let anything pass you, do you, Father? You’re sharp as a nail.”
“Come, let me go with you to the door.”
He led us through the garden until we reached the spiked gate and then stopped at a reasonable distance from the exit, gazing at the street that wound its way down toward the real world, as if he were afraid he would evaporate if he ventured out a few steps farther. I wondered when Father Fernando had last left the school grounds.
“I was very sad when I heard that Julián had died,” he said softly. “Despite everything that happened afterward and the fact that we grew apart as time went by, we were good friends: Miquel, Aldaya, Julián, and myself. Even Fumero. I always thought we were going to be inseparable, but life must know things that we don’t know. I’ve never had friends like those again, and I don’t imagine I ever will. I hope you find what you’re looking for, Daniel.”
·26·
IT WAS ALMOST MIDMORNING WHEN WE REACHED PASEO DE LA BONANOVA, wrapped in our own thoughts. I had little doubt that Fermín’s were largely devoted to the sinister appearance of Inspector Fumero in the story. I glanced over at him and noticed that he seemed consumed by anxiety. A veil of dark-red clouds bled across the sky, punctured by splinters of light the color of fallen leaves.
“If we don’t hurry, we’re going to get caught in a downpour,” I said.
“Not yet. Those clouds look like nighttime, like a bruise. They’re the sort that wait.”
“Don’t tell me you’re also a cloud expert, Fermín.”
“Living in the streets has unexpected educational side effects. Listen, just thinking about this Fumero business has stirred my juices. Would you object to a stop at the bar in Plaza de Sarriá to polish off two well-endowed omelette sandwiches, plus trimmings?”
We set off toward the square, where a knot of old folks hovered around the local pigeon community, their lives reduced to a ritual of spreading crumbs and waiting. We found ourselves a table near the entrance, and Fermín proceeded to wolf down the two sandwiches, his and mine, a pint of beer, two chocolate bars, and a triple coffee heavily laced with rum and sugar. For dessert he had a Sugus candy. A man sitting at the next table glanced at Fermín over his newspaper, probably thinking the same thing I was.
“I don’t see how you fit it all in, Fermín.”
“In my family we’ve always had a speedy metabolism. My sister Jesusa, may God rest her soul, was capable of eating a six-egg omelette with blood sausage in the middle of the afternoon and then tucking in like a Cossack at night. Poor thing. She was just like me, you know? Same face and same classic figure, rather on the lean side. A doctor from Cáceres once told my mother that the Romero de Torres family was the missing link between man and the hammerhead, for ninety percent of our organism is cartilage, mainly concentrated in the nose and the outer ear. Jesusa was often mistaken for me in the village, because she never grew breasts and began to shave before me. She died of consumption when she was twenty-two, a virgin to the end and secretly in love with a sanctimonious priest who, when he met her on the street, always said, ‘Hello, Fermín, you’re
becoming quite a dashing young man.’ Life’s ironies.”
“Do you miss them?”
“The family?”
Fermín shrugged his shoulders, caught in a nostalgic smile.
“What do I know? Few things are more deceptive than memories. Look at the priest…. And you? Do you miss your mother?”
I looked down. “A lot.”
“Do you know what I remember most about mine?” Fermín asked. “Her smell. She always smelled clean, like a loaf of sweet bread. It didn’t matter if she’d spent the day working in the fields or was wearing the same old rags she’d worn all week. She always smelled of the best things in this world. Mind you, she was pretty uncouth. She would swear like a trooper, but she smelled like a fairy-tale princess. Or at least that’s what I thought. What about you? What is it you remember most about your mother, Daniel?”
I hesitated for a moment, clawing at the words that my lips couldn’t shape.
“Nothing. For years now I haven’t been able to remember my mother. I can’t remember what her face was like, or her voice or her smell. I lost them on the day I discovered Julián Carax, and they haven’t come back.” Fermín watched me cautiously, considering his reply. “Don’t you have a photograph of her?”
“I’ve never wanted to look at them,” I said.
“Why not?”
I’d never told anyone this, not even my father or Tomás. “Because I’m afraid. I’m afraid of looking for a photograph of my mother and discovering that she’s a stranger. You probably think that’s nonsense.”
Fermín shook his head. “And is that why you believe that if you manage to unravel the mystery of Julián Carax and rescue him from oblivion, the face of your mother will come back to you?”
I looked at him. There was no irony or judgment in his expression. For a moment Fermín Romero de Torres seemed to me the wisest and most lucid man in the universe.
“Perhaps,” I said without thinking.
At noon on the dot, we got on a bus that would take us back downtown. We sat in the front, just behind the driver, a circumstance Fermín used as an excuse to hold a discussion with the man about the many advances, both technical and cosmetic, that he had noticed in public transportation since the last time he’d used it, circa 1940—especially with regard to signposting, as was borne out by the notice that readSPITTING AND FOUL LANGUAGE ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. Fermín looked briefly at the sign and decided to acknowledge it by energetically clearing his throat of phlegm. This granted us a sharp look of disapproval from of a trio of saintly ladies who traveled like a commando unit in the back of the bus, each one armed with a missal.
“You savage!” murmured the bigot on the eastern flank, who bore a remarkable likeness to the official portrait of Il Duce, but with curls.
“There they go,” said Fermín. “Three saints has my Spain. Saint Holier-than-thou, Saint Holyshit, and Saint Holycow. Between us all, we’ve turned this country into a joke.”
“You can say that again,” agreed the driver. “We were better off with the Republic. To say nothing of the traffic. It stinks.”
A man sitting in the back of the bus laughed, enjoying the exchange of views. I recognized him as the same fellow who had sat next to us in the bar. His expression seemed to suggest that he was on Fermín’s side and that he wanted to see him get merciless with the diehards. We exchanged a quick glance. He gave me a friendly smile and returned to his newspaper. When we got to Calle Ganduxer, I noticed that Fermín had curled up in a ball under his raincoat and was having a nap with his mouth open, an expression of bliss and innocence on his face.
The bus was gliding through the wealthy domains of Paseo de San Gervasio when Fermín suddenly woke up. “I’ve been dreaming about Father Fernando,” he told me. “Except that in my dream he was dressed as the center forward for Real Madrid and he had the league cup next to him, shining like the Holy Grail.”
“I wonder why?” I asked.
“If Freud is right, this probably means that the priest has sneaked in a goal for us.”
“He struck me as an honest man.”
“Fair enough. Perhaps too honest for his own good. All priests with the makings of a saint end up being sent off to the missions, to see whether the mosquitoes or the piranhas will finish them off.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“What blessed innocence, Daniel. You’d even believe in the tooth fairy. All right, just to give you an example: the tall tale about Miquel Moliner that Nuria Monfort landed on you. I think this wench told you more whoppers than the editorial page ofL’Osservatore Romano. Now it turns out that she’s married to a childhood friend of Aldaya and Carax—isn’t that a coincidence? And on top of that, we have the story of Jacinta, the good nurse, which might be true but sounds too much like the last act in a play by Alexandre Dumas the younger. Not to mention the star appearance of Fumero in the role of thug.”
“Then do you think Father Fernando lied to us?”
“No. I agree with you that he seems honest, but the uniform carries a lot of weight, and he may well have kept anora pro nobis or two up his sleeve, if you get my drift. I think that if he lied, it was by way of holding back and decorum, not out of spite or malice. Besides, don’t imagine him capable of inventing such a story. If he could lie better, he wouldn’t be teaching algebra and Latin; he’d be in the bishopric by now, growing fat in an office like a cardinal’s and plunging soft sponge cakes in his coffee.”
“What do you suggest we do, then?”
“Sooner or later we’re going to have to dig up the mummified corpse of the angelic granny and shake it from the ankles to see what falls out. For the time being, I’m going to pull a few strings and see what I can find out about this Miquel Moliner. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep an eye on that Nuria Monfort. I think she’s turning out to be what my deceased mother called a sly old fox.”
“You’re mistaken about her,” I claimed.
“You’re shown a pair of nice boobs and you think you’ve seen Saint Teresa—which at your age can be excused but not cured. Just leave her to me, Daniel. The fragrance of the eternal feminine no longer overpowers me the way it mesmerizes you. At my age the flow of blood to the brain has precedence over that which flows to the loins.”
“Look who’s talking.”
Fermín pulled out his wallet and started to count his money.
“You have a fortune there,” I said. “Is all that the change from this morning?”
“Partly. The rest is legitimate. I’m taking my Bernarda out today, and I can’t refuse that woman anything. If necessary, I would rob the Central Bank of Spain to indulge her every whim. What about you? What are your plans for the rest of the day?”
“Nothing special.”
“And what about the girl?”
“What girl?”
“Little Bo Peep. Who do you think? Aguilar’s sister.”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any plans.”
“What you don’t have, to put it bluntly, is enough balls to take the bull by the horns.”
At that the conductor made his way up to us with a tired expression, his mouth juggling a toothpick, which he twisted and turned through his teeth with circuslike dexterity.
“Excuse me, but these ladies over there want to know if you could use more respectable language.”
“They can mind their own bloody business,” answered Fermín in a loud voice.
The conductor turned toward the three ladies and shrugged, to indicate that he had done what he could and was not inclined to get involved in a scuffle over a matter of semantic modesty.
“People who have no life always have to stick their nose in the life of others,” said Fermín. “What were we talking about?”
“About my lack of guts.”
“Right. A textbook case. Trust you me, young man. Go after your girl. Life flies by, especially the bit that’s worth living. You heard what the priest said. Like a flash.”
“She’s notmy gi
rl.”
“Well, then, make her yours before someone else takes her, especially the little tin soldier.”
“You talk as if Bea were a trophy.”
“No, as if she were a blessing,” Fermín corrected. “Look, Daniel. Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”
I spent the rest of the journey considering this pearl of wisdom while Fermín had another snooze, an occupation for which he had a Napoleonic talent. We got off the bus on the corner of Gran Vía and Paseo de Gracia under a leaden sky that stole the light of day. Buttoning his raincoat up to his neck, Fermín announced that he was departing in a hurry toward hispensión, to smarten up for his meeting with Bernarda.
“You must understand that with rather modest looks such as mine, basic beautification entails at least ninety minutes. You won’t get far without some looks; that’s the sad truth about these dishonest times.Vanitas peccata mundi. ”
I saw him walk away down Gran Vía, barely a sketch of a little man sheltering himself in a drab raincoat that flapped in the wind like a ragged flag. I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world. When I turned the corner of Puerta del Ángel and Calle Santa Ana, my heart missed a beat. As usual, Fermín had been right. Destiny was waiting for me in front of the bookshop, clad in a tight gray wool suit, new shoes, and nylon stockings, studying her reflection in the shop window.
“My father thinks I’ve gone to twelve o’clock mass,” said Bea without looking up from her own image.
“You could as well be there. There’s been a continuous performance since nine o’clock in the morning less than twenty yards from here, in the Church of Santa Ana.”
We spoke like two strangers who have casually stopped by a shop window, looking for each other’s eyes in the pane.
“Let’s not make a joke of it. I’ve had to pick up a church leaflet to see what the sermon was about. He’s going to ask me for a detailed synopsis.”
“Your father thinks of everything.”