THE RED HOUSE TELLS THE STORY OF A MYSTERIOUS, TORMENTED individual who breaks into toy shops and museums to steal dolls and puppets. Once they are in his power, he pulls out their eyes and takes them back to his lugubrious abode, a ghostly old conservatory lingering on the misty banks of the Seine. One fateful night he breaks into a sumptuous mansion on Avenue Foch determined to plunder the private collection of dolls belonging to a tycoon who, predictably, had grown insanely rich through devious means during the industrial revolution. As he is about to leave with his loot, ourvoleur is surprised by the tycoon’s daughter, a young lady of Parisian high society named Giselle, exquisitely well read and highly refined but cursed with a morbid nature and naturally doomed to fall madly in love with the intruder. As the meandering saga continues through tumultuous incidents in dimly lit settings, the heroine begins to unravel the mystery that drives the enigmatic protagonist (whose name, of course, is never revealed) to blind the dolls, and as she does so, she discovers a horrible secret about her own father and his collection of china figures. At last the tale sinks into a tragic, darkly perfumed gothic denouement.
Monsieur Roquefort had literary pretensions himself and was the owner of a vast collection of letters of rejection signed by every self-respecting Parisian publisher, in response to the books of verse and prose he sent them so relentlessly. Thus he was able to identify the novel’s publishing house as a second-rate firm, known, if anything, for its books on cookery, sewing, and other lesser handicrafts. The owner of the bookstall told him that when the novel had appeared, it had merited but two scant reviews from provincial dailies, strategically placed next to the obituary notices. The critics had a field day writing Carax off in a few lines, advising him not to leave his employment as a pianist, as it was obvious that he was not going to hit the right note in literature. Monsieur Roquefort, whose heart and pocket softened when faced with lost causes, decided to invest half a franc on the book by the unknown Carax and at the same time took away an exquisite edition of the great master Gustave Flaubert, whose unrecognized successor he considered himself to be.
The train to Lyons was packed, and Monsieur Roquefort was obliged to share his second-class compartment with a couple of nuns who had given him disapproving looks from the moment they left the Gare d’Austerlitz, mumbling under their breath. Faced with such scrutiny, the teacher decided to extract the novel from his briefcase and barricade himself behind its pages. Much to his surprise, hundreds of kilometers later, he discovered he had quite forgotten about the sisters, the rocking of the train, and the dark landscape sliding past the windows like a nightmare scene from the Lumière brothers. He read all night, unaware of the nuns’ snoring or of the stations that flashed by in the fog. At daybreak, as he turned the last page, Monsieur Roquefort realized that his eyes were tearing up and his heart was poisoned with envy and amazement.
THAT MONDAY, MONSIEUR ROQUEFORT CALLED THE PUBLISHER IN Paris to request information on Julián Carax. After much insistence a telephonist with an asthmatic voice and a virulent disposition replied that Carax had no known address and that, anyhow, he no longer had dealings with the firm. She added that, since its publication,The Red House had sold exactly seventy-seven copies, most of which had presumably been acquired by young ladies of easy virtue and other regulars of the club where the author churned out nocturnes and polonaises for a few coins. The remaining copies had been returned and pulped for printing missals, fines, and lottery tickets.
The mysterious author’s wretched luck won Monsieur Roquefort’s sympathy, and during the following ten years, on each of his visits to Paris, he would scour the secondhand bookshops in search of other works by Julián Carax. He never found a single one. Almost nobody had heard of Carax, and those for whom the name rang a bell knew very little. Some swore he had brought out other books, always with small publishers, and with ridiculous print runs. Those books, if they really existed, were impossible to find. One bookseller claimed he had once had a book by Julián Carax in his hands. It was calledThe Cathedral Thief, but this was a long time ago, and besides, he wasn’t quite sure. At the end of 1935, news reached Monsieur Roquefort that a new novel by Julián Carax,The Shadow of the Wind, had been published by a small firm in Paris. He wrote to the publisher asking whether he could buy a few copies but never got an answer. The following year, in the spring of 1936, his old friend at the bookstall by the Seine asked him whether he was still interested in Carax. Monsieur Roquefort assured him that he never gave up. It was now a question of stubbornness: if the world was determined to bury Carax, he wasn’t going to go along. His friend then explained that some weeks earlier a rumor about Carax had been doing the rounds. It seemed that at last his fortunes had improved. He was going to marry a lady of good social standing and, after a few years’ silence, had published a novel that, for the first time, had earned him a good review in none less thanLe Monde. But just when it seemed that his luck was about to change, the bookseller went on, Carax had been involved in a duel in Père Lachaise cemetery. The circumstances surrounding this event were unclear. All the bookseller knew was that the duel had taken place at dawn on the day Carax was due to be married, and that the bridegroom had never made it to the church.
There was an opinion to match every taste: some maintained he had died in the duel and his body had been left abandoned in an unmarked grave; others, more optimistic, preferred to believe that Carax was tangled up in some shady affair that had forced him to abandon his fiancée at the altar, flee from Paris, and return to Barcelona. The nameless grave could never be found, and shortly afterward a new version of the facts began to circulate: Julián Carax, who had been plagued by misfortune, had died in his native city in the most dire straits. The girls in the brothel where he played the piano had organized a collection to pay for a decent burial, but when the money order reached Barcelona, the body had already been buried in a common grave, along with beggars and people with no name who turned up floating in the harbor waters or died of cold at the entrance to the subway.
IF ONLY BECAUSE HE LIKED TO OPPOSE GENERAL VIEWS, MONSIEUR Roquefort did not forget Carax. Eleven years after his discovery ofThe Red House, he decided to lend the novel to his two pupils, hoping that perhaps that strange book might encourage them to acquire the reading habit. Clara and Claudette were by then teenagers with hormones coursing through their veins, obsessed by the world winking at them from beyond the windows of the study. Despite the tutor’s best efforts, the girls had until then proved immune to the charms of the classics, Aesop’s fables, or the immortal verse of Dante Alighieri. Fearing that his contract might be terminated if Clara’s mother discovered that he was forming them into two illiterate, featherbrained young women, Monsieur Roquefort presented them with Carax’s novel dressed up as a love story, which was at least half true.
· 4 ·
NEVER BEFORE HAD I FELT TRAPPED, SEDUCED, AND CAUGHT UP in a story,” Clara explained, “the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. Have you ever kissed a girl, Daniel?”
My brain seized up; my saliva turned to sawdust.
“Well, you’re still very young. But it’s that same feeling, that first-time spark that you never forget. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn’t matter to anyone changed my life.”
By then I was hopelessly dumbstruck, at the mercy of this creature whose words and charms I had neither means nor desire to resist. I wished that she would never stop speaking, that her voice would wrap itself around me forever, and that her uncle would never return to break the spell of that moment that belonged only
to me.
“For years I looked for other books by Julián Carax,” Clara went on. “I asked in libraries, in bookshops, in schools. Always in vain. No one had ever heard of him or of his books. I couldn’t understand it. Later on, Monsieur Roquefort heard a rumor, a strange story about someone who went around libraries and bookshops looking for works by Julián Carax. If he found any, he would buy them, steal them, or get them by some other means, after which he would immediately set fire to them. Nobody knew who he was or why he did it. Another mystery to add to Carax’s own enigma. In time, my mother decided she wanted to return to Spain. She was ill, and Barcelona had always been her home. I was secretly hoping to make some discovery about Carax here, since, after all, Barcelona was the city in which he was born and from which he had disappeared at the start of the war. But even with the help of my uncle, all I could find were dead ends. As for my mother, much the same thing happened with her own search. The Barcelona she encountered on her return was not the place she had left behind. She discovered a city of shadows, one no longer inhabited by my father, although every corner was haunted by his memory. As if all that misery were not enough, she insisted on hiring someone to find out exactly what had happened to him. After months of investigation, all the detective was able to recover was a broken wristwatch and the name of the man who had killed my father in the moat of Montjuïc Castle. His name was Fumero, Javier Fumero. We were told that this individual—and he wasn’t the only one—had started off as a hired gunman with the FAI anarchist syndicate and had then flirted with the communists and the fascists, tricking them all, selling his services to the highest bidder. After the fall of Barcelona, he had gone over to the winning side and joined the police force. Now he is a famous bemedaled inspector. Nobody remembers my father. Not surprisingly, my mother faded away within a few months. The doctors said it was her heart, and I think that for once they were right. When she died, I went to live with my uncle Gustavo, the sole relative of my mother’s left in Barcelona. I adored him, because he always gave me books when he came to visit us. He has been my only family and my best friend through all these years. Even if he seems a little arrogant at times, he has a good heart, bless him. Every night, without fail, even if he’s dropping with sleep, he’ll read to me for a while.”
“I could read to you, if you like, Miss Clara,” I suggested courteously, instantly regretting my audacity, for I was convinced that for Clara my company could only be a nuisance, if not a joke.
“Thanks, Daniel,” she answered. “I’d love that.”
“Whenever you wish.”
She nodded slowly, looking for me with her smile.
“Unfortunately, I no longer have that copy ofThe Red House, ” she said. “Monsieur Roquefort refused to part with it. I could try to tell you the story, but it would be like describing a cathedral by saying it’s a pile of stones ending in a spire.”
“I’m sure you’d tell it much better than that,” I spluttered.
Women have an infallible instinct for knowing when a man has fallen madly in love with them, especially when the male in question is both a complete dunce and a minor. I fulfilled all the requirements for Clara Barceló to send me packing, but I preferred to think that her blindness afforded me a margin for error and that my crime—my complete and pathetic devotion to a woman twice my age, my intelligence, and my height—would remain in the dark. I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.
WHEN BARCELÓ RETURNED WEARING A FELINE SMILE, TWO HOURS HAD passed. To me they had seemed like two minutes. The bookseller handed me the book and winked.
“Have a good look at it, little dumpling. I don’t want you coming back to me saying I’ve switched it, eh?”
“I trust you,” I said.
“Stuff and nonsense. The last guy who said that to me (a tourist who was convinced that Hemingway had invented thefabada stew during the San Fermín bull run) bought a copy ofHamlet signed by Shakespeare in ballpoint, imagine that. So keep your eyes peeled. In the book business, you can’t even trust the index.”
It was getting dark when we stepped out into Calle Canuda. A fresh breeze combed the city, and Barceló removed his coat and put it over Clara’s shoulders. Seeing no better opportunity, I tentatively let slip that if they thought it was all right, I could drop by their home the following day to read a few chapters ofThe Shadow of the Wind to Clara. Barceló looked at me out of the corner of his eye and gave a hollow laugh.
“Boy, you’re getting ahead of yourself!” he muttered, although his tone implied consent.
“Well, if that’s not convenient, perhaps another day or…”
“It’s up to Clara,” said the bookseller. “We’ve already got seven cats and two cockatoos. One more creature won’t make much difference.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then, around seven,” concluded Clara. “Do you know the address?”
· 5 ·
THERE WAS A TIME, IN MY CHILDHOOD, WHEN, PERHAPS BECAUSE I had been raised among books and booksellers, I dreamed of becoming a novelist. The root of my literary ambitions, apart from the marvelous simplicity with which one sees things at the age of five, lay in a prodigious piece of craftsmanship and precision that was exhibited in a fountain-pen shop on Calle Anselmo Clavé, just behind the Military Government building. The object of my devotion, a plush black pen, adorned with heaven knows how many refinements and flourishes, presided over the shop window as if it were the crown jewels. A baroque fantasy magnificently wrought in silver and gold that shone like the lighthouse at Alexandria, the nib was a wonder in its own right. When my father and I went out for a walk, I wouldn’t stop pestering him until he took me to see the pen. My father declared that it must be, at the very least, the pen of an emperor. I was secretly convinced that with such a marvel one would be able to write anything, from novels to encyclopedias, and letters whose supernatural power would surpass any postal limitations—a letter written with that pen would reach the most remote corners of the world, even that unknowable place to which my father said my mother had gone and from where she would never return.
One day we decided to go into the shop and inquire about the blessed artifact. It turned out to be the queen of all fountain pens, a Montblanc Meinsterstück in a numbered series, that had once belonged, or so the shop attendant assured us, to Victor Hugo himself. From that gold nib, we were informed, had sprung the manuscript ofLes Misérables.
“Just as Vichy Catalán water springs from the source at Caldas,” the clerk swore.
He told us he had bought it personally from a most serious collector from Paris, and that he had assured himself of the item’s authenticity.
“And what is the price of this fountain of marvels, if you don’t mind telling me?” my father asked.
The very mention of the sum drew the color from his face, but I had already fallen under the pen’s spell. The clerk, who seemed to think we understood physics, began to assail us with incomprehensible gibberish about the alloys of precious metals, enamels from the Far East, and a revolutionary theory on pistons and communicating chambers, all of which was part of the Teutonic science underpinning the glorious stroke of that champion of scrivening technology. I have to say in his favor that, despite the fact that we must have looked like two poor devils, the clerk allowed us to handle the pen as much as we liked, filled it with ink for us, and offered me a piece of parchment so that I could write my name on it and thus commence my literary career in the footsteps of Victor Hugo. Then, after the clerk had polished it with a cloth to restore its shiny splendor, it was returned to its throne.
“Perhaps another day,” mumbled my father.
Once we were out in the street again, he told me in a subdued voice that we couldn’t afford the asking price. The bookshop provided just enough to
keep us afloat and send me to a decent school. The great Victor Hugo’s Montblanc pen would have to wait. I didn’t say anything, but my father must have noticed my disappointment.
“I tell you what we’ll do,” he proposed. “When you’re old enough to start writing, we’ll come back and buy it.”
“What if someone buys it first?”
“No one is going to take this one, you can be quite sure. And if not, we can ask Don Federico to make us one. That man has the hands of a master.”