CALLE ARCO DEL TEATRO WAS THERE WAITING FOR ME. A STREAM OF black water converged in the center of the narrow street and made its way, like a funeral procession, toward the heart of the Raval quarter. I recognized the old wooden door and the baroque façade to which my father had brought me that morning at dawn, six years before. I went up the steps and took shelter from the rain under the arched doorway. It reeked of urine and rotten wood. More than ever, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books smelled of death. I didn’t recall that the door knocker was shaped as a demon’s face. I took it by its horns and knocked three times. The cavernous echo dispersed within the building. After a while I knocked again, six knocks this time, each one louder than before, until my fist hurt. A few more minutes went by, and I began to fear that perhaps there was no longer anyone there. I crouched down against the door and took the Carax book from the inside pocket of my jacket. I opened it and reread that first sentence that had entranced me years before.
That summer it rained every day, and although many said it was God’s wrath because the villagers had opened a casino next to the church, I knew that it was my fault, and mine alone, for I had learned to lie and my lips still retained the last words spoken by my mother on her deathbed: “I never loved the man I married but another, who, I was told, had been killed in the war; look for him and tell him my last thoughts were for him, for he is your real father.”
I smiled, remembering that first night of feverish reading six years earlier. I closed the book and was about to knock one last time, but before my fingers touched the knocker, the large door opened far enough to reveal the profile of the keeper. He was carrying an oil lamp.
“Good evening,” I mumbled. “Isaac, isn’t it?”
The keeper observed me without blinking. The glow from the oil lamp sculpted his angular features in amber and scarlet hues, conferring on him a striking likeness to the little demon on the door knocker.
“You’re Sempere junior,” he muttered wearily.
“Your memory is excellent.”
“And your sense of timing is lousy. Do you know what the time is?”
His sharp eyes had already detected the book under my jacket. Isaac stared at me questioningly. I took the book out and showed it to him.
“Carax,” he said. “I’d say there are at most ten people in this town who know of him, or who have read this book.”
“Well, one of them is intent on setting fire to it. I can’t think of a better hiding place than this.”
“This is a cemetery, not a safe.”
“Exactly. What this book needs is to be buried where nobody can find it.”
Isaac glanced suspiciously down the alleyway. He opened the door a few inches and beckoned me to slip inside. The dark, unfathomable vestibule smelled of wax and damp. An intermittent drip could be heard in the gloom. Isaac gave me the lamp to hold while he put his hand in his coat and pulled out a ring of keys that would have been the envy of any jailer. When, by some imponderable science, he found the right one, he inserted it into a bolt under a glass case full of relays and cogwheels, like a large music box. With a twist of his wrist, the mechanism clicked and levers and fulcrums slid in an amazing mechanical ballet until the large door was clamped by a circle of steel bars that locked into place in the stone wall.
“The Bank of Spain couldn’t do better,” I remarked, impressed. “It looks like something out of Jules Verne.”
“Kafka,” Isaac corrected, retrieving the oil lamp and starting off toward the depths of the building. “The day you come to realize that the book business is nothing but an empty plate and you decide you want to learn how to rob a bank, or how to set one up, which is much the same thing, come and see me and I’ll teach you a few tricks about bolts.”
I followed him through corridors that I still remembered, flanked with fading frescoes of angels and shadowlike creatures. Isaac held the lamp up high, casting a flickering bubble of red light. He limped slightly, and his frayed flannel coat looked like an undertaker’s. It occurred to me that this man, somewhere between Charon and the librarian at Alexandria, seemed to belong in one of Julián Carax’s novels.
“Do you know anything about Carax?” I asked.
Isaac stopped at the end of a gallery and looked at me with indifference. “Not much. Only what they told me.”
“Who?”
“Someone who knew him well, or thought so at least.”
My heart missed a beat. “When was that?”
“When I still had use for a comb. You must have been in swaddling clothes. And you don’t seem to have come on much, quite frankly. Look at yourself: you’re shaking.”
“It’s my wet clothes, and it’s very cold in here.”
“Is it? Well, next time pray send advance notice of your call, and I’ll turn on the fancy central heating system to welcome you, little rosebud. Come on, follow me. My office is over there. There’s a stove and something for you to wrap yourself in while we dry your clothes. And some Mercurochrome and peroxide wouldn’t go amiss either. You look as if you’ve just been dropped from a police van.”
“Don’t bother, really.”
“I’m not bothering. I’m doing it for me, not for you. Once you’ve passed through this door, you play by my rules. This cemetery admits only books. You might catch pneumonia, and I don’t want to call the morgue. We’ll see about the book later. In thirty-eight years, I have yet to see one that will run away.”
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am—”
“Then don’t. If I’ve let you in, it’s out of respect for your father. Otherwise I would have left you in the street. Now, do follow me. If you behave yourself, I might consider telling you what I know of your friend Julián Carax.”
Out of the corner of my eye, when he thought I couldn’t see him, I noticed that, despite himself, he was smiling mischievously. Isaac clearly seemed to relish the role of sinister watchdog. I also smiled to myself. There was no doubt in my mind about to whom the face on the door knocker belonged.
·10·
ISAAC THREW A COUPLE OF BLANKETS OVER MY SHOULDERS AND offered me a cup of some steaming concoction that smelled of hot chocolate and hotter liquor.
“You were saying about Carax…”
“There’s not much to say. The first person I heard mention Carax was Toni Cabestany, the publisher. I’m talking about twenty years ago, when his firm was still in business. Whenever he returned from one of his scouting trips to London, Paris, or Vienna, Cabestany would drop by and we’d chat for a while. We were both widowers by then, and he would complain that we were now married to the books, I to the old ones and he to his ledgers. We were good friends. On one of his visits, he told me how, for a pittance, he’d just acquired the Spanish rights for the novels of Julián Carax, a young writer from Barcelona who lived in Paris. This must have been in 1928 or 1929. Seems that Carax worked nights as a pianist in some small-time brothel in Pigalle and wrote during the day in a shabby attic in Saint-Germain. Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art. Carax had published a couple of novels in France, which had turned out to be total flops. No one gave him the time of day in Paris, and Cabestany had always liked to buy cheap.”
“So did Carax write in Spanish or in French?”
“Who knows? Probably both. His mother was French, a music teacher, I believe, and he’d lived in Paris since he was about nineteen or twenty. Cabestany told me that his manuscripts arrived in Spanish. Whether they were a translation or the original, he didn’t care. His favorite language was money, the rest was neither here nor there. It occurred to Cabestany that perhaps, by a stroke of luck, he might place a few thousand copies in the Spanish market.”
“Did he?”
Isaac frowned as he poured me a bit more of his restorative potion. “I think the one that sold most,The Red House, sold about ninety copies.”
“But he continued to publish Carax’s books, even though he was losing money,” I pointed out.
&nbs
p; “That’s right. Beats me. Cabestany wasn’t exactly a romantic. But I suppose everyone has his secrets…. Between 1928 and 1936, he published eight of Carax’s novels. Anyway, where Cabestany really made his money was in catechisms and a series of cheap sentimental novels starring a provincial heroine called Violeta LaFleur. Those sold like candy in kiosks. My guess, or anybody’s, is that he published Carax’s novels because it tickled his fancy, or just to contradict Darwin.”
“What happened to Mr. Cabestany?”
Isaac sighed, looking up. “Age—the price we all must pay. He got ill and had a few money problems. In 1936 his eldest son took over the firm, but he was the sort who can’t even read the size of his underpants. The business collapsed in less than a year. Fortunately, Cabestany never saw what his heirs did with the fruit of his life’s labors, or what the war did to his country. A stroke saw him off on All Souls’ Night, with a Cuban cigar in his lips and a twenty-five-year-old on his lap. What a way to go. The son was another breed altogether. Arrogant as only idiots can be. His first grand idea was to try to sell the entire stock of the company backlist, his father’s legacy, and turn it into pulp or something like that. A friend, another brat, with a house in Caldetas and an Italian sports car, had convinced him that photo romances andMein Kampf were going to sell like hotcakes, and, as a result, there would be a huge demand for paper.”
“Did he really do that?”
“He would have, but he ran out of time. Shortly after his taking over the firm, someone turned up at his office and made him a very generous offer. He wanted to buy the whole remaining stock of Julián Carax novels and was offering to pay three times their market value.”
“Say no more. To burn them,” I murmured.
Isaac smiled. He looked surprised. “Actually, yes. And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.”
“Who was that man?”
“Someone called Aubert or Coubert, I can’t quite remember.”
“Laín Coubert?”
“Does that sound familiar?”
“It’s the name of one of the characters inThe Shadowof the Wind, the last of Carax’s novels.”
Isaac frowned. “A fictional character?”
“In the novel Laín Coubert is the name used by the devil.”
“A bit theatrical, if you ask me. But whoever he was, at least he had a sense of humor,” Isaac reckoned.
With the memory of that night’s encounter still fresh in my mind, I could not see the humorous side of it, from any angle, but I saved my opinion for a more auspicious occasion.
“This person, Coubert, or whatever his name is—was his face burned, disfigured?”
Isaac looked at me with a smile that betrayed both enjoyment and concern. “I haven’t the foggiest. The person who told me all this never actually got to see him, and only knew because Cabestany’s son told his secretary the following day. He didn’t mention anything about burned faces. Are you sure you haven’t got this out of some radio show?”
I threw my head back, as if to make light of the subject. “How did the matter end? Did the publisher’s son sell the books to Coubert?” I asked.
“The senseless dunce tried to be too clever by half. He asked for more money than Coubert was proposing, and Coubert withdrew his offer. A few days later, shortly after midnight, Cabestany’s warehouse in Pueblo Nuevo burned down to its foundations. And for free.”
I sighed. “What happened to Carax’s books, then? Were they all destroyed?”
“Nearly all. Luckily, when Cabestany’s secretary heard about the offer, she had a premonition. On her own initiative, she went to the warehouse and took a copy of each of the Carax titles. She was the one who had corresponded with Carax, and over the years they had formed a friendship of sorts. Her name was Nuria, and I think she was the only person in the publishing house, and probably in all of Barcelona, who read Carax’s novels. Nuria has a fondness for lost causes. When she was little, she would take in small animals she picked up in the street. In time she went on to adopt failed authors, maybe because her father wanted to be one and never made it.”
“You seem to know her very well.”
Isaac wore his devilish smile. “More than she thinks I do. She’s my daughter.”
Silence and doubt gnawed at me. The more I heard of the story, the more confused I felt. “Apparently, Carax returned to Barcelona in 1936. Some say he died here. Did he have any relatives left here? Someone who might know about him?”
Isaac sighed. “Goodness only knows. Carax’s parents had been separated for some time, I believe. The mother had gone off to South America, where she remarried. I don’t think he was on speaking terms with his father since he moved to Paris.”
“Why was that?”
“I don’t know. People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren’t already complicated enough.”
“Do you know whether Carax’s father is still alive?”
“I hope so. He was younger than me, but I go out very little these days and I haven’t read the obituary pages for years—acquaintances drop dead like flies, and, quite frankly, it puts the wind up you. By the way, Carax was his mother’s surname. The father was called Fortuny. He had a hat shop on Ronda de San Antonio.”
“Is it possible, then, do you think, that when he returned to Barcelona, Carax may have felt tempted to visit your daughter, Nuria, if they were friends, since he wasn’t on good terms with his father?”
Isaac laughed bitterly. “I’m probably the last person who would know. After all, I’m her father. I know that once, in 1932 or 1933, Nuria went to Paris on business for Cabestany, and she stayed in Julián Carax’s apartment for a couple of weeks. It was Cabestany who told me. According to my daughter, she stayed in a hotel. She was unmarried at the time, and I had an inkling that Carax was a bit smitten with her. My Nuria is the sort who breaks a man’s heart by just walking into a shop.”
“Do you mean they were lovers?”
“You like melodrama, eh? Look, I’ve never interfered in Nuria’s private life, because mine isn’t picture perfect either. If you ever have a daughter—a blessing I wouldn’t wish on anyone, because it’s Murphy’s Law that sooner or later she will break your heart—anyhow, as I was saying, if you ever have a daughter, you’ll begin, without realizing it, to divide men into two camps: those you suspect are sleeping with her and those you don’t. Whoever says that’s not true is lying through his teeth. I suspected that Carax was one of the first, so I didn’t care whether he was a genius or a poor wretch. To me he was always a scoundrel.”
“Perhaps you were mistaken.”
“Don’t be offended, but you’re still very young and know as much about women as I do about baking marzipan pastries.”
“No contest there,” I agreed. “What happened to the books your daughter took from the warehouse?”
“They’re here.”
“Here?”
“Where do you think your book came from—the one you found on the day your father brought you to this place?”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s very simple. One night, some days after the fire in Cabestany’s warehouse, my daughter, Nuria, turned up here. She looked nervous. She said that someone had been following her and she was afraid it was the man called Coubert, who was trying to get hold of the books to destroy them. Nuria said she had come to hide Carax’s books. She went into the large hall and hid them in the maze of bookshelves, like buried treasure. I didn’t ask her where she’d put them, nor did she tell me. Before she left, she said that as soon as she managed to find Carax, she’d come back for them. It seemed to me that she was still in love with him, but I didn’t say anything. I asked her whether she’d seen him recently, whether she’d had any news. She said she hadn’t heard from him for months, practically since he’d sent the final corrections for the manuscript of his last book. I can’t say whether she was lying. What I do know is that after that day Nuria d
idn’t hear from Carax again, and those books were left here, gathering dust.”
“Do you think your daughter would be willing to talk to me about all this?”
“Could be, but I don’t know whether she’d be able to tell you anything that yours truly hasn’t told you already. Remember, all this happened a long time ago. The truth is that we don’t get on as well as I’d like. We see each other once a month. We go out to lunch somewhere close by, and then she’s off as quick as she came. I know that a few years ago she married a nice man, a journalist, a bit harebrained, I’d say, one of those people who are always getting into trouble over politics, but with a good heart. They had a civil wedding, with no guests. I found out a month later. She has never introduced me to her husband. Miquel, his name is. Or something like that. I don’t suppose she’s very proud of her father, and I don’t blame her. Now she’s a changed woman. Imagine, she even learned to knit, and I’m told she no longer dresses like Simone de Beauvoir. One of these days, I’ll find out I’m a grandfather. For years she’s been working at home as an Italian and French translator. I don’t know where she got the talent from, quite frankly. Not from her father, that’s for sure. Let me write down her address, though I’m not sure it’s a very good idea to say I sent you.”
Isaac scribbled something on the corner of an old newspaper and handed me the scrap of paper.
“I’m very grateful. You never know, maybe she’ll remember something….”
Isaac smiled with some sadness. “As a child she’d remember everything. Everything. Then children grow up, and you no longer know what they think or what they feel. And that’s how it should be, I suppose. Don’t tell Nuria what I’ve told you, will you? What’s been said here tonight should go no further.”
“Don’t worry. Do you think she still thinks about Carax?”