The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  Like so many others, he had learned that often news wasn’t cheery.

  Before going into his office, Andreu Martí opened the door to Grandfather’s room and greeted him as he did every day; sometimes he got a response and other times, only the silence that announced that he wouldn’t be leaving his room that day.

  ‘Father, I’m home. I brought you two new “Coyotes”.’

  Grandfather, like her father and brother after him, had been a journalist, but now he read nothing but comic books and adventure stories. On Sundays her father sometimes managed to coax him out of the house to go to the second-hand market in the San Antonio district to buy copies of TBO, the Coyote, the Masked Warrior or books by Salgari, Verne or the Just William collection. He never bought War Deeds, because it made him anxious.

  Ana heard her grandfather’s voice, although she couldn’t make out the words; her father responded and her grandfather’s voice replied. Then came the sound of the door closing and her father’s footsteps heading to the next room.

  Meanwhile, she helped her mother set the table.

  ‘So you’re sticking to your guns,’ her mother said without looking at her.

  Ana took advantage of the fact that she was fetching the napkins from a drawer of the bureau to pretend she hadn’t heard.

  ‘Should I take out the plain ones?’

  ‘Yes, the plain ones. What did Gabriel say about you publishing a crime piece?’

  ‘Nothing yet. I still haven’t told him; I’ll talk to him on Sunday.’

  She distributed the napkins without looking up, as if doing so demanded all her attention.

  ‘What? You did it without his permission?’

  ‘I don’t need his permission to do my job,’ she replied, her gaze still lowered.

  Her mother snorted, and she couldn’t help echoing her with a huff. Separated by the table, they both stopped in their movements. Patricia Noguer opened her mouth to begin her next reproach, but the rage that began to show in her daughter’s eyes made her change not her opinion, but at least her strategy, and with a plaintive voice she added, ‘I can’t wait for him to finish his studies, come back from abroad and marry you, so you’ll abandon these silly dreams!’

  She could have been cruel and reminded her mother that Gabriel, after his stay abroad, still had two years, two long years, before he finished medical school, and that there was no promising that they could marry after that either. Perhaps she could have added that she wasn’t sure she wanted to, that frankly she didn’t miss him much. Or she could have thrown the last napkin onto the table and left, as she’d done on other occasions. She didn’t. Not today. Not with her article sitting on her father’s desk.

  But she could have, and her mother knew as much, so she held her tongue, swallowing the rest of her laments and reproaches and simply pointing to the napkin Ana still held in her hand like an indecisive boxing coach who’s not sure if he should throw in the towel or let the fight continue.

  ‘Fold it well, this isn’t a charity soup kitchen,’ her mother said.

  For her, the soup kitchen was the antechamber to hell, like all those places you don’t arrive at but rather fall into. The only way to avoid them, despite the family’s precarious situation, was to keep up appearances with exacting discipline. They never ate in the kitchen, always in the dining room, and while there were fewer silver settings, they still had to be properly placed.

  When she had entered the house she’d seen a basket with clothes for the children of the welfare service. In reality the basket contained only two or three items of clothing – the rest was stuffed with newspaper – but her mother wanted to go out onto the street with an overflowing basket, like before, when she and all the friends she no longer saw prided themselves on taking several bags of clothes for the ‘poor’. The poor are always those who don’t have what you do, even if it’s only three old jackets.

  No, it wasn’t the soup kitchen. Ana folded the napkin carefully. Her mother changed the subject and began to tell her that a relative, on her side, the Noguer side, had died. She nodded without paying the slightest attention as her mother told her when and where the funeral would be. She was really more interested in making sure that the silver settings were placed at the proper distance. Spoon, which meant there’d be soup. Knife and fork.

  ‘What’s for the second course?’

  ‘Stewed meat.’

  Stewed meat for a weekday lunch? Where had she got that from?

  It seemed the day was filled with successes, large and small. Her mother had bought meat, her grandfather was coming out of his room to eat and she had published her article. She heard the sound of a door opening. It wasn’t the exasperatingly slow creak of her grandfather’s; it was her father turning a handle before giving a vigorous pull. But his steps headed to the bedroom, not the dining room. Father had to change for lunch: another of the appearances kept up in that house.

  In her parents’ bedroom, behind the door of the large wardrobe, hid the shrine that her mother had erected to her dead son. The firstborn son, l’hereu, dead at twenty-seven, executed by firing squad in prison in 1943. There her mother prayed for forgiveness for her Red son, for her daughter-in-law exiled in France with a grandson they wouldn’t get to see grow up. As her father changed for lunch, he saw the photos of Ángel.

  Soon she heard the bedroom door again.

  The fact that her father hadn’t immediately come to congratulate her after reading the article had already somewhat diminished her expectations. That he still went by Grandfather’s room to ask him not to be late reduced them a bit further, although not enough to avoid her disappointment when her expectant look was met with nothing more than a curt, ‘Good, maybe a little formulaic. Have they paid you yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How are you doing for money, Aneta? Do you need anything? Are you up to date with your rent?’

  Her father was taking advantage of her mother being in the kitchen. She avoided his questions, pretending she heard noises in the hallway.

  ‘I think Grandfather’s coming.’

  Her father approached her and whispered, ‘Don’t mention your article during the meal. It’s better if Grandfather doesn’t read it or even know about it.’

  11

  Abel Mendoza, on the other hand, read it several times.

  After fleeing Mariona’s house that Sunday, he had travelled across the entire city to take refuge, once again, in Mercedes’s bed.

  He got to Hospital Street, in the Barrio Chino, at eight in the evening and was surprised to find the door to the house locked. He knocked but there was no movement inside. Then he saw the police notice warning that the establishment would remain closed for two weeks by order of the judge. Why did he have to find the doors locked that day?

  He knocked one more time, out of pure obstinacy.

  A bang and the creaking of hinges made him look up. Mercedes’s head peeped out of a first-floor window, framed by a cloud of tousled black curls.

  ‘Can’t you read, you dolt? You must be really horny… Oh! Hello, Abel! Wait, I’m coming down.’

  She hurried him inside, afraid that the watchman might see them and tell the police that he saw a client entering in defiance of the temporary shutdown order.

  Mercedes, despite her youth – twenty-four according to her papers, two fewer according to her mother – was already the madam’s right-hand woman, which gave her the privilege of being a kind of gatekeeper and having her own room. A room that customers didn’t have access to; only the men whom she allowed in. One of them was Abel.

  Mercedes – never call her Merche and never, ever Merceditas – had let him take refuge in her bed on many of his stays in Barcelona. Abel’s visits were a luxury for Mercedes, whose regular clients didn’t usually provide her with memorable moments: ‘It’s well known that the poor are not big on attention to detail in lovemaking.’

  It was a phrase she had learned from the madam.

  With the place shut down, th
e owner had gone to spend a few days at her family’s house in Vic, and had left Mercedes in charge of the empty building.

  Mercedes was very grateful to the owner, who had picked her up on the street before the family she was working for delivered her to the Foundation for the Protection of Women so that she could be locked up in a refuge for ‘fallen’ women. They were willing to make a large donation to rid themselves of the ‘lost woman’ who had got knocked up by the boss. No impropriety from a client could compare to what she’d heard you could expect from the wardens in the internment centres. Mercedes was grateful, and loyal.

  As they went up to her room, she told him why they’d been closed down.

  ‘Thank goodness the inspection didn’t happen on the owner’s niece’s first day on the job.’

  ‘Underage?’

  Mercedes nodded.

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘Twelve? Just a girl!’

  ‘It was with a big boss from Social.’

  ‘But twelve years old…’

  ‘If they want girls, we give them girls. There are some people you can’t say no to.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Look, we all win. Her parents, who need the money; the client, who needs a hairless pussy and us, because the last thing we need are problems.’

  ‘But what about the girls?’

  ‘They have to put up with it, just like we all do! Their turn will come.’

  She opened the door and they went in.

  Mercedes’s room was kept almost as white as a convent cell. White sheets, white curtains, white pillows, white upholstery on the armchairs. On a dresser rested a photo of her parents, who still lived in a town in the Extremadura region. There was also some sort of little altar with a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary filled with holy water and topped with a screw-on crown against which leaned a photo of her son, Alvarito, whom her parents were raising.

  ‘A couple of girls ended up in jail because they challenged the policemen who came to close the place down. We got shut down for two weeks, and a fine.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Formalities. We don’t register customers the way we’re supposed to.’

  ‘That was the reason?’

  ‘Partly, but the truth is that one of the inspectors has a thing for the new girl, the one from Majorca, and he wants too many freebies.’

  ‘Two weeks isn’t so bad.’

  ‘You think we eat air? Or love?’

  ‘You must have something stashed away…’

  ‘If I did I wouldn’t tell you about it.’

  ‘I don’t want money, just a bed and a roof over my head.’

  ‘Well, you should have said so. I can give you a bed and a roof, but only at night. We can’t have a man around during the day; they might think we aren’t meeting the terms of the ban.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  It was fine for both of them. They had met on one of Abel’s visits to the brothel, and Mercedes had offered him a bed any time he was in Barcelona on one of his business matters, whatever they might be; she didn’t seem too curious. She didn’t seem too curious about anything Abel did outside of her room, for that matter. A fortune teller had predicted that the man of her life would arrive by ship, so he wasn’t the one, but, while she was waiting, she had to have a good guy in her bed every once in a while, and practise having a boyfriend who would take her out for a bite to eat or a drink.

  As for Abel, he was happy not to have to spend the night in a boarding house. That way, the time he spent in Barcelona didn’t appear in any registers.

  ‘Abelín, you must be the son of nobility,’ Mercedes said on Tuesday morning, stretching ostentatiously. And she added, in a version of the madam’s phrase, ‘What art! What attention to detail!’

  Then, as she had done on Monday, she put him out on the street. Abel had another day of wandering the city before him. He was still dazed, directionless, overwhelmed by everything that had happened, first at home, then in Barcelona, at Mariona’s house.

  Since Mercedes had given him a little money in the end, he went into a barber’s shop and paid extra for a nice lotion after his shave.

  ‘But nothing that makes me smell like a queer.’

  It threatened rain. He went into a tavern, El Cocodrilo on San Ramón Street. He had been in once before, with Mercedes.

  It was a day when he had got quite a bit of money from Mariona, and he was feeling generous.

  ‘Come on, let’s go and have a vermouth. Where do you want me to take you?’

  He had expected Mercedes to say, ‘Take me to the Rigat in Plaza Cataluña, or one of the outdoor tables in Calvo Sotelo Square,’ but her universe ended at the border surrounding the Barrio Chino.

  ‘Let’s go to El Cocodrilo.’

  So that was where they went to drink their vermouth, surrounded by stevedores, prostitutes and local families. They were unified by their Sunday clothes and dignified by their clean shoes. Abel looked at them that day somewhat nostalgically, as if they were the remnants of a world he would soon abandon.

  Just as he had known from the beginning that at some point he would abandon Mercedes. He looked at her with the gaze of the protagonists of the many romantic novels he had read, for professional reasons. He looked at her the way he had learned to: ‘tenderly, tilting his head a little, parting his lips ever so slightly, letting his eyelids droop with a hint of languor’.

  Not even a woman like Mercedes, a professional used to hard dealings with men since she was practically a girl, could resist that gaze that made women feel unique, somewhere between girlfriend and princess. She blushed furiously and, although when she’d had a few she could take on any sailor who showed up at the brothel spoiling for a fight, she took a couple of dainty sips from her glass of vermouth.

  Lucky he hadn’t said his last goodbye to her the previous time, thought Abel as he slipped once more into a seat at one of the tavern’s tables. Otherwise where in the city would he go? This time he didn’t drink vermouth; all he had in his pockets was the money Mercedes had given him, as he had spent his own on the train ticket and the suit he was later planning to use to start his new life. He had left it hanging in the wardrobe of Mercedes’s white room. She had lent him a jacket that had been left by a customer after a raid. It was a bit small if he buttoned it up, but since he was forced to walk hunched over by the rain that had begun to fall while he was in the barber’s, he guessed it wasn’t as noticeable.

  He asked for bread and cheese and a small glass of wine. An early regular had left a copy of La Vanguardia on one of the chairs. He picked it up and began to read absent-mindedly until he reached page eleven. There it was. The news of Mariona’s death. The text said that the police were on the trail of a man who had been seen hastening away from the dead woman’s home.

  They were looking for him. Who could have seen him?

  He took the page out of the newspaper and folded it carefully so the owner wouldn’t see, but the man was busy polishing glasses and arguing with an unseen woman’s voice that was coming from the kitchen. Abel stuck the article in his pocket, paid and left.

  12

  ‘Tieta Beatriz! Hello!’

  His Aunt Beatriz jumped. She had almost passed him on Pelayo Street without noticing him.

  ‘Pablo! What brings you here?’

  His aunt pointed with one finger to her left cheek, so that he would kiss her, something she’d always done.

  ‘I was doing a few things for the firm, and now I want to have a coffee. Why don’t you join me?’

  ‘It’s just that…’

  It was always the same with Aunt Beatriz. On the one hand, it was obvious that she was very pleased to see him; on the other, she kept her distance. Perhaps she was thinking of some of those authors she was so fond of. ‘Beatriz is married to her books,’ his father would sometimes say.

  Pablo imagined it bothered his father that his sister had never married because if she had, she might have added some good connections to the family.


  ‘Instead, she went off to South America. Who knows what she was doing over there?’

  His Aunt Beatriz had lived for several years in Buenos Aires. She had come back a year before Pablo finished his secondary school studies and had taken care of his grandmother until her death. Pablo had got on well with her straight away, and he often visited her at the old family flat on the Rambla de Cataluña. During that last year of school she had organised and corrected several of his pretty disastrous essays, which had enabled him to get a decent grade in Language Arts. As she revised and read his texts, she let out occasional grunts of displeasure and quoted, through gritted teeth, Latin aphorisms on application and discipline, but then she had sorted out the essays for him. He always left her gifts of black market cigarettes and coffee on the sideboard in the parlour.

  This chance encounter was a stroke of luck: he needed to talk to someone about what had happened with Calvet and Pla, and who better than her? He couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that had taken hold of him after the lunch at Siete Puertas. He couldn’t go to his father with the matter, but his Aunt Beatriz was a good listener and often hit the nail on the head. And he was increasingly convinced that, in this story, there had to be some nail that needed hitting.

  He waited for her to light a cigarette and take two slow drags on the holder and then, with barely any preamble, he gave her the lie of the land. Their privacy was assured by the surrounding din of customers’ voices, the shouting of the waiters, the banging of cups and glasses and the constant roar of the coffee machine; but all the same he drew close to her when he spoke. He explained it all quickly, without pausing for questions or interruptions, as if he had kept the story bottled up and now couldn’t contain himself. Beatriz looked at him, and every once in a while brought her cigarette holder to her lips. She was a good listener. Or was she? Because at that moment her gaze shifted towards the large window, towards the street; really, noted Pablo, towards nothing in particular, just into the distance. Then he fell silent.