Your sudden disappearance from industrial circles has transformed you into a legend. Unreliable sources claim that you live in the old city and manage to make a living as a lawyer—to tell you the truth, I didn’t think you had it in you—and that you still play squash at the Condal. They also say that you married a penniless girl who came out of the blue. Evil tongues throw in for good measure that she already had a child before she married you . . . As you can see, I’m not completely in the dark as to your comings and goings. I remember telling you once, in the course of our last conversation, that I have many contacts. Those still left, quite a few, actually, amuse themselves speculating about whatever has become of you.
So, what do you think of this war raging in Europe that has divided the Barcelonese into Francophiles and German sympathizers? I suppose that you, who know France, value its refinements and speak its language, lean toward the French—like every member of your mother’s line. But let me tell you, it’s the Germans who are destined to save Europe. They have mastered technology, and technology is the future.
I don’t think I’ve been unfair to you. If it’s true that you married a girl who was poor and already a mother, I don’t know what to say about that. I can’t pretend I understand you, Maurici. I never have, and it’s too late to start now. If I wasn’t so sure that your mother was incapable of an indiscretion, I’d be tempted to believe that you are not my son. What’s beyond dispute is that in every respect you are hers. At any rate, be your family as it may, put it above everything else. In the long run, you will find out that there isn’t anything else.
My hand is tiring and I must change to go to the Eden with the Moragas. I seem to recall you had been a rather loyal customer of the Eden, although no one has seen you there for quite a while. In half an hour, their chauffeur will pick me up in the motorcar they’ve just bought.
Shortly after you receive this letter, my lawyer, Mr. Punset, will get in touch with you. For now, there’s no more to say but to send my regards to your family, which I will never know, and wish you good luck.
Your father,
RODERIC ALDABÒ CLOSAS
Maurici’s hands had grown cold from holding the letter. When he finished reading it, he showed it to Caterina and said, “He didn’t even want me at the funeral.” Of course, his father had died many years ago—he didn’t remember exactly when. The man who’d signed that letter was a stranger. Still, he read it once more as if he hoped to find in it some clarifying message, the key to their relationship. Deep down he knew, however, that the relationship with his father was a permanently unfinished chapter of his life. He folded the sheets and buried them in one of those drawers that are never opened, together with Rita’s faded picture.
His weary steps took him to the family apartment, where he was going to let Doro and Júlia know they could stay indefinitely. He couldn’t afford a big place with servants and, what’s more, once they were gone he could dispose of it as he pleased. When the two women saw him standing at the doorway after six years, they made a show of tears and affection befitting the return of the prodigal son. Past formalities seemed out of place.
He paced slowly down the hall and into the quiet furnished rooms, fossilized inside the caves of time. He’d call a moving company to haul the piano, the screen, and a few art objects to his apartment. No point in sorting out the displays in the cabinets: there was nowhere to put them in the new home. As he asked Doro about a suitable moving company, his memory flashed back to the Fidelity cards that years ago he’d found in the office. He burnt in the ashtray those that remained in the bundle tucked in the back of the drawer. There were very few. The smoke seemed to purify the room. As the ashes flickered out, his eyes strayed toward the leather chair that, like a sarcophagus, still held the contours of his father’s body. Then he realized that room kept the worst memories of his life like a putrid treasure. He closed the door behind him, with a nauseating feeling tempered by the hope of never opening it again.
Life in the narrow street began to flow calmly, like a forgotten undisturbed creek. After endless headaches and false starts, he managed to run his law practice. His legal learning, patchy to begin with, had ended seven or eight years ago and since gone fallow. Trade law was the only branch he’d kept up with; unfortunately, he couldn’t expect industrialists used to hiring experienced corporate lawyers to line up at his door.
He had to take up his books again and burn the midnight oil, always plagued by the anxiety of failure. Soon it became clear that studying after thirty was harder than at twenty. On those nights he slipped into bed late, his head beating like a drum and his eyes punished by small print, seeking comfort in the darkness of the room and Caterina’s sleepy caresses. He lost the first cases one after another and had to brush up past social graces to placate a furious plaintiff who regarded himself as a victim of fraud. In one instance he was forced to offer his services free of charge to a cabinet maker who, alarmed by his record of defeats, considered looking for another lawyer. Just as he began to despair, things took a turn for the better and he won the case. Other triumphs, however modest, followed, alternating with defeats in equal proportions. Then he started publicizing his practice and handing out his card.
One morning, a woman who looked like a worker came into his office. She sat on the chair he offered, crossing her feet and folding her hands on her purse. Clearing her throat at every other word, she explained that her husband worked in a glass factory in the outskirts—“Framis’s the name, maybe you heard about it?” Recently a machine had disabled his right hand—“Cut right through his nerves, know what I mean?” After forty years—“Forty, mind you, and not a day less!”—the owner wanted to fire him—“Give him the boot, can you believe it?”—without compensation. Somebody had told them one Maurici Aldabò specialized in such cases—“Working folks, like us.” Her husband wouldn’t have anything to do with lawyers. He said they were all thieves and parasites—“Sucking up to the rich.” So she’d decided to come on her own.
“What d’you say?” she asked, wrapping up her monologue.
“Let me ask you a question, Mrs. . .”
“Sabater. Cinta Sabater.”
“Mrs. Sabater. Who directed you to me?”
“My neighbor. You won’t remember the girl, but she says she knows you.”
“What’s her name?”
“Remei Sallent.”
Maurici grew speechless, as if he’d received a message from the afterlife. The image of the child with the bloodied pointing finger revisited him and sat in the vacant chair in his office. At last he turned to face the woman in the other chair.
“Remei Sallent? Of course I remember her. How does she know . . . ?”
“‘Cause she knows Martí, and you handled the mess with his brother . . . Martí Lluch, the cabinet maker, lives in the neighborhood. We all live in Sants, you know?”
“Yes, I know who you mean. But frankly, Mrs. Sabater, I don’t know on what basis Remei has recommended me . . . We haven’t seen each other since she was a child and she doesn’t know anything of my present line of work . . .”
The woman rushed to correct him.
“That’s where you’re wrong. She knows what Martí told her. Also, she says when she was a little girl working at your father’s factory, she hurt her finger and you fixed it. She says she knew then one can count on you, that you know what you’re doing. She says when someone needs you, you don’t have the heart to turn your back on them.”
He studied the woman for a few seconds, at a loss for words. Maurici made up for his inexperience and doubtful mastery of the law with a developed understanding of human nature. He knew where Cinta Sabater was coming from. He knew she was a potential victim of the long crooked arm of the law. She had come to a stranger with the most indestructible weapon: faith. She was one of those people who believed in a doctor, a friend, a remedy, a grocer. She believed because it was useful to believe. The most blatant show of incompetence wouldn’t alter the idea she’d f
ormed of him. He could botch up the case with impunity. She’d still proclaim that Maurici Aldabò was a fine lawyer who fought for the working man to his last drop of blood.
Leaning back on his chair, he pondered over Remei Sallent’s bizarre notion that he was incapable of turning his back on others. Little did she know that years ago he’d turned it for good on a girl not too different from herself . . . Nothing could have surprised him except the return of Remei Sallent, who came from far away to sneak again into his life through the back door. Did the child have no pity? Did she, after such a long time, still want to test him? As far as he was concerned, the test was over and forgotten . . . He’d bandaged her finger as he processed his customers’ claims, without self-confidence, relying only on his gift to persuade others of his ability to do it. On the other hand, maybe she had not been persuaded. Maybe it wasn’t enough for her. Maybe she wouldn’t settle for just that one time. How many more times would it take to reassure her? Resting his elbows on the table, he sighed and turned to the woman, who watched him and waited.
“I can’t promise anything, but this is what I suggest: if we win, you’ll pay me twenty-five per cent of the amount awarded to you; if we lose, you pay me nothing.”
Cinta Sabater craned her neck like a smug hen.
“Remei was right.”
* * *
He won the case plus a decent number of others that followed. His clients were widows that sued for modest inheritances, aggrieved workers, tenants threatened with eviction, local shopkeepers, . . . all those ants he’d spotted one day from the top, his head hazy with industrial fumes. His wages, prorated to the client’s income, ranged from respectable sums to zero. Sometimes his payment consisted of edible goods and other items—umbrellas, toys, even an Italian straw hat for Caterina—from penny ante merchants satisfied with his work. Between his earnings and the preschool classes Caterina held in the front room, which had a balcony that wrapped itself around the corner, they lived in contented obscurity, unenvied and envy free. As fresh upstarts, they had no social circle. Now and then they saw Albert, who even procured his cousin some clients, but never his wife—a princess of a metallurgic dynasty who turned up her nose at any metal that wasn’t twenty-two karat gold.
On weekends the three of them went to the movie theater, the fair, or the zoo. Lately Maurici had been taking Pere Anton to the squash club—where he occasionally ran into old acquaintances from the Equestrian—to teach him how to hit the ball and, as he put it, sweat for a good cause. In the summer they spent a few days in any small hotel on the beach or in the mountains, alternating his coastal preferences with Caterina’s, who after all had grown up in the Pyrenees. Once his practice was established, he promised them a trip to Paris as soon as the war was over.
His appearance had also changed. He resembled the former Maurici like a horse resembles a unicorn: the two were almost identical, but the family man in his thirties who practiced the law in a spartan office on a narrow street lacked a minimal component that was, at the same time, the most distinctive. It also happened to be a component that had been, perhaps from the beginning, more mythical than real.
His stride was still leisurely, his knees still bent with elasticity and ease at every step, but as he walked his eyes remained fixed on the ground. One couldn’t say he’d put on weight, but rather that the earth drew him with greater force. The graceful levity had turned to gravity, the sensuous languor, to broodiness. The lock of hair, still rich and black like a raven’s wing, yielded to the taming action of the comb. Sometimes, prompted by some offbeat comment from Pere Anton or by Caterina’s endearments, the smile would open wide, displaying a panoramic view of bright, perfectly aligned teeth. Those moments, rare and ephemeral, were sparks of an extinguished fire. If Caterina tried to arouse his interest in a banality such as the sunny balcony when they first looked at the apartment, or a wool carpet for the boy’s room, or a silk tie for him, he sketched a smile and said, “As you like.” He was happy through her, but incapable of generating the same degree of enthusiasm on his own. The old apathy, bruised and battered by the events of his youth, had evolved into a stoicism that had a mystic touch.
Every once in a while a tide rose from the deep and ruffled the calm waters of his existence. It was a vague restlessness that visited him in the evening, around the time when in days of old he used to leave the factory and roam the vicinity of the Street of the Three Beds. The children sang or recited their ABCs with Caterina in the front room, but he didn’t hear them. An urgent compulsion to light a Cuban cigar took hold of him, while his memory replayed voices and laughter ringing over the card table at the Equestrian. An army of ants crept up his legs and into his brain, making it impossible to remain seated at his office table. He put on his coat, took his hat, and slipped out through the front door.
He walked aimlessly, his steps directed by a rambling reverie that set the itinerary. The route and destination were independent from his will. Sometimes he took one street, sometimes another; other times he extricated himself from the maze of the old city to end up at The Ramblas, and then followed it to the hypnotic rhythm of his footsteps interrupted by the startling ring of the streetcar. Suddenly he’d find himself under laundry lines hanging across Aurora Street, or in front of the Olímpia Theater, or drifting in the stinky turmoil of the red-light district. More than once he’d ended up at the tavern on the Street of the Three Beds, drinking sherry while he listened to the chitchat of workers or the garbled musings of a wino. He swore that one day he heard from his table the “Hail Mary!” of the parrot in the bordello. During one of these visits it occurred to him to ask about Proverbs. When Bartomeu told him he’d died of cirrhosis a while ago, the news affected him strongly, as if he had lost an intimate part of himself.
The sleepwalking always stopped at the door of the Eden or the Palais de Cristal, which at that hour primed up for the night; or at the window of La Perla d’Orient, from where he observed as if through a telescope Mrs. Prat’s ponderous motions and Jaumet’s distant, apish figure. Only Maurici had changed. The rest had stayed the same.
One spring evening the stroll was longer than usual. It was April. The breeze that grew still as the sun went down had dried his throat. Until then, he hadn’t noticed his thirst, an urgent thirst that couldn’t wait. Looking at his surroundings, he realized he was walking down a boulevard. Soon he reached a block where two bars called Australia and Bohemia stood opposite each other. At that time the latter was quieter, so he chose a marble-top table there and ordered a dark beer. Not until he sat down did it dawn on him that he’d been beating the streets for ninety minutes and was tired.
The other customers huddled in a small area, leaving the rest of the room empty. At the center of the group somebody told a story with great excitement. The others—mostly men, except for a few peddlers from the nearby flea and food markets—broke periodically into laughter or exclamations. He only saw the backs bent toward the middle of the circle. Nobody paid attention to the accordion player in the background.
He took a few avid gulps of beer, then he stopped to read his watch. Ten after eight. As soon as he finished his drink he’d start back home; if he showed up late Caterina would receive him with that anxious look that usually greeted him after his pilgrimages. And yet, he felt calm. Whenever he was capable of establishing his coordinates in time and space it was a sign that the spell was broken. The cluster of customers grew livelier and livelier. Moved by a curiosity he seldom experienced, he grabbed his beer mug and approached them.
It was an ill-assorted crew: a couple of men in suits and ties, here and there a worker in denims, women in aprons carrying baskets and two younger, pretty girls. Holding court at a table there was a small man. A few white hairs managed to cover part of his skull. His tiny eyes glimmered as he spoke. From the first moment, Maurici had a strong impression that he’d seen his face somewhere else, who knew when. He remained standing to get a better view, bending his knee and resting his foot on a chair. The li
ttle man’s hands danced in the air.
“Historically, it belongs in this neighborhood, right? First of all I’d set up a shack with a sign that read: ‘Palace of Excecutions.’”
“But there ain’t no shacks no more!” chimed in one of the women from the market.
“Don’t interrupt!” a man growled.
The narrator proceeded. “Inside, I’d hang my license—framed, along with my picture and my birth certificate, right?”
“That’s a good idea!” another woman agreed.
“In the back we’d build a small scaffold with a ladder, so that yours truly and my assistant could climb on it. On the prisoner’s bench, two puppets: a man and a woman, dressed up with the proper robes. Farther back, a puppet . . .”
“Another puppet?”
“Quiet!”
“This other puppet’s gonna be the priest and he’ll be holding a crucifix. Then, yours truly will explain to the audience all the preliminaries of an execution, right? All of them. Now comes the moment of truth. Yours truly ties the prisoners to the bench.”
“With ropes?”
“No ropes! Since eighteen eighty-five they haven’t been used. No, with straps. First I’d hang puppet number one, the lady, and then number two. What d’you think?”
“Well, the whole thing sounds real nice, Nicomedes!” answered a red-cheeked matron.
The Street of the Three Beds Page 20
