But, dearest love, the doctor said it would be fine.
That doctor is a scoundrel. Like you.
A wise man is one who doesn’t stir up volcanoes, revolutions, or pregnant females. Fermín left the marital bed and tiptoed to the dining room of the modest flat in Calle Joaquín Costa where they had settled after their honeymoon. He’d thought of drowning his sorrows and his lust in a Sugus, but a quick glance at the larder revealed that he was down to zero supplies. Fermín felt his soul drop to his slippers. This was serious. Then he remembered that in the foyer of the Estación de Francia there was always a peddler selling confectionary and cigarettes who kept his stand there until midnight. He was known as Blind Diego, and he was normally very well stocked with sweets and indecent jokes. Fermín’s mouth watered in anticipation at the very thought of a lemon Sugus. He didn’t lose a second getting out of his pajamas and slipping into one of his Siberian wintry outfits. Thus attired, he set off down the street to satisfy his basic instincts and walk off his insomnia.
The Raval quarter is the land of insomniacs, for although it never sleeps, it invites you to forget. However many sorrows you drag along with you, you’ll only have walked a few steps before bumping into someone who will remind you that there’s always another person with a far worse set of cards than yours in the game of life. On that night of crossed destinies, a yellowish miasma made up of urine, gas lamps, and sepia-toned echoes drifted through the tangle of narrow streets like a spell, or a warning, depending on the beholder.
Fermín navigated the choir of shouts and waves of effluvia courtesy of the riffraff that livened up alleyways as dark and twisted as the fantasies of a bishop. He emerged at last at the foot of the statue of Columbus. A gaggle of seagulls had conspired to dye it guano-white in a murky homage to the Mediterranean diet. Fermín headed straight along the boulevard toward the railway station, without daring to look back lest he glimpse the sinister silhouette of Montjuïc Castle looming on the top of the hill.
Packs of American sailors roamed the area surrounding the port, looking for fun and the chance of cultural exchanges with ladies of easy virtue who’d be willing to teach them the basic vocabulary and three or four novel tricks of the trade. He remembered Rociíto, solace of so many dark nights of his youth, a good soul with a generous bosom who more than once had rescued him from loneliness. He imagined her with her fiancé, the prosperous tradesman from Reus who had removed her from active service a year ago, traveling around the world like the lady she had always been and perhaps feeling, for once, that life was smiling on her.
* * *
Thinking about Rociíto and people with hearts of gold—that rare species constantly threatened with extinction—Fermín soon arrived at the station. He spotted Blind Diego, who was about to close for the night, and hurried toward him.
“Hey, Fermín. At this time of night I imagined you’d be pestering the wife,” said Diego. “Short on Sugus?”
“Run out.”
“I’ve got lemon, pineapple, and strawberry.”
“Make it lemon. Five packets.”
“And one on the house.”
Fermín paid, adding a tip. Without counting them, Diego put the coins in a leather pouch that hung from his belt, like a tram conductor. Fermín had never understood how Blind Diego knew whether he was being cheated or not, but he knew. Diego had been born sightless, but he could see them coming. He lived alone in a windowless room in a pensión on Calle Princesa, where his best friend was a transistor radio on which he listened to soccer matches and the news bulletins that amused him so much.
“You’ve come to see the trains, eh?”
“Old habits,” said Fermín.
He watched Diego set off toward the room where not even bedbugs were waiting for him, and he thought of Bernarda, asleep in their bed and smelling of rose water. He was about to go back home but decided to step into the great nave of the station, that cathedral of steam and iron through which he’d returned to Barcelona one distant night in 1941. Fermín had always thought that destiny, though keen to ambush innocent people from behind and if possible with their pants down, also enjoyed nesting in railway stations whenever it took a refreshment break. This is where tragedies and romances began and ended, as did escapes and returns, betrayals and absences. Life, some said, is a railway station where one almost always enters, or gets put into, the wrong carriage.
Those thoughts, no deeper than a cup of coffee, usually came to Fermín in the small hours of the night, when his body was tired of tossing and turning but his head kept on spinning like a top. Determined to swap his cheap philosophy for the austere comfort of a wooden bench, he walked under the station’s curved vault. A design, he thought, with a clear message from its shrewd architect to the fresh arrivals: that the future is born crooked in Barcelona.
Fermín settled on the bench, unwrapped a Sugus, and popped it in his mouth. Absorbed in his sweet nirvana, he became mesmerized by the railway lines, which seemed to draw together as they vanished into the night. After a while he felt the ground shaking under his feet and saw the headlights of a locomotive breaking the shroud of midnight. A couple of minutes later the train entered the station, riding on a cloud of steam.
A blanket of sea mist swept in over the platforms, eerily enveloping the passengers as they alighted after their long journey. Happy faces were in short supply. Fermín watched them as they passed, taking in their weary expressions and smart clothes, fantasizing on prior incidents and circumstances that had brought them to the city. He was starting to relish his new role as an instant biographer of anonymous citizens when he saw her.
She stepped out of the carriage wrapped in a veil of white steam, just the way Fermín had learned to expect his beloved Marlene Dietrich to emerge in a station—be it in Berlin, Paris, or any other place that had never existed, in that glorious black-and-white twentieth century of the Capitol Cinema matinees. The woman—for although she couldn’t even be thirty, he would never have thought of describing her as a young girl, a chick, or any other of the terms currently in vogue—walked with a slight limp, lending her a somewhat intriguing and vulnerable air.
Her sharp features and presence exuded light and shade at the same time. If he’d had to describe her to his friend Daniel, he would have said she looked like one of the ghostly midnight angels that sometimes peeped out of the novels by his old cell-block pal in the prison of Montjuïc, David Martín. In particular she reminded him of the ineffable Chloé, the protagonist of many stories of doubtful decorum in the City of the Damned series, which had robbed him of so much sleep in his long sessions of feverish reading. From those novels he’d acquired an encyclopedic knowledge on the art of poisoning, the turbulent passions of criminal minds, and the techniques and variety in the making and wearing of women’s undergarments. Perhaps it was time to return to those wild Gothic romances, he told himself, before his spirit and his gonads dried up inexorably.
Fermín watched the woman as she drew near, and they exchanged glances. It was just a fleeting moment, an accidental gesture from which he quickly fled, lowering his head and allowing her to walk by. Fermín buried his eyes in his coat and faced the other way. The passengers were disappearing toward the exit, the woman with them. He stayed there, glued to his seat, almost trembling, until the station master went up to him.
“Listen, there are no more trains arriving tonight and you can’t sleep here . . .”
Fermín nodded and left, dragging his feet. When he reached the entrance hall, he looked around, but there was no sign of her. He hurried out to the street, where a cold breeze brought him back to the reality of winter.
“Alicia?” he asked the wind. “Is that you?” Sighing, he set off into the shadows of the streets, telling himself that it was not possible, that those eyes he’d met were not the same eyes he’d abandoned that faraway night of fire during the war, and that the girl he’d tried to save, Alicia, must have perished that night along with so many others. Not even his nemesis, destin
y, could have such a perverse sense of humor.
Perhaps it was a ghost who had returned from the dead to remind him that someone who lets a child die doesn’t deserve to bring descendants into this world, he speculated. The promptings of the Almighty were unknowable, said the priests. This had to have a scientific explanation, he told himself. Like an early-morning hard-on.
Clinging to that empirical principle and sinking his teeth into a Sugus or two, Fermín started walking back to the warm bed where Bernarda waited for him, convinced that nothing happened by chance and that sooner or later he would uncover that mystery or else that mystery would uncover him, once and for all.
3
While proceeding toward the exit, Alicia noticed the figure sitting on a bench by the platform entrance, looking at her out of the corner of his eye—a small, scrawny man whose face orbited around a prominent nose, his features vaguely reminiscent of a Goya painting. He wore a coat that was far too big for him, making him look like a snail carrying his shell. Alicia could have sworn he wore newspaper pages folded under his clothes to keep himself warm, or for goodness knows what other reason, a practice she had not seen since the first postwar years.
The simplest thing would have been to forget him and tell herself he was only another nameless face, caught in the flood of the dispossessed, still floating around the dark areas of large cities almost twenty years after the end of the war—hoping perhaps that history would remember Spain and rescue the country from oblivion. The simplest thing would have been to think that Barcelona would give her at least a few hours’ respite before making her confront her fate. She walked past him without looking back and went straight to the exit, praying to the devil that he hadn’t recognized her. Twenty years had passed since that night, and she’d only been a child at the time.
Outside the station she climbed into a taxi and asked the driver to take her to number 12, Calle Aviñón. Her voice shook as she pronounced those words. The car drove straight up Paseo Isabel II toward Vía Layetana, dodging a pas de deux of intersecting trams that lit up the mist with blue electric sparks crackling on the overhead cables. Alicia scanned Barcelona’s somber outlines through the window: the arches and towers, the narrow streets penetrating the old town, the lights of Montjuïc Castle far up in the distance. Home, dark home, she told herself.
At that time of night there was hardly any traffic. Ten minutes later, they’d reached their destination. The taxi driver left her by the front door of 12 Calle Aviñón, and after thanking her for the tip, which doubled the fare on the meter, he set off down the road, heading for the port. Alicia abandoned herself to the cold breeze that carried with it that neighborhood smell of an old Barcelona not even the rain could dispel. She caught herself smiling. In time, even bad memories dress up for the occasion.
* * *
Her home was just a few steps away from the intersection with Calle Fernando, opposite the old Gran Café. Alicia was fumbling for her keys in her coat pocket when she heard the front door opening. She looked up to meet the smiling face of Jesusa, the caretaker.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Jesusa intoned, visibly excited.
Before Alicia could reply, Jesusa caught her in one of her boa-constrictor embraces and riddled her face with kisses that smelled of aniseed. “Let’s have a good look at you,” said the caretaker as she freed her.
Alicia smiled. “Don’t tell me I’m too thin.”
“Men might say that, and for once they’d be right.”
“You can’t imagine how I’ve missed you, Jesusa.”
“You shameless flatterer. Let me give you another kiss that you don’t deserve. All that time goodness knows where, without coming, or calling, or writing, or anything at all . . .”
Jesusa Labordeta was one of those war widows with enough spirit and determination for nine lives she had never been able to live—and never would. For fifteen years she’d been working as a caretaker in the building. She occupied a tiny apartment with two rooms at the far end of the entrance hall, which she shared with a radio tuned to a station featuring romantic soaps, and a half-dead dog she’d rescued from the street. She’d christened the mutt Napoleon, even though he could barely capture the street corner in time to perform his early-morning urinary duties, and often ended up dropping his load under the row of mailboxes in the hall. She complemented her miserable wages by mending and sewing up old clothes for half the neighborhood. Loose tongues—and most tongues were loose in those days—liked to say that Jesusa was as fond of anise liqueur as of tight-trousered sailors, and that sometimes, when she went overboard with the bottle, she could be heard weeping in her minute home while poor Napoleon howled with fear.
“Come on in, it’s fiendishly cold out here.”
Alicia followed her indoors.
“Señor Leandro called this morning to let me know you were coming.”
“Always so thoughtful, Señor Leandro.”
“He’s a gentleman,” declared Jesusa, who had always put him on a pedestal. “He speaks so well and lovely . . .”
The building had no elevator, and the stairs seemed to have been put in by the architect as a deterrent. Jesusa walked ahead, and Alicia followed her as best she could, dragging her case step by step.
“I’ve aired the apartment and tidied the place up a bit, ’cause it really needed it. Fernandito helped me—I hope you don’t mind. As soon as he heard you were coming, he didn’t stop pestering me until I allowed him to make himself useful . . .”
Fernandito was Señora Jesusa’s nephew. A blameless soul of whom even a saint could take advantage, he was dangerously prone to the classic attacks of adolescent infatuation. To spice it all up, Mother Nature had enjoyed herself endowing him with the looks of a bumpkin. He lived with his mother in the next building and worked for a grocer’s as a delivery boy, although the bulk of his toils and talents was devoted to the composition of elaborate amorous verse dedicated to Alicia, in whom he saw an irresistible mixture of the Lady of the Camellias and the wicked queen in Snow White, only racier. Shortly before Alicia left Barcelona, three years earlier, Fernandito had declared his eternal love to her, his readiness to provide her with at least five offspring, God willing, and the promise that his body, soul, and other earthly belongings would always be hers, in exchange for a farewell kiss.
“Fernandito, I’m at least ten years older than you,” Alicia had told him at the time, drying his tears. “You shouldn’t think such things, it’s not right.”
“Why don’t you love me, Señorita Alicia? Am I not man enough for you?”
“Fernandito, you’re man enough to sink the Spanish Armada, but what you must do is find yourself a girlfriend who is your age. In a couple of years you’ll realize that I was right. All I can offer you is my friendship.”
Fernandito’s pride was like an earnest young boxer with more willingness than talent: it didn’t matter how many blows it took, it always came back for more. “Nobody will ever love you more than I do, Alicia,” he said. “Nobody.”
The day she was due to take the train to Madrid, Fernandito, who by dint of listening to boleros on the radio carried melodrama in his bloodstream, was waiting for her at the station dressed in his Sunday best, polished shoes, and the implausible air of an aspiring matinee idol, though somewhat on the short side. He carried a bunch of red roses that had probably cost him a month’s salary and insisted on handing her a passionate love letter that would have made Lady Chatterley blush but only made Alicia cry, and not in the way poor Fernandito longed for. Before Alicia could step onto the train and get safely away from the would-be Casanova, Fernandito summoned up all the courage and nerve he’d been bottling up since puberty and gave her an almighty kiss, the sort of kiss only a fifteen-year-old can give, making her feel, if only for a while, that there was still hope for the world.
“You’re breaking my heart and sending me to an early grave, Señorita Alicia,” he sobbed. “I’ll die from weeping. I’ve heard that this is a medical certainty. The
tear ducts dry up and end up bursting the aorta. They were talking about it on the radio the other day. You’ll see, they’ll send you the funeral notice, and then you’ll be sorry.”
“Fernandito, there’s more life in one of your tears than I could live if I made it to a hundred.”
“That sounds like something you’ve got out of a book.”
“No book can do you justice, Fernandito, unless it’s a treatise on biology.”
“Leave, go off with your deceit and your heart of stone. One day, when you feel you’re all alone with no one to turn to, you’ll miss me.”
Alicia kissed him on his forehead. She would have kissed him on the lips, but that would have killed him. “I’m missing you already. Take care, Fernandito. And try to forget me.”
* * *
At last they reached the top floor. When Alicia realized she was standing in front of the door to her old home, she emerged from her trance.
Jesusa opened the door and switched on the light. “Don’t worry,” she said, as if she’d read her thoughts. “The boy has a lovely girlfriend now and has wised up no end. Come along in.”
Alicia left her suitcase on the floor and walked into the flat. Jesusa stood waiting in the doorway. There were fresh flowers in a vase in the entrance hall, and the place had a pleasant smell of cleanliness. She went through the rooms and walked along the corridors slowly, as if she were visiting the apartment for the first time.
Hearing Jesusa behind her, setting the keys on the table, she came back into the dining room. The caretaker was looking at her with a half smile.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 20
