A.G.
Next to the initials was a design identical to the spiral staircase that appeared on the covers of all Víctor Mataix’s novels in the Labyrinth of the Spirits series.
Vilajuana opened the envelope and pulled out a wad of documents tied together with string. Under the knot he saw a card with the letterhead of the Algonquin Hotel in New York, which read as follows:
A good journalist will know how to find the story
that needs to be told . . .
Vilajuana frowned and untied the knot. After unfolding the bundle of papers on the table, he tried to decipher the resulting confusion of lists, cuttings, photographs, and handwritten notes. It took him a couple of minutes to understand what he was staring at.
“Good God,” he whispered.
* * *
That afternoon, Vilajuana sent a message saying he’d caught a highly infectious virus that turned the entire digestive system into a minefield and would not be able to come in all week for fear of condemning the entire team to a constant pilgrimage to the toilet. By Thursday, Mariano Carolo, who could smell a rat, turned up at Vilajuana’s home carrying a roll of toilet paper.
“Forewarned is forearmed,” he said.
Vilajuana sighed and let Carolo in. The editor made his way to the sitting room. When he saw the entire wall covered in papers, he got closer and ran his eyes over it. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked after a while.
“I’d say it’s only the beginning.”
“And what is your source?”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“I see. Is it reliable, at least?”
“I believe so.”
“I suppose you’re aware that if we publish something like this, they’ll close down the newspaper, you and I will end up teaching grammar in some forsaken backwater village, and our dear owner and publisher will have to exile himself to some hard-to-get-to mountainous country in central Europe.”
“I’m well aware.”
Carolo looked anxiously at Vilajuana and rubbed his stomach. Since he’d become the paper’s editor, he developed ulcers even in his dreams. “And there was I, so content with being the Catalan Noël Coward,” he murmured.
“The truth is, I don’t know what to do,” said Vilajuana.
“Do you have a lead?”
“Yes, there’s a trail I can follow.”
“OK. This is what we’re going to do. I’ll say you’re preparing a series of features on a relatively unexplored aspect of the Generalissimo: his secret but sublime work as screenwriter.”
“Hollywood’s greatest loss.”
“What a magnificent headline. Keep me informed. I give you two weeks.”
* * *
Vilajuana spent the rest of the week analyzing the documents and organizing them in a tree diagram. When he stared at it, he felt as if the tree was just one among many, and that beyond the four walls of that room a whole forest awaited him. Once he’d digested the documentation and its implications, the question was whether to follow the trail or not.
Alicia had provided him with almost all the pieces of the puzzle. The rest depended on him. After a couple of sleepless nights, he made up his mind. His first stop was the Civil Registry, a cavernous building beached in front of the port, home to a purgatory of archives and bureaucrats that seemed to have blended together in perfect symbiosis. He spent a few days there, delving into a chasm of files without finding anything. He was beginning to think that Alicia’s trail was a false one when, on the fifth day, he bumped into an old doorman on the point of retirement who spent his time stuck to a transistor radio, listening avidly to league matches and phone-in programs in a broom cupboard full of mops and provisions. The new crop of civil servants referred to him as Methuselah because he was the only one to have survived the last administrative purge. The new centurions, more polished and better trained than their predecessors, were doubly hermetic, and none would explain to him why, however hard he tried, he couldn’t find the registry books for death and birth certificates in the city of Barcelona before 1944.
“That’s from before the system change,” was the only answer he ever got.
Methuselah, who always managed to push his broom under Vilajuana’s feet while the journalist was trying to navigate through folders and boxes of documents, finally took pity on him. “What in heaven’s name are you looking for, my good man?”
“I’m beginning to think it’s the Holy Shroud.”
Thanks to a few coins and the companionship generated by ostracism, Methuselah ended up telling him that, in fact, what he was looking for was not papers but a person.
“Doña María Luisa. Things were different when she ran things around here. Don’t get me started.”
The attempts at finding this Doña María Luisa ran smack into the same wall.
“That person has retired,” the new director told him, in a tone that implied that if he knew what was good for him, he’d leave the matter well alone and take a walk along La Barceloneta to enjoy the views.
It took a couple of weeks to locate her. María Luisa Alcaine lived near Plaza Real in a tiny apartment at the top of a block of flats with no elevator and no hope of having one, surrounded by dovecotes and unfinished terraced roofs, with boxes of papers piled up from floor to ceiling. The years of retirement had not been kind to her. The woman who opened the door looked vanquished.
“Doña María Luisa Alcaine?”
“Who are you?”
Vilajuana had anticipated the question and prepared an answer, which he hoped would keep that door open, even if only for a few seconds.
“My name is Sergio Vilajuana, and I’m a journalist working for La Vanguardia. I’ve been sent to see you by a friend of an old acquaintance of yours, Captain Vargas. Do you remember him?”
Doña María Luisa gave a deep sigh and turned around, leaving the door open behind her. She clearly lived alone in that hole and was dying of cancer, or of neglect. She chain-smoked as if the cigarettes were jelly beans, and when she coughed, she sounded as if she was bringing up her soul in bits.
“It won’t make any difference now,” she said. “Sit down. If you can find a spot.”
That afternoon María Luisa told him how, years before, when she was still secretary to the director, a captain from the police force called Vargas had come to the Civil Registry. “A handsome man, the sort you rarely see nowadays.”
Vargas had shown her a list with numbers of death and birth certificates that seemed to correlate—the same list Vilajuana had received years later, neatly typed out.
“So you remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Do you know where I could find the registry books containing those records prior to 1944?”
Maria Luisa lit another cigarette and took a drag that Vilajuana thought would finish her off. When she emerged from a cloud of smoke that looked as if something inside her had exploded, she signaled to him to follow her.
“Help me,” she said, pointing at a mountain of boxes piled up in one of the kitchen cupboards. “It’s the two at the back. I brought them home to prevent them from being destroyed. I thought Vargas would come back for them one day and that, with luck, he’d come back for me too. After all these years, I imagine that good old Captain Vargas must have beaten me in the race to paradise.”
María Luisa told Vilajuana that as soon as Vargas had left the registry that day, she had started to put two and two together. Rummaging through the documents, she kept finding more and more numbers that had been switched and cases in which it was obvious that the procedures had been manipulated.
“Hundreds of children. Stolen from their parents, who were probably murdered or imprisoned until they rotted alive. And that’s only as far as I was able to go in a few days. I took home what I could, because as soon as they started asking about Captain Vargas and his visit, I saw it coming. This is all I was able to save. A week after Vargas came to search the records of the registry, the
re was a fire in the archives. Everything prior to 1944 was lost. I was blamed for the disaster and dismissed two days later. If they’d known that I’d taken all these documents home, God knows what they would have done to me. But they thought the entire archive had been destroyed in the blaze. The past doesn’t disappear, however hard idiots try to forget it and con men try to fake it and resell it as new.”
“What have you done all these years?”
“Die. Decent people are killed slowly in this country. Quick deaths are reserved for scoundrels. They kill people like me by ignoring us, shutting all the doors in our faces and pretending we don’t exist. For a couple of years I sold lottery tickets on the sly in the metro tunnels, until they found out and took that away from me too. I wasn’t able to find anything else. Since then I’ve lived off the charity of my neighbors.”
“Have you no family?”
“I had a son, but he was told his mother was a stinking red, and I haven’t seen him in years.” María Luisa looked at Vilajuana with a smile that was hard to make out.
“Can I do anything for you, María Luisa?”
“You can tell the truth.”
Vilajuana sighed. “To be honest, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to do that.”
“Do you have children?”
“Four.”
Vilajuana was trapped in the eyes of that dying woman. He didn’t know where to hide.
“Do it for them. Tell the truth for them. When you’re able to, and in whatever way you’re able to. But don’t let us die. There are so many of us by now. Someone must lend us their voice.”
Vilajuana nodded. María Luisa held out her hand, and he shook it.
“I’ll do what I can,” he said.
* * *
That night, while he was tucking in Nicolás, his son fixed him with his gaze.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“An elephant question.”
“Let’s have it.”
“Why did you become a journalist? Mommy says that Granddad wanted you to be something else.”
“Your grandfather wanted me to be a lawyer.”
“And you paid no attention to him?”
“On certain occasions—none of which should apply to you or to the immediate future—a father must be disobeyed.”
“Why?”
“Because some fathers, unlike yours, make mistakes when they judge what is best for their children.”
“I meant, why did you want to be a journalist?”
Vilajuana shrugged. “Because of the amazing pay and the regular hours.”
Nicolás laughed. “No, seriously. Why?”
“I don’t know, Nico. That was a long time ago. Sometimes, when you grow older, what at first seemed very clear isn’t as clear anymore.”
“But the elephant doesn’t forget. Even if they try to cut its tusks off.”
“I suppose it doesn’t.”
“So . . . ?”
Vilajuana nodded and gave in. “To tell the truth. That’s why I became a journalist.”
Nicolás weighed his reply pensively. “And what is the truth?”
Vilajuana turned off the light and kissed his son’s forehead. “That is something you’re going to have to ask your mother.”
Stories have no beginning and no end, only doors through which one may enter them.
A story is an endless labyrinth of words, images, and spirits, conjured up to show us the invisible truth about ourselves. A story is, after all, a conversation between the narrator and the reader, and just as narrators can only relate as far as their ability will permit, so too readers can only read as far as what is already written in their souls.
This is the golden rule that sustains every artifice of paper and ink. Because when the lights go out, when the music ends and the stalls are empty again, the only thing that matters is the mirage that has been engraved in the theater of the imagination all readers hold in their mind. This, and the hope every maker of tales carries within: that readers will open their hearts to these little creatures made of ink and paper, and give them a part of themselves so they can be immortal, even if only for a few minutes.
And having said these words a little more solemnly than the occasion probably merits, we had now better land at the end of the page and ask our friend the reader to accompany us at the closing moment of this story, to help us find the most difficult thing for a poor storyteller who is trapped in his own labyrinth: the exit door.
Prelude to
The Labyrinth of the Spirits
(The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, volume IV),
by Julián Carax.
Edited by Émile de Rosiers Castellaine.
Paris: Éditions de la Lumière, 1992.
Julián’s Book
1
I always knew that one day I would end up writing this story. The story of my family and of that Barcelona haunted by books, memories, and secrets in which I grew up and which has followed me all my life, even when I knew that it was probably no more than a paper dream.
My father, Daniel Sempere, had tried before me, and almost lost his youth in the attempt. For years the good bookseller would sneak away in the early hours, when he thought my mother had fallen asleep, and tiptoe down to the bookshop to lock himself up in the back room. There, by the light of a candle, he would wield his flea-market fountain pen and fight an endless duel with hundreds of pages until dawn.
My mother never reproached him for it. She feigned—the way so many things are feigned in a marriage to keep it on an even keel—that she hadn’t noticed. His obsession worried her almost as much as it worried me: I was beginning to fear my father was going off his rocker like Don Quixote, only the other way around: not from too much reading but from too much writing. She knew my father needed to make that voyage alone, not because he harbored any literary ambitions but because confronting the words was his way of discovering who he really was and trying to recover the memory and the spirit of the mother he had lost when he was four years old.
I remember one day when I woke up with a start shortly before dawn. My heart was beating furiously, and I could hardly breathe. I had dreamed that my father was dissolving into the mist, and I was losing him forever. It wasn’t the first time. I jumped out of bed and ran down to the bookshop. I found him in the back room, still in a solid state, a battlefield of crumpled pages strewn around his feet. His fingers were ink-stained and his eyes were bloodshot. He’d placed an old photograph of Isabella on the desk, taken when she was nineteen, the one we all knew he always carried with him because he was terrified of forgetting her face.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t give her life back to her.”
I held back my tears and looked into his eyes. “I’ll do it for you,” I said. “I promise.”
My father, who always smiled at my occasional outbursts of seriousness, embraced me. When he let go of me and saw that I was still there and I had been speaking in earnest, he offered me his fountain pen. “You’ll need this. I don’t even know what side it’s supposed to write with . . .”
I studied that dreadful-looking gadget and slowly shook my head. “I’ll use a typewriter,” I declared. “An Underwood, the professional’s choice.”
I’d seen that phrase, “the professional’s choice,” in a newspaper ad, and it had impressed me. It was quite something to think that just owning one of those contraptions of the size and tonnage of a steam engine might transform you from an amateur journalist to a professional writer.
My declaration of intentions must have caught my father by surprise. “So now you want to be a professional writer? With an Underwood and all that?”
While we’re at it, I thought dreamily, one with an office on the top floor of a Gothic skyscraper, imported cigarettes galore, a dry martini in one hand and a muse sitting on my lap, wearing blood-red lipstick and expensive black underwear. That, anyway, is how I imagined the professionals at the time, at least the ones who created those detective
novels that soaked up my sleep, my soul, and some other things too. Great expectations aside, I didn’t miss the slight hue of irony beneath my father’s affectionate tone. If he was going to question my vocation, we were bound to argue.
“Yes,” I replied dryly. “Like Julián Carax.”
Take that, I thought.
My father raised his eyebrows. The blow had confused him. “And how do you know what Carax writes with, or even who he is?”
I adopted the mysterious expression I had patented to imply that I knew more than everyone imagined. “I know loads.”
At home, the name Julián Carax was always mentioned in a whisper behind closed doors, protected by veiled looks and kept out of children’s reach, like one of those medicines tagged with a skull and crossbones. Little did my parents know that by the time I was eight, I’d discovered, in the top drawer of the dining-room cupboard (which I reached with the help of a chair and a wooden box), a collection of Julián Carax novels republished by a family friend called Don Gustavo Barceló. They were hidden behind two tins of Camprodón biscuits, which I polished off entirely, and a large bottle of muscatel wine that almost threw me into a coma at the tender age of nine.
By the time I was ten, I’d read them all twice over and, although I probably hadn’t understood them fully, been captivated by a prose that ignited my imagination with images, worlds, and characters I would never, ever forget. Having reached that point of sensory intoxication, I was quite sure that my ambition was to learn to do what this Carax did, and become his most outstanding successor in the art of telling tales. But I had the feeling that to achieve this, I first had to find out who he was, and why my parents had always preferred me not to know anything about him.
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