I’d read a report in a newspaper about some Japanese engineers who practiced something called reverse engineering. Apparently these industrious gentlemen disassembled an engine to its last piece, analyzing the function of each bit, the dynamics of the whole, and the interior design of the device in question to work out the mathematics that supported its operation. My mother had a brother who worked as an engineer in Germany, so I told myself that there must be something in my genes that would allow me to do the same thing with a book or with a story.
Every day I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as “inspiration” or “having something to tell” and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of narrative, with the painting of textures, with the timbres and colors of the staging, with the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas.
My second great occupation, or I should say my first, was far more suited to comedy, and at times touched on farce. There was a time in which I fell in love on a weekly basis, something that, in hindsight, I don’t recommend. I fell in love with a look, a voice, and above all with what was tightly concealed under those fine-wool dresses worn by the young girls of my time.
“That isn’t love, it’s a fever,” Fermín would specify. “At your age it is chemically impossible to tell the difference. Mother Nature brings on these tricks to repopulate the planet by injecting hormones and a raft of idiocies into young people’s veins so there’s enough cannon fodder available for them to reproduce like rabbits and at the same time sacrifice themselves in the name of whatever is parroted by bankers, clerics, and revolutionary visionaries in dire need of idealists, imbeciles, and other plagues that will prevent the world from evolving and make sure it always stays the same.”
“But Fermín, what has all this to do with anxieties of the heart?”
“Spare me the sugary lyrics, I know you only too well. The heart is an organ that pumps blood, not sonnets. With a bit of luck some of that circulation reaches the brain, but on the whole it ends up in the gut and, in your case, in the loins—which, if you’re not careful, will take over your brain until you reach your twenty-fifth birthday. Keep the testicular mass well away from the rudder, and you’ll come into port. Fool around, and your life will go by without your doing anything useful.”
“Amen.”
My free time was divided between romances in dark alleyways, exploring under blouses and skirts in the back row of some decrepit neighborhood cinema with more or less success, parties at La Paloma Ballroom, and strolls along the breakwater, holding hands with my girlfriend of the moment. I won’t go into further detail because there was no significant event worth reporting until I reached my seventeenth birthday and collided head-on with a creature named Valentina. Any self-respecting sailor has an iceberg waiting for him; mine was called Valentina. She was three years older than me (which for practical purposes seemed more like ten), and she left me in a catatonic state for a few months.
I met her one autumn afternoon when I’d gone into the old French Bookshop on Paseo de Gracia to shelter from the rain. She had her back to me, and something about her made me draw closer and look at her out of the corner of my eye. She was leafing through a novel by Julián Carax, The Shadow of the Wind, and if I dared to go up to her and open my mouth, that’s because in those days I felt indestructible.
“I’ve read this book too,” I said, parading a level of wit that proved Fermín’s circulation theories beyond all doubt.
She looked at me with emerald eyes that were sharp as blades, and blinked so slowly I thought time had stopped. “Lucky you,” she replied.
She returned the book to the shelf, turned around, and made her way to the exit. I just stood there, glued to the floor for a few seconds, fuming. When I recovered my wits, I grabbed the book from the shelf, took it to the cashier, paid for it, and ran into the street, hoping my iceberg hadn’t sunk under the sea forever.
The sky was the color of steel, and pearls of rain were pelting down. I caught up with her while she waited at the traffic light to cross Calle Rosellón, ignoring the rain.
“Should I call the police?” she asked, without turning her head.
“I hope not. I’m Julián.”
Valentina huffed. She turned her head and fixed those sharp eyes on me again. I smiled like an idiot and handed her the book.
She raised an eyebrow and, after a moment’s hesitation, accepted it. “Another Julián? Do you form a brotherhood or something like that?”
“My parents named me after the author of this book. He was a friend of theirs. It’s the best book I’ve ever read.”
My luck was decided by the scenery, as usually happens on such occasions. A flash of lightning streaked the facades on Paseo de Gracia with a silver hue, and the rumble of the storm crept angrily over the city. The traffic lights turned green. Before Valentina could send me packing or call a policeman, I played my last card.
“Ten minutes. A coffee. If in ten minutes I haven’t earned it, I’ll vanish and you’ll never set eyes on me again. I promise.”
Valentina looked at me, hesitating and repressing a smile. The rain was to blame for everything.
“OK,” she said.
And there I was, believing my life had changed the day I decided to be a novelist.
* * *
Valentina lived on her own in a top-floor flat on Calle Provenza. From there one could contemplate the whole of Barcelona, something I rarely did because I preferred to contemplate her in the different stages of undress to which I inevitably tried to reduce her. Her mother was Dutch, and her father had been a well-known Barcelona lawyer whose name even I knew. When he died, her mother decided to return to her country, but Valentina, by now an adult, decided to remain in Barcelona. She spoke five languages and worked for a lawyer’s practice founded by her father, translating lawsuit reports and multimillion-dollar cases for big companies and families with a box in the opera house going back four generations. When I asked her what she wanted to do with her life, she glanced back at me with that look that always entranced me. “Travel,” she said.
Valentina was the first person I allowed to read my modest attempts at writing. She had a tendency to keep her tenderness and her demonstrations of affection for the more prosaic part of our relationship. When it came to giving me her opinion on my literary dabblings, she would say that all I had of Carax was his first name. Deep down I agreed with her, so I didn’t take it badly. Perhaps for that reason, and because I thought nobody in the world could better understand the plan I’d been nursing for years, one day when I felt particularly well prepared to receive a slap in the face, I told her what I was planning to do as soon as I reached my eighteenth birthday.
“I hope you’re not going to ask me to marry you,” said Valentina.
I suppose I should have known how to interpret the clue fate was hinting at; all my big scenes with Valentina began with rain hot on my heels or scratching the windowpanes. That one was no different.
“What is the plan?” she said at last.
“To write the story of my family.”
We’d been together for almost a year, if that procession of afternoons between sheets in her studio up in the clouds could be called being together, and although I knew by heart every pore of her skin, I still hadn’t learned to read her silences.
“And . . . ?” she asked.
“Isn’t that enough for you?”
“Everyone has a family. And all families have a story.”
With Valentina you always had to earn everything. Whatever it was, it had to be won. She turned away from me, and that is how, addressing that beautiful naked back, I set out, for the first time in a loud voice, the idea that had been running through my mind for years. It was not a brilliant presentation, but I needed to hear it from my own lips to believe in it.
I had a beginning: a title. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. For years I’d been carryi
ng a blank notebook around with me, on whose cover I’d written, in bold, ostentatiously elegant handwriting:
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
A novel in four volumes
by
Julián Sempere
One day Fermín had caught me, pen in hand, staring spellbound at the first blank page of the notebook. He inspected the cover and, after letting out a sound that could be described as a cross between grunting and breaking wind, intoned:
“Accursed be those whose dreams are made of paper and ink, for theirs will be the purgatory of vanity and disappointment.”
“By your leave, would Your Excellency be so kind as to translate that solemn aphorism into plain speech?”
“I suppose silliness makes me go all biblical,” he said. “You’re the one who pretends to be a poet. Work out the semantics.”
I’d worked out that the magnum opus, a product of my feverish juvenile imagination, would reach a devilish size and a body weight close to fifteen kilos. The way I dreamed of it, the narrative would be divided into four interconnected volumes that would work like entrance doors into a labyrinth of stories. As the reader advanced into its pages, he would feel that the story was piecing itself together like a game of Russian dolls in which each plot and each character led to the next, and that, in turn, to yet another, and so on and so forth.
“It sounds like the instructions for piecing together an Erector set or an electric train.”
My sweet Valentina, always so eloquent.
“It does have a whiff of an Erector set,” I admitted.
I had tried to sell her my highfalutin letter of intent without feeling embarrassed, because it was, word for word, the one I’d written when I was sixteen, convinced that half my work had been already accomplished with it. The fact that I’d had the nerve to copy that idea straight out of The Shadow of the Wind, the novel I’d given Valentina the day I met her, was the least of it.
“Hasn’t Carax done that already?” asked Valentina.
“Everything in life has been done by someone before, at least anything worth doing,” I said. “The trick is to try to do it a bit better.”
“And there you go, with all the modesty of youth.”
Accustomed as I was to having jugs of ice-cold water poured on me by my beloved iceberg, I continued with my presentation, as determined as a soldier jumping out of his trench and advancing with a shout against the hail of machine guns.
According to my infallible plan, the first volume would focus on the story of a reader, in this case my father: on how, when he was young, he’d discovered the world of books—and, by extension, life—through an enigmatic novel by an unknown author concealing a huge mystery, the sort that leaves you drooling at the mouth. All that would provide the foundation for building, in one stroke of the pen, a novel that would combine all known and unknown forms.
“While you’re at it, it could also cure the flu and the common cold,” remarked Valentina.
The second volume, replete with a morbid, sinister aftertaste, seeking to goad the mainstream reader, would narrate the macabre wanderings of an ill-fated novelist, courtesy of David Martín, who would chart, in the first person, how he loses his mind, and drag us along in his descent into the hell of his own madness, thus becoming an even less reliable narrator than the Prince of Hell, who would also stroll around the novel’s pages. Or perhaps he wouldn’t, because it would all be a game in which the reader is the one who must finish the jigsaw puzzle and decide what kind of book it is.
“What if you’re left in the lurch, and nobody feels like taking part in this game?”
“It will have been worthwhile all the same,” I said. “There will always be someone who will take up the challenge.”
“Writing is for optimists,” Valentina declared.
The third volume, assuming some charitable reader had managed to survive the first two and not decided to board a different tram heading for a happy ending, would save us momentarily from the underworld and offer us the story of a character, the character par excellence and the voice of the official conscience of the story, that is to say, my adoptive uncle, Fermín Romero de Torres. His story would show us, with picaresque spirit, how he became the person he was, and his many misadventures in the most turbulent years of the century would reveal the lines connecting all the parts of the labyrinth.
“At least here we’ll have a good laugh.”
“Fermín to the rescue,” I agreed.
“And how does this monstrosity end?”
“With fireworks, a grand orchestra, and stage machinery, special effects in full force.”
The fourth installment, fierce and enormous, spiced with perfumes from all the earlier ones, would lead us at last to the center of the mystery, uncovering all the puzzles with the help of my favorite fallen angel of mist, Alicia Gris. The saga would contain villains and heroes, and a thousand tunnels through which the reader would be able to explore a kaleidoscopic plot resembling that mirage of perspectives I’d discovered with my father in the heart of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
“And you don’t appear?” asked Valentina.
“Only at the end, and it’s a very small part.”
“How modest.”
From her tone, I already guessed what was about to hit me.
“What I don’t understand is why, instead of talking so much about this story, you don’t just get on and write it.”
I had asked myself that question about three thousand times during the last few years.
“Because talking about it helps me to imagine it better. And above all, because I don’t know how to do it. That’s where my plan comes in.”
Valentina turned around and looked at me, confused. “I thought that was the plan.”
“That is the ambition. The plan is another thing.”
“What?”
“That Julián Carax write it for me,” I revealed.
Valentina stood there staring at me with that look that opened corridors into one’s soul. “And why would he do that?”
“Because, deep down, it’s also his story, and the story of his family.”
“I thought Carax was in Paris.”
I nodded.
Valentina half closed her eyes. Icy, intelligent, my adored Valentina. “In other words, your plan is to go to Paris to find Julián Carax, supposing he’s still alive, and convince him to write a three-thousand-page novel in your name with that story that supposedly is so important to you.”
“More or less,” I admitted.
I smiled, prepared to take the hit. Now she’d tell me I was thoughtless, naive, or a dreamer. I was ready to suffer any blow except the one she gave me, which, of course, was the one I deserved.
“You’re a coward.” She stood up, collected her clothes, and dressed, facing the window. Then, without looking at me, she lit a cigarette and let her eyes wander over the horizon of the Ensanche rooftops under the rain.
“I’d like to be alone,” she said.
Five days later I walked up those steps again to Valentina’s attic, only to find the door open, the room empty, and a bare chair facing the window. On the chair was an envelope with my name on it. I opened it. Inside were twenty thousand French francs and a note:
Bon voyage et bonne chance.
V.
When I stepped into the street, it had started to rain.
* * *
Three weeks later, on an afternoon when we had gathered a group of readers and regular customers in the bookshop to celebrate the publication of a first novel by a good friend of Sempere & Sons, Professor Alburquerque, something happened that had been widely expected for some time—something that would alter the history of our country, or at least bring it back to the present.
It was almost closing time when Don Federico, the neighborhood watchmaker, came in to the bookshop looking very flustered, hauling a contraption that turned out to be a portable television set he’d bought in Andorra. He put it down on the counter and
gave us all a solemn look.
“Quick,” he said. “I need a socket.”
“A plug is what you need,” joked Fermín, “like everyone else in this country, otherwise you won’t get anywhere.”
Something in Don Federico’s expression suggested that the watchmaker was in no mood for lighthearted banter. Professor Alburquerque, who already suspected what it was all about, helped him connect the machine. A noisy gray screen materialized, projecting a halo of flickering light throughout the bookshop.
Alerted by the commotion, my grandfather peered around the back-room curtain and looked inquisitively at us all. Fermín shrugged.
“Let everyone know,” ordered Don Federico.
While they were sorting out the position of the aerials, we congregated in front of the television set as if we were acting out some sort of ritual. Fermín and Professor Alburquerque began placing chairs. Soon all of us—myself, my parents, my grandfather, Fermín, Don Anacleto (he’d seen the glaring light on his way back from his afternoon stroll and thought we were watching a pop show, so he’d come in to nose around), Fernandito and Sofía, Merceditas, and the customers who were there for the launch of Professor Alburquerque’s book—found ourselves filling those improvised stalls, unsure of what we were waiting for.
“Do I have time to go for a wee and get popcorn?” asked Fermín.
“If I were you, I’d try to hold out,” warned Professor Alburquerque. “I have a feeling this is going to be momentous.”
Finally Don Federico twisted the aerials around, and the static window dissolved into the gloomy black-and-white frame that was broadcast by Televisión Española in those days. Against the grand, velvety background the face of an individual came into view. He looked like a cross between a provincial notary and Mighty Mouse and wore a tearful and contrite expression.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 79
