“Franco has died,” announced the then prime minister, Arias Navarro, amid sobs.
From the sky, or from somewhere else, a silence of unfathomable weight fell upon us. If the clock hanging on the wall had still been working, the pendulum would have stopped in mid-flight. What follows happened more or less simultaneously.
Merceditas burst into tears. My grandfather turned as pale as a meringue, probably fearing he would hear the rumble of tanks heading up Avenida Diagonal, and the declaration of another war. Don Anacleto, so prone to rhapsody and verse, went mute and began to visualize the burning of convents and other festivities. My parents looked at one another in bewilderment. Professor Alburquerque, who didn’t smoke, borrowed a cigarette from the watchmaker and lit it. Fernandito and Sofía, ignoring the commotion, smiled at one another as if they were returning to their enchanted world, and went on holding hands. Some of the readers who had gathered there made the sign of the cross and left in shock.
I looked around for some adult in full possession of his mental faculties and met with Fermín, who was following the speech with cold interest and utter calm. I sat down next to him.
“Look at him,” he remarked, “like a sniveling child, as if he’d never done anything bad in his life, and yet he’s signed more death sentences than Uncle Joe Stalin.”
“What’s going to happen now?” I asked anxiously.
Fermín smiled at me serenely and patted me on the back. He offered me a Sugus, peeled one for himself—lemon flavored—and sucked it with satisfaction. “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen here. Skirmishes, pantomimes, and hypocrisy en masse for a while, that’s for certain, but nothing serious. If we’re unlucky, some idiot might go too far, but whoever holds the reins won’t let anything get out of hand. It wouldn’t be worth it. There’ll be a fair amount of hullabaloo, but most of it will come to nothing. Records will be broken in the Olympic sport of coat turning, and we’ll see heroes emerging from under the sofa. The usual stuff in these cases. It’s going to be like a long constipation. It won’t be easy, but slowly the turd will come out, or at least the bit that hasn’t yet metabolized. And in the end, it won’t get too nasty, you’ll see. For the simple reason that it wouldn’t benefit anyone. After all, this is a market stall of different interests, dressed up more or less successfully for popular consumption. Setting aside the puppet shows, the only thing that matters is who will be ruling, who will have the keys to the cash register, and how they’re going to split up other people’s money among themselves. On their way to the booty they’ll spruce everything up, which is badly needed. New scoundrels will appear, new leaders, and a whole choir of innocents with no memory will come out into the streets, ready to believe whatever they want or need to believe. They’ll follow whichever Pied Piper flatters them most and promises them some shoddy paradise. This is what it is, Julianito, with its highs and lows, and it’s only as good as it gets, which is better than nothing. There are those who see it coming and go far away, like our Alicia, and there are those of us who stay with our feet stuck in the mud, because anyhow we don’t have anywhere better to go. But don’t worry about the circus. We’ve now come to the clown acts, and the trapeze artists will take a while to arrive. It’s probably the best thing that could have happened to us all. As far as I’m concerned, and I am not that much concerned, I’m happy with it.”
“And how do you know Alicia has gone so far away?”
Fermín smiled mischievously. “Touché.”
“What have you not told me?”
Fermín grabbed my arm and led me to a corner. “Another day. Today is a day of national mourning.”
“But—”
He left me before I could respond and went back to the congregation, which was still reeling at the death of the man who had been head of state for the last four decades.
“Are you going to propose a toast?” asked Don Anacleto.
Fermín shook his head. “I don’t toast anyone’s death,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going home to see Bernarda, and, God willing, try to get her as knocked up as science will allow. I suggest that, logistics permitting, you all do the same. And if not, then read a good book, like the one by our dear friend here, Professor Alburquerque. Tomorrow will be another day.”
* * *
And another day came, and then another, and a few months went by during which Fermín artfully slipped away and left me in the dark about his insinuations regarding Alicia Gris. Guessing that he would tell me what he had to tell me when the moment was right, or just whenever he felt like it, I made use of Valentina’s francs and bought myself a ticket to Paris. It was 1976, and I was nineteen.
My parents were unaware of the real reason for my trip, which I attributed to a desire to see the world, although my mother always suspected my true intentions. I was never able to hide the truth from her—as I had once told my father, I kept no secrets from her. My mother knew about my goings-on with Valentina and my ambitions, which she always supported, even when I periodically touched rock bottom and swore I was abandoning them because of my lack of talent and courage.
“Nobody succeeds without failing first,” she assured me.
I knew my father was annoyed, although he wouldn’t tell me. He didn’t approve of my trip to Paris. According to him, what I should be doing was making my mind up and devoting myself once and for all to whatever it was I was going to do. If I wanted to be a writer, I’d do better to start taking it seriously. And if I wanted to be a bookseller, or parakeet trainer, or anything else, then ditto.
I didn’t know how to tell him that what I needed was to go to Paris and find Carax, because it made no sense at all. I had no arguments with which to support the idea; I simply knew it in my heart. He didn’t come to the station, saying he had to go to Vic for a meeting with his distinguished colleague, Señor Costa, a doyen of the profession and possibly the wisest dealer in the secondhand book business. When I got to the Estación de Francia, I bumped into my mother, sitting on one of the platform benches.
“I bought you a pair of gloves,” she said. “I hear it’s freezing in Paris.”
I hugged her. “Do you also think I’m mistaken?”
My mother shook her head.
“One has to make one’s own mistakes, not other people’s. Do what you have to do and come back soon. Or whenever you can.”
* * *
In Paris I found the world. My scant budget allowed me to rent an attic the size of an ashtray crowning a building on the corner of Rue Soufflot, which was the architectural equivalent of a Paganini solo. My watchtower hung over Place du Panthéon. From there I could gaze over the whole of the Latin Quarter, the terraced roofs of the Sorbonne, and the entire Left Bank.
I suppose I rented it because it reminded me of Valentina. When I looked out for the first time and saw the crest of dormers and chimneys surrounding the attic, I felt I was the most fortunate man on the planet. I spent the first few days making my way through an extraordinary world of cafés, bookshops, and streets strewn with palaces, museums, and people breathing a freedom that dazzled a poor novice like me, who came from the Stone Age with a heap of fluttering dreams in his head.
The City of Light granted me a gentle landing. In my comings and goings I struck up conversation, in appalling French and gesticulating speech, with young and old people, with creatures from another world. There was also the occasional beauty in a miniskirt who laughed tenderly at me and told me that, although I was as green as a lettuce, she thought me très adorable. Soon I began to think that the universe, which was only a small part of Paris, was full of Valentinas. In my second week as an adopted Parisian I persuaded one of them, without much effort, to come up and enjoy the views from my bohemian attic. It didn’t take me long to discover that Paris was not Barcelona, and that here the rules of the game were very different.
“The things you’ve missed from not speaking French, Fermín . . .”
“Qui est Fermín?”
It took me a while to wake up from the enchantment of Paris and its mirages. Thanks to one of my Valentinas, Pascale, a redhead with a haircut and an air reminiscent of Jean Seberg, I managed to find a half-day job as a waiter. I worked in the mornings and during lunch in a café opposite the university called Le Comptoir du Panthéon, where I got a free meal after ending my shift. The owner, a kind gentleman who couldn’t quite understand why, being Spanish, I wasn’t a bullfighter or a flamenco dancer, asked me whether I’d come to Paris to study, in search of fortune and glory, or to perfect my French, which, more than perfecting, needed open-heart surgery and a brain transplant.
“I’ve come in search of a man,” I admitted.
“And there was I thinking that you rather fancied young ladies. You can tell Franco has died. . . . A couple of days without a dictator, and you Spaniards have already become bisexual. Good for you. One must live, life’s too short. Vive la différence!”
That reminded me that I’d come to Paris for a reason, and not to escape from myself. So the following day I began my search for Julián Carax. I started by visiting all the bookshops that lit up the pavements of Boulevard Saint-Germain, asking after the writer. Pascale, with whom I’d ended up becoming good friends, even if she’d made it quite clear that our thing under the sheets had no future (apparently I was trop doux for her taste), worked as a copy editor in a publishing house and knew a lot of people in the Parisian literary world. Every Friday she went along to a bookish gathering in a café of the literary quarter frequented by writers, translators, publishers, booksellers, and all the fauna and flora that inhabits the jungle of books and its surroundings. The crowd would change, depending on the week, but the rules were unvaried: to smoke and drink in huge quantities, maintain heated discussions about books and ideas, and go for one’s opponent’s throat as if one’s life depended on it. Most of the time I listened and sank into a hallucinogenic cloud of tobacco while I tried to slide my hand under Pascale’s skirt, an affectation she considered very gauche, bourgeois, and uncouth.
It was there that I was lucky enough to meet some of Carax’s translators, who had traveled to the city for a symposium on translation at the Sorbonne. An English novelist called Lucia Hargreaves, who had grown up in Mallorca and returned to London for love, told me she hadn’t heard about Carax for ages. His German translator, Herr Peter Schwarzenbeld, a gentleman from Zurich who preferred warmer regions and moved around Paris on a folding bicycle, explained that he had a feeling that Carax now devoted his time exclusively to composing piano sonatas and had adopted a new name. His Italian translator, Signor Bruno Arpaiani, confessed that for years he’d been picking up rumors that a new novel by Carax was about to appear, but he didn’t believe them. All in all, nobody knew anything tangible concerning Julián Carax’s whereabouts, or what had become of him.
At one of those café gatherings I happened to meet a remarkably clever gentleman called François Maspero, who had been a bookseller and a publisher and was now translating novels to great acclaim. Maspero had been Pascale’s mentor when she first arrived in Paris, and he agreed to invite me to a coffee at Les Deux Magots, where I was able to give him a rough idea of my plan.
“A very ambitious plan, young man, and very complicated too, but . . .”
A few days later, I bumped into Monsieur Maspero in the neighborhood. He told me he wanted to introduce me to a young German lady with steely composure and a quick brain who divided her time between Paris and Berlin and spoke more languages than I could name. She devoted herself to discovering literary marvels and secrets, which she then placed with different European publishers. Her name was Michi Strausmann.
“She might know something about Carax . . .”
Pascale, who admitted that she wanted to be like Fräulein Strausmann when she was older, warned me that she was not a tender little flower and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Monsieur Maspero very kindly set up a meeting with the four of us around a café table in the Marais area, not far from what had once been Victor Hugo’s home.
“Fräulein Strausmann is an expert on Carax’s work,” he said by way of introduction. “Tell her what you told me.”
So I did. She replied with a look that would have made the best soufflé collapse. “Are you an idiot?” she asked, in perfect Spanish.
“I’m in training,” I admitted.
After a while the Valkyrie softened her heart and admitted she’d been too severe with me. She confirmed that, like everyone else, she’d had no news of Carax for quite a while, much as she would have wanted to.
“Julián hasn’t written anything for a long time,” she told me. “Nor does he answer letters. I wish you luck with your proposal, but . . .”
“Have you any address where I could write to him?”
Fräulein Strausmann shook her head. “Try Currygan and Coliccio. That’s where I used to send my letters to him, and where I lost track of him years ago.”
Pascale explained that Madame Currygan and Tomaso Coliccio had been Julián Carax’s literary agents for over twenty-five years, and promised she’d arrange for them to see me.
* * *
Madame Currygan’s agency was on Rue de Rennes. Legend had it in the trade that over the years she had turned her office into an exquisite orchid garden, and Pascale advised me to take a new plant for her collection as an offering. Pascale was a friend of the members of the so-called Currygan Brigade, an imposing quartet of women of different nationalities who worked for Madame Currygan and through whose good auspices I managed to secure an audience with Carax’s agent.
Flowerpot in hand, I turned up at the agency. The members of the Currygan Brigade (Hilde, Claudia, Norma, and Tonya) mistook me for the errand boy from the corner florist. As soon as I opened my mouth, however, my identity was revealed. Once the mistake had been clarified, they led me to the office where Madame Currygan awaited. When I stepped in I noticed a glass cabinet with the complete works of Julián Carax and a splendid botanical garden. Madame Currygan listened patiently while she enjoyed a cigarette with which she filled the room with floating cobwebs.
“Yes, Julián did talk about Daniel and Bea sometimes,” she said. “But that was a long time ago. I haven’t heard from Julián in ages. He used to visit me often, but . . .”
“Did he get ill?”
“I suppose one could say he did, yes.”
“What with?”
“Melancholy.”
“Perhaps Signor Coliccio will know something about him.”
“I doubt it. I speak to Tomaso every week on work matters, and from what I gather he hasn’t heard from Julián either for at least three years. But you can try. Let me know if you find anything out.”
Her colleague Don Tomaso lived in a barge on the banks of the Seine, together with his wife, an editor called Elaine. The barge was packed with books and anchored half a kilometer west of the Île de la Cité. Elaine received me on the quayside with a warm smile. “You must be the boy from Barcelona,” she said.
“That’s me.”
“Come on board. Tomaso is reading an unbearable manuscript and will be glad for the interruption.”
Signor Coliccio had the air of a sea dog and wore a captain’s cap. He had silvery hair, but still preserved the smile of a mischievous child. After listening to my story, he remained silent for a while before speaking his mind.
“Look, young man. There are two things that are practically impossible to find in Paris. One of them is a decent pizza. The other is the whereabouts of Julián Carax.”
“Let’s say I give up on the pizza, and make do with Julián Carax,” I ventured.
“Never give up on a good pizza,” he advised. “What makes you think that Julián, supposing he’s still alive, will want to speak to you?”
“Why should he be dead?”
Don Tomaso gave me a look that was bathed in sorrow. “People die, especially those who would do better to stay alive. Perhaps it’s because God needs to make room for the huge amount of jerks with
which he enjoys peppering the world.”
“I need to believe that Carax is alive,” I said.
Tomaso Coliccio smiled. “Speak to Rosiers.”
Émile de Rosiers had been Julián Carax’s editor for many years. A poet and author in his free time, Rosiers had developed a long career as a successful editor in various Parisian publishing houses. Throughout his working life, he had also published, both in Spanish and French translations, the works of some Spanish authors either banned by the regime or living in exile, as well as books by prominent Latin American authors. Don Tomaso explained that not long ago, Rosiers had been named editor in chief of a small but prestigious firm, Éditions de la Lumière. Their office was close by, so I made my way there.
Émile de Rosiers did not have much free time, but he was kind enough to invite me to lunch in a café just around the corner from his office, on Rue du Dragon, and listen to me.
“I like the idea of your book,” he said, perhaps out of politeness, or because of genuine interest. “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a great title.”
“It’s all I have,” I admitted. “For the rest I need Monsieur Carax.”
“As far as I know, Julián has retired. A while ago he published a novel under a pseudonym, although not with me, and nothing after that. Utter silence.”
“Do you think he’s still in Paris?”
“It would surprise me. I would have heard something, or had news from him. Last month I saw his old Dutch publisher, my friend Nelleke, who told me that someone in Amsterdam had told her that Carax had sailed to the Americas two years ago and died halfway through the voyage. A few days later another person told her that Carax had actually reached dry land and now spent his time writing television serials under a pseudonym. Choose the version you like best.”
Rosiers must have read the despair on my face, after following so many false trails day after day. “Do you want a piece of advice?” he asked.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 80
