Secretly I was ashamed of what I did, and of the obscene amount of money I was being paid to do it. Or perhaps that’s what I liked to believe. The fact is that I accepted my astronomical salary happily and squandered it as soon as it hit my bank account.
“There’s nothing shameful in that,” Carax remarked. “On the contrary, it’s a profession that thrives on wit and opportunity. If you know how to play your cards, it will allow you to buy your freedom and a bit of time so that, once you abandon it, you can become who you really are.”
“And who am I really? The inventor of advertisements for soft drinks, credit cards, and luxury cars?”
“You’ll become who you believe you are.”
Deep down, I was less interested in who I was than in who Carax thought I was, or could be. I kept on working on our book, as I liked to call it. That project had become my second life, a world at whose doors I hung the disguise with which I walked around everywhere, and took hold of the pen or the Underwood or whatever, submerging myself into a story that for me was infinitely more real than my prosperous earthly existence.
* * *
Those years had changed all our lives to some extent. Not long after Alicia Gris was his guest, Isaac Montfort had announced that the moment had come for him to retire from active duty. He proposed that Fermín, who by then had become a father for the first time, take over from him as keeper of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
“It’s time we put a scoundrel in charge,” Isaac said.
Fermín had asked for Bernarda’s permission, and she ended up agreeing to move to a ground-floor flat next to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. There Fermín built a secret connecting door leading to the tunnels of the palace, and converted Isaac’s rooms into his new office.
Taking advantage of the fact that at the time I was working on the ad account of a well-known Japanese electronic brand, I got Fermín a colossal color television set, the kind that were starting to be called “top of the line.” Fermín, who once considered television as the Antichrist, modified his opinion when he discovered that it broadcast Orson Welles films—“he really knows, the rogue,” he’d say—and, above all, films starring Kim Novak, whose pointed brassieres still fueled his faith in the future of humanity.
After a few bumpy years during which I even thought their marriage was on the rocks, my parents managed to overcome a few hurdles about which neither would give me an explanation and, to everyone’s astonishment, presented me with a late sister whom they christened Isabella. Grandfather Sempere was just able to cradle her in his arms before dying a few days later from a massive heart attack that surprised him while he was lifting a box holding the complete works of Alexandre Dumas. We buried him next to his beloved wife Isabella with a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. Losing his father made mine suddenly grow old for us all, and he was never the same again. “I thought Granddad would live forever,” he said the day I found him crying, hiding in the bookshop’s back room.
Fernandito and Sofía got married, as everyone had foreseen, and moved into Alicia Gris’s old apartment on Calle Aviñón, in whose bed the groom had previously, and secretly, earned flying colors in his nonofficial inauguration with Sofía, thus finally turning all the theory acquired with Matilde into practice. In time, Sofía decided to open a small bookshop specializing in children’s books, which she christened the Little Sempere. Fernandito got a job in a department store where, in years to come, he would become head of the book section.
In 1981, shortly after the failed coup that almost took Spain back to the Stone Age or something worse, Sergio Vilajuana published a series of reports in La Vanguardia in which he uncovered the case of hundreds of children stolen from their parents, mostly political prisoners who had disappeared during the first postwar years in the prisons of Barcelona and then been murdered to eliminate their trail. The resulting scandal reopened a wound that many didn’t know about and others had wanted to cover up. Vilajuana’s articles, which prompted a series of investigations that are still ongoing today and have generated oceans of documentation, charges, and civil and criminal cases, encouraged many to come forward and start recovering official accounts of the darkest years in the country’s history, accounts that had been left buried all that time.
The reader will be wondering whether, while all this was going on, the ineffable Julián Sempere was alone, devoting himself by day to the mercenary industry of advertising and by night to Our Holy Lady of Literature. Not exactly. The task of writing the four books I had planned with Carax had begun as an escape to paradise, but became a monster that started to devour what was closest to me, which was myself. The monster, which had arrived in my life as a guest and then refused to leave, had to learn to live with the rest of my ghosts. In honor of my other grandfather, David Martín, I too took a peek over the chasm that all writers carry inside them, and ended up holding on to the edge by my fingertips.
In 1981 Valentina reemerged from the mists of time to appear in my life once again, in a scene that Carax would have proudly called his own. It happened one afternoon when my brain was turning to jelly and dripping down my ears. I had taken shelter once again in the French Bookshop, the setting of the original crime, and was loitering by the tables displaying recent publications when I saw her again. I stood stock-still, like a salt statue, until she looked around and saw me. She smiled, and I broke into a run.
* * *
She caught up with me at the traffic lights on Calle Rosellón. She’d bought me a book, and when I took it, without even looking to see what it was, she put her hand on my arm.
“Ten minutes?” she asked.
And yes, it soon began to rain. Although that was the least of it. Three months later, after furtive meetings in another one of her attics with views of half the northern hemisphere, we moved in together, or I should say that Valentina moved in with me, because by then I had a grand apartment in Sarriá with more space and more emptiness than I needed. This time Valentina stayed two years, three months, and one day. However, though she broke my heart, she also left me with the best gift anyone could have given me: a daughter.
We christened Alicia Sempere in August 1982. The following year, after a few comings and goings that I never quite understood, Valentina went away again, this time for good. Alicia and I were left on our own, but never alone. The little one saved my life, and taught me that none of the things I did would have had any meaning were it not for her. During the years I worked finishing those accursed books, even if only to be finally rid of them, Alicia was by my side, giving me back what I’d learned to disbelieve in: inspiration.
There were some fleeting relationships, potential adoptive mothers for Alicia—generous spirits I always ended up driving away. My daughter would tell me she didn’t like me to be alone, and I would tell her that I wasn’t.
“I’ve got you,” I assured her.
I had her and all my gallery of ghosts trapped between reality and fiction. In 1991, thinking that if I didn’t do it now, jump off the train once and for all, I’d lose what little truth remained in my soul, which wasn’t much, I abandoned my lucrative career in the advertising business and spent the rest of the year finishing the books.
By then I could no longer ignore that Julián Carax was unwell. I’d gotten into the habit of thinking he was ageless, and that nothing could happen to him. I’d started to think of him the way one thinks of a father, someone who will never abandon you. I thought he was going to live forever.
* * *
Julián Carax no longer ordered strawberry ice cream when we met up. When I asked him for advice, he barely crossed things out or made amendments. He said that I’d already learned to fly alone, that I’d earned my Underwood and I no longer needed him. It took me a long time to understand, but in the end I couldn’t go on fooling myself. I realized that that monstrous sadness he had always carried inside had returned to finish him off.
One night I dreamed I was losing him in the mist. I went out to search for him in
the early hours. I looked relentlessly in all the places where we’d met during those years. I found him at daybreak, on September 25, 1991, lying over the grave of Nuria Montfort. In his hand was a case containing the pen that had belonged to my father, and a note:
Julián:
I’m proud to have been your friend and I’m proud of everything I’ve learned from you.
I’m sorry not to be by your side to see you succeed and achieve what I never could or knew how to achieve myself, but I am reassured by the certainty that, although you may find it hard to believe at first, you no longer need me, just as you never needed me. I’m going to join the woman I should never have left. Take care of your parents and of all the characters in our narrative. Tell our stories to the world, and never forget that we exist so long as someone remembers us.
Your friend,
Julián Carax
That afternoon I found out that the space next to Nuria Montfort’s grave belonged, so I was told, to the city of Barcelona. Spanish institutions have a relentless voracity for other people’s money, and so, pulling at the thread, we settled on an astronomical figure that I paid on the spot, making good use for once of the copious amounts I’d received for the saga of the sports cars and the Christmas commercials for champagne with more ballerinas in tow than Busby Berkeley’s subconscious.
* * *
We buried my master, Julián Carax, one Saturday at the end of September. My daughter Alicia came with me, and when she saw the two graves lying side by side, she pressed my hand and told me not to worry, as now my friend would never be alone.
I find it hard to speak about Carax. Sometimes I wonder whether there isn’t something in me from my other granddad, the unfortunate David Martín, and I invented Carax, just as David Martín invented his Monsieur Corelli so he could remember what never happened. A couple of weeks after the burial I wrote to Madame Currygan and Signor Coliccio in Paris, to let them know Carax had passed away. In my letter I asked them to tell his friend Jean-Raymond Planaux, if they thought it appropriate, and whoever else they considered should know. Madame Currygan replied, thanking me for my letter and telling me that, shortly before his death, Carax had written to tell her about the manuscript we’d been working on together all those years. She asked me to send it to her as soon as I’d finished it. Carax taught me that a book is never finished and that, with luck, it’s the book that leaves us so we don’t spend the rest of eternity rewriting it.
At the end of 1991 I made a copy of the manuscript, almost two thousand pages long, this time, yes, typewritten with an Underwood, and sent it to Carax’s old agents. I didn’t think I’d ever hear back from them. I began to work on a new novel, following, once again, my master’s advice.
Sometimes it’s best to put your mind to work and exhaust it, rather than let it rest, in case it gets bored and starts eating you up alive.
A few months went by between the writing of that novel that had no title and long walks through Barcelona with Alicia, who had started to want to know everything.
“Is the new book about Valentina?”
Alicia never referred to Valentina as her mother, but called her by her name.
“No. It’s about you.”
“Liar.”
During those long walks I learned to rediscover the city through my daughter’s eyes, and I realized that the gloomy Barcelona my parents had lived in had slowly cleared, without us even noticing. The world I once imagined I could remember now lay dismantled. It had become a stage set, perfumed and carpeted for tourists, those lovers of sun and beaches who refused to notice the end of an epoch, however hard they looked—an epoch that hadn’t so much collapsed as dissolved into a fine film of dust that can still be breathed in the air.
Carax’s shadow continued to follow me everywhere. My mother often came to visit me, bringing little Isabella along so that my daughter could show her all her toys and books, which were many but didn’t include a single doll. The fact is that Alicia hated dolls and would knock their heads off with a catapult in the school playground. She always asked me whether it was all right to do that, knowing that the answer was no, and whether I’d had any news of Valentina, knowing also that the answer was invariably the same.
I never wanted to talk to my mother about Carax, about the mysteries and silences of all those years. I knew, somehow, that she imagined it, because I never had any secrets from her beyond the ones she pretended to accept.
“Your father misses you,” she would say. “You should come by the bookshop more often. Even Fermín asked me the other day whether you’d become a Carthusian monk.”
“I’ve been busy trying to finish a book.”
“For fifteen years?”
“It turned out to be harder than I expected.”
“Will I be able to read it?”
“I’m not sure you’re going to like it. In fact, I don’t know whether it’s a good idea to try to publish it.”
“May I know what it’s about?”
“About us. About us all. It’s the story of the family.”
My mother looked at me without saying a word.
“Perhaps I should destroy it,” I suggested.
“It’s your story,” she said. “You can do what you think best with it. And now that Granddad is no longer here and things have changed, I don’t think anyone will care about our secrets.”
“What about Dad?”
“He’ll probably be the person who would most appreciate reading it. Don’t imagine we weren’t all aware of what you were doing. We’re not that stupid.”
“Do I have your permission, then?”
“You don’t need mine. And if you want your father’s, you’ll have to ask him for it.”
I visited my father early one morning, when I knew he’d be alone in the bookshop. He pretended not to be surprised when he saw me, and when I asked him how the business was doing, he didn’t want to tell me that the Sempere & Sons accounts were in the red, and he’d already received two offers to buy the bookshop and replace it with a souvenir shop selling figurines of the Sagrada Familia and Barça T-shirts.
“Fermín has warned me that if I accept, he’ll set fire to himself outside the shop.”
“What a dilemma,” I remarked.
“He misses you,” he said, in that way he had of attributing to others the feelings he was unable to recognize in himself. “How about you? How are things going? Your mother says you’ve left that job making commercials, and now all you do is write. When will there be something I can sell here?”
“Did she tell you what sort of a book it was?”
“I’ve presumed you’ve changed the names and some of the more lurid details, even if only to make sure you don’t scandalize the neighbors.”
“Of course. The only one who appears showing it all is Fermín—he deserves it. He’s going to get more fans than Elvis Presley.”
“So shall I start clearing a space in the shop window?”
I shrugged. “I got a letter this morning from two literary agents to whom I sent the manuscript. It’s a series of four novels. A Paris editor, Émile de Rosiers, is interested in bringing them out, and a German editor, Michi Strausmann, has also made an offer for the rights. The agents tell me there might be further offers, but first I must polish up a million details. I’ve set two conditions: the first, that I needed my parents’ permission and that of all my family to tell this story. The second, that the novel should be published under the authorship of Julián Carax.”
My father looked down. “How is Carax?”
“In peace.”
He nodded.
“Do I have your permission?”
“Do you remember, when you were little, that day when you promised to tell the story for me?”
“Yes.”
“All these years I haven’t doubted for a single day that you would. I’m proud of you, son.”
My father hugged me as he hadn’t done since I was a child.
* * *
I visited Fermín in his rooms at the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, in July 1992, the day the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony was due to take place. Barcelona was clothed in light, and an aura of optimism and hope floated in the air, something I’d never felt before and would probably never experience again in the streets of my city. As soon as I got there, Fermín gave me a military salute. He looked very old to me, although I didn’t want to tell him.
“I thought you were dead,” he declared.
“I’m doing my best. You look as fit as a bull.”
“It’s the Sugus sweets, they caramelize me.”
“It must be that.”
“A birdie told me you’re going to make us famous,” Fermín let drop.
“Especially you. When you get offers to model for an advertising campaign, don’t think twice about consulting me. I still know a lot about all that.”
“I’m only planning to accept the racy ones for male underwear,” replied Fermín.
“Do I have your permission, then?”
“You have my blessing, given out to the four corners of the world. But I don’t think that’s the only reason why you came.”
“Why do you always suppose I have hidden motives, Fermín?”
“Because your mind is as twisted as a spring. I mean it as a compliment.”
“So why do you think I’ve come?”
“Probably to marvel at my still fertile wit, and perhaps for an account we have that is still pending.”
“Which of them?”
Fermín took me to a room he always kept under lock and key to protect it from the onslaught of his many offspring. He asked me to sit down in a large armchair he’d bought at the Encantes flea market. He sat down on a chair next to me, took a cardboard box, and placed it on his knees.
“Do you remember Alicia?” he asked. “It’s a rhetorical question.”
I could feel my heart missing a beat.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 82
