CAME THE DAY.
Shortly before dawn, Fermín woke up with his hormones raging. Heeding the call, he descended on an unsuspecting Bernarda and showered her with one of his morning love specials that would leave her exhausted for a week and the bedroom furniture askew, while rousing vigorous protests from the neighbours on the other side of the wall.
“Blame it on the full moon,” Fermín apologized to the lady next door, greeting her through the laundry room window overlooking the inner courtyard. “I don’t know what comes over me. I seem to be transformed.”
“Yes, but instead of transforming into a wolf, you turn into a pig. See if you can’t control yourself – there are children living here who haven’t yet taken their first communion.”
As was usually the case with Fermín in the aftermath of one of his arduous early performances, he felt the appetite of a tiger. He made himself a four-egg omelette with bits of chopped ham and cheese, which he polished off with a half-kilo French loaf and a small bottle of champagne to boot. Satisfied, he crowned it all with a small glass of orujo and proceeded to put on the prescribed attire for confronting a day that showed all the signs of possible complications.
“Will you tell me why you’ve dressed yourself like a diver?” asked Bernarda from the kitchen doorway.
“Out of precaution. In fact it’s an old raincoat lined with copies of one of the regime’s newspapers. Not even holy water gets through this material. Something to do with the ink they use. They say a big one’s coming.”
“Today, Sant Jordi’s day?”
“The ways of the Lord may be unknowable, but they’re often a pain in the butt,” Fermín chipped in.
“Fermín, no blaspheming in this house.”
“I’m sorry, my love. I’ll take the pill for my agnosticism right away, and it will pass.”
Fermín wasn’t lying. For some time now, a day of countless biblical disasters had been forecast to fall upon Barcelona, city of books and roses, on the day of its most beautiful celebration. The panel of experts had agreed in full: the National Meteorology Service, Radio Barcelona, La Vanguardia and the Civil Guard. The last drop before the proverbial deluge had been added by the well-known fortune teller Madame Carmanyola. The fortune teller was famous for two things. One was her condition as a morbidly obese nymph, which hid the fact that she was really a full-bodied man from Cornellá called Cucufate Brotolí, reborn into a hirsute womanliness – after a long career as a notary – to discover that what she really liked, deep down, was to dress as a tart and shake her rear end to the sensual hand-clapping of flamenco. The other was her infallible gift for weather forecasts. Quality and technical issues aside, the fact of the matter was that they were all in agreement. This Sant Jordi’s day was set to rain cats and dogs.
“Well, in that case perhaps you’d better not bring the stall out onto the street,” Bernarda advised.
“No way. Don Miguel de Cervantes and his colleague Don Guillermo de Shakespeare didn’t die in vain on the same date – strictly speaking – the twenty-third of April. Surely on this day of all days, we booksellers should be up for the challenge. Today we’ll be putting books and readers together, even if the ghost of General Espartero bombs us from Montjuïc Castle.”
“Will you at least bring me a rose?”
“I’ll bring you a cartload of the fullest and most scented ones, my little sugar.”
“And remember to give one to Señora Bea. Danielito is a bit of a disaster, and I’m sure he’ll forget at the last minute.”
“I’ve been changing the boy’s proverbial nappies for too many years now to forget strategic details of such importance.”
“Promise me you won’t get wet.”
“The wetter I get, the more fecund and fertile I’ll become.”
“Oh, dear God, we’ll be going straight to hell.”
“All the more reason to make the most of it while we can, my love.”
After assaulting his adored Bernarda with an array of kisses, pinches and cuddles, Fermín stepped out into the street, convinced that at the eleventh hour a miracle would occur, and the sun would appear, as bright as in a Sorolla painting.
On his way he stole the caretaker’s newspaper – it served her right for being a gossip and a Fascist sympathizer – and confirmed the latest predictions. They were forecasting thunder, lightning, hailstones the size of crystalized chestnuts, and gale-force winds likely to sweep millions of books and roses into the sea, forming an isle like Sancho Panza’s Barataria, stretching as far as the eye could see.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Fermín, donating the paper to a poor soul who was sleeping it off, wedged in a chair next to the Canaletas kiosk.
Fermín wasn’t the only one to have that feeling. Barcelonians are peculiar creatures, never wasting an opportunity to contradict acknowledged truths such as weather maps or Aristotelian logic. That morning, which dawned with a sky the colour of the trumpets of death, all the booksellers had got up early, ready to bring their bookstands out into the street and if necessary face tornadoes and typhoons.
When he saw the display of camaraderie along the Ramblas, Fermín felt that the optimists would surely triumph that day. “That’s what I like to see. Show them what we’re made of. Let it pour down, but they won’t make us budge.”
The florists, armed with an ocean of red roses, had shown no less courage. At 9:00 on the dot, the streets in central Barcelona were all decked out for the great day of books, hoping that the troubling prophecies would not scare away sweethearts, readers, and all the absentminded folk who’d congregated punctually every April 23 since 1930 to celebrate what was, in Fermín’s view, the most glorious holiday in the known universe.
At 9:24, as was not to be expected, the miracle occurred.