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 harboured 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.
By good luck, my honorary uncle, Fermín Romero de Torres, didn’t share my parents’ information policy. By then Fermín no longer worked in the bookshop. He visited us often, but there was always an aura of mystery concerning what his new occupation was, and neither Fermín nor any member of my family volunteered to clarify it. Still, whatever his new job, it seemed to provide him with ample time for reading. He had recently taken in a number of anthropology treatises that had led him to come up with some formidable speculative theories, an occupation that, he said, helped him avoid kidney colic and expel stones the size of loquat seeds [sic] through the urinary system.
According to one of those peculiar theories, forensic evidence accumulated over the centuries proved that, after millennia of supposed evolution, humans had managed to eliminate a bit of body hair, perfect their loincloths and refine their tools, but little else. From this premise, a second part of the theorem was inexplicably arrived at, and it went something like this: what the said threadbare evolution had not achieved even remotely was to understand that the more one tries to hide something from a child, the more he is set on finding it, be it a sweet or a postcard with outrageous chorus girls flaunting their charms to the wind.
“And thank goodness that’s the way things are, because the day we lose the spark that makes us want to know things, and young people are content with the nonsense dressed in tinsel sold to them by the current popes of bullshittery – be it a miniature electrical appliance or a battery-run chamber pot – and become incapable of understanding anything that lies beyond their backsides, we’ll return to the age of the slug.”
I would laugh and say, “This is apocalyptic,” making use of a word I’d learned from Fermín that always earned me a Sugus sweet.
“That’s what I like to hear,” he would reply. “So long as we have youngsters who know how to manage five-syllable words, there will be hope.”
Perhaps it was due to Fermín’s bad influence, or maybe to all those tricks I’d learned in the thrillers I devoured as if they were sugared almonds, but soon, by virtue of my enthusiasm for tying up loose ends, eavesdropping on furtive conversations, rummaging in forbidden drawers and, above all, reading all the pages my father thought had ended up in the wastepaper basket, the enigma of who Julián Carax had been and why my parents had decided to christen me with his name began to clear up. And wherever my skills of deduction and detection didn’t reach, Fermín and his magisterial impromptu lectures filled in, supplying me on the sly with clues for solving the mystery, and connecting the different strands of the story.
That morning, as if he didn’t have enough worries already, my father was served a double shot: that his son wanted to be a professional author, and that, moreover, I knew the entire cache of secrets he’d always tried to hide from me, probably more out of modesty than anything else. To his credit, I must say that he took it quite well. Instead of yelling and threatening to lock me up in a boarding school, the poor man just stood there staring at me, not knowing what to say.
“I thought you would want to be a bookseller, like me, like your grandfather, and like my grandfather before him, and like almost all the Semperes since time immemorial . . .”
Realizing that I’d caught him off guard, I decided to shore up my position.
“I’m going to be a writer,” I said. “A novelist. To crown it all, I think one says.”
That last phrase I let slip as a bit of humorous padding, but clearly my father didn’t find it funny. He crossed his arms, leaned back in his chair, and studied me cautiously. The puppy was showing a rebellious streak that didn’t please him. Welcome to fatherhood, I thought. You bring children into the world, and this is what you get.
“That’s what your mother has always said, but I thought she just said it to tease me.”
More in my favour. The day my mother makes a mistake will be when Judgement Day happens to fall on April Fool’s. But, being allergic to resignation from birth, my father was still stuck in his warning attitude, and I feared a speech to dissuade me was on its way.
“At your age I also thought I had what it takes to be a writer,” he began.
You could see him coming like a meteorite wrapped in flames. If I didn’t disarm him now, this could become a sermon on the dangers of devoting one’s life to literature. And I knew, because I’d often heard it from those starving authors who visited the bookshop – the ones to whom we had to sell on credit, and even treat to a snack – that literature showed as much devotion to its loyal followers as a praying mantis to its consort. Before my father got too worked up, I cast a melodramatic look over the battlefield of scattered pages on the floor and rested my eyes on him again without saying a word.
“As Fermín says,” he admitted, “wise men make mistakes.”
I realized that my counter-argument could work as a bridge to his main premise, i.e., that the Semperes didn’t have scribblers’ blood, and booksellers also served literature without exposing themselves to absolute ruin and misery. Since, deep down, I suspected that the good man was as right as a saint, I went on the offensive. In a rhetorical duel one must never lose the initiative, even less when the opponent looks like he’s winning.
“What Fermín says is that wise men own up when they sometimes make mistakes, but idiots always make mistakes, even though they never admit it and always think they’re right. He calls it his Archimedean Principle of Communicable Imbecilities.”
“Oh, does he?”
“Yes. According to him, an idiot is an animal who doesn’t know how to, or is unable to, change his mind,” I machine-gunned back.
“You seem extremely well versed in Fermín’s philosophy and science.”
“Are you saying he’s wrong?”
“What he is, is disproportionately interested in speaking ex cathedra.”
“And what does that mean?”
“To piss outside the pot.”
“Well, in one of these pissy ex cathedra moments, he also told me there’s something you should have shown me ages ago.”
My father looked confused for a moment. Any hint of a sermon had evaporated, and now he was staggering around without knowing where the next punch would come from.
“He said what?”
“Something about books. And about the dead.”
“The dead?”
“Something or other about a cemetery. The bit about the dead is my idea.”
In fact, what had been going through my mind was that this business might have something to do with Carax, who in my personal canon combined the notion of books and the dead to perfection.
My father considered the matter. A flash crossed his eyes, as it always did when he had an idea. “I suppose on that point he was probably right.”
I sniffed the sweet scent of victory surfacing somewhere.
“Go on, go upstairs and get dressed,” said my father. “But don’t wake your mother.”
“Are we going somewhere?”
“It’s a secret. I’m going to show you something that changed my life, and might change yours too.”
I realized I’d lost the initiative, and the ball was in his court. “At this hour?”
My father smiled again and winked at me.
“Some things can only be seen in the dark.”