LIFE WENT ON at a steady pace, between revelations and fantasies, as it usually does, without paying too much attention to all of us who travel hanging onto it by our fingertips. I enjoyed two childhoods: the first was quite conventional, if such a thing can ever be, and was the one others saw; the second was an imaginary childhood, and the one I truly lived. I made some good friends, most of them books. In school I was bored stiff and acquired the habit of spending my time in the classroom with my head in the clouds, a habit I still retain. I was lucky enough to come across a few good teachers, who treated me with patience and agreed that the fact that I was always different wasn’t necessarily something bad. It takes all sorts to make a world, including a few Julián Semperes. Still, I probably learned more about the world reading between the four walls of the bookshop, visiting libraries on my own, or listening to Fermín, who always had some theory, advice, or practical warning to offer, than in all my years of schooling.
“At school they say I’m a bit odd,” I once admitted to Fermín.
“Well, that’s good news. We’ll start worrying the day they tell you you’re normal.”
For better or for worse, nobody ever accused me of that.
*
I suppose my adolescence offers a little more biographical interest because at least I lived a greater part of it outside my head. My paper-filled dreams and my ambitions of becoming a soldier of the pen without perishing in the attempt were gaining strength, even though they were somewhat restrained, I must admit, by a certain dose of realism acquired as time went by and I observed the workings of the world. Halfway through my journey, I had already realized that my dreams were forged with impossibilities, but that if I abandoned them before charging into battle, I would never win the war.
I was still confident that one day the gods on Mount Parnassus would take pity on me and allow me to learn how to tell stories. Meanwhile, I stocked up on raw material, hoping the day would come when I’d be able to premiere my own factory of dreams and nightmares. Slowly, I compiled everything related to the history of my family, its many secrets, and the thousand and one narratives that made up the little universe of the Semperes, an imagined world I had decided to name The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
Aside from discovering everything discoverable and whatever resisted discovery about my family, I had two great passions at the time: one magical and ethereal, which was reading, and the other mundane and entirely predictable, which was pursuing silly love affairs.
Concerning my literary ambitions, my successes went from slender to non-existent. During those years I started a hundred woefully bad novels that died along the way, hundreds of short stories, plays, radio serials, and even poems that I wouldn’t let anyone read, for their own good. I only needed to read them myself to see how much I still had to learn and what little progress I was making, despite the desire and enthusiasm I put into it. I was forever rereading Carax’s novels and those of countless authors I borrowed from my parents’ bookshop. I tried to pull them apart as if they were transistor radios, or the engine of a Rolls-Royce, hoping I would be able to figure out how they were built and how and why they worked.
I’d read a report in a newspaper about some Japanese engineers who practised something called reverse engineering. Apparently these industrious gentlemen disassembled an engine to its last piece, analysing 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 colours 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 neighbourhood 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 colour 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 carrying a blank notebook around with me, on whose cover I’d written, in bold, ostentatiously elegant handwriting:
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 instalment, fierce and enormous, spiced with perfumes from all the earlier ones, would lead us at last to the centre of the mystery, uncovering all the puzzles with the help of my favourite 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 neighbourhood 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 grey 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.
“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 snivelling 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-flavoured – 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 travelled 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 rumours 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 neighbourhood. 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 kilometre 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.
“Please.”
“It’s practical advice I give all budding authors when they ask me what they should do. If you want to be a writer, write. If you have a story to tell, tell it. Or try.”
“If to become a writer all one needed was a story to tell, everyone would be a novelist.”
“Imagine how awful, a world full of novelists,” joked Rosiers. “The end of all times.”
“Probably the last thing the world needs is one more.”
“Let the world decide that,” Rosiers advised once again. “And if it doesn’t work out, don’t worry. All the better for you, according to statistics. But if one day you manage to capture on paper with some skill something like the idea you have just described to me, come and see me. I might be interested.”
“And until then?”
“Until then, forget about Carax.”
“The Semperes never forget. It’s a congenital illness.”
“In that case I feel sorry for you.”
“Then perform an act of charity.”
Rosiers hesitated. “Julián had a good friend. I believe he was his best friend. His name was Jean-Raymond Planaux. He had nothing to do with this absurd business of ours. An intelligent, level-headed guy, with no nonsense about him. If anyone knows anything about Julián, he’ll be the one.”
“Where can I find him?”
“In the catacombs.”
I should have started there. Since this was Carax we were dealing with, it seemed inevitable that if there was any hope left of finding his trail on the face of this earth, it would be in a setting straight out of one of his books: the catacombs of Paris.
*
Jean-Raymond de Planaux Flavieu was a solid-looking bear of a man, a trifle intimidating at first sight, but who soon revealed his friendly disposition and a tendency to joke. He worked in the marketing office of the firm managing the Paris catacombs and was in charge of their advertising, tourist promotion, and everything related to that particular context of the hereafter.
“Welcome to the world of death, kid,” he said, giving me a handshake that crunched my bones. “What can I do for you?”
“I wondered whether you could help me find a friend of yours.”
“Is he alive?” He laughed. “I don’t spend much time among the living.”
“Julián Carax.”
As soon as I’d uttered that name, Monsieur Planaux frowned, cancelled his happy expression, and leaned forward with a threatening and protective air, cornering me against the wall.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Julián Sempere. My parents named me after Monsieur Carax.”
“I don’t care whether they named you after the inventor of the public urinal.”
Fearing for my safety, I tried to take a step backwards. The thick wall, probably connected to the catacombs, stopped me. I could see myself wedged in there in perpetuity between a hundred thousand skulls.
“My parents knew Monsieur Carax,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “Daniel and Bea.”
Planaux’s eyes drilled into mine for a few seconds. I reckoned there was a fifty per cent chance that he would smash my face in. The other fifty per cent looked uncertain.
“Are you the son of Daniel and Beatriz?”
I nodded.
“From the Sempere bookshop?”
“Prove it.”
For almost an hour I recited the same speech I’d delivered to Carax’s old agents and to his publisher. Planaux listened to me attentively, and I thought I glimpsed an air of sadness that intensified as I reeled off my story.
When I’d finished, he pulled a cigar out of his jacket and lit it, producing a cloud of smoke that threatened to bury the whole of Paris. “Do you know how Julián and I met?”
I shook my head.
“When I was young, we worked together in a third-rate publishing house. That was before realizing that this death business has much more future than literature. I was one of the sales reps, and would go out to sell the junk we mostly published. Carax worked for a salary, writing horror stories for us. The amount of cigars like this one we smoked late at night, in the café below the publishing company, watching all the girls go by . . . Those were the days. Don’t be stupid: don’t grow old, it doesn’t bring you any nobility, knowledge or shit skewered on a stick that’s worth it. I think that’s an expression from your country I once heard Julián use, and I found it very apt.”
“Do you know where I could find him?”
Planaux shrugged. “Julián left Paris long ago.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“He didn’t say.”
“But you can guess.”
“You’re sharp.”
“Where?” I insisted.
“Where do people hide when they’re old?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you’ll never find Julián.”
“In memories?” I ventured.
Planaux gave me a smile wounded with sadness.
“Do you mean he went back to Barcelona?” I asked.
“Not to Barcelona – to what he loved.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor did he. At least not for many years. It took him his whole life to realize what it was he had loved most.”
All those years listening to stories about Carax, and I felt as lost as the day I arrived in Paris.
“If you are who you say you are, you should know,” Planaux stated. “And if your answer is ‘literature’, I’ll give you a beating you’ll never forget. But I don’t think you’re that stupid.”
I swallowed hard. “I think I know what you’re referring to. Or who.”
“Then you know what you must do.”
*
That evening I bade farewell to Paris, to Pascale, to my dazzling career in the catering industry, and to my nest in the clouds, and headed for the Gare d’Austerlitz. I spent all the cash I had left on a third-class ticket and took the night train back to Barcelona. I arrived at dawn, having survived the journey thanks to a couple of charitable pensioners from Lyon who were returning from visiting their daughter and shared the delicious food they’d bought that afternoon in the market on Rue Mouffetard, while I told them my story in the small hours of the night.
“Bonne chance,” they said when they got off the train. “Cherchez la femme . . .”
When I got back, and for the first few days, everything looked small to me, and closed and grey. The light of Paris had stayed trapped in my memory, and the world had suddenly become large and distant.
“So, did you see Emmanuelle?” asked Fermín.
“An impeccable screenplay,” I said.
“Just as I imagined. The envy of Billy Wilder and company. And tell me, did you find the Phantom of the Opera?” Fermín gave the smile of a devil. I should have imagined he knew perfectly well why I’d travelled to Paris.
“Not exactly,” I admitted.
“So you’re not going to tell me anything juicy.”
“I thought you were the one who was going to tell me something juicy. Remember?”
“First solve your mystery, and then we’ll see.”
“Welcome to Planet Earth,” said Fermín. “Go on, impress me. Say something in French. ‘Bonjour’ and ‘Oh là là’ don’t count.”
“Cherchez la femme,” I said.
Fermín frowned. “The classic maxim of any self-respecting thriller . . .”
“Voilà.”
*
Nuria Montfort’s grave lies on a promontory among trees, in the old part of Montjuïc Cemetery. It has a view of the sea and is not far from Isabella’s tomb. It was there, one summer’s evening in 1977, after unsuccessfully searching every corner of a Barcelona already receding into the past, that I found Julián Carax. He’d left fresh flowers on the headstone and was sitting on a stone bench facing the grave. He remained there for almost an hour, talking to himself. I didn’t dare interrupt him.
I found him again in the same place the following day, and the next. Julián Carax had realized only too late that the person he loved most in the world, the woman who had given her life for him, would never be able to hear his voice again. He went there every day and sat opposite her grave to talk to her and spend what was left of his life in her company.
It was he who came up to me one day and stood there, looking at me in silence. The skin he’d lost in the fire had grown again and lent him an ageless face with no expression, which he hid beneath a bushy beard and an old-fashioned homburg hat.
“Who are you?” he asked. There was no hostility in his voice.
“My name is Julián Sempere. I’m the son of Daniel and Bea.”
He nodded slowly. “Are they well?”
“Yes.”
“Do they know you’re here?”
“Nobody knows.”
“And may I ask you why you’re here?”
I didn’t know where to begin. “May I buy you a cup of coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee,” he said. “But you can buy me an ice cream.”
My face must have betrayed my surprise.
“When I was young, there were hardly any ice creams. I’ve discovered them late, like so many other things . . .”
*
That is how, that slow summer evening, after having dreamed of that moment since I was a child, and having ransacked Paris and Barcelona trying to find him, I ended up in a milk bar in Plaza Real sharing a table with Julián Carax, whom I bought two scoops of strawberry ice cream and a rolled wafer. I ordered an iced lemonade, because the damp heat that pervades Barcelona summers was already looming.
“What can I do for you, Señor Sempere?”
“If I tell you, you’ll take me for a fool.”
“I have a feeling you’ve been looking for me for some time. And since in the end you’ve found me, I would only take you for a fool if you didn’t tell me.”
I drank half the lemonade in one gulp, to gather strength. Then I set out my idea. He listened attentively, showing no sign of disapproval or reservation.
“Very ingenious,” he concluded at the end of my speech.
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“It wouldn’t occur to me. I’m telling you what I think.”
“What else are you thinking?”
“That you’re the one who should write this story. It belongs to you.”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know how to. I’m not a writer.”
“Get yourself an Underwood. The professional’s choice.”
“I didn’t know that ad had also appeared in France.”
“It ran everywhere. Don’t trust ads. An Olivetti would also do the job.”
I smiled. At least I shared a sense of humour with Carax.
“Let me show you something,” Carax offered.
“How to write?”
“That’s something you’ll have to learn on your own,” he replied. “Writing is a profession that can be learned, but nobody can teach it. The day you understand what that means will be the day you start learning to be a writer.”
He opened up the black linen jacket he was wearing and pulled out a shiny object. He placed it on the table and pushed it towards me. “Take it,” he invited.
It was the most fabulous pen I had ever seen, the queen of all Montblancs. Its nib was made of gold and platinum, and had I still been a child I would have thought that only masterpieces could flow from it.
“They say it originally belonged to Victor Hugo, although I’d only take this in a metaphorical sense.”
“Did fountain pens exist in Victor Hugo’s day?” I asked.
“The first piston fountain pen was patented in 1827 by a Romanian called Petrache Poenaru, but it wasn’t until the eighteen eighties that it was perfected and began to be commercialized on a large scale.”
“So technically it could have been Victor Hugo’s.”
“If you insist . . . Let’s say that from the dubious hands of Monsieur Hugo it passed on to the no less illustrious and more likely hands of one Daniel Sempere, a good friend of mine. Eventually it crossed my path, and I’ve been keeping it all these years, waiting for the day when someone, someone like you, came to collect it. About time.”
I shook my head energetically, pushing the pen back towards his hands. “I won’t hear of it. I can’t accept it. It’s yours.”
“A pen doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s a free spirit that stays with one while that person needs it.”
“That’s what a character in one of your novels said.”
“They always accuse me of repeating myself. It’s a disease that affects all novelists.”
“I’ve never caught it. A sign that I’m not one.”
“Just give it time. Take it.”
“No.”
Carax shrugged and put the pen back. “That’s because you’re not ready yet. A pen is like a cat – it only follows the person who will feed it. And just as it comes, it goes.”
“What do you think of my proposal?”
Carax took the last spoonful of his ice cream. “This is what we’ll do. We’ll write it together. You give it all the force of youth, and I’ll put in the old dog’s tricks.”
I was stunned. “Are you serious?”
He stood up and tapped my shoulder. “Thanks for the ice cream. Next time it’s on me.”
*
There was a next time, and many more. Carax always asked for two scoops of strawberry ice cream, whether it was summer or winter, but he never ate the rolled wafer. I would take what I’d written and he would go through it, cross things out, and rearrange the words on the page as if they were notes on a music score.
“I’m not sure this beginning is the right one,” I would say.
“A story has no beginning and no end, only points of entry.”
Every time we met, Carax went carefully through the new pages I handed him. He pulled his pen open and made notes that he would then use to point out, with endless patience, what I’d done wrong, which was almost everything. Point by point he would show me what didn’t work, giving me the reason why and explaining in detail how it could be fixed. His analysis was extraordinarily meticulous. For every error I thought I’d made, he’d show me fifteen whose existence I hadn’t even suspected. He pulled apart every word, every sentence and every paragraph, and put them together again like a goldsmith working with a magnifying glass. He did all this without condescension, as if he were an engineer telling an apprentice how combustion or steam engines work. Sometimes he would question turns of phrase and ideas that I thought were the only things likely to be saved that day, most of which I’d copied from him.
“Don’t try to imitate me. Imitating another writer is a prop. It helps you learn and find your own voice, but it’s a beginner’s thing.”
“And what am I?”
I never knew where he spent his nights or the time he didn’t share with me. He never said, and I never dared ask him. We always arranged to meet in cafés and bars in the old town. The only condition was that they must serve strawberry ice cream. I was aware that every afternoon he went to his appointment with Nuria Montfort. The first time he read the section in which she appears as a character, he smiled with a sadness that still overwhelms me. Julián Carax had lost his tear ducts in the fire that disfigured him and couldn’t cry, but never in my life have I known anyone breathe the shadow of loss the way he did.
I like to think that we became good friends. As far as I’m concerned, at least, I’ve never had a better one, nor do I think I ever will. Perhaps because of the affection he felt towards my parents, perhaps because that strange ritual of reconstructing the past helped him come to terms with the pain that had consumed his life, or perhaps simply because he saw in me something of himself, he stayed by my side, guiding my steps and my pen, through all the years it took me to write those four novels, correcting, crossing out and rearranging to the end.
“To write is to rewrite,” he kept reminding me. “One writes for oneself, and one rewrites for others.”
*
Of course, there was life beyond the fiction. A great deal happened during the years I devoted to rewriting once and a thousand times every page of the saga. True to my promise not to follow in my father’s footsteps and head up the bookshop (after all, he and my mother were more than capable of running it), I’d managed to find a job in an advertising agency that, in another twist of fate, was located on Avenida del Tibidabo number 32, the old mansion of the Aldayas where my parents had conceived me one distant stormy night in 1955.
My work in the peculiar genre of advertising never seemed particularly memorable to me, but to my surprise my salary grew every month, and my value as a word and image mercenary was on the rise. The years went by, and I left a considerable trail of television, radio and press advertisements behind me, for the greater renown of luxury cars that made rising executives drool, banks that were ever determined to make the small saver’s dreams come true, electrical appliances that promised happiness, perfumes that led to a frenzied love life, and the endless gifts that thrived in those days in Spain. In the absence of the old regime, or at least of its more visible censors, the country was growing, modernizing itself at the increasing speed of too much money in circulation, while displaying stock-market indexes that left the Swiss Alps in the shade. When my father learned how much I was earning, he asked me whether what I did was legal.
“It’s legal, yes. But ethical? That’s another matter.”
Fermín was delighted, showing no scruples about my prosperity. “As long as you don’t get too full of yourself and lose your way, make money now that you’re young, which is when it serves some purpose. And a loaded bachelor like you, well, what can I say? With the number of willing knockouts there must be in this publicity business, where everything is pretty and shiny . . . I wish I’d been able to have a taste of that in the postwar crap we were landed with, where even virgins had moustaches. Go for it. Enjoy all this, now’s the moment. Have adventures, you know what I mean, go over the limits that can be gone over, but remember to jump off the train in time. Some professions are only for the young, and unless you’re a main shareholder of this little shack – something I can’t see you becoming, because we both know you have matters to be dealt with in the less well-paid writing business – it would be folly to remain in such a powder keg beyond thirty.”
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 colour 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 fuelled 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 colours in his non-official 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 honour 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 re-emerged 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 round 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 got 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 visit 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.”
“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 neighbours.”
“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.
“Is she alive? Have you heard from her?”
Fermín opened the box and pulled out a handful of letters.
“I never told you, because I felt that it was best for us all, but Alicia returned to Barcelona in 1960 before leaving forever. It was Sant Jordi Day, the twenty-third of April. She came back to say goodbye, in her own way.”
“I remember it perfectly. I was very young.”
“And you still are.”
We looked at one another in silence.
“Where did she go?”
“I said goodbye to her on the docks and saw her board a ship that was sailing to the Americas. Since then, every Christmas, I’ve received a letter with no sender’s address.”
Fermín handed me the wad of over thirty letters, one for every year. “You can open them.”
All the envelopes had a photograph inside. The stamp showed that each one had been sent from a different place: New York, Washington, DC, Seattle, Denver, Santa Fe, Portland, Philadelphia, Key West, New Orleans, Santa Monica, Chicago, San Francisco . . .
I looked at Fermín in astonishment. He began to hum the national anthem of the United States of America, which on his lips sounded like a sardana. Each photograph had been taken with the sun behind her and showed a shadow, the silhouette of a woman, outlined against a panoramic view of parks, skyscrapers, beaches, deserts or forests.
“Was there nothing else?” I asked. “A note? Something?”
Fermín shook his head. “Not until the last one. It arrived last Christmas.”
I frowned. “How do you know it was the last one?”
He handed me the envelope.
The postmark showed it had been sent from Monterey, California. I pulled out the photograph and stared at it in disbelief. For once the image didn’t show just a shadow. There was Alicia Gris, thirty years on, looking at the camera and smiling from what seemed to me the most beautiful place in the world, a sort of peninsula with cliffs and mysterious forests that stretched out into the sea through the mist of the Pacific Ocean. On one side, a sign read POINT LOBOS.
I turned the photograph over and met with Alicia’s handwriting;
The end of the road. It was worth it. Thanks again for saving me, Fermín, once and so many times. Save yourself too and tell Julián to make us all immortal: we always trust he will.
I love you
Alicia
My eyes filled with tears. I wanted to believe that in that dreamlike place, so far from our Barcelona, Alicia had found her peace and her destiny.
“May I keep it?” I asked in a broken voice.
“It’s yours.”
I knew then that at last I’d found the final piece of my story, and that, from that moment on, what awaited me was life and, with luck, fiction.