NURIA MONFORT LIVED ADRIFT IN SHADOWS. A NARROW COR ridor led to a dining room that also served as kitchen, library, and office. On the way I noticed a modest bedroom, with no windows. That was all, other than a tiny bathroom with no shower or tub out of which all kinds of odors emanated, from smells of cooking from the bar below to a musty stench of pipes and drains that dated from the turn of the century. The entire apartment was sunk in perpetual gloom, like a block of darkness propped up between peeling walls. It smelled of black tobacco, cold, and absence. Nuria Monfort observed me while I pretended not to notice the precarious condition of her home.
“I go down to the street because there’s hardly any light in the apartment,” she said. “My husband has promised to give me a reading lamp when he comes back.”
“Is your husband away?”
“Miquel is in prison.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know….”
“You couldn’t have known. I’m not ashamed of telling you, because he isn’t a criminal. This last time they took him away for printing leaflets for the metalworkers’ union. That was two years ago. The neighbors think he’s in America, traveling. My father doesn’t know either, and I wouldn’t like him to find out.”
“Don’t worry. He won’t find out through me,” I said.
A tense silence wove itself around us, and I imagined she was considering whether I was a spy sent by Isaac.
“It must be hard to run a house on one’s own,” I said stupidly, just to fill the void.
“It’s not easy. I get what money I can from translations, but with a husband in prison, that’s not nearly enough. The lawyers have bled me dry, and I’m up to my neck in debts. Translating is almost as badly paid as writing.”
She looked at me as if she was expecting an answer. I just smiled meekly. “You translate books?”
“Not anymore. Now I’ve started to translate forms, contracts, and customs documents—that pays much better. You get only a pittance for translating literature, though a bit more than for writing it, it’s true. The residents’ association has already tried to throw me out a couple of times. The least of their worries is that I’m behind with the maintenance fees. You can imagine, a woman who speaks foreign languages and wears trousers…. More than one neighbor has accused me of running a house of ill repute in this apartment. I should be so lucky….”
I hoped the darkness would hide my blushes.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I’m embarrassing you.”
“It’s my fault. I asked.”
She laughed nervously. She had around her a burning aura of loneliness.
“You remind me a bit of Julián,” she said suddenly. “The way you look, and your gestures. He used to do what you are doing now. He would stare at you without saying a word, and you wouldn’t know what he was thinking, and so, like an idiot, you’d tell him things it would have been better to keep to yourself…. Can I offer you anything? A cup of coffee maybe?”
“Nothing, thanks. I don’t want to trouble you.”
“It’s no trouble. I was about to make one for myself.”
Something told me that that cup of coffee was all she was having for lunch. I refused again and watched her walk over to a corner of the dining room where there was a small electric stove.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, her back to me.
I looked around and asked myself how. Nuria Monfort’s office consisted of a desk that took up the corner next to the balcony, an Underwood typewriter with an oil lamp beside it, and a shelf full of dictionaries and manuals. There were no family photos, but the wall by the desk was covered with postcards, all of them pictures of a bridge I remembered seeing somewhere but couldn’t pinpoint—perhaps Paris or Rome. Beneath this display the desk showcased an almost obsessive neatness and order. The pencils were sharpened and perfectly lined up. The papers and folders were arranged and placed in three symmetrical rows. When I turned around, I realized that Nuria Monfort was gazing at me from the entrance to the corridor. She regarded me in silence, the way one looks at strangers on the street or in the subway. She lit a cigarette and stayed where she was, her face masked by spirals of blue smoke. I suddenly thought that, despite herself, Nuria Monfort exuded a certain air of the femme fatale, like those women in the movies who dazzled Fermín when they materialized out of the mist of a Berlin station, enveloped in halos of improbable light, the sort of beautiful women whose own appearance bored them.
“There’s not much to tell,” she began. “I met Julián over twenty years ago, in Paris. At that time I was working for Cabestany, the publishing house. Mr. Cabestany had acquired the rights to Julián’s novels for peanuts. At first I worked in the accounts department, but when Mr. Cabestany found out that I spoke French, Italian, and a little German, he moved me to the purchasing department, and I became his personal secretary. One of my jobs was to correspond with foreign authors and publishers with whom our firm had business, and that’s how I came into contact with Julián Carax.”
“Your father told me you two were good friends.”
“My father probably told you we had a fling or something along those lines, right? According to him, I run after any pair of pants, like a bitch in heat.”
That woman’s frankness and her brazen manner left me speechless. I took too long to come up with an acceptable reply. By then Nuria Monfort was smiling to herself and shaking her head.
“Pay no attention to him. My father got that idea from a trip to Paris I once had to make, back in 1933, to resolve some matters between Mr. Cabestany and Gallimard. I spent a week in the city and stayed in Julián’s apartment for the simple reason that Mr. Cabestany preferred to save on hotel expenses. Very romantic, as you can see. Until then my relationship with Julián Carax had been conducted strictly by letter, normally dealing with copyright, proofs, or editorial matters. What I knew about him, or imagined, had come from reading the manuscripts he sent us.”
“Did he tell you anything about his life in Paris?”
“No. Julián didn’t like talking about his books or about himself. I didn’t think he was happy in Paris. Though he gave the impression that he was one of those people who cannot be happy anywhere. The truth is, I never got to know him well. He wouldn’t let you. He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in people. Mr. Cabestany thought he was shy and perhaps a bit crazy, but I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them—a comfortable prison of his own design.”
“You say this as if you envied him.”