Clara would swear again and again that it was true, and I would give up, tortured by the image of that phantom who found pleasure in caressing her swan’s neck—and heaven knows what else—while all I could do was long for it. Had I paused to reflect, I would have understood that my devotion to Clara brought me no more than suffering. Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most. During that bleak postwar summer, the only thing I feared was the arrival of the new school term, when I would no longer be able to spend all day with Clara.
BY DINT OF SEEING ME SO OFTEN AROUND THE HOUSE, BERNARDA, whose severe appearance concealed a doting maternal instinct, became fond of me and, in her own manner, decided to adopt me.
“You can tell this boy hasn’t got a mother, sir,” she would say to Barceló. “I feel so sorry for him, poor little mite.”
Bernarda had arrived in Barcelona shortly after the war, fleeing from poverty and from a father who on a good day would beat her up and tell her she was stupid, ugly, and a slut, and on a bad one would corner her in the pigsty, drunk, and fondle her until she sobbed with terror—at which point he’d let her go, calling her prudish and stuck up, like her mother. Barceló had come across Bernarda by chance when she worked in a vegetable stall in the Borne Market and, following his instinct, had offered her a post in his household.
“Ours will be a brand-newPygmalion, ” he announced. “You shall be my Eliza and I’ll be your Professor Higgins.”
Bernarda, whose literary appetite was more than satisfied with the church newsletter, looked at him out of the corner of her eye.
“One might be poor and ignorant, but very decent, too,” she said.
Barceló was not exactly George Bernard Shaw, but even if he had not managed to endow his pupil with the eloquence and spirit of a salon dame, his efforts had refined Bernarda and taught her the manners and speech of a provincial maid. She was twenty-eight, but I always thought she carried ten more years on her back, even if they showed only in her eyes. She was a serial churchgoer with an ecstatic devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes. Every morning she went to the eight o’clock service at the basilica of Santa María del Mar, and she confessed no less than three times a week, four in warm weather. Don Gustavo, who was a confirmed agnostic (which Bernarda suspected might be a respiratory condition, like asthma, but afflicting only refined gentlemen), deemed it mathematically impossible that the maid should be able to sin sufficiently to keep up that schedule of confession and contrition.
“You’re as good as gold, Bernarda,” he would say indignantly. “These people who see sin everywhere are sick in their souls and, if you really press me, in their bowels. The endemic condition of the Iberian saint is chronic constipation.”
Every time she heard such blasphemy, Bernarda would make the sign of the cross five times over. Later, at night, she would say a prayer for the tainted soul of Mr. Barceló, who had a good heart but whose brains had rotted away due to excessive reading, like that fellow Sancho Panza. Very occasionally Bernarda had boyfriends, who would beat her, take what little money she had stashed in a savings account, and sooner or later dump her. Every time one of these crises arose, Bernarda would lock herself up in her room for days, where she would cry an ocean and swear she was going to kill herself with rat poison or bleach. After exhausting all his persuasive tricks, Barceló would get truly frightened and call the locksmith to open the door. Then the family doctor would administer a sedative strong enough to calm a horse. When the poor thing woke up two days later, the bookseller would buy her roses, chocolates, and a new dress and would take her to the movies to see the latest from Cary Grant, who in her book was the handsomest man in recorded history.
“Did you know? They say Cary Grant is queer,” she would murmur, stuffing herself with chocolates. “Is that possible?”
“Rubbish,” Barceló would swear. “Dunces and blockheads live in a state of perpetual envy.”
“You do speak well, sir. It shows that you’ve been to that Sorbet university.”
“The Sorbonne,” he would answer, gently correcting her.
It was very difficult not to love Bernarda. Without being asked, she would cook and sew for me. She would mend my clothes and my shoes, comb and cut my hair, buy me vitamins and toothpaste. Once she even gave me a small medal with a glass container full of holy water, which a sister of hers who lived in San Adrián del Besós had brought all the way from Lourdes by bus. Sometimes, while she inspected my head in search of lice and other parasites, she would speak to me in a hushed voice.
“Miss Clara is the most wonderful person in the world, and may God strike me dead if it should ever enter my head to criticize her, but it’s not right that you, Master Daniel, should become too obsessed with her, if you know what I mean.”
“Don’t worry, Bernarda, we’re only friends.”
“That’s just what I say.”
To illustrate her arguments, Bernarda would then bring up some story she had heard on the radio about a boy who had fallen in love with his teacher and on whom some sort of avenging spell had been cast. It made his hair and his teeth fall out, and his face and hands were covered with some incriminating fungus, a sort of leprosy of lust.
“Lust is a bad thing,” Bernarda would conclude. “Take it from me.”
Despite the jokes he made at my expense, Don Gustavo looked favorably on my devotion to Clara and my eager commitment to be her companion. I attributed his tolerance to the fact that he probably considered me harmless. From time to time, he would still let slip enticing offers to buy the Carax novel from me. He would tell me that he had mentioned the subject to colleagues in the antiquarian book trade, and they all agreed that a Carax could now be worth a fortune, especially in Paris. I always refused his offers, at which he would just smile shrewdly. He had given me a copy of the keys to the apartment so that I could come and go without having to worry about whether he or Bernarda were there to open the door. My father was another story. As the years went by, he had got over his instinctive reluctance to talk about any subject that truly worried him. One of the first consequences of that progress was that he began to show his obvious disapproval of my relationship with Clara.
“You ought to go out with friends your own age, like Tomás Aguilar, whom you seem to have forgotten, though he’s a splendid boy, and not with a woman who is old enough to be married.”
“What does it matter how old we each are if we’re good friends?”
What hurt me most was the reference to Tomás, because it was true. I hadn’t gone out with him for months, whereas before we had been inseparable. My father looked at me reprovingly.
“Daniel, you don’t know anything about women, and this one is playing with you like a cat with a canary.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t know anything about women,” I would reply, offended. “And much less about Clara.”
Our conversations on the subject rarely went any further than an exchange of reproaches and wounded looks. When I was not at school or with Clara, I devoted my time to helping my father in the bookshop—tidying up the storeroom in the back of the shop, delivering orders, running errands, or even serving regular customers. My father complained that I didn’t really put my mind or my heart into the work. I, in turn, replied that I spent my whole life working there and I couldn’t see what he could possibly complain about. Many nights, when sleep eluded me, I’d lie awake remembering the intimacy, the small world we had shared during the years following my mother’s death, the years of Victor Hugo’s pen and the tin trains. I recalled them as years of peace and sadness, a world that was vanishing and that had begun to evaporate on the dawn when my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Time played on the opposite team. One day my father discovered that I’d given Carax’s book to Clara, and he rose in anger.
“Yo
u disappoint me, Daniel,” he said. “When I took you to that secret place, I told you that the book you chose was something special, that you were going to adopt it and had to be responsible for it.”
“I was ten at the time, Father, and that was a child’s game.”