The Whispering City Page 6
Stay objective, don’t show any emotion, control your body language. Pablo struggled to do so and hoped he was more or less managing it.
‘Don Jaime, of course I am most grateful, and I appreciate your attempt to protect me, but could you tell me what it says in the accusation?’
Pablo extended a hand, but Pla didn’t give him the piece of paper. He unfolded it and smoothed it out.
‘I’m going to read it to you.’
Pla ran his hand over his thin moustache, fitted some reading glasses onto his nose and looked at Pablo once more before directing his gaze to the piece of paper in his hand.
‘It’s almost impossible to read this scribble. The handwriting is a disaster.’
He started to read. ‘Your Excellency…’
He glanced up.
‘It seems that our friend doesn’t have a good grip on the whole title business.’
He continued reading. ‘As a good citizen of new Spain I have to denounce something. The consumption of prohibitive drugs – I guess he meant prohibited – is rising, and they even sell them in bars. Were will we end up if solisotors do these things and skorn morality? Yesterday I was in a bar and was witness to thus. Neer eleven at night a group of posch young men, among them one named Pablo Noguer who I wanted to denounce to the proscecutor for the crime below. They all wanted champain and women. They were partying for a wile with plenty whore, as you can imagine. Round one I saw the aforesaid Pablo Noguer sell cocaine to several people. It wasnt the first time, I saw him several times sell in La Paloma Blanca, on Tapia Street, and La Gallega, on the Rambla Santa Mónica, both rough place where the poch little lord go looking for cheep women.’
Pla looked at him.
‘That last part isn’t particularly important because it doesn’t give any precise information. But in the first accusation, there is a place, date and time. I still haven’t spoken with your colleagues. Given your name and your family’s name, Noguer, I chose to talk to you first. Which is why I am asking you: is what he says true?’
Pablo swallowed hard. If he denied having taken cocaine and any of the other three admitted it, he could lose his credibility with Pla. He had no choice but to lower his eyes and say, ‘Only one of the points is true, Don Jaime; I think I tried the cocaine. I admit it was foolish, but…’
Pablo trusted that Pla would see it as a minor infraction. The fact was, cocaine could be bought in the pharmacy on prescription. Although it had to be registered. But not everyone had a doctor who would prescribe it. Which was why the black market flourished. Those who did business in it ran the risk of a long sentence. The repercussions that an accusation such as this one could have on a career in the law were obvious.
‘… But I assure you that I was not the one who passed it round, much less sold it.’
Pla nodded gravely. Did he believe him? Pablo continued his counter-attack, trying to deflect attention away from himself. ‘Besides, the declaration doesn’t hold much weight. An anonymous eyewitness who surely wouldn’t be willing to testify under oath.’
‘You already know, Noguer, that anonymous accusations are taken very seriously in this country.’
He knew it well. An anonymous denunciation was enough to get you called into the police station. It was enough to make you the victim of interrogations that some people came back from with broken arms or legs. When they came back. But that couldn’t happen to him, could it? If it did, perhaps his father could pull strings. He would have to write pleas, pay large sums of money or perhaps call in a favour to stop the process. His shame turned to mortification as he thought of what his father would say, the disdain in his voice when he spoke to him, his mother’s aggrieved face.
Yes, he would get him out of the jam, but there’d be no end to his reproaches. And his father wouldn’t be able to stop everyone in Barcelona from finding out about it, and his career would be ruined.
Then Pla asked him, ‘Do you have any idea who could have written this letter?’
‘No. I haven’t the slightest idea. Maybe someone from the brothel? One of the girls? One of the pimps?’
‘One of the girls? Did you treat them… did you treat them badly?’
Pablo blushed.
‘No. For the love of God! It was just the regular,’ he cleared his throat, ‘the services we agreed upon and the corresponding remuneration.’
Pla started to twirl the fountain pen around again. It was a German model, a Pelikan with green and black stripes that blended together as the lawyer spun it fast.
‘But the man or woman who accused you knew your name,’ he said finally.
‘That’s not hard. We were all calling each other by our names.’
He remembered that when Calvet had ordered the champagne, he had egged him on: ‘Come on, Noguer, let’s see what you’re really made of. In court you act like an altar boy.’ Pablo held the bottle between his legs. They all shouted when the foam started to emerge in a spout and chanted his name when Calvet held the bottle to his mouth for him to drink. He didn’t want to remember anything from that point on. That night wasn’t one of the proudest moments of his life.
Pla’s voice took on a strict tone. ‘I can’t say that I’m pleased about this matter. I expect model behaviour from my lawyers. I expect that, in every situation, they know where the permitted and tolerated limits are. On the other hand, I value your work highly and I would like to continue to employ you. I am going to have to reflect on how to proceed in this case.’
He got up from his chair. The conversation was over.
Pablo managed to mumble a few words of gratitude and exited the office.
He passed by Maribel’s desk. She called to him, ‘The minutes from the Molina case. You have to draw up the buying contract.’
He turned and took the papers she held out to him.
‘Forgive me, Maribel. I was distracted.’
Maribel smiled at him.
He returned the smile mechanically and went to his office with the minutes under his arm.
8
Once a week Ana offered her services as a scrivener in one of the stalls near the Boquería market. Seated inside one of the wooden booths, she wrote and read letters for people who were illiterate or who wanted to ensure a standard of writing. Letters to family members, to friends, to institutions; to give news, communicate births and deaths, marriages, First Communions; having got work, having lost it, asking for money or demanding the payment of debts. And love letters.
One of her regular customers was Carmiña Orozco, a young woman from Galicia who worked as a chambermaid at the Hotel Majestic, a luxury hotel on the Paseo de Gracia. Carmiña wasn’t illiterate: she knew how to read, albeit slowly, and how to write, but she preferred the letters she sent her boyfriend, Hernán, in prison, to be ‘in nice handwriting’.
Hernán still had three of the seven years he’d been sentenced to for stealing a Singer sewing machine from a warehouse, time that Carmiña had used to put together a trousseau by means of petty theft from the hotel.
That day she wanted to let her boyfriend know that they already had a complete set of bed linen, with two sheets and pillowcases.
‘Carmiña, you know that’s a crime, and that you could end up in jail like your boyfriend, don’t you?’
Ana told her the same thing each time, but mostly to feel that she had fulfilled her moral obligation. This time, after having seen the treatment Castro had meted out to Mariona Sobrerroca’s maid, she feared for what would happen to Carmiña if they caught her. As she pulled out a sheet of paper to begin the letter, she imagined Castro slapping the young woman.
‘Yes, ma’am. But you aren’t going to grass on me, are you?’
‘Of course not! What you tell me remains a professional secret,’ lied Ana, ‘like what clients tell priests or solicitors.’
‘Clients? Priests?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Carmiña nodded. Ana picked up her pen.
‘How should we put it this tim
e?’
‘Put that the head of housekeeping gave me a bed set because she is very happy with my work.’
In Carmiña’s letters, her thefts were disguised as gifts from her boss when they were textiles, or from the cafeteria supervisor when they were dishes, or from the owner of the hotel when they were other things, such as an ashtray, a pitcher and other decorative ornaments she’d managed to take without, for the moment, arousing suspicion.
‘And that I’m going to have them embroidered with our initials.’
This was how she had erased the monograms that had once proclaimed the towels, bathrobe and sheets to be the property of the Hotel Majestic.
‘The sheets and the pillowcases are embroidered too?’
‘Of course. It’s the Majestic.’
‘Well, you can leave the H for Hernán.’
‘No. It wouldn’t look right. They’re machine-embroidered, and you can tell the difference.’
Carmiña had her dignity. Or perhaps she was aware of the irony that Hernán was in prison for trying to steal sewing machines.
‘You’re right.’
Ana wrote.
Dear Hernán,
I hope that these lines find you in good health.
Ana had tried several times to convince Carmiña that such formalities weren’t necessary in a letter to her boyfriend, but she insisted on them so it would be clear that it was a serious letter, a proper letter.
Sra Gómez, the head of housekeeping, praised me again for my good work. She says I’m an example of diligence, tidiness and care, that when we marry I will be a perfect housewife, as befits a Spanish woman. That is why she gave me a full bed set. It is linen, and I’m going to take it to the embroiderer so she will put our initials on it.
She read it over and crossed out the part about the ‘Spanish woman’.
She didn’t want to go too far. The letter had to get through the prison censors, but it was enough, in her opinion, that the news she was transmitting was inane, and at the end she put the obligatory repetitions of ‘long live the Caudillo’.
She read it to Carmiña.
‘Do you want me to add anything else?’
‘Put something nice. Something sweet and nice. Don’t make me say it, it really embarrasses me.’
Since she couldn’t think of any verse she could camouflage into prose, she put a piece of a bolero by Antonio Machín, with a few changes:
I don’t care what state we live in, or how, or where. All I care is that it is by your side.
She showed it to Carmiña, who read it slowly, excited when she reached the end. She approved it. Ana wrote a clean version on the paper Carmiña had brought with her.
Carmiña left, after paying her for her work, with the handwritten letter – you don’t type love letters – folded carefully and placed inside an envelope. Ana watched her go, thinking that when she sealed the envelope perhaps she would shed a couple of tears onto the paper that was already scented with a few drops of perfume she’d stolen from a hotel guest. Hernán didn’t realise it, but he had sniffed some of the world’s most expensive perfumes.
The stalls to Ana’s right and left were also occupied. From the one to her right she could hear the voice of Oleguer Pons, a retired man who spent his days in the National Library of Catalonia reading history books and who earned a few coins writing letters.
Oleguer Pons was lucky to have been born a lefty (although in school he hadn’t been allowed to write that way) because a stay in the police headquarters on the Vía Layetana had rendered his right hand useless. To make him confess to the whereabouts of his son, an underground militant in the Communist Party, the police had hung him from a pipe by his wrists with handcuffs for two days. He held out, as did one of his wrists. The right wrist was contorted and twisted inward for ever.
But Oleguer Pons – called by the Castilian version of his name, Olegario, during the two weeks they’d held him in the Social Investigation Brigade prison cell – remembered when he was released that his hands had been tied on another occasion. In school, the teacher had tied his left hand to the back of the chair with string to keep him from writing with it. Which is why, when the bruises disappeared from his left wrist, he needed only a week of practice to develop lovely handwriting with that hand. Since he couldn’t go back to work, now that he was crippled and had a police record, he survived by writing postcards and invitations for a printing house and helping people with their letters near the Library of Catalonia.
Oleguer was reading a letter to someone. It seemed as though it was something difficult, because the woman interrupted him frequently to ask, ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘How do you expect me to know, woman?’
Ana resisted the temptation to look over. As much as she had been exaggerating when she’d explained the secrecy of her profession to Carmiña, she did believe that her work was subject to an ethic that demanded discretion. Besides, she was going to find out anyway, since old Oleguer didn’t share her reservations and enjoyed talking about his work. He was also more in need of conversation than she was, and clung to the few chances he had, even when it was telling her about the letters he had read or written that day. He didn’t talk about his deformed hand. They had discussed it once, and that was enough.
She thought that if they had a lull at the same time, she would tell Pons about her article, but she decided not to tell him that she had been at Vía Layetana and worked with the police inspector. Perhaps it would be better to stick to their customers and their stories, as always. Now that she thought about it, most of the conversations they had were about other people’s lives. But this time she felt like talking about herself, about her article, about Sanvisens congratulating her on it, about getting up early to go to a kiosk and buy a copy, turning the pages with nervous fingers and finding it there, her article.
She pulled a book out of her bag, an edition of Nada by Carmen Laforet that she had bought second-hand at the Cervantes Bookshop. She had read about five pages, when, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a familiar figure approaching her stall; it was the unmistakable silhouette of another of her regulars, Pepe ‘The Spider’, a slight man in his thirties, barely five feet tall spread out over thin legs, a narrow torso and a pair of skinny arms in which all the muscles seemed to have been replaced by tendons. With them he could climb up any wall that had even the slightest texture. Pepe the Spider was a cat burglar. And illiterate.
For more than a year now, The Spider had come once a week for Ana to write a letter to the girlfriend he had back in his village in the province of Seville and to read him her response to the previous letter. He always turned up, except for those three weeks when he had had to disappear because he was a suspect in a break-in at a house in San Gervasio. That was four months ago.
‘Every time there’s some break-in that involves climbing, they nick me, even though I had nothing to do with it. And once I’m there, they shave my head. You don’t know how much it hurts to have them take all this off.’ The Spider pointed to his hair, rough as a brush.
‘Why do they do it?’
‘Because they can,’ The Spider lamented as he explained to Ana the reason for his absence.
When he could allow himself to be seen on the streets again, he brought three letters from his girlfriend for Ana to read. He had them sent to an ironmonger’s on the street where he lived. It was a precaution in case they ever sent him down for a long stretch, so that his girlfriend’s letters wouldn’t end up in just anybody’s hands. The shop assistant there was an old friend of his from his village.
The Spider’s girlfriend, Azucena, knew how to read, but she too had someone write her letters for her. Ana didn’t dare ask her client, but she assumed it was a woman.
‘Is there a school in your village?’
‘Of course. I didn’t go, but there is one.’
‘And is the teacher there a man or a woman?’
‘A woman. Why?’
‘Just curious.’
She read The Spider his letter. The man could barely hold back his tears when Azucena sent him greetings from his family. Then he explained to Ana what she should write to his girlfriend.
‘Tell her that I will soon be able to bring her here.’
When he’d finished, he said, ‘Can you give me this one on credit, Señorita Ana? I’ll pay for it next week, I swear.’
‘Yes, all right.’
The Spider left happily with his letter in an envelope and, thought Ana, with a scheme for some burglary in his head, if he was thinking of bringing his girlfriend to Barcelona.
‘One of these days a gust of wind will come and blow that one right away,’ said a voice from the booth to the right.
Oleguer Pons had also finished with his inquisitive client and was watching The Spider as he disappeared around a corner. Then, as Ana had expected, he told her about the contents of his client’s letter. She listened to it with the impatience of someone who knows that the story she has to tell, when it is her turn to speak, is going to be infinitely more interesting. And it was. Old Oleguer was the perfect listener: attentive, curious and enthusiastic. Ana went on in depth and then held out the copy of La Vanguardia that she had brought with her to show to her parents. Oleguer Pons read the text and told her, ‘The family tradition continues. Has your father or your grandfather seen it?’
No. Not yet. She was planning on going to their house later, for lunch. And taking them a copy of the newspaper. She was eager to see her family’s reaction to her first success.