The Crime of Julian Wells Read Online Free PDF Page B

with high ceilings, one of the few such buildings whose upper floors still provided a view of Central Park. Once there, I dropped into a chair and let my gaze roam among the shelves of books that stood across from me until my attention was drawn to where Julian’s books were arranged chronologically, beginning with The Tortures of Cuenca.
    I drew the book from the shelf, opened it, and read the book’s dedication: For Philip, sole witness to my crime.
    The “crime,” I always thought, was Julian’s decision to write about what had happened in Cuenca, an effort I disparaged at the time because I could see no need to retell a story already well known. It would be a crime to waste his time on such a book, I told him, advice he’d obviously not taken, and of which his dedication had been meant to remind me.
    I’d read this dedication many times, of course, always with a knowing smile, but now it returned me to the brief few days Julian and I had spent together in Cuenca. We’d met in Madrid, where Julian had been living, doing odd jobs, picking up the first of his many languages. We’d then driven around Spain for several days before reaching the town. Our month in Argentina was more than a year behind us by then, but Julian was still laboring under the effects of what he’d experienced there, all of which I’d expected to dissipate in time.
    We’d arrived at Cuenca about midday, strolled the town’s streets, then taken a table at a small café on the village square. Though a matter of dark renown in Spain, neither of us had ever heard of the crime that had occurred there some seventy years before. As I later discovered, it was briefly mentioned in the guidebook I’d bought in the airport before leaving New York, a book I’d intended to read on the flight but hadn’t. In any event, an English-speaking former magistrate had given us the details, an old man who’d claimed to have seen the actual figures in the story—the guards, the prisoners, even the prosecutor.
    “No one thought anything about the crime of Cuenca,” he said. “I mean, that it would take so strange a turn.”
    The old man had then gone through the details of what had happened there, a story he told quite well but from which he drew a somewhat banal conclusion.
    “So you see, it’s quite possible for a person to disappear,” he said.
    I glanced at Julian and saw that he was deep in thought. “Yes,” he said quietly, “It’s quite possible.”
    The old man glanced about the village square, his gaze captured by a group of unruly teenagers, all of them speaking in loud voices, heedless of the disturbance they caused.
    “ Vivíamos mejor cuando vivía Franco ,” he said, almost to himself, reverting to Spanish. “We lived better when Franco lived.” With that he rose, bid us a polite good-bye, and left.
    Seconds later, I noticed that Julian’s attention was focused on two Guardia Civil lounging at the entrance to one of the town’s official buildings, tall and dark, wearing their curiously winged black caps. It was such men as these who’d carried out the tortures of Cuenca, and for a moment Julian simply stared at them quietly.
    Then, quite suddenly, a thought appeared to seize him.
    “Let’s go,” he said.
    We paid the bill, then rose, and moved along the town’s dusty streets. The evening shade was descending, the first lights coming on.
    “Someone once said to me that it’s not what a man feels before he first wields the whip,” Julian said as we closed in on the road that let out of the town, “it’s what he feels after it.” He stopped and looked at me. “But it’s really what the person being whipped feels that matters. Guilt is a luxury, Philip.”
    I thought of a French painter, James Tissot, the way he’d portrayed the scourging of Christ from different angles, the faces of the men who’d beaten him, obscured in one, revealed in the other.
    I described these paintings to Julian, then said, “The guilt of