The Whispering City Read Online Free PDF Page A

wondered fleetingly. One of the emblem books? One of the Virgils? Probably
The Consolation of Philosophy
by Boethius; the edition on her shelf was printed in Lyon in 1515. It had been read, like all the books in her library, but it was in perfect condition. Perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary. When the letter arrived with the message she was waiting for… her ticket out.
    In Spain, she couldn’t work at any university, couldn’t even teach sixth-formers. In order to be able to work she needed a certificate that guaranteed her adhesion to the Regime. And they would never give her that. When she had come back from Argentina she’d tried to get a post at the University of Barcelona. They had soon made it clear that there was no place for her in a university that was ‘free of subversive elements’.
    ‘I’m sorry, Doctor. There is no place here for people who wish to undermine the principles of the Movement,’ one of the professors told her sarcastically, a man whose face she thought she remembered from her student days in Madrid.
    She had never considered herself a subversive element; she had never even been particularly interested in politics. But some articles that she had written at the start of the Civil War defending the legitimacy of the Republic had meant she’d had to go into exile and, on her return, she found she was ostracised from academia.
    Returning from Buenos Aires in 1948, she went to live with her mother in the enormous family flat on the Rambla de Cataluña. Her father had died many years before. She settled into her old room. Her mother was already very ill by then. Beatriz read her French novels and her mother, who listened with her eyes closed, corrected her pronunciation every once in a while.
    ‘Young lady, I think you should take another trip to France.’
    Later, the intervals where her mother was awake grew shorter; her comments about her pronunciation grew few and far between. Finally Beatriz stopped reading and would sing softly to her, the same songs her mother had lulled her to sleep with more than thirty years earlier. She died the same day the national football team won against England, against ‘Perfidious Albion’, as the president of the Spanish Football Federation said on the radio. When she went into her mother’s room to tell her about it and give her a little laugh, she found her dead in her bed.
    Now she lives alone in the flat with Encarni. But not for much longer, if the letter she’s waiting for says what she’s hoping it will. And what if it doesn’t? Then she’ll have to continue hibernating.

     
    5
    ‘Goddamn it to hell. This is the last thing I need.’
    Inspector Isidro Castro, of the Criminal Investigation Brigade, had had a bad night. Daniel, his youngest child, had been coughing incessantly.
    The coughing had woken him at dawn. Every time he heard it, it stirred an old fear in him, a fear rooted in something he avoided mentioning despite knowing full well what it was. He got out of bed to see how the boy was doing.
    As he put on his flannel slippers, he heard a violent coughing fit from the children’s room. It gave him a stab of panic. Only the sight of Araceli, his wife, who continued sleeping peacefully, calmed him down a little. ‘If it were serious, if the lad was in danger, her mother’s instinct would wake her,’ he told himself.
    He left the room without turning on any lamps. He had enough light from the street lamp, light that entered through slits in a blind that didn’t close properly.
    He went into the children’s room. Cristóbal, the eldest, was sleeping face down, tangled in the blankets. He had inherited his own restless way of sleeping. Very carefully, so as not to wake him, Castro managed to undo the knot formed by his lanky legs, sheets, blankets and bedspread. ‘What a growth spurt this boy’s had.’ He covered him up. It was bad enough having one child ill.
    As if wanting to remind him, Daniel coughed again. He went over to him.