Free The Whispering City by Sara Moliner

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