Free The Whispering City by Sara Moliner Page A

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feet tall spread out over thin legs, a narrow torso and a pair of skinny arms in which all the muscles seemed to have been replaced by tendons.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.’
    Perhaps the teacher was the author of the letters that The Spider received. In any case, they were definitely written by a woman. Not only because of the style, with fragments such as, ‘Today I pick up my pen to write to you’ and ‘I am at a loss for words to show the depth of my appreciation for the effort I know you are making so that we can marry soon’, but for one sound reason: a woman wouldn’t dictate her love letters to a man, no matter how prosaic they were and how filled with cliché. That was also her experience as a writer and reader of letters. For love letters, both men and women preferred that the scrivener be a woman.
    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