three decades, and I know him almost as well as Bernardo does, which is why I dare make that statement. Thanks to his natural charm which is more than a little and his awesome good luck, he has been loved by dozens of women, usually without inviting it. A vague hint, a look out of the corner of his eye, one of his radiant smiles, is ordinarily enough to make even women with virtuous reputations invite him to climb to their balcony at questionable hours of the night. However, Zorro does not fall for them he prefers impossible romances. I would swear that as soon as he jumps from the balcony to terra firma, he forgets the lady he was embracing only moments before. He himself does not know how many times he has fought a duel with a vindictive husband or offended father, but I have kept count not for reasons of envy or jealousy, but because of my thoroughness as a chronicler. Diego remembers only women who tortured him with their indifference like the incomparable Juliana. Many of his feats during those years were frantic attempts to attract that young lady’s attention. When he was with her, he did not play the role of the faint- hearted fop that he adopted to deceive Agnes Duchamp, Le Chevalier, and others. To the contrary, in her presence he fanned out all his feathers like a peacock. He would have done battle with a dragon for her, but there were none in Barcelona, and he had to settle for Rafael Moncada. And now that I have mentioned him, it seems only fair to do justice to the man. Every story must have a villain. In fact, his wickedness is essential, for there are no heroes without enemies of their own stature. Zorro was fortunate to have a rival like Rafael Moncada; otherwise I would not have much to tell in these pages.
Juliana and Diego slept beneath the same roof, but they led separate lives, and there were few reasons for them to meet in that mansion with so many empty rooms. Only rarely were they alone, because Nuria watched Juliana and Isabel spied on Diego. Sometimes he waited hours to catch her alone in a corridor and walk a few steps with her without witnesses. They happened upon one another in the dining room at dinner hour, in the salon during harp concerts, Sundays at mass, and in the theater when there was a play by Lope de Vega or Moliere, writers who delighted Tomas de Romeu. In church as well as in the theater, men and women were seated separately, so that Diego had to be satisfied with observing the back of his beloved’s neck. He lived in the same house with her for more than four years, pursuing her with a hunter’s dogged determination, without a single episode worthy of mention, until tragedy struck the family and the scales tipped in Diego’s favor. Up until then, Juliana had responded to his siege with so little emotion that it was as if she didn’t see him but he needed very little to feed his illusions. He believed that her indifference was a stratagem intended to mask her true feelings. Someone had told him that women do such things. He was pitiful to see, poor man; it would have been better had Juliana loathed him. The heart is a capricious organ that can make a sudden turn, but warm, sisterly affection is nearly impossible to reverse.
The de Romeu family made occasional trips to Santa Fe, where they owned a semi-abandoned property. The patriarchal home was a square building on the point of a cliff, where the grandparents of Tomas de Romeu’s deceased wife had ruled over their children and their peasants. The view was magnificent. Once those hills had been covered with vineyards that produced a wine comparable to the best of France, but during the war no one had tended them, and now nothing was left but dried-up, insect-infested runners. The house itself was taken over by the famous Santa Fe rats, well-fed, bad-tempered vermin that the campesinos had been known to eat during times of hardship. With garlic and leeks, they are not half bad. Two weeks before going there, Tomas would send a crew of servants to smoke out the rooms, the only way to make the rodents retreat temporarily. Those excursions were less frequent now; the roads had become too dangerous. One could feel the hatred of the country folk in the air like hot breath, exhalations of bad omen that raised the hair on the back of one’s neck. Tomas de Romeu, like many landowners, scarcely dared leave the city, say nothing of trying to collect rents from his tenants, for fear of having his throat slit. In the country Juliana read, played her music, and tried to charm the campesinos like a fairy godmother to gain their affection, with little success. Nuria criticized the climate and complained about everything.
Isabel entertained herself painting watercolor landscapes and portraits. Have I told you that she was a good artist? I think I forgot to mention that an unpardonable omission, seeing that it was her only talent. On the whole, her art won more sympathy among the humble than all Juliana’s charitable works. She could capture a remarkable likeness, but she made her subjects better-looking than they were, giving them more teeth, fewer wrinkles, and a dignified expression they seldom possessed.
But let us go back to Barcelona, where Diego kept busy with his classes, La Justicia, the taverns where he met with other students, and his swashbuckling adventures, which was his romantic way of referring to his escapades. In the meantime Juliana was living the idle life of young women of the period. She could go nowhere, not even to confession, without a chaperone. Nuria was her shadow. Neither could she be seen talking alone with any man under sixty. She went to balls with her father, sometimes accompanied by Diego, whom they introduced as a cousin from the Indies. Juliana showed no sign of being in any hurry to marry, despite the long line of eager suitors. It was her father’s responsibility to arrange a good marriage for her, but he seemed incapable of choosing a son-in-law worthy of his marvelous daughter. In two years Juliana would be twenty, the allowable limit for finding a fiance; if she was not engaged by then, the odds of her marrying would plummet month by month. With his unquenchable optimism, Diego was making the same calculations, and he concluded that time was working in his favor: once Juliana saw that she was withering on the vine, she would marry him to keep from becoming an old maid. He tried to use this curious argument to convince Bernardo, the one person patient enough to listen to his constant ranting about his desperate love.
As 1812 came to a close, Napoleon Bonaparte met defeat in Russia. The emperor had invaded that enormous country with his Grande Armee of nearly two hundred thousand men. The invincible French armies operated under an iron discipline, and they moved at a forced march, much more quickly than their enemies because they carried very little weight and lived off the land they conquered. As they advanced toward the interior of Russia, towns emptied, their inhabitants evaporated, and farmers burned their harvests. With every advance, Napoleon left behind scorched earth. The invaders triumphantly marched into Moscow, where they were welcomed by apocalyptic flames and the isolated fire of sharpshooters hidden in the smoking ruins, ready to die killing. The Muscovites, imitating the example of the brave farmers, had burned their possessions before evacuating the city. No one was left to give the keys of the city to Napoleon, not a single Russian soldier to humiliate, only a few tired prostitutes resigned to entertaining the conquerors now that their usual clients had decamped. Napoleon found himself isolated in the midst of a mountain of ashes. He waited, not knowing what he was waiting for, through the summer. By the time he decided to return to France, the rains had begun, and soon the soil of Russia would be covered with snow as hard as granite. The emperor could never have imagined the terrible trials that his men would have to bear. Added to harassment from the Cossacks and ambushes by farmers, they suffered hunger and a lunar cold that none of his soldiers had ever experienced. Thousands of the French army were turned into statues of eternal ice and left stationed along the ignominious route of the retreat. Soldiers were forced to eat their horses, their boots, at times even the corpses of their comrades. Only ten thousand men, defeated and disillusioned, made it back to their homeland. When he saw his destroyed army, Napoleon knew that the star that had shone so brightly in his prodigious ascent to power was beginning to fade. He had to pull back the troops occupying a large part of Europe. Two-thirds of those sent to Spain were recalled. At last the Spanish could glimpse a victorious end after years of bloody resistance, but that triumph would not come until sixteen months later.
That year, during the same period that Napoleon was licking his wounds after the disastrous retreat to France, Eulalia de Califs sent her nephew Rafael Moncada to the Antilles on a mission to expand her chocolate enterprise. She planned to sell cocoa, almond paste, preserved nutmeats, and refined aromatic sugar to chocolatiers in Europe and the United States. She had heard that all Americans had a sweet tooth. Her nephew’s mission was to weave a network of business contacts in important cities from Washington to Paris.
Moscow was put on hold, since it was in ruins, but Eulalia was confident that as soon as the smoke of war cleared, the Russian capital would be rebuilt in all its previous splendor. Rafael set out on an eleven-month tour, plowing oceans and pounding his kidneys on horseback, all to establish the aromatic brotherhood of chocolate imagined by Eulalia.
Before he left for the Antilles, and without saying a word of his intentions to his aunt, Rafael requested an audience with Tomas de Romeu. He was not received in the de Romeu home but on the neutral terrain of the Geographic and Philosophic Society, of which the older man was a member. The club ran an excellent restaurant on the second floor, and Tomas de Romeu’s admiration for France did not extend to its exquisite cuisine. No canary tongues for him he preferred robust Catalan dishes: escudella, a soup to raise the dead, esto fat de toro, a stew with the firepower of a bomb, and the divine butifarra del obispo, a blood sausage blacker and fatter than most. Rafael Moncada, facing his host across a mountain of meat and fat, was a little pale.
