The Cathedral Thief

It was raining heavily on Paris when we stepped out of the station. The sky was dark, with charcoal-grey clouds that hung very low above the city, allowing almost no light to shine through. Rain poured down from the heavens in a grey veil that reduced our vision even more, and torrents of water were running down the streets with a gurgling sound. Within minutes, all that water had infiltrated my shoes, and raindrops were running down my face, neck and back. It was hard to fake happiness in these conditions. It immediately – quite literally – drenched Chat’s enthusiasm too.

“I want it to stop!” she whined in a little girl’s voice – the voice that always managed to unnerve me, no matter what it was that she said.

“It’ll stop when it’s time to stop,” said mother, half philosophical, and half defeated.

“But I want it to stop! I-want-it-to-stop-I-want-it-to-stop-I-want-it-to-stop-I-want-it-to-stop-I-want-it-to-”

“Oh, shut up Chat,” I groaned menacingly, violently tugging at her hand to force her to walk faster.

The reaction was immediate. “Sophie!” mother shouted, sounding properly offended by my words. Like all mothers, I think, she insisted upon seeing us well-mannered and well-behaved in all and every circumstances.

“I apologize,” I mumbled automatically, though not thinking a word of it.

The weather, fickle as it was, changed almost as soon as we reached what was now our new home. Rain stopped, quite suddenly. Then, the clouds disappeared slowly, revealing a pale, almost white sky. There was a bit of sunshine that eventually came through, but even that did not manage to make the place look better in my opinion. Our new home, as it was to be called now, was a two-room apartment on the second floor of an old brick building. The building belonged to an old and fat lady called madame Odette. Madame Odette lived on the ground floor, with a company of cats that immediately attracted Chat’s attention, and kept her quiet for a moment. She also had a small backyard, and from what she said about it when she gave us the tour of the propriety, on our arrival, she was quite proud of it. I absolutely failed to see the interest of it, when I first saw it. It was small, dirty, and covered in mud. The walls of the surrounding buildings were darkened by smoke. It was hardly a paradise.

There were three more people living in the building, hiring their apartments just like we did. On the first floor, there was an old couple. Madame Odette informed us proudly that the husband was a veteran from the 1870-1871 war, as if his supposed pride could somehow spurt back on her. The couple, old people, hardly ever came out of their apartments. And when they did, it was only ever to shout at Chat or I because we were making too much noise as we climbed up or down the stairs. On the second floor, there was our apartment, small for the three of us, but at least dry, which after the rain was a real blessing. Just across the landing, there was a second apartment. There lived a single young man.

There was an attic room, too. It was unoccupied when we moved in, and remained so for a long time. Then, one day, a young Spanish writer moved in. For some time, Julián – that was his name, Julián Carax – was the only person whom I trusted with the story of what happened during my first year in Paris. Julian could understand, I thought, because it was the sort of things that he wrote about in his books. It was the sort of things that he could make a book of. Actually, he did make a book of it. A brilliant and clever thing that he called – upon my suggestion, may I add – The Cathedral Thief and that, like all the other books he wrote, was dedicated to the mysterious P. about whom he refused to talk. But Julian had his own obsessions, and of course he incorporated some of them in the story. He romanticized the events that happened. I might not have Julián’s talent for storytelling, but at least this is the truth.