The Shadow of the Wind Read online

  ELS QUATRE GATS WAS JUST A FIVE-MINUTE WALK FROM OUR HOUSE AND one of my favorite haunts. My parents had met there in 1932, and I attributed my one-way ticket into this world in part to the old café’s charms. Stone dragons guarded a lamplit façade anchored in shadows. Inside, voices seemed shaded by the echoes of other times. Accountants, dreamers, and would-be geniuses shared tables with the specters of Pablo Picasso, Isaac Albéniz, Federico García Lorca, and Salvador Dalí. There any poor devil could pass for a historical figure for the price of a small coffee.

  “Sempere, old man,” proclaimed Barceló when he saw my father come in. “Hail the prodigal son. To what do we owe the honor?”

  “You owe the honor to my son, Daniel, Don Gustavo. He’s just made a discovery.”

  “Well, then, pray come and sit down with us, for we must celebrate this ephemeral event,” he announced.

  “Ephemeral?” I whispered to my father.

  “Barceló can express himself only in frilly words,” my father whispered back. “Don’t say anything, or he’ll get carried away.”

  The lesser members of the coterie made room for us in their circle, and Barceló, who enjoyed flaunting his generosity in public, insisted on treating us.

  “How old is the lad?” inquired Barceló, inspecting me out of the corner of his eye.

  “Almost eleven,” I announced.

  Barceló flashed a sly smile.

  “In other words, ten. Don’t add on any years, you rascal. Life will see to that without your help.”

  A few of his chums grumbled in assent. Barceló signaled to a waiter of such remarkable decrepitude that he looked as if he should be declared a national landmark.

  “A cognac for my friend Sempere, from the good bottle, and a cinnamon milk shake for the young one—he’s a growing boy. Ah, and bring us some bits of ham, but spare us the delicacies you brought us earlier, eh? If we fancy rubber, we’ll call for Pirelli tires.”

  The waiter nodded and left, dragging his feet.

  “I hate to bring up the subject,” Barceló said, “but how can there be jobs? In this country nobody ever retires, not even after they’re dead. Just look at El Cid. I tell you, we’re a hopeless case.”

  He sucked on his cold pipe, eyes already scanning the book in my hands. Despite his pretentious façade and his verbosity, Barceló could smell good prey the way a wolf scents blood.

  “Let me see,” he said, feigning disinterest. “What have we here?”

  I glanced at my father. He nodded approvingly. Without further ado, I handed Barceló the book. The bookseller greeted it with expert hands. His pianist’s fingers quickly explored its texture, consistency, and condition. He located the page with the publication and printer’s notices and studied it with Holmesian flair. The rest watched in silence, as if awaiting a miracle, or permission to breathe again.

  “Carax. Interesting,” he murmured in an inscrutable tone.

  I held out my hand to recover the book. Barceló arched his eyebrows but gave it back with an icy smile.

  “Where did you find it, young man?”

  “It’s a secret,” I answered, knowing that my father would be smiling to himself. Barceló frowned and looked at my father. “Sempere, my dearest old friend, because it’s you and because of the high esteem I hold you in, and in honor of the long and profound friendship that unites us like brothers, let’s call it at forty duros, end of story.”

  “You’ll have to discuss that with my son,” my father pointed out. “The book is his.”

  Barceló granted me a wolfish smile. “What do you say, laddie? Forty duros isn’t bad for a first sale…. Sempere, this boy of yours will make a name for himself in the business.”

  The choir cheered his remark. Barceló gave me a triumphant look and pulled out his leather wallet. He ceremoniously counted out two hundred pesetas, which in those days was quite a fortune, and handed them to me. But I just shook my head. Barceló scowled.

  “Dear boy, greed is most certainly an ugly, not to say mortal, sin. Be sensible. Call me crazy, but I’ll raise that to sixty duros, and you can open a retirement fund. At your age you must start thinking of the future.”

  I shook my head again. Barceló shot a poisonous look at my father through his monocle.

  “Don’t look at me,” said my father. “I’m only here as an escort.”

  Barceló sighed and peered at me closely.

  “Let’s see, junior.What is it you want?”

  “What I want is to know who Julián Carax is and where I can find other books he’s written.”

  Barceló chuckled and pocketed his wallet, reconsidering his adversary.

  “Goodness, a scholar. Sempere, what do you feed the boy?”

  The bookseller leaned toward me confidentially, and for a second I thought he betrayed a look of respect that had not been there a few moments earlier.

  “We’ll make a deal,” he said. “Tomorrow, Sunday, in the afternoon, drop by the Ateneo library and ask for me. Bring your precious find with you so that I can examine it properly, and I’ll tell you what I know about Julián Carax. Quid pro quo.”

  “Quid pro what?”

  “Latin, young man. There’s no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds. Paraphrasing, it means that you can’t get something for nothing, but since I like you, I’m going to do you a favor.”

  The man’s oratory could kill flies in midair, but I suspected that if I wanted to find out anything about Julián Carax, I’d be well advised to stay on good terms with him. I proffered my most saintly smile in delight at his Latin outpourings.

  “Remember, tomorrow, in the Ateneo,” pronounced the bookseller. “But bring the book, or there’s no deal.”

  “Fine.”

  Our conversation slowly merged into the murmuring of the other members of the coffee set. The discussion turned to some documents found in the basement of El Escorial that hinted at the possibility that Don Miguel de Cervantes had in fact been the nom de plume of a large, hairy lady of letters from Toledo. Barceló seemed distracted, not tempted to claim a share in the debate. He remained quiet, observing me from his fake monocle with a masked smile. Or perhaps he was only looking at the book I held in my hands.

  ·2·

  THAT SUNDAY, CLOUDS SPILLED DOWN FROM THE SKY AND swamped the streets with a hot mist that made the thermometers on the walls perspire. Halfway through the afternoon, the temperature was already grazing the nineties as I set off toward Calle Canuda for my appointment with Barceló, carrying my book under my arm, beads of sweat on my forehead. The Ateneo was—and remains—one of the many places in Barcelona where the nineteenth century has not yet been served its eviction notice. A grand stone staircase led up from a palatial courtyard to a ghostly network of passageways and reading rooms. There, inventions such as the telephone, the wristwatch, and haste seemed futuristic anachronisms. The porter, or perhaps it was a statue in uniform, barely noticed my arrival. I glided up to the first floor, blessing the blades of a fan that swirled above the sleepy readers, melting like ice cubes over their books.

  Don Gustavo’s profile was outlined against the windows of a gallery that overlooked the building’s interior garden. Despite the almost tropical atmosphere, he sported his customary foppish attire, his monocle shining in the dark like a coin at the bottom of a well. Next to him was a figure swathed in a white alpaca dress who looked to me like an angel.

  When Barceló heard my footsteps, he half closed his eyes and signaled for me to come nearer. “Daniel, isn’t it?” asked the bookseller. “Did you bring the book?”

  I nodded on both counts and accepted the chair Barceló offered me next to him and his mysterious companion. For a while the bookseller only smiled placidly, taking no notice of my presence. I soon abandoned all hope of being introduced to the lady in white, whoever she might be. Barceló behaved as if she wasn’t there and neither of us could see her. I cast a sidelong glance at her, afraid of meeting her eyes, which stared vacantly into the distance. The
skin on her face and arms was pale, almost translucent. Her features were sharp, sketched with firm strokes and framed by a black head of hair that shone like damp stone. I figured she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows. I was trying to catch any sign of a pulse under her swan’s neck when I realized that Barceló was staring at me.

  “So are you going to tell me where you found the book?” he asked.

  “I would, but I promised my father I would keep the secret,” I explained.

  “I see. Sempere and his mysteries,” said Barceló. “I think I can guess where. You’ve hit the jackpot, son. That’s what I call finding a needle in a field of lilies. May I have a look?”

  I handed him the book, and Barceló took it with infinite care. “You’ve read it, I suppose.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I envy you. I’ve always thought that the best time to read Carax is when one still has a young heart and a blank soul. Did you know this was the last novel he wrote?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you know how many copies like this one there are in the market, Daniel?”

  “Thousands, I suppose.”

  “None,” Barceló specified. “Only yours. The rest were burned.”

  “Burned?”

  For an answer Barceló only smiled enigmatically while he leafed through the book, stroking the paper as if it were a rare silk. The lady in white turned slowly. Her lips formed a timid and trembling smile. Her eyes groped the void, pupils white as marble. I gulped. She was blind.

  “You don’t know my niece Clara, do you?” asked Barceló.

  I could only shake my head, unable to take my eyes off the woman with the china doll’s complexion and white eyes, the saddest eyes I have ever seen.

  “Actually, the expert on Julián Carax is Clara, which is why I brought her along,” said Barceló. “Come to think of it, I’ll retire to another room, if you don’t mind, to inspect this tome while you get to know each other. Is that all right?”

  I looked at him aghast. The scoundrel gave me a little pat on the back and left with my book under his arm.

  “You’ve impressed him, you know,” said the voice behind me.

  I turned to discover the faint smile of the bookseller’s niece. Her voice was pure crystal, transparent and so fragile I feared that her words would break if I interrupted them.

  “My uncle said he offered you a good sum of money for the Carax book, but you refused it,” Clara added. “You have earned his respect.”

  “All evidence to the contrary.” I sighed.

  I noticed that when she smiled, Clara leaned her head slightly to one side and her fingers played with a ring that looked like a wreath of sapphires.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Almost eleven,” I replied. “How old are you, Miss Clara?”

  Clara laughed at my cheeky innocence.

  “Almost twice your age, but even so, there’s no need to call me Miss Clara.”

  “You seem younger, miss,” I remarked, hoping that this would prove a good way out of my indiscretion.

  “I’ll trust you, then, because I don’t know what I look like,” she answered. “But if I seem younger to you, all the more reason to drop the ‘miss.’”

  “Whatever you say, Miss Clara.”

  I observed her hands spread like wings on her lap, the suggestion of her fragile waist under the alpaca folds, the shape of her shoulders, the extreme paleness of her neck, the line of her lips, which I would have given my soul to stroke with the tips of my fingers. Never before had I had a chance to examine a woman so closely and with such precision, yet without the danger of meeting her eyes.

  “What are you looking at?” asked Clara, not without a pinch of malice.

  “Your uncle says you’re an expert on Julián Carax, miss,” I improvised. My mouth felt dry.

  “My uncle would say anything if that bought him a few minutes alone with a book that fascinates him,” explained Clara. “But you must be wondering how someone who is blind can be a book expert.”

  “The thought had not crossed my mind.”

  “For someone who is almost eleven, you’re not a bad liar. Be careful, or you’ll end up like my uncle.”

  Fearful of making yet another faux pas, I decided to remain silent. I just sat gawking at her, imbibing her presence.

  “Here, come, get closer,” Clara said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Come closer, don’t be afraid. I won’t bite you.”

  I left my chair and went over to where she was sitting. The bookseller’s niece raised her right hand, trying to find me. Without quite knowing what to do, I, too, stretched out my hand, toward hers. She took it in her left hand and, without saying anything, offered me her right hand. Instinctively I understood what she was asking me to do, and guided her to my face. Her touch was both firm and delicate. Her fingers ran over my cheeks and cheekbones. I stood there motionless, hardly daring to breathe, while Clara read my features with her hands. While she did, she smiled to herself, and I noticed a slight movement of her lips, like a voiceless murmuring. I felt the brush of her hands on my forehead, on my hair and eyelids. She paused on my lips, following their shape with her forefinger and ring finger. Her fingers smelled of cinnamon. I swallowed, feeling my pulse race, and gave silent thanks there were no eyewitnesses to my blushing, which could have set a cigar alight a foot away.

  ·3·

  THAT AFTERNOON OF MIST AND DRIZZLE, CLARA BARCELÓ STOLE my heart, my breath, and my sleep. In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that wasn’t to be broken for years. While I stared, enraptured, she explained how she, too, had stumbled on the work of Julián Carax by chance in a village in Provence. Her father, a prominent lawyer linked to the Catalan president’s cabinet, had had the foresight to send his wife and daughter to the other side of the border at the start of the Civil War. Some considered his fear exaggerated, and maintained that nothing could possibly happen in Barcelona. In Spain, both the cradle and pinnacle of Christian civilization, barbarism was for anarchists—those people who rode bicycles and wore darned socks—and surely they wouldn’t get very far. But Clara’s father believed that nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds. He had a good understanding of history and knew that the future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press. For months he wrote a letter to his wife and daughter once a week. At first he did it from his office on Calle Diputación, but later his letters had no return address. In the end he wrote secretly, from a cell in Montjuïc Castle, into which no one saw him go and from which, like countless others, he would never come out.

  CLARA’S MOTHER READ THE LETTERS ALOUD, BARELY ABLE TO HOLD back her tears and skipping paragraphs that her daughter sensed without needing to hear them. Later, as her mother slept, Clara would convince her cousin Claudette to reread her father’s letters from start to finish. That is how Clara read, with borrowed eyes. Nobody ever saw her shed a tear, not even when the letters from the lawyer stopped coming, not even when news of the war made them all fear the worst.

  “My father knew from the start what was going to happen,” Clara explained. “He stayed close to his friends because he felt it was his duty. What killed him was his loyalty to people who, when their time came, betrayed him. Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.”

  Clara spoke these words with a hardness that seemed grown out of years of secret brooding. I gladly lost myself in her porcelain gaze and listened to her talk about things that at the time I could not possibly understand. She described people, scenes, and objects she had never seen with the detail and precision of a Flemish master. Her words evoked textures and echoes, the color of voices, the rhythm of
footsteps. She explained how, during her years of exile in France, she and her cousin Claudette had shared a private tutor. He was a man in his fifties, a bit of a tippler, who affected literary airs and boasted of being able to recite Virgil’sAeneid in Latin without an accent. The girls had nicknamed him “Monsieur Roquefort” by virtue of the peculiar aroma he exuded, despite the baths of eau de cologne in which he marinated his Rabelaisian anatomy. Notwithstanding his peculiarities (notably his firm and militant conviction that blood sausages and other pork delicacies provided a miracle cure for bad circulation and gout), Monsieur Roquefort was a man of refined taste. Since his youth he had traveled to Paris once a month to spice up his cultural savoir faire with the latest literary novelties, visit museums, and, rumor had it, allow himself a night out in the arms of a nymphet he had christened “Madame Bovary,” even though her name was Hortense and she limited her reading to twenty-franc notes. In the course of these educational escapades, Monsieur Roquefort frequently visited a secondhand bookstall positioned outside Notre-Dame. It was there, by chance, one afternoon in 1929, that he came across a novel by an unknown author, someone called Julián Carax. Always open to thenouveau, Monsieur Roquefort bought the book on a whim. The title seemed suggestive, and he was in the habit of reading something light on his train journey home. It was calledThe Red House, and on the back cover there was a blurred picture of the author, perhaps a photograph or a charcoal sketch. According to the biographical notes, Monsieur Julián Carax was twenty-seven, born with the century in Barcelona, and currently living in Paris; he wrote in French and worked at night as a professional pianist in a hostess bar. The blurb, written in the pompous, moldy style of the age, proclaimed that this was a first work of dazzling courage, the mark of a protean and trailblazing talent, and a sign of hope for the future of all of European letters. In spite of such solemn claims, the synopsis that followed suggested that the story contained some vaguely sinister elements slowly marinated in saucy melodrama, which, to the eyes of Monsieur Roquefort, was always a plus: after the classics what he most enjoyed were tales of crime, boudoir intrigue, and questionable conduct.