bookworm-returning

[bookworm-returning]

[bookworm-returning]

[bookworm-returning]

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 yet rendered them with the detail and precision of a Flemish master. Her words evoked textures and echoes, the colour of voices, the rhythm of footsteps.

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

“Some things can only be seen in the shadows”

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

The Barcelona she encountered on her return was not the place she had left behind. She discovered a city of shadows, one no longer inhabited by my father, although every corner was haunted by his memory.

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

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 guessed 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.

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 had ever seen.

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

When I was not at school or with Clara, I devoted my time to helping my father in the bookshop - tidying up the storeroom at the back of the shop, delivering orders, running errands, or even serving regular customers. My father complained that I didn't really put my mind or my heart into the work.

I, in turn, replied that I spent my whole life working there and I couldn't see what he could possibly complain about. Many nights, when sleep eluded me, I'd lie awake remembering the intimacy, the small world we had both shared during the years following my mother's death, the years of Victor Hugo's pen and the tin trains. I recalled them as years of peace and sadness, a world that was vanishing and that had begun to evaporate on the dawn when my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Time played on the opposite team.

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

“Is it true that during the war people were taken to Montjuic Castle and were never seen again?”

My father finished his spoonful of soup unperturbed and looked dosely at me, his brief smile slipping away from his lips.

“Who told you that? Barceló?“

No. Tomas Aguilar, He sometimes tells stories at school.' My father nodded slowly.

"When there's a war, things happen that are very hard to explain, Daniel. Often even I don't know what they really mean. Sometimes it's best to leave things alone.'

He sighed and sipped his soup with little relish. I watched him without saying a word.

*Before your mother died, she made me promise that I would never talk to you about the war, that I wouldn't let you remember any of what happened.

I didn't know how to answer. My father half closed his eyes, as if he were searching for something in the air - looks, silences, or perhaps my mother - to corroborate what he had just said.

"Sometimes I think I've been wrong to listen to her. I don't know.'

'It doesn't matter, Dad...'

“No, it does matter, Daniel. Nothing is ever the same after a war. And yes, it's true that lots of people who went into that castle never came out.”

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

Childhood devotions make unfaithful and fickle lovers

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

Women have an infallible instinct for knowing when a man has fallen madly in love with them, especially when the male in question is both young and a complete dunce. I fulfilled all the requirements for Clara Barceló to send me packing, but I preferred to think that her blindness afforded me a margin for error and that my crime - my complete and pathetic devotion to a woman twice my age, my intelligence, and my height - would remain in the dark. I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

Sometimes, while I was in the back room wrapping up parcels or preparing an order, I would hear a customer joking with my father.

'What you need is a good woman, Sempere. These days there are plenty of good-looking widows around, in the prime of their life, if you see what I mean. A young lady would sort out your life, my friend, and take twenty years off you. What a good pair of breasts can't do ...'. My father never responded to these insinuations, but I found them increasingly sensible. Once, at dinnertime, which had become a battleground of silences and stolen glances, I brought up the subject. I thought that if I were the one to suggest it, it would make things easier.

My father was an attractive man, always clean and neat in appearance, and I knew for a fact that more than one lady in the neighbourhood approved of him and would have welcomed more than just his reading suggestions.

'It's been very easy for you to find a substitute for your mother,' he answered bitterly. 'But for me there is no such person, and I have no interest at all in looking.*

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

When Barceló returned wearing a feline smile, two hours had passed. To me they had seemed like two minutes. The bookseller handed me the book and winked.

“Have a good look at it, little dumpling. I don't want you coming back to me saying I've switched it, eh?”

“I trust you” I said.

“Stuff and nonsense. The last man who said that to me (a tourist who was convinced that Hemingway had invented the fabada stew during the San Fermin bull run) bought a copy of Hamlet signed by Shakespeare in ballpoint, imagine that. So keep your eyes peeled. In the book business you can't even trust the index.”

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

“Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.”

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later - no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget - we will return.

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

🥰 New books 🥰

[bookworm-returning]

Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they only have us. Do you think you’ll be able to keep such a secret?

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[bookworm-returning]

I roamed through galleries filled with hundreds, thousands of volumes. After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered, while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

The shadow of the wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón