The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1)

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

‘This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

I lay in the bluish half-light with the book on my chest and listened to the murmur of the sleeping city. My eyes began to close, but I resisted. I did not want to lose the story’s spell or bid farewell to its characters just yet.

‘Ephemeral?’

Don’t add on any years, you rascal. Life will see to that without your help.’

but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless.

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.

That is how Clara read, with borrowed eyes.

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.’

One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn’t have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.

In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took away mothers, beggars, or ninety-year-old neighbours, like a hellish lottery. But I couldn’t absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for a walk

it occurred to me that perhaps the papier-mâché world that I accepted as real was only a stage setting.

in those stolen years you never knew when the end of childhood was due.

New details, strands of images and fantasy appeared between the lines, and new shapes revealed themselves, like the structure of a building looked at from different angles.

She was twenty-eight, but I always thought she carried ten more years on her back, even if they showed only in her eyes.

‘What do you know about Clara?’ ‘I dare say I know more than you, and that you’d do best to forget her, although I know you won’t. I have been sixteen too. . .

He looked like some grey government accountant who had been sleeping in the same suit for the last fifteen years. He stretched out his hand, and I shook it. ‘Fermín Romero de Torres, currently unemployed. Pleased to meet you.’

Find out whether she’s happy. And whether she’s forgiven her father.’

‘Presents are made for the pleasure of the one who gives them, not for the merits of those who receive them,’ said my father. ‘Besides, it can’t be returned. Open it.’

The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it’s much the same.’

Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say - it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.’

and the family became strangers living under the same roof, like so many other families in the vast city.

If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is to win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping which steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.’

Trust me: I wrote the book on taking shit from everybody and his mother.

The leaves on the orange trees in the cloister shimmered like silver tears, and the sound of the fountain echoed through the arches.

I asked myself how I could feel so detached from her and at the same time read every little detail of her lips.

She shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyes as if she were trying to catch words that were escaping from her.

‘Someone once said that the moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you’ve already stopped loving that person forever,’

‘Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as they wish us to be.’

I told her how, until that moment, I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

‘So that I can deserve her. You cannot understand such things right now, because you’re young. But in good time you’ll see that sometimes what matters isn’t what one gives but what one gives up.

It’s like going to heaven, but without dying.’

‘Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you,’

He has the heart of a spider. And if you don’t believe me, time will tell. I wonder what he dreams about. . . ?’

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home

‘I believe that nothing happens by chance. Deep down, things have their own secret plan, even though we don’t understand it. Like you finding that novel by Julián Carax in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, or the fact that you and I are here now, in this house that belonged to the Aldayas. It’s all part of something we cannot comprehend, something that owns us.’

He hadn’t told me anything about that strange trembling of the hands that turned every button, every zip, into a superhuman challenge. Nor had he told me about that bewitchment of pale, tremulous skin, that first brush of the lips, or about the mirage that seemed to shimmer from every pore of the skin. He didn’t tell me any of that because he knew that the miracle happened only once, and when it did, it spoke in a language of secrets that, were they disclosed, would vanish again forever.

My friend stroked her face and her forehead. She appreciated the touch of another skin like a purring cat. I felt a lump in my throat.

‘Then how did she know she was going to marry him?’ ‘Because she’d seen him. In her dreams.’

The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

When that mysterious boy called Julián came to the house, Jacinta noticed that, from the very first moment, a current flowed between him and Penélope. They were joined by a bond, similar to the one that joined her to Penélope,

He began to fear that if he ever did come to deserve Penélope, there would be nothing left of the Julián who saw her the first time.

watching a love grow between them such as she had never known, which had always been denied her.

plagued by nightmares in which that troubled-looking boy threw himself on Penélope with the cold and indifferent brutality of some strange insect.

They learned each other’s bodies by heart

much he was going to miss his friend. ‘And keep your dreams,’ said Miquel. ‘You never know when you might need them.’

There are people you remember and people you dream of. For me, Nuria Montfort was like a mirage:

I knew that one day she would return to me, in the months or years to come, and that I would always relive her memory in the touch of a stranger, in the recollection of images that no longer belonged to me.

My mother lay buried only a hundred yards from the path along which I walked. With every step I took, I could feel the cold, the emptiness, and the fury of that place; the horror of its silence, of the faces trapped in old photographs abandoned to the company of candles and dead flowers.

‘She was delirious, but I think she was referring to you. At one point she said there were worse prisons than words. Then, before she died, she asked me to tell you to let her go.’