More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 27 - December 31, 2024
‘There are worse prisons than words,’ I murmured.
I wasn’t the one who had to let Penélope go. Her last words hadn’t been for a stranger, but for a man she had loved in silence for twenty years: Julián Carax.
empty and tattooed by penknives with the names of lovers, with insults and promises.
‘The dead never go to their own funeral.’
‘Perhaps she loved me, in her own way, as I loved her, in mine. But we didn’t know one another. Perhaps because I never allowed her to know me, or I never took any steps towards getting to know her. We spent our lives like two strangers who see each other every single day and greet one another out of politeness. And I think she probably died without forgiving me.’
‘Daniel, you’re young and you try hard, but even though I’ve had a bit to drink and I don’t know what I’m saying, you still haven’t learned to lie enough to fool an old man whose heart has been broken by misfortune.’
“From your eyes, Father, from your eyes,” she said. Not once did it occur to me that perhaps I’d been an even greater disappointment to her. Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they’re there to make our most absurd dreams come true.’
‘It’s the story you were looking for, Daniel. The story of a woman I never knew, even though she bore my name and my blood. Now it belongs to you.’
She said that Nuria adored me and because she thought her father loved only books, she wanted to write books to make her father love her.’
Perhaps she had been trying to find in these words the peace and safety that life had not granted her.
‘While you’re working, you don’t have to look life in the eye.’
Julián Carax possessed the most charming smile in the world. It was all that was left of him.
In the light of dawn, he seemed like an aged child. He had shaved and put on what I imagined must be his only decent outfit, a cream-coloured cotton suit that looked worn but elegant.
‘Cabestany is a pirate, but even he knows that you can’t see Paris in two days, or in two months, or even in two years.’ ‘I can’t spend two years in Paris, Julián.’ He looked at me for a long while, without speaking, and then he smiled. ‘Why not? Is there someone waiting for you?’
asked him why he had never returned to Barcelona in search of Penélope. He fell into a long, deep silence, and when I looked at his face in the dark, I saw it was lined with tears.
know I found his lips and let him caress me without realizing that I, too, was crying and didn’t know why. That dawn, and all the ones that followed in the two weeks I spent with Julián, we made love to one another on the floor, never saying a word.
I would look into his eyes and know, without any need to question him, that he still loved Penélope. I remember that during those days I learned to hate that seventeen-year-old girl (for Penélope was always seventeen to me) whom I had never met and who now haunted my dreams.
All I know is that those two weeks I spent with Julián were the only time in my life when I felt, for once, that I was myself; when I understood with the hopeless clarity of what cannot be explained that I would never be able to love another man the way I loved Julián, even if I spent the rest of my days trying.
According to the pawnbroker, it had once belonged to Victor Hugo.
I watched her walking away down the street, and at that moment I understood that Julián would never be mine.
He undressed me without saying anything, and we made love for the last time. When he asked me why I was crying, I told him they were tears of joy. Later, when Julián went down to buy some food, I packed my bags and placed the case with the pen on his typewriter. I put the manuscript of the novel in my suitcase and left before Julián returned.
‘Vous avez du poison au coeur, mademoiselle.’
The train was already leaving when I looked out the window and caught a glimpse of Julián’s silhouette on the platform, in the same place I’d seen him for the first time. I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again until we had lost sight of the station and that bewitching city to which I could never return.
It was my twenty-fourth birthday, and I knew that the best part of my life was already behind me.
about him, I wouldn’t know what to say. When we did meet again, I didn’t need to tell him anything. Miquel just looked me in the eyes and knew. He seemed to me thinner than before my trip to Paris; his face had an almost unhealthy pallor, which I attributed to the enormous workload with which he punished himself. He
‘Making money isn’t hard in itself,’ he complained. ‘What’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to.’
That is how we became lovers, out of desperation. I saw in his eyes what I would have wanted to see in Julián’s. I felt that by giving myself to him I was taking revenge on Julián and Penélope and on everything that had been denied to me. Miquel, who was ill with desire and loneliness, knew that our love was a farce, but even so he couldn’t let me go.
He would then joke bitterly that, after all, we’d turned into the perfect married couple in record time. We were hurting one another through spite and cowardice.
She only had to look at Antoni Fortuny to know that she would never be able to love him. Not the way she dreamed she would love somebody one day.
Aldaya had wolfish eyes, hungry and sharp; the eyes of a man who knew where and when to strike. He kissed her hand slowly, caressing her knuckles with his lips. Just as the hatter exuded kindness and warmth, Don Ricardo radiated cruelty and power.
Nothing had ever terrified her so much as sensing that animality under her own skin, the prey’s instinctive recognition of the predator.
‘I haven’t stopped thinking about you all week. Tell me you haven’t done the same and I’ll let you go, and you won’t ever see me again,’ said Ricardo. Sophie shook her head. Their secret meetings lasted ninety-six days. They met in the afternoons, always in that empty apartment on the corner of Diputación and Rambla de Cataluña. Tuesdays and Thursdays, at three.
The hatter didn’t see the marks on her skin, the cuts and burns that peppered her body. The hatter didn’t see the despair in her smile, in her meekness.
Perhaps for that reason, she accepted his promise of marriage. By then she already suspected that she was carrying Aldaya’s child, but was afraid of telling him, almost
Julián, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time.
It didn’t occur to him for an instant that Julián secretly despised him, that his affection was a sham, only a pretext to be close to Penélope. To possess her completely and utterly. They did resemble one another in that.
He saw his own hand in Julián’s hand, the hand that had plunged the dagger deep into his heart. He didn’t yet know it, but the day he ordered Penélope to be locked up in the third-floor bedroom was the day he began to die. Everything
Penélope Aldaya gave birth to a stillborn baby boy on 26 September 1919.
If a doctor had been present, perhaps he would have been able to stop the haemorrhaging that took Penélope’s life, while she shrieked and scratched at the locked door, on the other side of which her father wept in silence and her mother cowered, staring at her husband. If
Fumero was said to be death incarnate.
He revered mosquitoes and all insects in general. He admired their discipline, their fortitude and organization. There was no laziness in them, no irreverence or racial degeneration.
Fumero took over his post with pride, knowing that he had done the right thing by pushing him, for Dirán was getting too old for the job.
He was the kindest and frailest man I had ever known, my only friend.
The tone was colder and more distant than before. But my attempts at hating him were unsuccessful. I began to believe that Julián was not a man, he was an illness.
Sometimes I’d catch him looking at me with a gentle smile, as if the very sight of my presence were his greatest treasure.
silently blessed every minute we spent together, and every night he would fall asleep embracing me, while I hid the tears caused by the anger I felt at having been incapable of loving that man the way he loved me, incapable of giving him what I had so pointlessly abandoned at Julián’s feet.
If some day these pages should reach your hands and you should judge me, as I have judged myself when writing them, looking at my reflection in this mirror of remorse, remember me like this, Daniel.
A man dressed in black, with somewhat nondescript features and thin lips, like an open scar. His eyes were black and expressionless, fish eyes. Before he disappeared down the stairs, he looked up into the darkness. I leaned against the wall, holding my breath. The visitor remained there for a few moments, as if he could smell me, licking his lips with a doglike grin.
He’d gone out in search of Julián and would soon bring him home. He ended the note by saying that he loved me. The note fell from my hands. Then I noticed that before leaving, Miquel had removed his things from the desk, as if he wasn’t planning to use it anymore. I knew that I would never see him again.
