The Shadow of the Wind Read Online Free PDF Page A

change, the bookseller went on, Carax had been involved in a duel in Père Lachaise cemetery. The circumstances surrounding this event were unclear. All the bookseller knew was that the duel had taken place at dawn on the day Carax was due to be married, and that the bridegroom had never made it to the church.
    There was an opinion to match every taste: some maintained he had died in the duel and his body had been left abandoned in an unmarked grave; others, more optimistic, preferred to believe that Carax was tangled up in some shady affair that had forced him to abandon his fiancée at the altar, flee from Paris, and return to Barcelona. The nameless grave could never be found, and shortly afterward a new version of the facts began to circulate: Julián Carax, who had been plagued by misfortune, had died in his native city in the most dire straits. The girls in the brothel where he played the piano had organized a collection to pay for a decent burial, but when the money order reached Barcelona, the body had already been buried in a common grave, along with beggars and people with no name who turned up floating in the harbor waters or died of cold at the entrance to the subway.
    Â 
    I F ONLY BECAUSE HE LIKED TO OPPOSE GENERAL VIEWS, M ONSIEUR Roquefort did not forget Carax. Eleven years after his discovery of The Red House, he decided to lend the novel to his two pupils, hoping that perhaps that strange book might encourage them to acquire the reading habit. Clara and Claudette were by then teenagers with hormones coursing through their veins, obsessed by the world winking at them from beyond the windows of the study. Despite the tutor’s best efforts, the girls had until then proved immune to the charms of the classics, Aesop’s fables, or the immortal verse of Dante Alighieri. Fearing that his contract might be terminated if Clara’s mother discovered that he was forming them into two illiterate, featherbrained young women, Monsieur Roquefort presented them with Carax’s novel dressed up as a love story, which was at least half true.

· 4 ·
    N EVER BEFORE HAD I FELT TRAPPED, SEDUCED, AND CAUGHT UP in a story,” Clara explained, “the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. Have you ever kissed a girl, Daniel?”
    My brain seized up; my saliva turned to sawdust.
    â€œWell, you’re still very young. But it’s that same feeling, that first-time spark that you never forget. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn’t matter to anyone changed my life.”
    By then I was hopelessly dumbstruck, at the mercy of this creature whose words and charms I had neither means nor desire to resist. I wished that she would never stop speaking, that her voice would wrap itself around me forever, and that her uncle would never return to break the spell of that moment that belonged only to me.
    â€œFor years I looked for other books by Julián Carax,” Clara went on. “I asked in libraries, in bookshops, in schools. Always in vain. No one had ever heard of him or of his books. I couldn’t understand it. Later on, Monsieur Roquefort heard a rumor, a strange story about someone who went around libraries and bookshops looking for works by Julián Carax. If he found any, he would buy them, steal them, or get them by some other means, after which he would immediately set fire to them. Nobody knew who he was or why he did it. Another mystery to add to Carax’s own enigma. In