Shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón Read Free Book Online

side of this forest, overlooking the square. Draped in a diaphanous turquoise-blue cotton dress, the object of my confused desire was playing the piano beneath the weak light from the rose window. Clara played badly, with no sense of rhythm and mistaking half the notes, but to me her serenade was liquid heaven. I saw her sitting up straight at the keyboard, with a half smile and her head tilted to one side, and she seemed like a celestial vision. I was about to clear my throat to indicate my presence, but the whiff of cologne betrayed me. Clara suddenly stopped her playing, and an embarrassed smile lit up her face.
    'For a moment I thought you were my uncle,' she said. 'He has forbidden me to play Mompou, because he says that what I do with him is a sacrilege.'
    The only Mompou I knew was a gaunt priest with a tendency to flatulence who taught us physics and chemistry at school. The association of ideas seemed to me both grotesque and downright improbable.
    'Well, I think you play beautifully.'
    'No I don't. My uncle is a real music enthusiast, and he's even hired a music teacher to mend my ways - a young composer who shows a lot of promise called Adrian Neri. He's studied in Paris and Vienna. You've got to meet him. He's writing a symphony that is going to premiere with the Barcelona City Orchestra - his uncle sits on the management board. He's a genius.'
    'The uncle or the nephew?'
    'Don't be wicked, Daniel. I'm sure you'll fall for Adrian.'
    More likely he'll fall on me like a grand piano plummeting down from the seventh floor, I thought.
    'Would you like a snack?' Clara offered. 'Bernarda makes the most breathtaking cinnamon sponge cakes.'
    We took our afternoon snack like royalty, wolfing down everything the maid put before us. I had no idea about the protocol for this unfamiliar occasion and was not sure how to behave. Clara, who always seemed to know what I was thinking, suggested that I read from The Shadow of the Wind whenever I liked and that I might as well start at the beginning. And so, trying to sound like one of those pompous voices on Radio Nacional that recited patriotic vignettes after the midday Angelus, I threw myself into revisiting the text of the novel. My voice, rather stiff at first, slowly became more relaxed, and soon I forgot myself and was submerged once more into the narrative, discovering cadences and turns of phrase that flowed like musical motifs, riddles made of timbre and pauses I had not noticed during my first reading. 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. I read for about an hour, getting through five chapters, until my throat felt dry and half a dozen clocks chimed throughout the apartment, reminding me that it was getting late. I closed the book and observed that Clara was smiling at me calmly.
    'It reminds me a bit of The Red House,' she said. 'But this story seems less sombre.'
    'Don't you believe it,' I said. 'This is just the beginning. Later on, things get complicated.'
    'You have to go, don't you?' Clara asked.
    'I'm afraid so. It's not that I want to, but...'
    'If you have nothing else to do, you could come back tomorrow,' she suggested. 'But I don't want to take advantage of you.
    'Six o'clock?' I offered. 'That way we'll have more time.'
    That meeting in the music room of the Plaza Real apartment was the first of many more throughout the summer of 1945 and the years to follow. Soon my visits to the Barcelos became almost daily, except for Tuesdays and Thursdays, when Clara had music lessons with Adrian Neri. I spent long hours there, and in time I memorized every room, every passageway, and every plant in Don Gustavo's forest. The Shadow of the Wind lasted us about a fortnight, but we had no trouble in finding successors with which to fill our reading hours. Barcelo owned a fabulous library, and, for want of more Julian Carax titles, we ambled