The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón Read Free Book Online Page B

could see. We always ended up in a dairy shop on Calle Petritxol, sharing a bowl of whipped cream or a cup of hot chocolate with sponge fingers. Sometimes people would look at us askance, and more than one know-it-all waiter referred to her as “your older sister,” but I paid no attention to their taunts and insinuations. Other times, I don’t know whether out of malice or morbidity, Clara confided in me, telling me far-fetched secrets that I was not sure how to take. One of her favorite topics concerned a stranger, a person who sometimes came up to her when she was alone on the street and spoke to her in a hoarse voice. This mysterious person, who never mentioned his name, asked her questions about Don Gustavo and even about me. Once he had stroked her throat. Such stories tormented me mercilessly. Another time Clara told me she had begged the supposed stranger to let her read his face with her hands. He did not reply, which she took as a yes. When she raised her hands to his face, he stopped her suddenly, but she still managed to feel what she thought was leather.
    â€œAs if he wore a leather mask,” she said.
    â€œYou’re making that up, Clara.”
    Clara would swear again and again that it was true, and I would give up, tortured by the image of that phantom who found pleasure in caressing her swan’s neck—and heaven knows what else—while all I could do was long for it. Had I paused to reflect, I would have understood that my devotion to Clara brought me no more than suffering. Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most. During that bleak postwar summer, the only thing I feared was the arrival of the new school term, when I would no longer be able to spend all day with Clara.
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    B Y DINT OF SEEING ME SO OFTEN AROUND THE HOUSE, B ERNARDA, whose severe appearance concealed a doting maternal instinct, became fond of me and, in her own manner, decided to adopt me.
    â€œYou can tell this boy hasn’t got a mother, sir,” she would say to Barceló. “I feel so sorry for him, poor little mite.”
    Bernarda had arrived in Barcelona shortly after the war, fleeing from poverty and from a father who on a good day would beat her up and tell her she was stupid, ugly, and a slut, and on a bad one would corner her in the pigsty, drunk, and fondle her until she sobbed with terror—at which point he’d let her go, calling her prudish and stuck up, like her mother. Barceló had come across Bernarda by chance when she worked in a vegetable stall in the Borne Market and, following his instinct, had offered her a post in his household.
    â€œOurs will be a brand-new Pygmalion, ” he announced. “You shall be my Eliza and I’ll be your Professor Higgins.”
    Bernarda, whose literary appetite was more than satisfied with the church newsletter, looked at him out of the corner of her eye.
    â€œOne might be poor and ignorant, but very decent, too,” she said.
    Barceló was not exactly George Bernard Shaw, but even if he had not managed to endow his pupil with the eloquence and spirit of a salon dame, his efforts had refined Bernarda and taught her the manners and speech of a provincial maid. She was twenty-eight, but I always thought she carried ten more years on her back, even if they showed only in her eyes. She was a serial churchgoer with an ecstatic devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes. Every morning she went to the eight o’clock service at the basilica of Santa María del Mar, and she confessed no less than three times a week, four in warm weather. Don Gustavo, who was a confirmed agnostic (which Bernarda suspected might be a respiratory condition, like asthma, but afflicting only refined gentlemen), deemed it mathematically impossible that the maid should be able to sin sufficiently to keep up that schedule of confession and contrition.
    â€œYou’re