The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten 1)

“The police are lying.”

Isaac assented. “I know.”

“I can assure you—”

“There’s no need, Daniel. I know you’re telling the truth,” said Isaac, pulling out an envelope from his coat pocket.

“The afternoon before she died, Nuria came to see me, as she used to do years ago. I remember we used to go and eat in a café on Calle Guardia, where I would take her when she was a child. We always talked about books, about old books. She would sometimes tell me things about her work, trifles, the sort of things one tells a stranger on a bus…. Once she told me she was sorry she’d been a disappointment to me. I asked her where she’d got that ridiculous idea. ‘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.”

“Isaac, with all due respect, you’ve been drinking like a fish, and you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man. I know enough to understand that my own daughter never trusted me. She trusted more in you, Daniel, and she’d seen you only a couple of times.”

“I can assure you you’re wrong.”

“The last afternoon we saw each other, she brought me this envelope. She was restless, worried about something that she didn’t want to talk about. She asked me to keep this envelope and, should anything happen, to give it to you.”

“Should anything happen?”

“Those were her words. She looked so distressed that I suggested we go together to the police, that, whatever the problem, we’d find a solution. Then she said that the police was the last place she could go to for help. I begged her to let me know what it was about, but she said she had to leave and made me promise that I’d give you this envelope if she didn’t come back for it within a couple of days. She asked me not to open it.”

Isaac handed me the envelope. It was open. “I lied to her, as usual,” he said.

I examined the envelope. It contained a wad of handwritten sheets of paper. “Have you read them?” I asked.

The old man nodded slowly.

“What do they say?”

The old man looked up. His lips were trembling. He seemed to have aged a hundred years since the last time I’d seen him.

“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.”

I put the envelope into my coat pocket.

“I’m going to ask you to leave me alone here, with her, if you don’t mind. A while ago, as I was reading those pages, it seemed to me that I was seeing her again. However hard I try, I can only remember her the way she was as a little girl. She was very quiet then, you know. She looked at everything pensively, and never laughed. What she liked best were stories, and I don’t think any child has ever learned to read so early. She used to say she wanted to be an author and write encyclopedias and treatises on history and philosophy. Her mother said it was all my fault. 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.”

“Isaac, I don’t think it’s a good idea to be on your own tonight. Why don’t you come home with me? Spend the night with us, and that way you can keep my father company.”

Isaac shook his head again. “I have things to do, Daniel. You go home and read those pages. They belong to you.”

The old man looked away, and I took a few steps toward the door. I was in the doorway when Isaac’s voice called me, barely a whisper.

“Daniel?”

“Yes?”

“Take great care.”

When I got out into the street, it seemed as if darkness were creeping along the paving in pursuit of me. I quickened my pace and didn’t slow down until I reached the apartment on Calle Santa Ana. I found my father in his armchair with an open book on his lap. It was a photograph album. On seeing me, he got up with an expression of great relief.

“I was beginning to get worried,” he said. “How was the funeral?”

I shrugged, and my father nodded gravely.

“I got a bit of dinner ready for you. If you like, I could warm it up and—”

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry. I had a bite to eat out there.”