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“Actually, the expert on Julián Carax is Clara, which is why I brought her along,” said Barceló. “Come to think of it, I’ll retire to another room, if you don’t mind, to inspect this tome while you get to know each other. Is that all right?”
I looked at him aghast. The scoundrel gave me a little pat on the back and left with my book under his arm.
“You’ve impressed him, you know,” said the voice behind me.
I turned to discover the faint smile of the bookseller’s niece. Her voice was pure crystal, transparent and so fragile I feared that her words would break if I interrupted them.
“My uncle said he offered you a good sum of money for the Carax book, but you refused it,” Clara added. “You have earned his respect.”
“All evidence to the contrary.” I sighed.
I noticed that when she smiled, Clara leaned her head slightly to one side and her fingers played with a ring that looked like a wreath of sapphires.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Almost eleven,” I replied. “How old are you, Miss Clara?”
Clara laughed at my cheeky innocence.
“Almost twice your age, but even so, there’s no need to call me Miss Clara.”
“You seem younger, miss,” I remarked, hoping that this would prove a good way out of my indiscretion.
“I’ll trust you, then, because I don’t know what I look like,” she answered. “But if I seem younger to you, all the more reason to drop the ‘miss.’”
“Whatever you say, Miss Clara.”
I observed her hands spread like wings on her lap, the suggestion of her fragile waist under the alpaca folds, the shape of her shoulders, the extreme paleness of her neck, the line of her lips, which I would have given my soul to stroke with the tips of my fingers. Never before had I had a chance to examine a woman so closely and with such precision, yet without the danger of meeting her eyes.
“What are you looking at?” asked Clara, not without a pinch of malice.
“Your uncle says you’re an expert on Julián Carax, miss,” I improvised. My mouth felt dry.
“My uncle would say anything if that bought him a few minutes alone with a book that fascinates him,” explained Clara. “But you must be wondering how someone who is blind can be a book expert.”
“The thought had not crossed my mind.”
“For someone who is almost eleven, you’re not a bad liar. Be careful, or you’ll end up like my uncle.”
Fearful of making yet another faux pas, I decided to remain silent. I just sat gawking at her, imbibing her presence.
“Here, come, get closer,” Clara said.
“Pardon me?”
“Come closer, don’t be afraid. I won’t bite you.”
I left my chair and went over to where she was sitting. The bookseller’s niece raised her right hand, trying to find me. Without quite knowing what to do, I, too, stretched out my hand, toward hers. She took it in her left hand and, without saying anything, offered me her right hand. Instinctively I understood what she was asking me to do, and guided her to my face. Her touch was both firm and delicate. Her fingers ran over my cheeks and cheekbones. I stood there motionless, hardly daring to breathe, while Clara read my features with her hands. While she did, she smiled to herself, and I noticed a slight movement of her lips, like a voiceless murmuring. I felt the brush of her hands on my forehead, on my hair and eyelids. She paused on my lips, following their shape with her forefinger and ring finger. Her fingers smelled of cinnamon. I swallowed, feeling my pulse race, and gave silent thanks there were no eyewitnesses to my blushing, which could have set a cigar alight a foot away.
·3·
THAT AFTERNOON OF MIST AND DRIZZLE, CLARA BARCELÓ STOLE my heart, my breath, and my sleep. In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that wasn’t to be broken for years. While I stared, enraptured, she explained how she, too, had stumbled on the work of Julián Carax by chance in a village in Provence. Her father, a prominent lawyer linked to the Catalan president’s cabinet, had had the foresight to send his wife and daughter to the other side of the border at the start of the Civil War. Some considered his fear exaggerated, and maintained that nothing could possibly happen in Barcelona. In Spain, both the cradle and pinnacle of Christian civilization, barbarism was for anarchists—those people who rode bicycles and wore darned socks—and surely they wouldn’t get very far. But Clara’s father believed that nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds. He had a good understanding of history and knew that the future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press. For months he wrote a letter to his wife and daughter once a week. At first he did it from his office on Calle Diputación, but later his letters had no return address. In the end he wrote secretly, from a cell in Montjuïc Castle, into which no one saw him go and from which, like countless others, he would never come out.
CLARA’S MOTHER READ THE LETTERS ALOUD, BARELY ABLE TO HOLD back her tears and skipping paragraphs that her daughter sensed without needing to hear them. Later, as her mother slept, Clara would convince her cousin Claudette to reread her father’s letters from start to finish. That is how Clara read, with borrowed eyes. Nobody ever saw her shed a tear, not even when the letters from the lawyer stopped coming, not even when news of the war made them all fear the worst.
“My father knew from the start what was going to happen,” Clara explained. “He stayed close to his friends because he felt it was his duty. What killed him was his loyalty to people who, when their time came, betrayed him. Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.”
Clara spoke these words with a hardness that seemed grown out of years of secret brooding. I gladly lost myself in her porcelain gaze and listened to her talk about things that at the time I could not possibly understand. She described people, scenes, and objects she had never seen with the detail and precision of a Flemish master. Her words evoked textures and echoes, the color of voices, the rhythm of
