Sunday Pages: "The Shadow of the Wind"

A novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Dear Reader,

Coincidences are the scars of fate.

So writes the reclusive novelist Julián Carax, the animating force of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, a novel set in Barcelona in the two decades after the end of the Second World War.

Only one copy exists of Carax’s novel, also called The Shadow of the Wind, and ten-year-old Daniel, the narrator and protagonist of our The Shadow of the Wind, selects it at random from The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. All that follows follows because he chose that book, rather than something else he might have found there (one of my early novels, say).

Coincidence? Fate?

It was fate, or perhaps coincidence, that brought us to Barcelona. Spain was not on my short list of places to go, or my wife’s. But friends of ours had rented a house for a month in Vilanova i La Geltrú, a charming beach town south of the city, just past the better-known Sitches, and invited us to stay for a few days. Two round-trip tickets from Newark to Barcelona cost 150,000 miles; I had 160,000. So off we went, for our first big trip à deux in many years.

Other friends who’d visited the city gave me suggestions of where to go, what to see, where to eat. For various reasons, we wound up doing none of those things. My approach to European travel is usually to make a list of stuff to see and do and then go see it and do it. But this time, I wanted to have no agenda. I wanted to relax, and to let the city, and Catalonia, reveal itself to us.

The Shadow of the Wind was recommended by a friend a few days before the trip, and came in the mail the day we were set to leave. That, too, was coincidence, or maybe fate. It’s fun to read a book set in a foreign city while you’re in that foreign city. The geography becomes more familiar. The reading experience is enhanced.

And Barcelona, founded by the Phoenicians long before the Romans made it one of their ports, is full of ghosts, as all ancient place are. More recently, the city became prosperous in the nineteenth century, on account of the plantations its rich citizens owned in Cuba. That influx of wealth created the city’s elite, the old money that controlled Barcelona until the end of the Great War, and that Zafón speaks about here:

“Those were different times, of course, and during those days power was still concentrated within families and dynasties. That world has vanished—the last few remains swept away with the fall of the Republic, for the better, I suppose. All that is left of it are the names on the letterheads of companies, banks, and faceless consortiums. Like all cities, Barcelona is the sum of its ruins. The great glories so many people are proud of—palaces, factories, and monuments, the emblems with which we identify—are nothing more than relics of an extinguished civilization.”

We didn’t want to do anything. We didn’t want an itinerary. We wanted to walk around aimlessly, go to the beach or to the hotel’s rooftop pool, drink rosé and Aperol spritzes, eat, and let the day take us where it took us.

Our friend Bianca suggested that, on the way from Vilanova to Barcelona, we visit Monserrat. I’d heard the word before, but knew nothing about the place—and I may have been conflating it in my mind with Monterrey. The thought of going somewhere else, anywhere else, was exhausting. I’d have to be convinced.

The dialogue went something like this:

BIANCA
Monserrat is amazing. It’s a monastery on top of this mountain range, and the chapel houses an ancient artifact called La Moreneta, or the Black Madonna. It’s an incredibly beautiful place, and there are some great trails on top of the mountain where you can go hiking.

ME
Meh.

BIANCA
Also, they filmed part of Andor there.

ME
When do we leave?

Despite Bianca’s precise description, I was unprepared for what followed. We took a train to the outskirts of the city, and from the train, climbed into a yellow cable car, which was hexagonal in shape, like an enormous D&D die. The cable car went up, and I mean straight up, the side of the mountain.

As we climbed, I was suddenly overwhelmed by what can only be called holiness. The breathtaking majesty of this place, these ancient rocks that really do look, as the Andor location scouts recognized, like a different planet, moved me to tears. Literally, I started crying, right there in the cable car. And we weren’t even at the monastery yet! It was exactly how I felt at the Grand Canyon. I turned my head away from my friends and wiped my eyes, hoping no one noticed.

From the cable car we got into a “funicular,” which is basically a series of moveable risers that climb even further up the mountain. At the top, the weather changes, and everything is quieter. And yes, this is where they filmed Andor: the scenes of the wedding in Chandrilla. Senator Mon Mothma and her cousin plotted on these same trails; here the air-car came to take away, and take out, her old friend who was demanding too much money.

What I felt, on the soul-nourishing mountains of Monserrat, was a sense of patience, of comfort, of certitude: the wisdom of the ancients. This too shall pass. Monasteries like this one safeguarded the work of the Greeks and the Romans that was being destroyed during the Dark Ages. This is a sanctuary. The evil of Donald Trump felt very far away, and also fleeting; I knew that come what may, it would be temporary. Which calls to mind another passage from The Shadow of the Wind:

“Not evil,” Fermín objected. “Moronic, which isn’t quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn’t stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced he’s doing good, that he’s always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around fucking up, if you’ll excuse the French, anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or, as in the case of Don Federico, his leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.”

For a book written in 2001, that’s a pretty good description of Donald, and the whole MAGA movement besides.

Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, an autonomous community of Spain. Everywhere hangs the flag, which is just orange and yellow bars, no coat of arms. The language is not Spanish (which in any case we don’t speak a word of) but Catalan, which to my ears sounds more like French or Italian.

These are things I probably should have known before I got there.

Barcelona was the last bastion of Republicanism during the Civil War. The Fall of Barcelona, in January of 1939, more or less ended the fighting and gave the country to the odious Franco and the fascists. Zafón:

Nineteen forty-five, a year of ashes. Only six years had elapsed since the end of the Civil War, and although its bruises were felt at every step, almost nobody spoke about it openly. Now people talked about the other war, the world war, which had polluted the entire globe with the stench of corpses that would never go away.

But here we are in 2025, eight decades after that year of ashes. We mill around a city that is free, that is happy, that hums and teems with art and culture. The diversity is striking. Spain has always been a melting pot, a place where different cultures come together, and Barcelona today is the same. The city’s vibrancy comes in no small part from its cultural diversity—the same sort of diversity artless MAGA wants to root out here in the U.S.

We skipped the Gaudí and the Picasso and just walked around the tortuous streets of El Raval, the neighborhood in the old city where the (fictitious, alas) Museum of Forgotten Books is located. The roads wind around without any coherence or logic, like rivers of stone, and if such a museum existed, it would exist here. So: no mythical book depository. But we did find an excellent yarn store, All You Knit Is Love, which made my crochet-mad wife happy.

What brought us to El Raval at that moment? Coincidence? Fate?

“Destiny is usually just around the corner,” Zafón writes. “Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”

The Andor Manifesto puts it more succinctly:

Remember this: Try.

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ICYMI

A “neat” episode of The Five 8 on Friday, our first together in three weeks:

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Photos: My wife surveys the beauty of Monserrat; me in El Raval.