“It must have been very hard for you.”

“No. The months I spent taking care of him were the happiest, and the saddest, of my life.”

“How did David Martín die, Ariadna?”

“One night I asked him who Corelli was and why he was so afraid of him. He told me Corelli was a black soul—those were his words. David had agreed to write a book commissioned by Corelli, but he had betrayed him by destroying the book before Corelli could get his hands on it.”

“What sort of a book?”

“I’m not quite sure. Some sort of religious text or something like that. David called it Lux Aeterna.”

“So David thought Corelli wanted to take his revenge on him.”

“Yes.”

“How, Ariadna?”

“What does it matter? It has nothing to do with Valls or with anything.”

“Everything is connected, Ariadna. Please, help me.”

“David was convinced that the baby I carried in my womb was someone he had known and lost.”

“Did he say who?”

“He called her Cristina. He hardly ever spoke of her. But when he mentioned her, his voice seemed to shrink with remorse and guilt.”

“Cristina was the wife of Pedro Vidal. The police also accused Martín of her death. They assured us that he’d drowned her in a lake in Puigcerdá, very near the old house in the Pyrenees where he took you to.”

“Lies.”

“Perhaps. But you’re telling me that when he spoke about her, he showed signs of guilt . . .”

“David was a good man.”

“But you yourself said that he’d completely lost his mind, that he imagined things and people who were not there, that he thought you were his old apprentice, Isabella, who had died ten years earlier. . . . Weren’t you afraid for yourself? For your baby?”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me it didn’t cross your mind to leave that house and run away.”

“No.”

“All right. What happened next?”

14

“It was at the end of March, I think. David’s health had improved over the last few days. He’d found an old wooden boat in a shed at the bottom of the cliff, and almost every morning, early, he would row out to sea in it. I was already seven months pregnant and spent my time reading. The house had a library, and there were copies of almost all the works by David Martin’s favorite author, someone I’d never heard of, called Julián Carax. In the afternoon we’d light the fire in the sitting room, and I would read aloud to him. We read them all. We spent those two last weeks reading the latest novel by Julián Carax, The Shadow of the Wind.”

“I don’t know it.”

“Almost nobody knows it. They think they do, but they don’t really. One night we finished reading the book in the early hours. I went to bed, and two hours later I felt the first contractions.”

“You had two months to go . . .”

“I started to feel a terrible pain, as if I’d been stabbed in the womb. I panicked. I shouted David’s name. When he pulled back the sheet to pick me up in his arms and take me to the doctor, they were soaked in blood . . .”