“Judging by the crimes committed against Johann Sebastian Bach, Maestro Clemente’s fingers must be frozen stiff this morning,” he added.

Daniel nodded again. Sempere gazed at his son, who for some days now had seemed lost in thought. Daniel carried inside him a world of absences and silence that Sempere had never been able to enter. He often recalled that dawn, fifteen years ago, when his son had woken up screaming because he could no longer remember his mother’s face. That morning the bookseller had taken him for the first time to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, perhaps hoping that the place and what it signified might fill the emptiness that losing Isabella had left in their lives. He had watched him grow and become a man, get married, and bring a child into the world, and yet he still woke up every morning fearing for him and wishing Isabella were by his side, to tell him the things he would never be able to say. A parent never sees his children grow old. To a father’s eyes, they always seem like those kids who once looked up at him with veneration, convinced that he had the answers to all the mysteries of the universe.

That morning, however, in the half-light of a chapel far from God and from the world, the bookseller looked at his son and for the first time thought that time had begun to pass for him too, that he would never again see the boy who lived only to remember the face of a mother who would never return. Sempere tried to find words with which to tell Daniel that he understood, that he was not alone, but the darkness hanging over his son like a poisoned shadow scared him. Daniel turned toward his father, and Sempere read anger and hatred in his eyes such as he’d never seen, not even in the eyes of old men whose lives had already been condemned to misery.

“Daniel . . . ,” he whispered.

His son put his arms around him, hushing him and holding him tight, as if he feared something might snatch him away. The bookseller couldn’t see his face, but he knew his son was weeping silently. And for the first time since Isabella had left them, he prayed for him.

2

The bus left them at the gates of Montjuïc Cemetery shortly before noon. Daniel took Julián in his arms and waited for Bea to get down first. Never before had they taken the boy there. A cold sun had burned away the clouds, and the sky projected an expanse of metallic blue that seemed out of place with the scenery. They walked through the portal of the city of the dead and began their ascent. The path running along the hillside bordered the old part of the graveyard built at the end of the nineteenth century and was flanked by mausoleums and tombs of theatrical architecture that invoked angels and phantoms wrought in intricate chaos to the greater glory of the vast fortunes and families of Barcelona.