The Shadow of the Wind

Daniel visits the Fortuny hat shop, which is abandoned and dusty. The building caretaker, Doña Aurora, knows a lot about Carax. She tells him that Carax went to Paris between 1918 and 1919 to escape his father, Fortuny, who wanted to put him in the army. Daniel asks about his return to Barcelona, but the caretaker says that after a letter arrived for him in Barcelona, Fortuny told her that Carax died in Paris that year. She’s happy to hear that he might be alive, because he was a good child and used to fascinate the neighborhood kids with the wild stories he told.

Doña Aurora also divulges that Fortuny beat his wife regularly, and that the wife, Sophie, told one of her neighbors that Julian wasn’t Fortuny’s biological son. She says Fortuny was a “mean old bastard.”

Doña Aurora isn’t sure if the man in the photo is Carax, and she doesn’t recognize the woman. But she does remark that during school Julian fell in with the son of the famously rich Aldaya family, as well as a “scatterbrained” boy named Miquel.

The apartment is now entrusted to the care of Sophie’s lawyer, whom Doña Aurora believes visits the apartment at night, possibly with women. A mysterious police “inspector” also once visited the apartment.

Daniel tempts the voyeuristic caretaker into visiting the empty apartment, which turns out to be stuffed with old dusty possessions and infested with birds. They find a pile of childhood photos of Carax, which reminds Doña Aurora that Carax used to tell her daughter he had a secret sister who lived with Satan at the bottom of a lake. The door to Carax’s room is locked, but Daniel stumbles on the key hidden in a music box and opens the door.