The Shadow of the Wind: Days of Ashes: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

That afternoon, Daniel falls in love with Clara Barceló. He characterizes this passion as disastrous, a “curse on his skin” from which he won’t escape for years.

Clara explains that she became acquainted with Carax as a child in Provence, where her father sent her and her mother to wait out the Spanish Civil War. Friends thought her father was paranoid, but based on his understanding of history, Clara’s father knew that Spain was in for upheaval and tumult, for he knew that “the future could be read much more clearly in the streets…than in the morning press.” After hostilities broke out, he was jailed and eventually murdered in Barcelona’s infamous Montjuïc Castle, betrayed by friends to whom he had remained loyal. Clara punctuates this story with an injunction to “never trust anyone.”

Clara continues that in France, she and her cousin Claudette had a mediocre tutor, Monsieur Roquefort, who pretended to have high literary taste. He stumbled upon Carax’s novel The Red House during a trip to Paris; the biographical notes stated that Carax was of Spanish origin but currently living in Paris and working as a pianist in a hostess bar (meaning a brothel). Roquefort bought the novel because it seemed gothic and salacious.

Actually, the novel is about a man who steals dolls from shops and museums to pull out their eyes and store them in his house. One night, he breaks into the house of a man made rich by questionable activities during the industrial revolution. There, he runs into the man’s daughter, a gloomy and intellectual girl who falls in love with him. Driven by curiosity, the girl investigates the reason for the man’s bizarre obsession with dolls, eventually discovering a “horrible secret” about her own father’s collection of dolls. The novel ends tragically, but Clara doesn’t specify exactly how.

Immediately hooked, Roquefort read the entire thriller on the train ride home. He called Carax’s publisher for more information, but the receptionist didn’t even know his address. However, she told Roquefort that The Red House had sold exactly 27 copies and had been panned by critics. After years of searching, Roquefort never found another Carax novel. In 1935, a bookseller friend related a scandalous story: after years of being a poor pianist, Carax published a well-reviewed novel and was on the verge of marrying a wealthy woman, only to become involved in a duel in the Pére Lachaise cemetery. He has never been seen since then, and no one knows whether he died or fled the city. Eventually, a new rumor spread that he returned to Barcelona and died there as a pauper.