The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz 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 a stench of corpses that would never go away. Those were years of want and misery, strangely blessed by the sort of peace that the dumb and the disabled inspire in us-halfway between pity and revulsion. At last, after years of searching in vain for work as a translator, I found a job as a copyeditor in a publishing house run by a businessman of the new breed called Pedro Sanmartí. Sanmartí had built his company with the fortune of his father-in-law, who had then been promptly dispatched to a nursing home on the shores of Lake Bañolas while Sanmartí awaited a letter containing his death certificate. The businessman liked to court young ladies half his age by presenting himself as the self-made man, an image much in vogue at the time. He spoke broken English with a thick accent, convinced that it was the language of the future, and he finished his sentences with "Okay."

Sanmartí's firm (which he had named Endymion because he thought it sounded impressive and was likely to sell books) published catechisms, manuals on etiquette, and various series of moralizing novels whose pro tagonists were either young nuns in humorous capers, Red Cross workers, or civil servants who were happy and morally sound. We also published a comic-book series about soldiers called Brave Commando-a raging success among young boys in need of heroes. I made a good friend in the firm, Sanmartí's secretary, a war widow called Mercedes Pietro, with whom I soon felt a great affinity. Mercedes and I had a lot in common: we were two women adrift, surrounded by men who were either dead or hiding from the world. Mercedes had a seven-year-old son who suffered from muscular dystrophy, for whom she cared as best she could. She was only thirty-two, but the lines on her face spoke of a life of hardship. All those years Mercedes was the only person to whom I felt tempted to tell everything.