Explore "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafón on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The room was white, a shimmer of sheets and curtains made of mist and bright sunshine. From my window I could make out a blue sea. One day someone would try to convince me that one cannot view the sea from the Corachán Clinic, that its rooms are not white or ethereal, and that the sea of that November was like a leaden pond, cold and hostile; that it went on snowing every day of that week until all of Barcelona was buried in three feet of snow, and that even Fermín, the eternal optimist, thought I was going to die again.
I had already died before, in the ambulance, in the arms of Bea and Lieutenant Palacios, who ruined his uniform with my blood. The bullet, said the doctors, who spoke about me thinking that I couldn't hear them, had destroyed two ribs, had brushed my heart, had severed an artery, and had come out at full speed through my side, dragging with it everything it had encountered on the way. My heart stopped beating for sixty-four seconds. They told me that when I returned from my excursion to eternity, I opened my eyes and smiled before losing consciousness.