The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

THAT AFTERNOON, AS I WARMED MYSELF BY THE FIRE, BEA TOLD ME the story of how The Angel of Mist had come into the possession of the Aldaya family. It had all the makings of a lurid melodrama that could well have come from the pen of Julián Carax. The house was built in 1899 by the architectural partnership of Naulí, Martorell i Bergadà, for a prosperous and extravagant Catalan financier called Salvador Jausà, who would live in it for only a year. The tycoon, an orphan since the age of six and of humble origins, had amassed most of his fortune in Cuba and Puerto Rico. People said that he was one of the many shady figures behind the plot that led to the fall of Cuba and the war with the United States, in which the last of the colonies were lost. He brought back rather more than a fortune from the New World: with him were an American wife-a fragile damsel from Philadelphia high society who didn't speak a word of Spanish-and a mulatto maid who had been in his service since his first years in Cuba and who traveled with a caged macaque in harlequin dress and seven trunks of luggage. At first they moved into a few rooms in the Hotel Colón, while they waited to acquire a residence that would suit the tastes and desires of Jausà.

Nobody doubted in the least that the maid-an ebony beauty endowed with eyes and a figure that, according to the society pages, could make heart rates soar-was in fact his lover, the guide to innumerable illicit pleasures. It was assumed, moreover, that she was a witch and a sorceress. Her name was Marisela, or that's what Jausà called her. Her presence and her air of mystery soon became the favorite talking point at gatherings that wellborn ladies held to sample sponge fingers and kill time and the autumn blues. Unconfirmed rumors circulated at these tea parties that the woman, like a vision from hell, fornicated on top of the male, that is to say, rode him like a mare in heat, which violated at least five of six recognized mortal sins. In consequence, more than one person wrote to the bishopric asking for a special blessing and protection for the untainted, immaculate souls of all respectable families in Barcelona. And to crown it all, Jausà had the audacity to go out for a ride in his carriage on Sundays, in the middle of the morning, with his wife and with Marisela, parading this Babylonian spectacle of depravity in front of the eyes of any virtuous young man who might happen to be strolling along Paseo de Gracia on his way to the eleven o'clock mass. Even the newspapers noted the haughty look of the strapping woman, who gazed at the Barcelona public "as a queen of the jungle might gaze at a collection of pygmies."