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Penélope Aldaya
Daniel meets Clara, his first love, because she’s the niece of Gustavo Barceló (who is Mr. Sempere’s colleague and friend). Notwithstanding the fact that she’s much older than him, Daniel is immediately infatuated, partly because of her helplessness (she’s blind), and he befriends her by reading to her for long hours. Their friendship and his devotion continue for several years until he discovers her in bed with her music teacher, Neri, which he considers a personal betrayal even though she wasn’t committed to him in any way. At the end of the novel Clara is a bitter and reclusive middle-aged woman; Daniel links her unhappiness to a desire for the adoration that she never valued in him. While Clara always appears dressed in white and is frequently described as angelic, she’s a very sharp and earthy character, certainly much less conventionally pure than an angel. This contradiction is a reminder that appearances—especially ones that characterize people as uniformly good or bad—are likely to be deceiving.
Clara Barceló Quotes in The Shadow of the Wind
The The Shadow of the Wind quotes below are all either spoken by Clara Barceló or refer to Clara Barceló. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Days of Ashes: Chapter 5
Quotes
I could not blot out Clara’s story about her father’s disappearance. In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took away mothers, beggars, or ninety-year-old neighbors, like a hellish lottery. But I couldn’t absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned by hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for walk…and then, in the afternoon, make someone disappear in the dungeons of Montjuïc Castle.
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Clara Barceló Quotes in The Shadow of the Wind
The The Shadow of the Wind quotes below are all either spoken by Clara Barceló or refer to Clara Barceló. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Days of Ashes: Chapter 5
Quotes
I could not blot out Clara’s story about her father’s disappearance. In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took away mothers, beggars, or ninety-year-old neighbors, like a hellish lottery. But I couldn’t absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned by hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for walk…and then, in the afternoon, make someone disappear in the dungeons of Montjuïc Castle.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
