The Shadow of the Wind: City of Shadows: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

Carax’s room is “infested with crucifixes” which hang all over the room and are even scratched on the furniture and the tiles. On the desks are many notebooks, but they only contain math problems and doodles. In one of them Daniel finds a photograph of the same girl from the first picture, captioned “Penélope, who loves you.”

As they leave, Daniel remembers the letter that came for Carax and secretly pockets it, taking it from the cabinet where Doña Aurora left it many years ago. She confesses that she read it and that it was a love letter just like the ones in radio dramas, “only sadder […] because it sounded as if it was really true.”

After leaving Doña Aurora, Daniel visits Mr. Molins, the decrepit building administrator, who immediately launches into a monologue about Doña Aurora’s beauty as a young woman and his own erstwhile sexual prowess. He gives Daniel the name of Sophie Carax’s lawyer, José María Requejo, as well as his office address and the PO box where they send his mail. After consulting a map, Daniel finds that the lawyer’s address doesn’t exist, although Mr. Molins is too lazy to be perturbed about this.

Mr. Molins describes Fortuny as “ascetic” because he declined the administrator’s invitation to “go whoring.” He also repeats the rumor that Carax wasn’t Fortuny’s biological son. Daniel convinces him to explain everything he knows about the family, and a nested narrative begins, with Mr. Molins as the narrator.

According to Mr. Molins, Fortuny met Sophie Carax when he was getting old and impatient to be married. He chose Sophie, a poor girl without family who gave piano lessons, because she was young and seemed easy to control and likely to conceive. When they returned to Barcelona from their honeymoon, the couple was already on bad terms. Sophie’s friend, Viçeneta, later divulged that when Sophie tried to initiate sex on their wedding night, Fortuny called her a whore and rejected her. A few months later, Sophie told him that she had conceived a child by another man.

Having grown up in an abusive household himself, Fortuny immediately started beating Sophie, who in turn refused to name the baby’s father no matter how much he hit her. Fortuny decided the father must be the devil, because “sin had only one father,” Satan. To combat the supposed presence of the devil in his home, he hung crucifixes everywhere, throwing Sophie violently out of the apartment and breaking her arm when she objected.

Sophie delivered the baby with the assistance of neighbors, and begged Fortuny to treat him as a son. He assented, but treated his wife as a servant, rarely having sex with her and feeling consumed with self-disgust every time he did. Although he tried to interest the boy in his own pursuits—religion and hat-making—the young Carax was unreceptive and uninterested in anything except making up fantastic stories. Fortuny interpreted his son’s creativity—including a desire to be a painter and his habit of composing his own music on the piano—as a sign of deviance, and gave up on trying to mentor his son.

At the age of twelve, Carax began working his way through the local library’s stock of fiction and poetry. Fortuny was convinced that Carax was a useless idiot and asked God why he had been punished with such a son. Meanwhile, Sophie chafed inside her loveless marriage but saw no way to leave, especially with her son to care for. No matter how often Fortuny resolved to be a better man than his own father, he hit Sophie every time they fought, and the troubled family “became strangers living under the same roof.”

Mr. Molins’s narrative ends and Daniel returns to the bookshop, where Fermín immediately starts teasing him about dating a young woman. After some confusion, Daniel finds out that Bea had stopped by the shop while he was away to say she would see him on Friday. Daniel points out that Bea is engaged, and is his friend’s sister, but Fermín is unconvinced. To distract him, Daniel asks about Bernarda, about whom Fermín talks lasciviously but seems to have good intentions. He says he’ll make her happy “if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Before Fermín leaves to meet Bernarda for the afternoon, Daniel asks him to find out who owns the lawyer’s PO box. Fermín agrees without even asking why Daniel needs the information.

When Daniel is alone in the bookshop, a strange man arrives and browses languidly, while informing Daniel that reading is for women, who have “nothing to do” with their time. The man giggles and warns Daniel that he and Mr. Sempere are harboring “undesirable characters” in the shop, subsequently alleging that Don Federico visits the shop to buy gay pornography. He shows his badge and identifies himself as Chief Inspector Francisco Javier Fumero. It turns out he’s less interested in Don Federico than Fermín, whom he knows by various aliases and has tracked to the bookstore. Scared but stalwart, Daniel denies he knows him and Fumero leaves, threatening that Daniel has to cooperate with him or suffer the punishment.

To relieve his anxiety, Daniel goes for a walk. He decides not to tell Mr. Sempere and Fermín about this development, thinking that making them anxious would be playing into Fumero’s game. He runs into Don Federico, a kind and gentle man who gives him an alarm clock to replace Mr. Sempere’s broken one at home. Daniel is uncertain if he should warn Don Federico, but says nothing.

When he gets home, Daniel falls asleep until the middle of the night, when he gets up and opens the envelope from the Fortuny apartment. It’s from 1919, and the sender is Penélope Aldaya. In the letter, she tells Carax that she knows he’s left Barcelona and that he probably thinks she betrayed him, since nothing worked out as they planned. However, she has loved him since the first day she met him and will continue to love him forever. She’s writing in secret, since someone named Jorge has promised to kill Carax if he ever turns up at her house again.