Carlos Zafon - The Midnight Palace

‘On the few occasions when he deigned to speak to me, he didn’t say much. At last he decided to ask for my consent to marry your mother, and I enquired how he intended to provide for her and what his situation was. My years on the brink of poverty with your grandfather had taught me to protect Kylian against it. I was convinced that there’s nothing like an empty stomach for destroying the myth that hunger is a noble condition.

‘Your father looked at me – keeping his real thoughts to himself, as he always did – and replied that he was an engineer and a writer. He said he was trying to obtain a post with a British construction company and that a Delhi publisher had paid him an advance on a manuscript he’d sent. All of which, once you cleared away the long words with which your father laced his talk when it suited him, smelled to me of deprivation and hardship. I told him so. He smiled, and taking my hand gently in his, he whispered these words I’ll never forget: “Mother, this is the first and last time I’ll say this. From now on, your daughter and I are in charge of our own future, and that includes providing for her and carving out a life for myself. Nobody, alive or dead, will ever be allowed to interfere. On that matter you must rest assured and trust in the love I have for her. But if worry still gives you sleepless nights, don’t let a single word, gesture or action sully the bond which, with or without your consent, will unite us for ever, because eternity would not be long enough for you to regret it.”

‘Three months later they were married, and I never spoke to your father in private again. The future proved him right, and soon he began to make a name for himself as an engineer, without abandoning his passion for literature. They moved into a house not far from here – which was demolished years ago – while he conceived what was going to be their dream home, a real palace which he designed down to the minutest detail. He planned to retire there with your mother. Nobody could imagine then what was about to happen.

‘I never really got to know him. He didn’t give me the chance, nor did he seem to be interested in opening up to anyone but your mother. He intimidated me, and when I was with him I felt quite incapable of approaching him or trying to win him over. It was impossible to know what he was thinking. I used to read his books, which your mother would bring when she came to see me, and I’d study them carefully in an effort to discover clues that might allow me to penetrate the maze of his mind. I never succeeded.

‘Your father was a mysterious man who never talked about his family or his past. Maybe that’s why I was never able to foresee the threat that hovered over him and my daughter, a threat born of that dark and unfathomable past. He never let me help him and, when disaster struck, he was as alone as he’d always been, locked in the fortress of solitude he’d made for himself. Only one person ever held the keys, during the time she shared with him: Kylian.

‘But your father, like all of us, had a past, and from that past a figure emerged who would bring darkness and tragedy upon our family.

‘When your father was young and roamed the streets of Calcutta, dreaming about numbers and mathematical formulae, he met a lonely orphan boy of his own age. At the time your father lived in the most abject poverty and, like so many children in this city, he caught one of the fevers that claim thousands of lives every year. During the rainy season the monsoon unleashed powerful storms over the Bengali Peninsula, flooding the entire Ganges Delta and the surrounding area. Year after year the salt lake that still lies to the east of the city would overflow; and when the rain ceased and the water level subsided, all the dead fish were exposed to the sun, producing a cloud of poisonous fumes which winds from the mountains in the north would then blow over Calcutta, spreading illness and death like some infernal plague.

‘That year your father was a victim of the deadly winds and he would have died had it not been for his friend Jawahal, who looked after him for twenty days in a hovel made of mud and burnt wood on the banks of the Hooghly River. When he recovered, your father swore he would always protect Jawahal and would share with him whatever the future might bring, because now his life also belonged to his friend. It was a child’s oath. A pact of blood and honour. But there was something your father didn’t know: Jawahal, his guardian angel, who was barely nine years old at the time, carried in his veins an illness far more terrible than the one that had almost taken your father’s life. An illness that would manifest itself much later, at first imperceptibly, then as surely as a death sentence: madness.

‘Years later your father was told that Jawahal’s mother had set fire to herself in front of her son as a sacrificial act to the goddess Kali, and that his mother’s mother had ended her days in a miserable cell in a lunatic asylum in Bombay. Those two events were only links in the long chain of horrors and misfortunes that characterised the history of the family. But your father was a strong person, even as a boy, and he took on the responsibility of protecting his friend, whatever the outcome of his terrible inheritance.

‘It all went well until Jawahal turned eighteen, when he cold-bloodedly murdered a wealthy trader in the bazaar, just because the man refused to sell him a large medallion on the grounds that Jawahal’s appearance made the trader doubt his solvency. Your father kept Jawahal hidden in his home for months and put his own life and future at risk by protecting him from the police, who were searching for him all over town. He succeeded, but that incident was only the start of it. A year later, on the night of the Hindu new year celebrations, Jawahal set fire to a house where about a dozen old women lived, then sat outside watching the flames until the beams collapsed and the building turned to ash. This time not even your father’s cunning was able to save Jawahal from the hands of justice.

‘There was a trial – long and terrible – at the end of which Jawahal was given a life sentence for his crimes. Your father did what he could to help him, spending all his savings on lawyers, sending clean clothes to the prison where his friend was being held, bribing the guards so they wouldn’t torment him. But the only thanks he got from Jawahal were words of hatred. He accused your father of having denounced him, of abandoning him and wanting to get rid of him. He reproached him for breaking the oath they had made years earlier and swore revenge because, as he shouted from the dock when his sentence was read out, half your father’s life belonged to him.

‘Your father hid this secret in the depths of his heart and never wanted your mother to find out about it. Time erased all trace of those events. After the wedding, the first years of married life and your father’s early success, it became just a memory, a remote episode buried in the past.

‘I remember when your mother became pregnant. Your father turned into a different person, a stranger. He bought a puppy and said he was going to train it to become a watchdog, turn it into the best nanny for his future son. And he didn’t stop talking about the house he was going to build, the plans he had for the future, a new book …

‘A month later Lieutenant Michael Peake, one of your mother’s former suitors, knocked on the door with news that would sow terror in their lives: Jawahal had set fire to the secure prison block where he was being held, and had escaped. Before fleeing he’d slit his cellmate’s throat and had used his blood to write a single word on the wall: REVENGE.

‘Peake promised that he would personally look for Jawahal and protect the couple from any possible threat. Two months went by with no sign of the escaped prisoner. Until your father’s birthday.