The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [13]
Isobel’s affections belonged exclusively to Michael, a tall skinny boy who was quiet by nature and given to long inexplicable spells of melancholy. Michael had the dubious privilege of having known, and therefore of remembering, his parents. They had died during a flood of the Ganges Delta when an overloaded barge had capsized. Michael spoke little and was a good listener. There was only one way of deciphering his thoughts: by looking at the dozens of drawings he did during the day. Ben used to say that if there was more than one Michael in the world, he’d invest all his fortune – still to be made – in the paper business.
Michael’s best friend was Seth, a strong Bengali boy with a serious expression who smiled about six times a year and even then with hesitation. Seth was a scholar of anything that came into his line of fire, a tireless devourer of Mr Carter’s classics, and keen on astronomy. When he wasn’t with us, he concentrated all his efforts on building a strange telescope, with which, according to Ben, you couldn’t even see the tips of your toes. Seth never appreciated Ben’s vaguely caustic sense of humour.
Only Ben remains, and, although I’ve left him until the end, I still find it hard to talk about him. There was a different Ben for every day. His mood changed every half-hour and he’d go from long stretches of silence, a sad expression on his face, to periods of hyperactivity that ended up exhausting us all. One day he wanted to be a writer; the following day an inventor and a mathematician; the day after that a sailor or a deep-sea diver; the rest of the time it was all of those things with a few more added. Ben invented mathematical theories that even he didn’t manage to remember and wrote such bizarre tales of adventure that he ended up destroying them a week after they were finished, embarrassed at the thought that he had penned them. He machine-gunned us constantly with elaborate ideas and complex puns which he always refused to repeat. Ben was like a bottomless trunk, full of surprises, also of mystery, light and shadow. He was, and I suppose he still is, even though we haven’t seen one another in decades, my best friend.
As for me, there’s not much to tell. Just call me Ian. I had only one dream, and it was a modest one: to study medicine and become a doctor. Fate was good to me and I was granted that wish. As Ben wrote in one of his stories, I ‘just happened to be passing by and was a witness to those events’.
I remember that in the last days of that month, May 1932, all of us – all seven members of the Chowbar Society – were going to turn sixteen. It was a fateful age, both feared and keenly anticipated by us all.
Following its statutes, St Patrick’s would return us to society when we reached sixteen so that we could grow into responsible men and women. That date held another meaning that we all understood only too well: it signified the dissolution of the Chowbar Society. From that summer onwards our paths would diverge, and despite our promises and all the kind lies we had told ourselves, we knew that it would not be long before the bond that had joined us was washed away like a sandcastle on the seashore.
I have so many memories of those years that even today I catch myself smiling at Ben’s witty remarks and the fantastic stories we shared in the Midnight Palace. But perhaps, of all the images that refuse to be swept away by the current of time, the one I recall most vividly is that of a figure I often thought I saw at night in the dormitory shared by most of the boys of St Patrick’s – a long dark room with a high vaulted ceiling reminiscent of a hospital ward. I suppose that, due to the insomnia I suffered until two years after I moved to Europe, I found myself, yet again, a spectator of everything that was going on around me while the others slept …
It was there, in that soulless dormitory, that night after night I thought I saw a pale light crossing the room. Not knowing how to react, I would try to sit up and follow the reflection until it reached the