71 pages • 2 hours read
Carlos Ruiz ZafónThe Angel's Game
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 30-41Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Lux Aeterna”
Part 2, Chapter 30 Summary
At Sempere & Sons, David tells the younger Sempere that Isabella is a good Christian who secretly loves him, even though neither of these things is true.
Part 2, Chapter 31 Summary
At the tower house, David lies and tells Isabella the younger Sempere is in love with her. Although she doesn't feel the same way, David tells Isabella to give him a chance in case he asks her on a date.
Part 2, Chapter 32 Summary
David tracks down a conjuring shop that belongs to Damián Roures, one of the spirtualists who conducted seances with Irene and Jaco. Roures dismisses Salvador's theories as preposterous. When David accuses Roures of taking advantage of a grieving man through phony seances, Roures denies doing so. He claims that once Marlasca started losing his mind, Roures admitted to him that the seances were nothing more than mumbo jumbo and refused to continue conducting them for him.
Roures adds that Marlasca believed a spirit or parasite had infected him. With Roures refusing to fuel his occult illusions further, Irene took Marlasca to a woman known as the Witch of Somorrostro to help protect him from someone, possibly Corelli.
Finally, David asks Roures what he knows about the phrase Lux Aeterna. Roures says it's the name of an occult pamphlet they'd use in seances, "a poem about death about the seven names of the Son of Morning, Bringer of Light. […] Lucifer" (420).
Part 2, Chapter 33 Summary
After leaving the conjuring shop, David realizes that Inspector Grandes is following him. Grandes warns him against "playing at detectives" and lets him know that his superiors are close friends with Valera (423). He also tells David that Cristina tried to commit suicide by overdosing on laudanum. His mind and spirit in tatters upon hearing this news, David is tempted to tell Grandes everything. He notes, "I would have done so, had I known where to begin" (425).
At the tower house, David finds Isabella asleep in her bed with the door open. While covering her with a shawl to prevent her from catching a chill, he discovers a bundle of letters hidden under her mattress. They are all letters from Cristina that Isabella hid from David. In tears, Isabella says, "I did it to protect you" (427). David replies, "Leave. Leave this house" (427), then walks out the door into the rain.
Part 2, Chapter 34 Summary
To get his mind off Cristina, David walks to the San Gervasio Cemetery, where Marlasca is interred. He hopes to access the family vault and inspect the body in the tomb.
Inside, the vault is desecrated. As David examines Marlasca's tomb and pulls out the photograph of Marlasca that Salvador gave him, he hears footsteps at the entrance to the mausoleum. There, he sees a woman in white who he believes is Irene. Somebody hits David from behind, knocking him down. As his consciousness fades, Irene bends over and cuts a six-pointed star into his chest with a razor. When David wakes up, the photo is gone.
Part 2, Chapter 35 Summary
Back at the tower house, David reads one of Cristina's letters from two weeks ago. In it, she admits that she doesn't love Pedro and that her heart is empty. She also asks David to forgive Pedro.
Later in the night, Grandes has two of his meanest goons, Marcos and Castelo, bang on David's door. Without telling him why, they bring him to the police station and into an interrogation room. There, Grandes says that shortly after David's visit to Roures, the man was found dead, tied to a chair with barbed wire over a pool of blood, his eyes and tongue cut out with scissors.
Just then, Valera arrives and says the interrogation is over. After Valera drives him home, David thanks him. "Don't thank me," Valera says, handing him a white envelope from Corelli (444). The letter inside schedules a new meeting this Friday. David burns the letter and whispers, "Go to hell" (445).
Part 2, Chapter 36 Summary
Just before dawn the next day, David takes a tram to Sarria to see Alicia, but her house is empty. Inside Ismael's room, David finds a crucifix broken in three places and a dead dove with a needle pierced through its heart.
Downstairs, David sees a dark figure with a knife and hears it laughing maliciously. He runs to the pool area and trips over the exit. With his face now directly above the waterline, he sees Alicia's dead body at the bottom of the pool. David doesn't stop running until he makes it to the main road.
Part 2, Chapter 37 Summary
Back at the tower house, a shivering and delirious David wraps himself in blankets and clutches his father's loaded pistol. With a half hour before his meeting with Corelli, David resigns himself to missing it and falls asleep.
In the middle of the night, David is awoken in a terror by a knock at the door. It is Cristina, soaked from the rain outside. They embrace, and David says, "Welcome home."
Part 2, Chapter 38 Summary
Cristina tells David that Isabella came to see her and explained everything. Moreover, Pedro left her—not in anger but in sadness because he realizes she will never love him and that she married him out of gratitude, to pay the debt she felt she owed. David dries her off, and they fall asleep in each other's arms.
Part 2, Chapter 39 Summary
In the morning, David vows to abandon Corelli's project, but he cannot bring himself to burn the manuscript: "Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books" (460).
David receives a cordial letter from Corelli betraying no ill will regarding the missed appointment. David and Cristina decide to leave Barcelona forever and go for one more walk to say goodbye to the city.
Part 2, Chapter 40 Summary
After walking around the city for hours, they arrive at Semper & Sons. David says, "This is the place where I've found almost all the good things in my life. I don't want to say goodbye" (464). At home, after David and Cristina have sex, Cristina insists on reading his book, arguing that "the only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him" (466). David adamantly refuses.
Part 2, Chapter 41 Summary
At dawn, David goes to the train station and buys two 1:00pm tickets to Paris. When he returns home, the front door is open, and Cristina is nowhere to be seen. In his study, he smells the faint odor of phosphorous and finds two burnt matches on the ground. Then he notices that the ribbon to the manuscript folder is undone and realizes "that she had gone, that those brief hours we had shared were nothing but a mirage" (475).
As David contemplates suicide, Isabella knocks on the door. She tells David that Sempere is dead.
Part 2, Chapters 30-41 Analysis
In these chapters, the author has a great deal of fun with occult imagery and history. At first glance, Roures's decision to use a bawdy actress like Irene in his seances may seem strange for what's ostensibly a somber affair of contacting the dead. Nor does it seem as if a hoodlum like Jaco would devote so much energy to a presumably niche occult ritual. By the turn of the century, however, seances had become enormously popular and took many forms, some of them extraordinarily rowdy and erotic.
One of the most notorious spirit mediums of the era was Eva Carrière. During her seances, the Frenchwoman would run around the room performing sexual acts on the guests. She also claimed to produce ectoplasm—a supposedly supernatural substance made of gauze or sheep's lung that acted as a material for manifesting spirits—from her vagina. She even brought along a physician, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, to perform gynecological exams before and after the ritual to show guests she produced the ectoplasm naturally. Needless to say, seances in the early 20th century were far different from how many modern individuals view them. Further, their history suggests that Roures tells the truth when he claims that he cut Marlasca off after realizing the grieving man truly believed in spirits.
Meanwhile, the dead dove David discovers at the scene of Alicia's murder may be a reference to the practice of Santeria, a religion that developed in Cuba among people of West African descent. Due to some of its rituals—which include the sacrifice of doves and other birds—Santeria is sometimes incorrectly associated with Satanism or the occult when in reality it is associated with, though not accepted by, the Roman Catholic Church. Because bird sacrifice is often used in children's healing rituals, and because David discovers the dove in Ismael's room, it is possible that the dove was killed by Marlasca long ago or even Alicia in the present.
More confusing still—yet also potentially relevant in a symbolic sense—is Irene's carving of a six-sided star on David's chest outside Marlasca's tomb. The star most commonly associated with the occult is the pentagram, a five-sided star used by early Christians to symbolize the five wounds of Jesus and later adopted by 20th-century occultists. While a six-sided star may also represent the occult, another interpretation is that the symbol is related to the Jewish Star of David. Throughout the narrative and particularly in the final chapters, the author hints that David's cursed manuscript causes or at the very least prophesies much of the carnage that overtakes Europe in the 15 years following the book's narrative, including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Holocaust. For this reason, Irene may intend to mark David for death in the same manner as the victims of the violence that sweeps through Europe following the completion of the manuscript.
These chapters also include the first direct reference to Lucifer. At the conjuring shop, Roures tells David he's seen the phrase Lux Aeterna—the title of Marlasca's book—in an occult pamphlet used in seances. He adds that it's "a poem about death and the seven names of the Son of Morning, Bringer of Light [...] Lucifer" (420). While it may seem counterintuitive to call the embodiment of evil the "bringer of light," the term is rooted in mythology around the planet Venus, which is frequently seen in the morning. Some ancient observers therefore viewed Venus as a symbolic embodiment of an angel reaching for heaven's highest seat, only to be cast down. Elsewhere, the author views light as a metaphor for knowledge, given the serpent's role in convincing Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis.
Aside from the occult imagery, these chapters speak once again to David's vanity regarding his writing. Upon Cristina's return, David vows to abandon Corelli's manuscript—and yet, he cannot bring himself to destroy it. While David claims he lacks the courage to do so, the real reason appears to be more rooted in his narcissism and vanity, which Corelli repeatedly exploits. David states, "I had always felt that the pages I left behind were a part of me. […] There was nothing in those pages that deserved anything better than to be burned, and yet they were still flesh of my flesh" (460).
Finally, these chapters hold thematic relevance relating to the characters of David and Cristina and their sense of indebtedness. Cristina explains that Pedro realizes she "married him out of gratitude or pity" (458) and that is why he left, highlight the tragic consequences that arise from acting as her benefactor. David, too, touches on this matter when Cristina says, "My father used to say that life doesn't give second chances" (463), to which David replies, "Only to those who never had a first chance. Actually, they're secondhand chances that someone else hasn't made use of, but that's better than nothing (463). This comment suggests that all good fortune comes at the expense of someone else, creating a circle of indebtedness that manifests in both the book's domestic narrative and its supernatural narrative. In the domestic narrative, David and Cristina struggle to negotiate their own feelings of indebtedness to Pedro, who in the end suffers greatly as a result of their actions. In the supernatural narrative, both David and Marlasca try to extend their lives by making deals with shadowy forces at great cost.
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By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
