The Corachan Clinic is the Barcelona hospital where Daniel Sempere is treated after the gunshot wound he suffers at the Aldaya mansion. The novel makes the clinic more than a place of recovery: Daniel remembers dying there, revives after a prolonged unconsciousness, and describes a visit from Julián Carax that the staff deny occurred. The hospital’s apparently serene setting and Daniel’s uncertain account make it a threshold between medical fact, memory, and the supernatural.## Setting and Medical Crisis Daniel’s account of the clinic opens under the heading “POSTMORTEM 27 NOVEMBER 1955.” He describes a white room, bright sunshine, gauzy curtains, and a view of the sea. Yet he immediately qualifies that recollection: someone, he says, would later insist that the clinic’s rooms were not white and ethereal, that the sea was cold and leaden, and that snow had buried Barcelona. The contrast establishes the scene’s central uncertainty. The room as Daniel remembers it is not an uncomplicated clinical record, but an experience shaped by a brush with death.

The medical account is starkly specific. Daniel says he had already died in the ambulance, in the arms of Beatriz Aguilar and Lieutenant Palacios, whose uniform was stained with his blood. Doctors later explained that the bullet had broken two ribs, passed close to his heart, severed an artery, and exited through his side. His heart had stopped for sixty-four seconds. When he returned to consciousness in the ambulance, he smiled before losing consciousness again; he did not properly wake until eight days later in the clinic. The distinction between what doctors reported and what Daniel remembers gives the episode two registers: the measurable emergency and the strange calm he associates with his near-death experience.

Vigil and Recovery

While Daniel lies unconscious, his father remains beside the bed, sleeping in a chair for seven nights. When Daniel wakes at dawn, he smiles at his father, who breaks into tears. Fermín, who has been sleeping in the corridor with Beatriz nearby, is also there. Daniel learns that he has lost all his blood and that Fermín donated the blood now sustaining him. Fermín has spent days eating meat sandwiches in the hospital canteen in case further blood is needed. The transfer of blood gives their friendship a material consequence: Daniel’s return to life is inseparable from his friend’s care.

A stream of visitors follows Daniel’s awakening. Gustavo Barceló and Clara Barceló, Bernarda, Tomás Aguilar, Don Federico, Merceditas, and Don Anacleto come to see him. Tomás cannot meet Daniel’s eyes; when Daniel embraces him, he runs out to weep in the street. Beatriz watches quietly as others offer thanks and congratulations, while Daniel’s father has spent a week praying despite not believing in God. The clinic gathers people whose relationships have been strained or changed, turning the sickroom into a place where relief, shame, gratitude, and affection become visible through their actions.

Before leaving Daniel to rest, his father brings the Victor Hugo fountain pen and a notebook, in case Daniel wants to write. The gift recalls Daniel’s childhood wish for the pen and his father’s promise to buy it if he completed his first work. Fermín adds that the hospital’s doctors have assured him Daniel will not have to perform compulsory military service. Exhausted, Daniel is left alone with the pen case on his bedside table. The object joins his recovery to the promise of writing and to the father-son bond that has shaped his life.

The Uncertain Visit

During Daniel’s recovery, Julián Carax appears at his bedside. He gives Daniel water, holds his hand, and conveys farewell; Daniel understands that Carax has never discovered Penélope Aldaya’s true identity and believes they will not meet again. Daniel cannot remember Carax’s exact words, but remembers his own reply: he tells Carax to take the pen, which had always been Carax’s, and write again. Their encounter makes the clinic a meeting place for two lives that have repeatedly echoed one another, and turns the pen from a childhood object into a charge to recover a silenced voice.

When Daniel wakes again, Beatriz tells him that Carax disappeared in the storm eight days earlier, leaving a trail of blood in the snow, and that everyone has assumed him dead. Daniel insists that Carax had been with him moments before. The nurse, who had been sitting at the desk by the door, says no one entered the room and explains that Daniel had slept for six hours. The disagreement remains unresolved: the scene allows the visit to be read as a dream or memory, while preserving its emotional reality for Daniel.

That night Daniel notices that the pen case has been opened and the pen is missing. The absence gives physical weight to an encounter the clinic staff reject. Later, a book arrives from Paris under the name Boris Laurent, with a dedication to Daniel and Beatriz written in the familiar blue strokes of the pen. The clinic episode thus anticipates a concrete return: Carax has survived, and Daniel’s words have reached him, even though the hospital scene cannot be verified by anyone else.

Memory, Silence, and the Clinic’s Meaning

The clinic’s uncertain testimony belongs to a broader pattern in which crucial experiences are delayed, withheld, or passed on through personal accounts. Daniel’s father had promised Daniel’s mother never to tell him about the war or allow him to remember what happened. Elsewhere, Nuria Monfort entrusts Daniel with her written story and asks him to remember her; her appeal links survival in memory to the act of telling. Against these forms of silence, the clinic scene offers Daniel as both patient and witness: he cannot establish that Carax visited, but he preserves what he understood and what he said.

The hospital also gathers the novel’s recurring tension between bodily evidence and stories that cannot be fully confirmed. Doctors provide exact details about the bullet and Daniel’s stopped heart; the nurse supplies a firm account of the hours when Carax supposedly appeared; Daniel retains a vivid conviction and finds the pen gone. The clinic does not resolve these competing accounts. Instead, its role is to hold them together, making recovery physical and relational while leaving the return from apparent death—and Carax’s visit—open to uncertainty.