By 1972, the year his father bought him a Mini to celebrate his brilliant grades and choice of major—architecture—his differences from the rest of the family had become more marked. He used to site his dark skin, his permanent inability to take things lightly, his complicated way of dealing with simple issues, his taste for solitude and alienation, his love of anything he didn’t understand, the weird feeling of anguish and unreality he felt at nightfall, the sense of menace.

The car gave him resolve, maturity, and insolence. Not to mention the ability to spend most of his time away from home, at the university. Architecture wasn’t only a vocation; it was, above all, a means of imposing distance, something that the faculty building itself contributed to: it had been damaged in the Civil War and had only undergone a very modest renovation since it was reopened in the postwar period, thus heightening the impression of existing in another era: a bunker in temporal suspension, accessed by long corridors. A number of white glass globes, resembling plastic footballs, cast a dim light on the bronze busts of provosts whose names, inscribed on small plaques, he could never be bothered to read. When he started his studies, repairs had just begun on the roof of the north wing, where an unexploded shell was discovered in the foundations, and for weeks afterward he read about the clashes that had taken place in the University City.

Starting out on a major he was passionate about didn’t distract him from the breach. The day the rusty shell was found, he wanted to send everything flying through the air; he was all too often irritated by the professors, the student cliques, and the ordinary-looking women who drew in charcoal. He liked to take refuge in the west-facing rose garden and gaze toward a horizon broken by Fernando Higueras’s beautiful, extraterrestrial “crown of thorns,” one of the few examples of Madrid’s contemporary architecture that didn’t make him want to move to another country. It may be that what prevented that breach with his family from closing was the transformation he saw in Older Brother, whose sole legal guardian he’d become after his mother had washed her hands of her son. His brother’s new state of mental health entered his freshman’s bloodstream with the force of things both long desired and long feared.