After my mother died, I realized how much I missed her. Perhaps that’s why I started going to the university library, for which she’d managed to get me a reader’s card before she died, without telling my father, who thought all I needed to study was the catechism, and all I needed to read were the lives of saints. My stepmother hated books. Their very presence offended her; she hid them inside cupboards so they wouldn’t ruin the decor of the house.

The library is where my life changed. I didn’t even open the catechism by chance, and the only saint I enjoyed reading about was Saint Teresa, for I was utterly intrigued by those mysterious ecstasies, which I associated with shameful practices that I don’t even dare tell these pages. In the library I read everything I was allowed to read, and especially what some people told me I shouldn’t read. Doña Lorena, a wise librarian who used to be around in the afternoons, always prepared a pile of books she described as “books all young ladies should read and nobody wants them to read.” Doña Lorena said that the level of barbarism in a society is measured by the distance it tries to create between women and books. “Nothing frightens a loutish person more than a woman who knows how to read, write, and think, and moreover shows her knees.” During the war she was sent to the women’s prison, and they say she hanged herself in her cell.

I knew from the start that I wanted to live among books, and I began to dream that one day my own stories would end up in one of those tomes I so worshiped. Books taught me to think, to feel, and to live a thousand lives. I’m not ashamed to admit that, just as Doña Lorena predicted, the day came when I also started liking boys. Too much. I can tell these pages and laugh about how my legs trembled when I saw some of the young men who unloaded boxes in the Borne market and looked at me with hungry smiles, their torsos covered in sweat, their skin tanned and, I was sure, tasting of salt. “Oh, what I’d give you, gorgeous,” one of them told me, before my father locked me up in the house for a week, a week I devoted to fantasizing about what that daring young man wanted to give me, while feeling a bit like Saint Teresa.