You only truly fall in love when you don’t realize it’s happening. I fell in love with that broken, profoundly unhappy man long before I began to suspect that I even liked him. He, who always read me like an open book, feared for me. It was his idea that I should work in the Sempere & Sons bookshop, where he’d been a customer all his life. It was his idea to convince Juan, who would end up being my husband and who at the time was “the young Sempere,” to court me. In those days Juan was as shy as David could be brazen. In a way they were like day and night; in David’s heart it was always night.

By then I’d begun to realize that I would never be a writer, or even a submariner, and that the Brontë sisters would have to wait for another, more like-minded candidate to succeed them. I had also started to realize that David Martín was ill. A chasm opened up inside him, and after an entire existence spent fighting to maintain his sanity, when I came into his life David had already lost the battle with himself and was losing his mind, like sand slipping through his fingers. If I’d heeded common sense, I would have run away, but by then I’d already started to enjoy contradicting myself.

* * *

In time, a lot of things were said about David Martín, and terrible crimes were attributed to him. I am convinced—and I think I knew him better than anyone else—that the only crimes he committed were against himself. That is why I helped him escape from Barcelona, after the police had accused him of murdering his protector, Pedro Vidal, and Vidal’s wife Cristina—with whom he thought he was in love, in that stupid and fatal way some men imagine they love a woman they can’t tell apart from an apparition. And that’s why I prayed he would never return to this city, that he would find peace in some faraway place, that I would be able to forget him, or eventually persuade myself that I had. God only listens when one prays for what one doesn’t need.

I spent the next four years trying to forget David Martín, and thinking I had almost managed to do so. Having abandoned my dreams of writing, I’d made my other dream, that of living among books and words, a reality. I worked in the Sempere & Sons bookshop, where, after the death of Grandfather Sempere, Juan had become Señor Sempere. Our engagement was one of those prewar affairs—a modest courtship, cheeks caressed, strolls on Sunday afternoons, and stolen kisses under marquees during the street fiestas in Gracia, when no family members were spying on us. There were no trembling legs, but that wasn’t necessary either. One can’t live one’s whole life as if one were always fourteen.

Juan didn’t take long to propose to me. My father accepted his proposal in three minutes flat, full of gratitude to Saint Rita, patron saint of impossible causes, as he glimpsed the improbable sight of his daughter dressed in white bowing before a priest and doing as she was told. Barcelona, city of miracles. When I said yes to Juan, I did it with the conviction that he was the best man I would ever meet, that I didn’t deserve him, and that I’d learned to love him not only with my heart but also with my mind. My “yes” wasn’t that of a young girl. How wise I felt. My mother would have been proud of me. All those books had served some purpose. I accepted his hand knowing that what I most desired in the world was to make him happy and raise a family with him. And for a while I actually believed that that was how it would be. I was still so innocent.