“Why?”

“Because some fathers, unlike yours, make mistakes when they judge what is best for their children.”

“I meant, why did you want to be a journalist?”

Vilajuana shrugged. “Because of the amazing pay and the regular hours.”

Nicolás laughed. “No, seriously. Why?”

“I don’t know, Nico. That was a long time ago. Sometimes, when you grow older, what at first seemed very clear isn’t as clear anymore.”

“But the elephant doesn’t forget. Even if they try to cut its tusks off.”

“I suppose it doesn’t.”

“So . . . ?”

Vilajuana nodded and gave in. “To tell the truth. That’s why I became a journalist.”

Nicolás weighed his reply pensively. “And what is the truth?”

Vilajuana turned off the light and kissed his son’s forehead. “That is something you’re going to have to ask your mother.”

Stories have no beginning and no end, only doors through which one may enter them.

A story is an endless labyrinth of words, images, and spirits, conjured up to show us the invisible truth about ourselves. A story is, after all, a conversation between the narrator and the reader, and just as narrators can only relate as far as their ability will permit, so too readers can only read as far as what is already written in their souls.

This is the golden rule that sustains every artifice of paper and ink. Because when the lights go out, when the music ends and the stalls are empty again, the only thing that matters is the mirage that has been engraved in the theater of the imagination all readers hold in their mind. This, and the hope every maker of tales carries within: that readers will open their hearts to these little creatures made of ink and paper, and give them a part of themselves so they can be immortal, even if only for a few minutes.

And having said these words a little more solemnly than the occasion probably merits, we had now better land at the end of the page and ask our friend the reader to accompany us at the closing moment of this story, to help us find the most difficult thing for a poor storyteller who is trapped in his own labyrinth: the exit door.

Prelude to

The Labyrinth of the Spirits

(The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, volume IV),

by Julián Carax.

Edited by Émile de Rosiers Castellaine.

Paris: Éditions de la Lumière, 1992.

Julián’s Book

1

I always knew that one day I would end up writing this story. The story of my family and of that Barcelona haunted by books, memories, and secrets in which I grew up and which has followed me all my life, even when I knew that it was probably no more than a paper dream.

My father, Daniel Sempere, had tried before me, and almost lost his youth in the attempt. For years the good bookseller would sneak away in the early hours, when he thought my mother had fallen asleep, and tiptoe down to the bookshop to lock himself up in the back room. There, by the light of a candle, he would wield his flea-market fountain pen and fight an endless duel with hundreds of pages until dawn.