“Yes,” I replied dryly. “Like Julián Carax.”

Take that, I thought.

My father raised his eyebrows. The blow had confused him. “And how do you know what Carax writes with, or even who he is?”

I adopted the mysterious expression I had patented to imply that I knew more than everyone imagined. “I know loads.”

At home, the name Julián Carax was always mentioned in a whisper behind closed doors, protected by veiled looks and kept out of children’s reach, like one of those medicines tagged with a skull and crossbones. Little did my parents know that by the time I was eight, I’d discovered, in the top drawer of the dining-room cupboard (which I reached with the help of a chair and a wooden box), a collection of Julián Carax novels republished by a family friend called Don Gustavo Barceló. They were hidden behind two tins of Camprodón biscuits, which I polished off entirely, and a large bottle of muscatel wine that almost threw me into a coma at the tender age of nine.

By the time I was ten, I’d read them all twice over and, although I probably hadn’t understood them fully, been captivated by a prose that ignited my imagination with images, worlds, and characters I would never, ever forget. Having reached that point of sensory intoxication, I was quite sure that my ambition was to learn to do what this Carax did, and become his most outstanding successor in the art of telling tales. But I had the feeling that to achieve this, I first had to find out who he was, and why my parents had always preferred me not to know anything about him.

By good luck, my honorary uncle, Fermín Romero de Torres, didn’t share my parents’ information policy. By then Fermín no longer worked in the bookshop. He visited us often, but there was always an aura of mystery concerning what his new occupation was, and neither Fermín nor any member of my family volunteered to clarify it. Still, whatever his new job, it seemed to provide him with ample time for reading. He had recently taken in a number of anthropology treatises that had led him to come up with some formidable speculative theories, an occupation that, he said, helped him avoid kidney colic and expel stones the size of loquat seeds [sic] through the urinary system.

According to one of those peculiar theories, forensic evidence accumulated over the centuries proved that, after millennia of supposed evolution, humans had managed to eliminate a bit of body hair, perfect their loincloths, and refine their tools, but little else. From this premise, a second part of the theorem was inexplicably arrived at, and it went something like this: what the said threadbare evolution had not achieved even remotely was to understand that the more one tries to hide something from a child, the more he is set on finding it, be it a sweet or a postcard with outrageous chorus girls flaunting their charms to the wind.