“And thank goodness that’s the way things are, because the day we lose the spark that makes us want to know things, and young people are content with the nonsense dressed in tinsel sold to them by the current popes of bullshittery—be it a miniature electrical appliance or a battery-run chamber pot—and become incapable of understanding anything that lies beyond their backsides, we’ll return to the age of the slug.”

I would laugh and say, “This is apocalyptic,” making use of a word I’d learned from Fermín that always earned me a Sugus sweet.

“That’s what I like to hear,” he would reply. “So long as we have youngsters who know how to manage five-syllable words, there will be hope.”

Perhaps it was due to Fermín’s bad influence, or maybe to all those tricks I’d learned in the thrillers I devoured as if they were sugared almonds, but soon, by virtue of my enthusiasm for tying up loose ends, eavesdropping on furtive conversations, rummaging in forbidden drawers and, above all, reading all the pages my father thought had ended up in the wastepaper basket, the enigma of who Julián Carax had been and why my parents had decided to christen me with his name began to clear up. And wherever my skills of deduction and detection didn’t reach, Fermín and his magisterial impromptu lectures filled in, supplying me on the sly with clues for solving the mystery, and connecting the different strands of the story.

That morning, as if he didn’t have enough worries already, my father was served a double shot: that his son wanted to be a professional author, and that, moreover, I knew the entire cache of secrets he’d always tried to hide from me, probably more out of modesty than anything else. To his credit, I must say that he took it quite well. Instead of yelling and threatening to lock me up in a boarding school, the poor man just stood there staring at me, not knowing what to say.

“I thought you would want to be a bookseller, like me, like your grandfather, and like my grandfather before him, and like almost all the Semperes since time immemorial . . .”

Realizing that I’d caught him off guard, I decided to shore up my position.

“I’m going to be a writer,” I said. “A novelist. To crown it all, I think one says.”

That last phrase I let slip as a bit of humorous padding, but clearly my father didn’t find it funny. He crossed his arms, leaned back in his chair, and studied me cautiously. The puppy was showing a rebellious streak that didn’t please him. Welcome to fatherhood, I thought. You bring children into the world, and this is what you get.

“That’s what your mother has always said, but I thought she just said it to tease me.”

More in my favor. The day my mother makes a mistake will be when Judgment Day happens to fall on April Fool’s. But, being allergic to resignation from birth, my father was still stuck in his warning attitude, and I feared a speech to dissuade me was on its way.