My father smiled again and winked at me.

“Some things can only be seen in the dark.”

2

That dawn my father took me to visit the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the autumn of 1966, and a drizzle had decorated the Ramblas with little puddles that shone like copper tears as we walked. The mist I had so often dreamed about accompanied us, but it lifted when we turned into Calle Arco del Teatro. A dark breach lay before us, and soon a grand palace of blackened stone emerged from its shadows. My father knocked on the large front door with a knocker in the shape of a devil’s face. To my surprise, the person who opened the door to us was none other than Fermín Romero de Torres, who smiled mischievously when he saw me.

“About time,” he said. “All that cloak-and-dagger business was giving me stomach cramps.”

“Is this where you work now, Fermín?” I asked, intrigued. “Is this a bookshop?”

“Something like that, although there isn’t much in the comic book section. . . . Come on in.”

Fermín accompanied us through a curved gallery whose walls were painted with frescoes of angels and legendary creatures. Needless to say, by then I was in a trance. Little did I know that the wonders had only just begun.

The gallery led us to a hall with a vaulted ceiling that rose into infinity under a cascade of prodigious light. I looked up, and a labyrinthine structure materialized before my eyes. The tower formed in a never-ending spiral, like a reef on which all the libraries of the world had been shipwrecked. I advanced slowly, openmouthed, toward that castle woven together of all the books ever written. I felt as if I’d entered the pages of one of Julián Carax’s stories, afraid that if I dared to take one more step, that instant would turn to dust and I’d wake up in my room.

My father appeared by my side. I looked at him and took his hand, if only to convince myself that I was awake and that place was real.

He smiled. “Julián, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”

It took me quite a while to recover my pulse and reconnect to the laws of gravity. Once I had calmed down, my father murmured these words to me through the gloom:

“This is a place of mystery, Julián, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they only have us, Julián. Do you think you’ll be able to keep such a secret?”