My gaze was lost in the immensity of the place and its sorcery of light. I nodded, and my father smiled.

Fermín offered me a glass of water and stood there, looking at me. “Does the kid know the rules?”

“That’s what I was about to tell him,” said my father.

My father then gave me a detailed list of the rules and responsibilities that had to be accepted by all new entrants to the secret brotherhood of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, including the privilege of being able to adopt a book in perpetuity and become its protector for life.

While I listened to him, I began to wonder whether he hadn’t had some ulterior motive to have chosen that exact day to bombard my eyes and my brain with that vision. Perhaps, as a last resort, the good bookseller hoped that the sight of that city populated by hundreds of thousands of abandoned tomes, by so many forgotten lives, ideas, and universes, might serve as a metaphor of the future that awaited me if I persisted in my obstinate belief in being able, one day, to earn a living from literature. If that was his intention, the vision had quite the opposite effect. My vocation, which until then had been a mere child’s daydream, became etched on my heart that day. And nothing my father or anyone might say could make me change my mind.

Destiny, I suppose, had made the choice for me.

In my long wanderings through the tunnels of the labyrinth, I chose a book titled The Crimson Tunic, a novel belonging to a cycle called The City of the Damned, whose author was someone called David Martín, of whom I’d never heard until then. Or perhaps I should say that the book chose me; when at last I rested my eyes on the cover, I had the strange feeling that the copy had been waiting there for me for some time, as if it knew that on that dawn I would bump into it.

When at last I reemerged from the edifice, and my father saw the book I held in my hands, he turned pale. For a moment he looked as if he would collapse.

“Where did you find that book?” he murmured.

“On a table in one of the rooms. . . . It was standing up, as if someone had left it there for me to find.”

My father and Fermín exchanged mysterious glances.

“Is something the matter?” I asked. “Should I choose another one?”

My father shook his head.

“It’s destiny,” murmured Fermín.

I smiled with excitement. That was exactly what I had thought, even if I didn’t quite know why.

* * *

I spent the rest of the week in a trance, reading the adventures narrated by David Martín, savoring every scene as if I were observing a large canvas where the more I explored, the more details and landscapes I discovered. My father also retreated into his daydreaming, although his worries seemed to be anything but literary.