“At school they say I’m a bit odd,” I once admitted to Fermín.

“Well, that’s good news. We’ll start worrying the day they tell you you’re normal.”

For better or for worse, nobody ever accused me of that.

* * *

I suppose my adolescence offers a little more biographical interest because at least I lived a greater part of it outside my head. My paper-filled dreams and my ambitions of becoming a soldier of the pen without perishing in the attempt were gaining strength, even though they were somewhat restrained, I must admit, by a certain dose of realism acquired as time went by and I observed the workings of the world. Halfway through my journey, I had already realized that my dreams were forged with impossibilities, but that if I abandoned them before charging into battle, I would never win the war.

I was still confident that one day the gods on Mount Parnassus would take pity on me and allow me to learn how to tell stories. Meanwhile, I stocked up on raw material, hoping the day would come when I’d be able to premiere my own factory of dreams and nightmares. Slowly, I compiled everything related to the history of my family, its many secrets, and the thousand and one narratives that made up the little universe of the Semperes, an imagined world I had decided to name The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

Aside from discovering everything discoverable and whatever resisted discovery about my family, I had two great passions at the time: one magical and ethereal, which was reading, and the other mundane and entirely predictable, which was pursuing silly love affairs.

Concerning my literary ambitions, my successes went from slender to nonexistent. During those years I started a hundred woefully bad novels that died along the way, hundreds of short stories, plays, radio serials, and even poems that I wouldn’t let anyone read, for their own good. I only needed to read them myself to see how much I still had to learn and what little progress I was making, despite the desire and enthusiasm I put into it. I was forever rereading Carax’s novels and those of countless authors I borrowed from my parents’ bookshop. I tried to pull them apart as if they were transistor radios, or the engine of a Rolls-Royce, hoping I would be able to figure out how they were built and how and why they worked.

I’d read a report in a newspaper about some Japanese engineers who practiced something called reverse engineering. Apparently these industrious gentlemen disassembled an engine to its last piece, analyzing the function of each bit, the dynamics of the whole, and the interior design of the device in question to work out the mathematics that supported its operation. My mother had a brother who worked as an engineer in Germany, so I told myself that there must be something in my genes that would allow me to do the same thing with a book or with a story.