“I hope you’re not going to ask me to marry you,” said Valentina.

I suppose I should have known how to interpret the clue fate was hinting at; all my big scenes with Valentina began with rain hot on my heels or scratching the windowpanes. That one was no different.

“What is the plan?” she said at last.

“To write the story of my family.”

We’d been together for almost a year, if that procession of afternoons between sheets in her studio up in the clouds could be called being together, and although I knew by heart every pore of her skin, I still hadn’t learned to read her silences.

“And . . . ?” she asked.

“Isn’t that enough for you?”

“Everyone has a family. And all families have a story.”

With Valentina you always had to earn everything. Whatever it was, it had to be won. She turned away from me, and that is how, addressing that beautiful naked back, I set out, for the first time in a loud voice, the idea that had been running through my mind for years. It was not a brilliant presentation, but I needed to hear it from my own lips to believe in it.

I had a beginning: a title. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. For years I’d been carrying a blank notebook around with me, on whose cover I’d written, in bold, ostentatiously elegant handwriting:

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books

A novel in four volumes
by
Julián Sempere

One day Fermín had caught me, pen in hand, staring spellbound at the first blank page of the notebook. He inspected the cover and, after letting out a sound that could be described as a cross between grunting and breaking wind, intoned:

“Accursed be those whose dreams are made of paper and ink, for theirs will be the purgatory of vanity and disappointment.”

“By your leave, would Your Excellency be so kind as to translate that solemn aphorism into plain speech?”

“I suppose silliness makes me go all biblical,” he said. “You’re the one who pretends to be a poet. Work out the semantics.”

I’d worked out that the magnum opus, a product of my feverish juvenile imagination, would reach a devilish size and a body weight close to fifteen kilos. The way I dreamed of it, the narrative would be divided into four interconnected volumes that would work like entrance doors into a labyrinth of stories. As the reader advanced into its pages, he would feel that the story was piecing itself together like a game of Russian dolls in which each plot and each character led to the next, and that, in turn, to yet another, and so on and so forth.

“It sounds like the instructions for piecing together an Erector set or an electric train.”

My sweet Valentina, always so eloquent.

“It does have a whiff of an Erector set,” I admitted.

I had tried to sell her my highfalutin letter of intent without feeling embarrassed, because it was, word for word, the one I’d written when I was sixteen, convinced that half my work had been already accomplished with it. The fact that I’d had the nerve to copy that idea straight out of The Shadow of the Wind, the novel I’d given Valentina the day I met her, was the least of it.