“And you don’t appear?” asked Valentina.

“Only at the end, and it’s a very small part.”

“How modest.”

From her tone, I already guessed what was about to hit me.

“What I don’t understand is why, instead of talking so much about this story, you don’t just get on and write it.”

I had asked myself that question about three thousand times during the last few years.

“Because talking about it helps me to imagine it better. And above all, because I don’t know how to do it. That’s where my plan comes in.”

Valentina turned around and looked at me, confused. “I thought that was the plan.”

“That is the ambition. The plan is another thing.”

“What?”

“That Julián Carax write it for me,” I revealed.

Valentina stood there staring at me with that look that opened corridors into one’s soul. “And why would he do that?”

“Because, deep down, it’s also his story, and the story of his family.”

“I thought Carax was in Paris.”

I nodded.

Valentina half closed her eyes. Icy, intelligent, my adored Valentina. “In other words, your plan is to go to Paris to find Julián Carax, supposing he’s still alive, and convince him to write a three-thousand-page novel in your name with that story that supposedly is so important to you.”

“More or less,” I admitted.

I smiled, prepared to take the hit. Now she’d tell me I was thoughtless, naive, or a dreamer. I was ready to suffer any blow except the one she gave me, which, of course, was the one I deserved.

“You’re a coward.” She stood up, collected her clothes, and dressed, facing the window. Then, without looking at me, she lit a cigarette and let her eyes wander over the horizon of the Ensanche rooftops under the rain.

“I’d like to be alone,” she said.

Five days later I walked up those steps again to Valentina’s attic, only to find the door open, the room empty, and a bare chair facing the window. On the chair was an envelope with my name on it. I opened it. Inside were twenty thousand French francs and a note:

Bon voyage et bonne chance.

V.

When I stepped into the street, it had started to rain.

* * *

Three weeks later, on an afternoon when we had gathered a group of readers and regular customers in the bookshop to celebrate the publication of a first novel by a good friend of Sempere & Sons, Professor Alburquerque, something happened that had been widely expected for some time—something that would alter the history of our country, or at least bring it back to the present.

It was almost closing time when Don Federico, the neighborhood watchmaker, came in to the bookshop looking very flustered, hauling a contraption that turned out to be a portable television set he’d bought in Andorra. He put it down on the counter and gave us all a solemn look.

“Quick,” he said. “I need a socket.”

“A plug is what you need,” joked Fermín, “like everyone else in this country, otherwise you won’t get anywhere.”