The City of Light granted me a gentle landing. In my comings and goings I struck up conversation, in appalling French and gesticulating speech, with young and old people, with creatures from another world. There was also the occasional beauty in a miniskirt who laughed tenderly at me and told me that, although I was as green as a lettuce, she thought me très adorable. Soon I began to think that the universe, which was only a small part of Paris, was full of Valentinas. In my second week as an adopted Parisian I persuaded one of them, without much effort, to come up and enjoy the views from my bohemian attic. It didn’t take me long to discover that Paris was not Barcelona, and that here the rules of the game were very different.

“The things you’ve missed from not speaking French, Fermín . . .”

“Qui est Fermín?”

It took me a while to wake up from the enchantment of Paris and its mirages. Thanks to one of my Valentinas, Pascale, a redhead with a haircut and an air reminiscent of Jean Seberg, I managed to find a half-day job as a waiter. I worked in the mornings and during lunch in a café opposite the university called Le Comptoir du Panthéon, where I got a free meal after ending my shift. The owner, a kind gentleman who couldn’t quite understand why, being Spanish, I wasn’t a bullfighter or a flamenco dancer, asked me whether I’d come to Paris to study, in search of fortune and glory, or to perfect my French, which, more than perfecting, needed open-heart surgery and a brain transplant.

“I’ve come in search of a man,” I admitted.

“And there was I thinking that you rather fancied young ladies. You can tell Franco has died. . . . A couple of days without a dictator, and you Spaniards have already become bisexual. Good for you. One must live, life’s too short. Vive la différence!”

That reminded me that I’d come to Paris for a reason, and not to escape from myself. So the following day I began my search for Julián Carax. I started by visiting all the bookshops that lit up the pavements of Boulevard Saint-Germain, asking after the writer. Pascale, with whom I’d ended up becoming good friends, even if she’d made it quite clear that our thing under the sheets had no future (apparently I was trop doux for her taste), worked as a copy editor in a publishing house and knew a lot of people in the Parisian literary world. Every Friday she went along to a bookish gathering in a café of the literary quarter frequented by writers, translators, publishers, booksellers, and all the fauna and flora that inhabits the jungle of books and its surroundings. The crowd would change, depending on the week, but the rules were unvaried: to smoke and drink in huge quantities, maintain heated discussions about books and ideas, and go for one’s opponent’s throat as if one’s life depended on it. Most of the time I listened and sank into a hallucinogenic cloud of tobacco while I tried to slide my hand under Pascale’s skirt, an affectation she considered very gauche, bourgeois, and uncouth.