“Don’t try to imitate me. Imitating another writer is a prop. It helps you learn and find your own voice, but it’s a beginner’s thing.”

“And what am I?”

I never knew where he spent his nights or the time he didn’t share with me. He never said, and I never dared ask him. We always arranged to meet in cafés and bars in the old town. The only condition was that they must serve strawberry ice cream. I was aware that every afternoon he went to his appointment with Nuria Montfort. The first time he read the section in which she appears as a character, he smiled with a sadness that still overwhelms me. Julián Carax had lost his tear ducts in the fire that disfigured him and couldn’t cry, but never in my life have I known anyone breathe the shadow of loss the way he did.

I like to think that we became good friends. As far as I’m concerned, at least, I’ve never had a better one, nor do I think I ever will. Perhaps because of the affection he felt toward my parents, perhaps because that strange ritual of reconstructing the past helped him come to terms with the pain that had consumed his life, or perhaps simply because he saw in me something of himself, he stayed by my side, guiding my steps and my pen, through all the years it took me to write those four novels, correcting, crossing out, and rearranging to the end.

“To write is to rewrite,” he kept reminding me. “One writes for oneself, and one rewrites for others.”

* * *

Of course, there was life beyond the fiction. A great deal happened during the years I devoted to rewriting once and a thousand times every page of the saga. True to my promise not to follow in my father’s footsteps and head up the bookshop (after all, he and my mother were more than capable of running it), I’d managed to find a job in an advertising agency that, in another twist of fate, was located on Avenida del Tibidabo number 32, the old mansion of the Aldayas where my parents had conceived me one distant stormy night in 1955.

My work in the peculiar genre of advertising never seemed particularly memorable to me, but to my surprise my salary grew every month, and my value as a word and image mercenary was on the rise. The years went by, and I left a considerable trail of television, radio, and press advertisements behind me, for the greater renown of luxury cars that made rising executives drool, banks that were ever determined to make the small saver’s dreams come true, electrical appliances that promised happiness, perfumes that led to a frenzied love life, and the endless gifts that thrived in those days in Spain. In the absence of the old regime, or at least of its more visible censors, the country was growing, modernizing itself at the increasing speed of too much money in circulation, while displaying stock-market indexes that left the Swiss Alps in the shade. When my father learned how much I was earning, he asked me whether what I did was legal.