Taking advantage of the fact that at the time I was working on the ad account of a well-known Japanese electronic brand, I got Fermín a colossal color television set, the kind that were starting to be called “top of the line.” Fermín, who once considered television as the Antichrist, modified his opinion when he discovered that it broadcast Orson Welles films—“he really knows, the rogue,” he’d say—and, above all, films starring Kim Novak, whose pointed brassieres still fueled his faith in the future of humanity.

After a few bumpy years during which I even thought their marriage was on the rocks, my parents managed to overcome a few hurdles about which neither would give me an explanation and, to everyone’s astonishment, presented me with a late sister whom they christened Isabella. Grandfather Sempere was just able to cradle her in his arms before dying a few days later from a massive heart attack that surprised him while he was lifting a box holding the complete works of Alexandre Dumas. We buried him next to his beloved wife Isabella with a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. Losing his father made mine suddenly grow old for us all, and he was never the same again. “I thought Granddad would live forever,” he said the day I found him crying, hiding in the bookshop’s back room.

Fernandito and Sofía got married, as everyone had foreseen, and moved into Alicia Gris’s old apartment on Calle Aviñón, in whose bed the groom had previously, and secretly, earned flying colors in his nonofficial inauguration with Sofía, thus finally turning all the theory acquired with Matilde into practice. In time, Sofía decided to open a small bookshop specializing in children’s books, which she christened the Little Sempere. Fernandito got a job in a department store where, in years to come, he would become head of the book section.

In 1981, shortly after the failed coup that almost took Spain back to the Stone Age or something worse, Sergio Vilajuana published a series of reports in La Vanguardia in which he uncovered the case of hundreds of children stolen from their parents, mostly political prisoners who had disappeared during the first postwar years in the prisons of Barcelona and then been murdered to eliminate their trail. The resulting scandal reopened a wound that many didn’t know about and others had wanted to cover up. Vilajuana’s articles, which prompted a series of investigations that are still ongoing today and have generated oceans of documentation, charges, and civil and criminal cases, encouraged many to come forward and start recovering official accounts of the darkest years in the country’s history, accounts that had been left buried all that time.

The reader will be wondering whether, while all this was going on, the ineffable Julián Sempere was alone, devoting himself by day to the mercenary industry of advertising and by night to Our Holy Lady of Literature. Not exactly. The task of writing the four books I had planned with Carax had begun as an escape to paradise, but became a monster that started to devour what was closest to me, which was myself. The monster, which had arrived in my life as a guest and then refused to leave, had to learn to live with the rest of my ghosts. In honor of my other grandfather, David Martín, I too took a peek over the chasm that all writers carry inside them, and ended up holding on to the edge by my fingertips.