Julián Carax no longer ordered strawberry ice cream when we met up. When I asked him for advice, he barely crossed things out or made amendments. He said that I’d already learned to fly alone, that I’d earned my Underwood and I no longer needed him. It took me a long time to understand, but in the end I couldn’t go on fooling myself. I realized that that monstrous sadness he had always carried inside had returned to finish him off.

One night I dreamed I was losing him in the mist. I went out to search for him in the early hours. I looked relentlessly in all the places where we’d met during those years. I found him at daybreak, on September 25, 1991, lying over the grave of Nuria Montfort. In his hand was a case containing the pen that had belonged to my father, and a note:

Julián:

I’m proud to have been your friend and I’m proud of everything I’ve learned from you.

I’m sorry not to be by your side to see you succeed and achieve what I never could or knew how to achieve myself, but I am reassured by the certainty that, although you may find it hard to believe at first, you no longer need me, just as you never needed me. I’m going to join the woman I should never have left. Take care of your parents and of all the characters in our narrative. Tell our stories to the world, and never forget that we exist so long as someone remembers us.

Your friend,

Julián Carax

That afternoon I found out that the space next to Nuria Montfort’s grave belonged, so I was told, to the city of Barcelona. Spanish institutions have a relentless voracity for other people’s money, and so, pulling at the thread, we settled on an astronomical figure that I paid on the spot, making good use for once of the copious amounts I’d received for the saga of the sports cars and the Christmas commercials for champagne with more ballerinas in tow than Busby Berkeley’s subconscious.

* * *

We buried my master, Julián Carax, one Saturday at the end of September. My daughter Alicia came with me, and when she saw the two graves lying side by side, she pressed my hand and told me not to worry, as now my friend would never be alone.

I find it hard to speak about Carax. Sometimes I wonder whether there isn’t something in me from my other granddad, the unfortunate David Martín, and I invented Carax, just as David Martín invented his Monsieur Corelli so he could remember what never happened. A couple of weeks after the burial I wrote to Madame Currygan and Signor Coliccio in Paris, to let them know Carax had passed away. In my letter I asked them to tell his friend Jean-Raymond Planaux, if they thought it appropriate, and whoever else they considered should know. Madame Currygan replied, thanking me for my letter and telling me that, shortly before his death, Carax had written to tell her about the manuscript we’d been working on together all those years. She asked me to send it to her as soon as I’d finished it. Carax taught me that a book is never finished and that, with luck, it’s the book that leaves us so we don’t spend the rest of eternity rewriting it.