At the end of 1991 I made a copy of the manuscript, almost two thousand pages long, this time, yes, typewritten with an Underwood, and sent it to Carax’s old agents. I didn’t think I’d ever hear back from them. I began to work on a new novel, following, once again, my master’s advice.

Sometimes it’s best to put your mind to work and exhaust it, rather than let it rest, in case it gets bored and starts eating you up alive.

A few months went by between the writing of that novel that had no title and long walks through Barcelona with Alicia, who had started to want to know everything.

“Is the new book about Valentina?”

Alicia never referred to Valentina as her mother, but called her by her name.

“No. It’s about you.”

“Liar.”

During those long walks I learned to rediscover the city through my daughter’s eyes, and I realized that the gloomy Barcelona my parents had lived in had slowly cleared, without us even noticing. The world I once imagined I could remember now lay dismantled. It had become a stage set, perfumed and carpeted for tourists, those lovers of sun and beaches who refused to notice the end of an epoch, however hard they looked—an epoch that hadn’t so much collapsed as dissolved into a fine film of dust that can still be breathed in the air.

Carax’s shadow continued to follow me everywhere. My mother often came to visit me, bringing little Isabella along so that my daughter could show her all her toys and books, which were many but didn’t include a single doll. The fact is that Alicia hated dolls and would knock their heads off with a catapult in the school playground. She always asked me whether it was all right to do that, knowing that the answer was no, and whether I’d had any news of Valentina, knowing also that the answer was invariably the same.

I never wanted to talk to my mother about Carax, about the mysteries and silences of all those years. I knew, somehow, that she imagined it, because I never had any secrets from her beyond the ones she pretended to accept.

“Your father misses you,” she would say. “You should come by the bookshop more often. Even Fermín asked me the other day whether you’d become a Carthusian monk.”

“I’ve been busy trying to finish a book.”

“For fifteen years?”

“It turned out to be harder than I expected.”

“Will I be able to read it?”

“I’m not sure you’re going to like it. In fact, I don’t know whether it’s a good idea to try to publish it.”

“May I know what it’s about?”

“About us. About us all. It’s the story of the family.”

My mother looked at me without saying a word.

“Perhaps I should destroy it,” I suggested.

“It’s your story,” she said. “You can do what you think best with it. And now that Granddad is no longer here and things have changed, I don’t think anyone will care about our secrets.”