THAT DAWN MY father took me to visit the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the autumn of 1966, and a drizzle had decorated the Ramblas with little puddles that shone like copper tears as we walked. The mist I had so often dreamed about accompanied us, but it lifted when we turned into Calle Arco del Teatro. A dark breach lay before us, and soon a grand palace of blackened stone emerged from its shadows. My father knocked on the large front door with a knocker in the shape of a devil’s face. To my surprise, the person who opened the door to us was none other than Fermín Romero de Torres, who smiled mischievously when he saw me.
“About time,” he said. “All that cloak-and-dagger business was giving me stomach cramps.”
“Is this where you work now, Fermín?” I asked, intrigued. “Is this a bookshop?”
“Something like that, although there isn’t much in the comic book section . . . Come on in.”
Fermín accompanied us through a curved gallery whose walls were painted with frescoes of angels and legendary creatures. Needless to say, by then I was in a trance. Little did I know that the wonders had only just begun.
The gallery led us to a hall with a vaulted ceiling that rose into infinity under a cascade of prodigious light. I looked up, and a labyrinthine structure materialized before my eyes. The tower formed a never-ending spiral, like a reef on which all the libraries of the world had been shipwrecked. I advanced slowly, open-mouthed, towards that castle woven together of all the books ever written. I felt as if I’d entered the pages of one of Julián Carax’s stories, afraid that if I dared to take one more step, that instant would turn to dust and I’d wake up in my room.
My father appeared by my side. I looked at him and took his hand, if only to convince myself that I was awake and that place was real.
He smiled. “Julián, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”
It took me quite a while to recover my pulse and reconnect to the laws of gravity. Once I had calmed down, my father murmured these words to me through the gloom:
“This is a place of mystery, Julián, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they only have us, Julián. Do you think you’ll be able to keep such a secret?”
My gaze was lost in the immensity of the place and its sorcery of light. I nodded, and my father smiled.
Fermín offered me a glass of water and stood there, looking at me. “Does the kid know the rules?”
“That’s what I was about to tell him,” said my father.
My father then gave me a detailed list of the rules and responsibilities that had to be accepted by all new entrants to the secret brotherhood of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, including the privilege of being able to adopt a book in perpetuity and become its protector for life.
While I listened to him, I began to wonder whether he hadn’t had some ulterior motive to have chosen that exact day to bombard my eyes and my brain with that vision. Perhaps, as a last resort, the good bookseller hoped that the sight of that city populated by hundreds of thousands of abandoned tomes, by so many forgotten lives, ideas and universes, might serve as a metaphor of the future that awaited me if I persisted in my obstinate belief in being able, one day, to earn a living from literature. If that was his intention, the vision had quite the opposite effect. My vocation, which until then had been a mere child’s daydream, became etched on my heart that day. And nothing my father or anyone might say could make me change my mind.
Destiny, I suppose, had made the choice for me.
In my long wanderings through the tunnels of the labyrinth, I chose a book titled The Crimson Tunic, a novel belonging to a cycle called The City of the Damned, whose author was someone called David Martín, of whom I’d never heard until then. Or perhaps I should say that the book chose me; when at last I rested my eyes on the cover, I had the strange feeling that the copy had been waiting there for me for some time, as if it knew that on that dawn I would bump into it.
When at last I re-emerged from the edifice, and my father saw the book I held in my hands, he turned pale. For a moment he looked as if he would collapse.
“Where did you find that book?” he murmured.
“On a table in one of the rooms . . . It was standing up, as if someone had left it there for me to find.”
My father and Fermín exchanged mysterious glances.
“Is something the matter?” I asked. “Should I choose another one?”
My father shook his head.
“It’s destiny,” murmured Fermín.
I smiled with excitement. That was exactly what I had thought, even if I didn’t quite know why.
*
I spent the rest of the week in a trance, reading the adventures narrated by David Martín, savouring every scene as if I were observing a large canvas where the more I explored, the more details and landscapes I discovered. My father also retreated into his daydreaming, although his worries seemed to be anything but literary.
Like many men, by then my father was beginning to suspect that he’d stopped being a young man, and he often revisited the scenes of his early youth, looking for answers to questions he still didn’t fully understand.
“What’s the matter with Dad?” I asked my mother.
“Nothing. He’s just growing.”
“Isn’t he past the growing age?”
My mother gave a patient sigh. “You men are like that.”
“I’ll grow fast, and you won’t have to worry.”
My mother smiled. “We’re in no hurry, Julián. Let life take care of that.”
In one of his mysterious journeys to the centre of his navel, my father came back from the post office carrying a parcel that came from Paris. Inside it was a book called The Angel of Mist. Anything with angels and mist in it sounded totally up my alley, so I decided to investigate, even if only because of the expression on my father’s face when he’d opened the parcel and seen the cover of the book. After some research I concluded that it was a novel written by a certain Boris Laurent, a pen name, I later discovered, for none other than Julián Carax. The book came with a dedication that made my mother cry – and she never was one to run for the handkerchief at the first chance – and finally convinced my father that destiny had us all caught by a place he wouldn’t be explicit about, but that, I surmised, required delicate handling.
To be honest, I was the one who was most surprised. For some reason, I had always supposed that Carax had been dead since time immemorial (a historical period comprising everything that had taken place before my birth). I always thought that Carax was another of the many phantoms from the past lurking in the haunted palace of the official family memory. When I realized that I had been mistaken and that Carax was alive, kicking, and writing in Paris, I had an epiphany.
As I caressed the pages of The Angel of Mist, I suddenly understood what I had to do. That is how the plan was hatched that would allow me to fulfil that destiny, a destiny that for once had decided to pay a house call, and many years later would give birth to this book.