This story begins with the first touches of cold in December of 1990. I have very seriously questioned the wisdom of publishing this, especially because of how personal it is for me. It is, essentially, the story of how an apprentice writer was taught to look at—and see—a painting.

As with so many great human adventures, mine began in a moment of crisis. At the beginning of that decade, I was a nineteen-year-old youth from the provinces who had just arrived in Madrid with dreams of making his way in a city full of possibilities.

Everything seemed to be teeming around me, and I got the impression that for our generation, the future was unrolling faster than we were capable of perceiving. The preparations for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and the Expo in Seville, the building of Spain’s first high-speed train, and the appearance not only of three new national newspapers but also the first non-government-run TV stations—these were just the most visible pieces of that frenzy. And though I was convinced that one of these changes was sure to affect me, in the end none of them did.

In my starry-eyed way, I believed myself to be on the threshold of carving out a role in the world of media—something I’d dreamed of since I was a kid. As soon as I got to Madrid, I did everything I could to visit radio stations, TV news sets, press club meetings, book signings, and media workshops, both to try to meet the journalists I admired and to get a sense of my chosen career.

Soon enough, however, Madrid was to become for me a place of much higher voltage.

On one hand, my instinct told me to be out in the streets of the city, drinking in its rich life. On the other, I needed to do well in my second year at the university and get the best grades I could so that I wouldn’t lose the scholarship that had gotten me this far. How was I going to reconcile two such opposing needs? Whenever I looked up from my books, I saw time slipping through my fingers. Twenty-four hours in a day just wasn’t enough, though in fairness, there were two other factors to blame for my hemorrhaging hours in this way. One was a part-time entry-level job that a friend had gotten for me at a start-up monthly magazine devoted to scientific discovery, and the other was my passion for spending what time I could lost in the galleries of the Prado Museum. It was there, in that latter setting, that the tale I’m about to relate was forged.

You could say that it all happened because the museum’s galleries offered me what I most needed at that time: serenity.

The Prado—majestic, sober, eternal, oblivious to daily concerns—instantly impressed me as a setting rich in history. Both welcoming and filled with cultured people, it was a place where you could pass the hours without attracting attention for being from somewhere else. Moreover, admission was free—it was probably the one great attraction in Madrid where you didn’t have to pay to enter. In those days, you could just present yourself at the door with a Spanish identity card and you’d have access to its treasures.

Now, with the perspective of time, I believe my fascination with the Prado was due in large part to its paintings being the one thing in Madrid familiar to me. The great museum had had a big impact on me when I first discovered it in the early eighties, holding onto my mother’s hand. I was a child with a wild imagination, and that endless sequence of extraordinary images electrified me from the start. I can still remember how I felt on that first visit. The exquisite images of Velázquez, Goya, Rubens, and Titian—to name just the masters I knew from my schoolbooks—imprinted themselves on my mind and became living history for me. To see them was to have a window into scenes from a remote past that seemed to have been preserved in amber, as if by some magic.

For some reason, that childhood vision caused me to see each painting as a sort of magical machine, capable of sending me to forgotten times, situations and worlds which, years later, I’d be fortunate enough to understand thanks to the old books I purchased at the little stands on the nearby Cuesta de Moyano. I could never have imagined, however, that on one of those gray afternoons at the end of October 1990, something would happen to me that would far surpass those early imaginings.

It all began in the museum’s Gallery A, where I stood facing the huge wall where the Holy Family paintings by Raphael are hung. I was absorbed in the painting that Philip IV used to call The Pearl, as it was the jewel of his collection, when a man who looked as if he’d just stepped out of a Goya appeared at my side, seeming to admire the same painting. I wouldn’t really have noticed him were it not for the fact that at that moment we were the only two people in the entire gallery, and though we were surrounded by more than thirty large masterpieces, for some reason we had both decided to look at this one. We spent a good half hour in silent contemplation of the painting, and then, impressed by the fact that my companion had barely moved in all that time, I began to examine him with some curiosity.

At first, I watched his various small movements—the guarded stares, the slight hisses of breath—as if half expecting him suddenly to seize the painting and make off with it. When that didn’t happen, I tried to imagine what he might be hoping to find in The Pearl, and came up with increasingly outlandish theories. Was he playing a trick on me? Trying to latch on to me? Feigning great cultivation? Did he mean to scare me in some way, or even rob me? Or perhaps he was engaged in some surreal competition to see who could last the longest in front of one painting.

My companion carried no guidebook of any kind, not even the then–popular Three Hours in the Prado Museum by Eugenio d’Ors. Nor did he show any interest in the small card beside the painting which gave its history. or bother to adjust his position to avoid the annoying glare of the spotlights on the canvas, as I did.

He looked to be around sixty years old. Gaunt, with a full head of hair in the process of going gray, he wore no glasses and had a thick gold ring on his left hand. He was well dressed, with gleaming shoes, a cravat, and an elegant, black, three-quarter-length coat. He had a rather severe—even dark—gaze, that, even after all this time, I can still feel on my back when I find myself in that gallery.

The more I observed him, the more appealing I found him. There was something magnetic I couldn’t define but was in some way connected to that power of concentration he had. I assumed he was French. His smooth, angular face gave him an erudite look, like some smart, cultivated Parisian, and this dispelled any possible suspicions I might have harbored about a perfect stranger. My imagination quickly took over. I wanted to believe I was standing next to a retired professor from some institute. A widower, with all the time in the world to devote to appreciating art. An aficionado of Europe’s great museums, who no doubt ran in higher circles than I did. I was just a curious student with a headful of dreams and a love of journalism, history, and mystery books, who needed to make sure he got back to his residence hall in time for dinner.

It was at that moment, just as I was finally about to let him have The Pearl all to himself, that he decided to come down from his cloud and speak.

“Are you familiar with the saying, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears’?”

It came on the quietest voice, as if he were afraid someone might overhear him. I hadn’t been prepared to hear the question posed in perfect Spanish.

“Are you speaking to me?” I asked.

He nodded. “I am indeed asking you,” he said. “Who else? Tell me,” he persisted, “do you know the saying?”

Out of this simple exchange was born a relationship—I never quite dared think of it as a friendship—that would last just a couple of months. What came next, which I propose to relate here in detail, would bring me back to the museum over and over again, one afternoon after the other, through the last days of that year and the first days of the next.

Two long decades have passed since my encounter with the man in the black coat, and I still don’t know if what I learned from him there within the great walls of the Prado, safe from the rigors of the Madrid climate and far from my everyday concerns, was all imagined, or if he really did teach me those things.

I was never sure about his real name or where he was from, much less his profession. He never gave me his card, for instance, or his phone number. I was much more trusting in those days.

He had only to extend an invitation to show me the hidden secrets of those galleries—“If you like; if you have the time”—for me to let myself be carried along by those conversations and to continue meeting there, each time with greater enthusiasm.

I decided, in the end, that I would call him “the Master.”

For twenty-two years, I have kept silent about these events, never feeling there was enough of a reason to speak out publicly. Especially since, one day, without any warning, he stopped appearing for our meetings. He simply vanished. That disappearance—abrupt, complete, and incomprehensible—has only become more unbearable over time. Though we never exactly had a formal relationship, he became a kind of secret godfather for me, an ally during my first days in that big city. The embodiment of an enigma—my enigma.

Perhaps because of this, and out of a nostalgia about how I learned to see—not just to look at—some of the Prado’s paintings at his side, this feels like the right moment to tell the story of how I was initiated into certain mysteries of art. I’d also like to believe that I’m not the only one to have gone through something like this, and that once my account is published others will emerge who were also illuminated in the same way by my evanescent Master, or perhaps some other.

However, before I begin, let me be clear: The reader should not think that what I experienced in my youth in any way blunted my critical assessment of what I learned in those sessions. On the contrary. In putting these lessons to paper, many of them strike me as extremely strange, almost as if lifted from a dream. Nonetheless, as I go over them I see that some of these lessons have also found their way—in small and considered doses—into my best novels. Their influence can be seen in The Lady in Blue (La dama azul), The Templar Gates (Las puertas templarias), and The Secret Supper (La cena secreta) to such an extent that any attentive reader will quickly pick up on it.

So it is only fitting then that to that opportune visitor to the Prado and others like him, to those masters, and to those books that arrive at the moment when we are best prepared to receive them, I dedicate this work with gratitude, affection, and the hope that we may one day meet again.