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had found a city that preferred not to recognize him and a wife who had already forgotten him. Two years later she decided to abandon him altogether, leaving him with a broken heart and a son he had never wanted. He did not know what to do with a child. Barely able to read or to write his own name, he had no fixed job. All he had learned during the war was how to kill other men before they killed him—in thename of great and empty-sounding causes that seemed more absurd and repellent the closer he came to the fighting.
    When he returned from the war, my father—who looked twenty years older than the man who had left—searched for work in various factories in the Pueblo Nuevo and Sant Martí neighborhoods. The jobs lasted only a few days, and sooner or later I would see him return home, his eyes blazing with resentment. As time went by, for want of anything better, he accepted a post as night watchman at
The Voice of Industry.
The pay was modest, but the months passed by and for the first time since he came back from the war it seemed he was not getting into trouble. But the peace was short-lived. Soon some of his old comrades in arms, living corpses who had come home maimed in body and soul only to discover that those who had sent them off to die in the name of God and the Fatherland were now spitting in their faces, got him involved in shady affairs that were too much for him and that he never really understood.
    My father would often disappear for a couple of days, and when he returned his hands and clothes smelled of gunpowder and his pockets of money. He would retreat to his room and, although he thought I didn’t notice, he would inject himself with whatever he had been able to get. At first he never closed his door, but one day he caught me spying on him and slapped me so hard that he split my lip. He then hugged me until there was no strength left in his arms and lay down, stretched out on the floor with the hypodermic needle still stuck in his skin. I pulled out the needle and covered him with a blanket. After that, he began to lock himself in.
    We lived in a small attic suspended over the building site of the new auditorium, the Palau de la Música. It was a cold, narrow place in which wind and humidity seemed to mock the walls. I used to sit on the tiny balcony with my legs dangling out, watching people pass by and gazing at the battlement of weird sculptures and columns that was growing on the other side of the street. Sometimes I felt I could almost touch the building with my fingertips, at other times—most of the time—it seemed as far away as the moon. I was a weak and sickly child, prone to fevers and infections that dragged me to the edge of the gravealthough, at the last minute, death always relented and went off in search of larger prey. When I fell ill, my father would end up losing his patience and after the second sleepless night would leave me in the care of one of the neighbors and disappear. As time went by I began to suspect that he hoped to find me dead on his return and so free himself of the burden of a child with brittle health who was no use for anything.
    More than once I, too, hoped that would happen, but my father always came back and found me alive and kicking, and a bit taller. Mother Nature didn’t hold back: she punished me with her extensive range of germs and miseries but never found a way of successfully finishing the job. Against all prognoses, I survived those first years on the tightrope of a childhood before penicillin. In those days death was not yet anonymous and one could see and smell it everywhere, devouring souls that had not even had time enough to sin.
    Even then my only friends were made of paper and ink. At school I had learned to read and write long before the other children. Where my school friends saw notches of ink on incomprehensible pages, I saw light, streets, and people. Words and the mystery of their hidden science fascinated me, and I saw in them a key