He was telling me about his aunt Clara.

“My head hurts,” he would say, he would lie down… and read.

Very smart.

He had a drawer of books next to his bed. I spied on her and witnessed her pleasure: she read novels, one after another…

And your name is Clara, like her…

And there were a lot of lazy people at home.

Yeah?

Always full of people, my parents liked that, they were somewhat libertine. Mine was the only mother who was topless. “Mom, cover yourself,” I begged her…

Lively atmosphere.

I learned to console myself with novels.

Take comfort from what?

Of being left without friends because of the transfers for my father’s work… And my parents’ passions.

What passions?

I laugh at Liz Taylor and Richard Burton! Jealousy, depression, crying, laughing…

Literary matter.

I learned that jealousy is a very harmful disease for those who suffer from it.

Jealousy: who hasn’t felt it?

Perhaps it is the deepest emotion. Jealousy occurs a lot in the literary world.

Have you felt them?

Every writer aspires to be liked, and as the smoke sustains us, it is natural to feel jealousy and envy.

So that means yes.

I have had bad times: “Why not me?”

How sincere! Thank you.

We are fake. In the golden age they insulted each other in public. Now we go behind.

Do you envy anyone today?

That lasts me five minutes, so nothing happens. If envy settles in you every day, you will harm yourself and others.

Which female writers could you envy?

Soledad Puértolas, Annie Ernaux, Alice Munro, Natalia Ginzburg, Mercè Rodoreda… I admire them. Today I don’t envy.

Did the jealousy between your parents become literary material for you?

Yes, and also that when I was five years old they gave me an almost blind babysitter: “Nenica, who’s coming over there?” I asked myself. I told her, and that made me an observer and a storyteller: she saw but she also invented.

The novelist was born.

Fiction is the true time machine: it allows us to travel to the past, and to the future, and inward. This is what I said in my recent entrance speech at the Royal Spanish Academy.

What chair do you occupy?

Chair X: I like it, it symbolizes mystery. It was previously occupied by the Valencian poet Francisco Brines, who died in 2021. And that excites me, because the same light of the Levantine beaches links us.

His eyes light up…

My senses are impregnated with aromas of orange blossom, oranges, jasmine and roses, of Mediterranean air, of its blinding light, which is also that of Albert Camus.

What else did you say in your admission?

That literary fiction has often anticipated scientific advances: see Voltaire writing Micromegas, fable… which Newton read! And Einstein read Don Quixote.

I did not know that.

That’s right, and in Don Quixote he anticipates the law of space-time relativity in his adventure in the Montesinos cave: Don Quixote believes he has lived three days and three nights… having spent a single day.

Well seen, in any case.

Time is the great mystery. Does it really exist? There is a narrative time… It is explored by The Invention of Morel, a story written in 1940 by Borges and Bioy Casares.

Is the Royal Spanish Academy really necessary?

“Cleans, fixes and gives splendor” is their motto, which I know sounds like an advertisement for a window cleaner.

Well now that you say it, yes, ha, ha…

But it is important to collect what society creates when it speaks, and give it prominence. And sixteen academies from as many countries with Spanish speakers cooperate.

Advise a young writer.

Do you know how to be alone? Forward! No? Do not mess. Oh, and if you are going to dedicate yourself to writing, find a job that supports you.

What do you aspire to as a writer?

True success is selling your books and being greatly envied.

Yeah? And have you achieved it?

Well yes: my books have been translated into twenty languages ??and I have already sold three million copies.

What is the key to that success?

Mystery, that is a miracle, it is something that only usually happens to others.

In your latest novel there is a successful author… who is handsome: does that matter?

It matters, it matters that the author has personal appeal: the champion was Hemingway and we all remember Umbral, Cela…