He felt so unexpectedly satisfied that he still spent a good while wondering to himself if there wasn’t something insane about that uncontainable urge to scream clawing up his throat. To scream! He didn’t do that—needless to say—but the electrical current which began to flow slowly through his limbs, causing every last hair on his body to stand up, sought to notify him that, despite whatever the morning’s chewy croissant could have foretold, that day which had only just begun to slosh into the mid-afternoon was going to be—even just for that—one of those storied days where the most repressed desires, where the things which one secretly spends their whole life awaiting…

Well. Of course he was sure that people read his books. How could they not! Right there were the sales reports, the royalty checks, and even those emails by the Biblioteca Virtual Galega people that overflowed from the university—not always from old school friends surprised, when not obviously amused, by the type of job he had searched for. Because, without being in any way one of those cracks who argue vehemently against literary agents, right there was that career that could offer some certainly respectable numbers over time. Thirty? Forty? Fifty-thousand books sold? Twenty years, he ruminated, allow for a great deal. Even to delude himself, disabuse himself, and ultimately console himself with those numbers which, by means of adding up lustra, meetings with the press, and one pious lie or another, shot off some results which could be maneuvered in any conversation without the risk of feeling a sharp silence sliding down his back. Nevertheless (and he returned to the point of departure) it was the first time in his whole career that…

What’s certain is that he had already had occasion, overcoming the mandate of not appearing overly vulnerable, to speak fully with a colleague about that moment in which one manages to truly understand what that with which they are occupying a good part of the day, in general, since the old and confusing adolescent era, consists of. Absolutely. There were those who, despite sum-total certainly less published work, proudly confessed to a pair of encounters with unprepared readers—referring with that descriptor to those who had not anticipated the moment photographing themselves with their books in the same doorway—an adventure which, in terms of setting, displayed such a variety of localizations that it seemed a bit stupid to speak of rules: if some mentioned an airport or a bus or train station, others described a relatively lush park or the relatively appropriate decorations of a bar, of a cafe, of any tavern. He—not seeing himself as any kind of superstitious chimpanzee—knew that only the laws of chance operated in the roulette wheel. Or rather, mathematics (or was it statistics?). Nevertheless (and the adversative became as questionable to him as the fact of seeing some incongruity there), listening to those confessions and hearing his authors touched by a magic wand…