The living letters against the "monotony of rain behind the panes," as Machado said

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I started school in the autumn of 1963 or the winter of '64, when I was five years old. When I arrived, the nuns—we had to call them sisters—had drawn a table and a chair on the blackboard and, below them, some figures. They pointed to them and made us say T-A-B-L-E and C-H-A-I-R. Then, they made us draw more figures. Then, spell out syllables. I found no meaning in anything that seemed useless and boring to me. On the third day, I got fed up, and flatly refused to go back to a school I didn't like and found utterly useless. But my mother took it very badly and dragged me there herself, pulling me along the way, without the slightest bit of pity. Helplessly, I continued with apparently absurd exercises for a few more days, amidst that deadly boredom, "monotony of rain behind the windows," which a poem by Machado very accurately managed to reflect.

I was a sickly child and, soon after, I had to spend a few days in bed with a fever, surrounded by the silent comic books of my favorite heroes, Captain Thunder and El Jabato. Of course, I knew that my beloved panels included a kind of speech bubbles full of signs that, as I had been told, represented what the characters were saying. But since I couldn't read, I ignored them. I contented myself with being distracted by the luxuriant richness of the drawings, and interpreted the moments of action as best I could. Suddenly, I had a revelation, and the word is apt. I discovered that some of those secret signs looked very much like the ones I traced in school boredom. And there was light. I looked at the cover, where it was supposed to say El Capitán Trueno, and immediately recognized the vowels. Therefore, the other signs must be l, c, p, t, and r. That t and n appeared twice in the right places was supplementary proof of the method's soundness. Within the jumble of letters in the comic book, words like "throne" and "attack" became intelligible. I held in my hands my Rosetta Stone for deciphering the arcana of writing. Only an exercise in elementary combinatorics was needed to find the solution.

What was happening was that, suddenly, the whole adventure of my favorite hero came to life. The captain said things, formulated intentions, played tough or rejoiced at the good outcome of his endeavors. The action took place in the land of the Kyrgyz, a most exotic setting in deep Asia. Everything was new and indescribably fantastic, an adventure far superior to anything I could have imagined. I was fascinated, passionate, enchanted. And I deciphered all that with exasperated slowness, in my eagerness to know more and more. I didn't stop until I reached the beginning; then, I started again, until I understood everything. When I finished, still very excited, I grabbed another comic book, and another and another. My sickroom had ceased to be a solitary place and, suddenly, my bed had become the most tumultuous and richest stage of wonders on earth. Everything was pulsating life, unbridled passions and energetic actions, the constant surprise of intrigues, the fervent sound of the word. That day I learned to read. It was the best treasure ever found. A treasure that an unusually benevolent genius gave me, the source of life that illuminated everything and had the virtue of never running out.

Human beings are what we do. We are also what we say, what we think, and what we feel. Because saying, thinking, and feeling are actions, verbal actions. We say words, and at the same time, they represent us. We live them, and they inspire us to be what we are. What we are, we are in the word. On the other hand, everything that is verbal can be transcribed. Writing, ultimately, is a tool—a technology, as we say now—that allows us to fix, to make enduring the incessant flow of the verb. Everything, absolutely everything that can be said, thought, or felt, can be written. Thus, reading gives us access to everything that has ever become a word, if someone has transcribed it and it has survived the vicissitudes of time. Perhaps it is not everything, but it is an immensity. A gift for my five years: access to the entire human universe: the knowledge of sciences, the wisdoms, and the infinitely vast and varied adventures of the human experience. The lived and the imagined. And from the word—which is everywhere and always accompanies us—can come a book of stories, an erudite study, a comic book, a newspaper article, a letter, a pamphlet, a cyberdocument. Like musical scores, which will only be music when someone interprets them, each text is a germinal world that calls to us, a country where a spark of the essence of man dwells. Every written word lives when we read it. We resurrect it, and it is ours.

Only what is transmitted from one man to another can overcome the dangers of oblivion and death. Even today, writing is the most effective means of transmitting what we are. We can read the hymns that Egyptian priests carved into the stone of the pyramids five thousand years ago, and their thunderous feeling of the sacred can still move us; just as Gilgamesh's pain before dead Enkidu, and his failure in the endeavor—not even within reach of a hero like him—to be immortal, a cry, written more than four millennia ago, is also ours, and can captivate us. We are moved by Priam's tears before his son's killer, Ulysses' longing to return home, the vision of old Socrates tirelessly discussing among sleeping drunks at the end of the Symposium, Dante's journey through hells and heavens, or the journey of Quixote and Sancho through spaces that are more prodigious because they build dreams in the everyday, or the strange adventure of a child who learned to read on a long evening of fever and solitude and who still appreciates this inexhaustible gift. To read is to take possession of the world, a party that never ends.