A house of books is a source to dream and love. I grew up in a house like that. I still live in a house whose walls are books. About the furniture. On the corners ...

The wind comes in through the window and sometimes opens pages at random. You stop. You look. There is a message that the books send you. Growing up in a house of books makes you master of secrets and mysteries. It takes you far, as much as you can not imagine. Books are a source of knowledge, pleasure and power.

They make you tame skies and seas, infinite, foreign wills and with them you live unthinkable stories. That is why reading is a privilege and reading a right that must be freely exercised. But you have something advanced if you were born in a house of books. Or if you are able to build it and shelter your loved ones in it. A house of books is a source to dream and love.

I do not know why, but since always, books have seemed like a window, precisely that window that opens insidious and promising to me and makes me look into them constantly and repeatedly, waiting (or not waiting, who knows) find something different every time I look at it as a space of infinity and surprise.

The book inspires me with freedom. The window gives me freedom. Book-Freedom-Window. Subtle combination of words with contrasting meanings, but somehow so related to each other by something strange that I am not yet able to define or understand.

I had a childhood full of books and windows. From windows that were closed to the air, to voices coming from the street, to the whispering of friends inviting me to escape the window (or door) outside to go play.

A childhood full of books that, like windows, opened to me suggestive and friends. From books that were entertainment, adventure and the unmatched pleasure of playing one and many characters at the same time.

I played with the windows of my house. They were like an open book to me. I would look at them inventing impossible stories and I used to study the nearby streets, the distant passers-by who, in my fantasy, were going to cross in front of my portal, the next minute. But the hours passed and the unexpected sometimes left me waiting uselessly.

So, when the windows of my room and those of my imagination were closed, for me there was no other way than to open the windows of the books, those ineffable ways that allowed me to escape from my world and go much further, far away in distances. or times.

I remember the books crammed one on top of the other on top of a shaking chair upholstered in pink, which was in the corner of my mother's room. From there I took them and they were scattered in the, for me, huge bed where I spent many hours a day, reading without respite.

Actually, I initially saw the letters, but I couldn't read what they were trying to tell me. Little by little, I was getting to know them. I imagined them tracing paths towards words, feelings and emotions, unknown ideas that perhaps I was already imagining.

The illustrations were very expressive, I would say impressive. What a curious effect it produced on me to see those images so rare and unusual in the daily life of a child living in a coastal fishing village!

They were images full of mystery, because somehow I sensed that they came from the real world, but behind them you could see the gaze of an artist who saw everything with different eyes.

I grew up with books from Spanish publishers on my knees because, at that time, my mother was a librarian in an enchanted place where all those books arrived: Aguilar, Doncel, Timun Mas, Molino, Juventud, Noguer ...

There were from biblical images to medieval knights. I saw long before the slender and romantic figure of the knight Roldán de Roncesvalles, even without knowing who he really was. The venerable old man, who later became Charlemagne, struck me with his kind but severe face.

In Italian legends or tales of ogres I discovered the underlying terror of those homicidal characters that, in the style of Bluebeard, populate classic universal children's literature and that are capable of producing such a delicious shock in children as voracious for knowledge as the one that once I went.

I was ecstatic with the legend of Sakuntala or the death of the child Muni from the volume Flor de leyendas , by Alejandro Casona —which I still keep today—, or all those illustrated stories from The Arabian Nights. The world of images that books offered was so wonderful and vast, so bewildering ...

He had not read Alice in Wonderland, but he honored his wishes to order a book where, yes, there were many, many images.

But I return to my childhood window, to the real one, not to the imaginary one that was opened to me in so many different books. Through her I learned to read people's faces. Which is very difficult if you look closely, because sometimes people are trying to hide their true face from others ...

That reading — I didn't know it then, I could never have even imagined it — was going to serve me a long time later, when I least imagined it, in my writing profession.

Everyone has a face that screams its truths. A cold and indifferent face that tries to become warm precisely to the person who makes it suffer the most. A hopeful face at dawn. A face that fades from exhaustion when it gets dark. A smiling face that remembers its own thoughts. A face that lights up when it sees another appear very close. Faces of fury. Charming faces. Curious faces. Faces of astonishment. Inquisitive looks. The face that dreams and dreams give without ever making the dream come true.

I could see so much from my window!

From so much seeing and seeing, he knew how long the people of the neighborhood would arrive or leave. I imagined their steps there far away, just a block away or I imagined them lost in a remote place that I invented for them, depending on how their face told me what their dreams or aspirations were.

Reading people's faces has always been very useful to me and it is a science that I will never regret exercising. It is, in short, the reading that most teaches how to live and understand ourselves with others, with those that we will ever stumble upon in our strange and unsuspected life ...

That is why windows always remind me of reading. And reading has been for me one of the biggest windows that I have ever dared to cross.

Reading is my window to yesterday. My window to today. My window to the future. My window to others. My window to me. My window to dreams. My window to the mysteries. My window to my soul, sometimes close or perhaps alien, always unfathomable and mysterious, like the greatest and oldest enigma of humanity ...

I believe that my soul, as must happen to many, is still that mysterious book (or window) that I hardly dare to open. Will I ever do it? And then will I get to read it? That may be the enigma that stuns so many authors who, unknowingly, in each new undress and let others, looking through the window through some pages, peek into their mystery.

The great Italian theorist, teacher and writer Gianni Rodari asked himself: "Is it worth it for a child to learn by crying what he can learn by laughing?" And he assured that: “Through the stories and the fantastic procedures that produce them, we help children to enter reality through the window, instead of through the door. It is more fun and therefore more useful.

I believe that if all the adults who, whether they are children, grandchildren, nephews, students, have children in our care, were able to stimulate that innate fantasy and imagination of childhood, we would be able to open for them an immeasurable window to infinity. Reading can never be a prison for them. Precisely because reading is, like few others, one of the most promising spaces in LIBERTY.