I had dreamed about the place so often as I walked past its front door that now I hardly noticed the dark gloomy aura that possessed it. I walked up the main corridor, exploring rooms of all shapes and sizes in which old furniture lay abandoned under a thick layer of dust and shadow. One table was still covered with a frayed tablecloth on which sat a dinner service and a tray of petrified fruit and flowers. The glasses and cutlery were still there, as if the inhabitants were in the middle of dinner... The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that when I opened the windows - my new windows - each evening its streets would whisper stories to me, secrets in my ear, that I could catch on paper and narrate to whoever cared to hear.