The world in which Goytisolo has chosen to end his days is radically different from the one in which he grew up. Born in 1931 in Barcelona, Goytisolo belonged to Catalonia's ultraconservative haute bourgeoisie. His paternal great-grandfather made his fortune in Cuban sugar, and Goytisolo attributes his own political awakening to his discovery, in his early 20's, of a trove of letters from the plantation's Cuban slaves. These begging letters all innocently revealed the misery on which his family's privileges rested; his immersion in these archives coincided with his first reading of Marx. His politics were also shaped by the fact that his mother was killed, when he was 7, in a bombing raid by Franco's side. "What was most curious was my father hid reality from us," Goytisolo told me. "He said our mother was murdered by 'the reds.' At 15, 16, I finally realized Franco killed my mother. Much later, at the Cinémathèque in Paris, I saw newsreels of that day's aerial bombardment. Eight hundred people were killed in one day. I was terrified I would see my mother's body."


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Goytisolo's mother came from a more liberal family than his father: "She wrote stories, she read Proust." With her death, Juan and his three siblings were cut off both from a mother's love and from any access to secular culture. (Surprisingly, his two brothers also grew up to be distinguished writers in Spain.) "I am the son not of my mother, but of the civil war, its messianism, its hatred," he told me.

In college, Goytisolo joined the anti-Franco resistance and began what he calls his real education. "I had received only indoctrination," he told me. "I needed a counterindoctrination to get clean. I went to a bookseller who had a hidden room. 'I have Sartre, Döblin, Dos Passos, Hemingway.' I read everything from Lenin to 'Lolita.' "