A lifetime has passed, but at 81 years old, Luis Mateo Díez (Villablino, 1942) vividly remembers the place that marked him forever.
It was a municipal attic converted into a blood hospital during the war.
A “ghostly” room in the Villablino City Hall (León), where his father worked as secretary.
There, among boxes full of copies of
Corazón
, by Edmundo de Amicis, a book removed from circulation by the dictatorship, he discovered his passion for literature.
“I was a strange child who wrote, who read and who liked to tell stories, but today I am afraid of that child I was because he had a very powerful inner world.
“I would have liked to be more foolish and naive,” he admits in the interview video from
In the Library
.