"Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta was born in the southern Spanish city of Seville circa 1950 and died by suicide in Madrid in 1987, burning himself to death in a small room on whose rent he was nearly three months in arrears. He is known to have spent much of his life outside Spain, in Central and South America and the Philippines; what precisely he did there remains uncertain, and confirmation or refutation of the many rumours, variously unsavoury and contradictory, that circulated during his lifetime will have to wait for the complete decipherment of his coded diaries."