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March 29 - April 3, 2025
“Daniel, you mustn’t tell anyone what you’re about to see today,” my father warned. “Not even your friend Tomás. No one.” “Not even Mommy?” My father sighed, hiding behind the sad smile that followed him like a shadow through life. “Of course you can tell her,” he answered, heavyhearted. “We keep no secrets from her. You can tell her everything.”
As a child I learned to fall asleep talking to my mother in the darkness of my bedroom, telling her about the day’s events, my adventures at school, and the things I had been taught. I couldn’t hear her voice or feel her touch, but her radiance and her warmth haunted every corner of our home, and I believed, with the innocence of those who can still count their age on their ten fingers, that if I closed my eyes and spoke to her, she would be able to hear me wherever she was. Sometimes my father would listen to me from the dining room, crying in silence.
“I can’t remember her face. I can’t remember Mommy’s face,” I muttered, breathless. My father held me tight. “Don’t worry, Daniel. I’ll remember for both of us.”
For the first time, I realized my father was growing old.
My father knelt next to me and, with his eyes fixed on mine, addressed me in the hushed voice he reserved for promises and secrets. “This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they have only us, Daniel. Do you think you’ll be able to keep such a secret?”
“According to tradition, the first time someone visits this place, he must choose a book, whichever he wants, and adopt it, making sure that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive. It’s a very important promise. For life,” explained my father. “Today it’s your turn.”
A SECRET’S WORTH DEPENDS ON THE PEOPLE FROM WHOM IT MUST be kept.
I handed him the book, and Barceló took it with infinite care. “You’ve read it, I suppose.” “Yes, sir.” “I envy you. I’ve always thought that the best time to read Carax is when one still has a young heart and a blank soul. Did you know this was the last novel he wrote?”
THAT AFTERNOON OF MIST AND DRIZZLE, CLARA BARCELÓ STOLE my heart, my breath, and my sleep. In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that wasn’t to be broken for years.
In Spain, both the cradle and pinnacle of Christian civilization, barbarism was for anarchists—those people who rode bicycles and wore darned socks—and surely they wouldn’t get very far. But Clara’s father believed that nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds. He had a good understanding of history and knew that the future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.
“My father knew from the start what was going to happen,” Clara explained. “He stayed close to his friends because he felt it was his duty. What killed him was his loyalty to people who, when their time came, betrayed him. Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.”
NEVER BEFORE HAD I FELT TRAPPED, SEDUCED, AND CAUGHT UP in a story,” Clara explained, “the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. Have you ever kissed a girl, Daniel?”
“Well, you’re still very young. But it’s that same feeling, that first-time spark that you never forget. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn’t matter to anyone changed my life.”
Later on, Monsieur Roquefort heard a rumor, a strange story about someone who went around libraries and bookshops looking for works by Julián Carax. If he found any, he would buy them, steal them, or get them by some other means, after which he would immediately set fire to them. Nobody knew who he was or why he did it. Another mystery to add to Carax’s own enigma.
Women have an infallible instinct for knowing when a man has fallen madly in love with them, especially when the male in question is both a complete dunce and a minor.
“Before your mother died, she made me promise that I would never talk to you about the war, that I wouldn’t let you remember any of what happened.”
“The only thing that should be done with them, Daniel,” he answered. He pulled a box of matches out of his pocket. He took one and struck it. The flame showed his face for the first time. My blood froze. He had no nose, lips, or eyelids. His face was nothing but a mask of black scarred skin, consumed by fire. It was the same dead skin that Clara had touched. “Burn them,” he whispered, his voice and his eyes poisoned by hate.
I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.
“Don’t you like the cinema, Fermín?” “Between you and me, this business of the seventh art leaves me cold. As far as I can see, it’s only a way of feeding the mindless and making them even more stupid. Worse than football or bullfights. The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it’s much the same.” Fermín’s attitude changed radically the day he discovered Carole Lombard. “What breasts, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what breasts!” he exclaimed in the middle of the film, beside himself. “Those aren’t tits, they’re two schooners!”
Tell me, what sort of women do you like, Daniel?” “I don’t know much about them, honestly.” “Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it’s like electricity: you don’t have to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.
From that day on, Fermín always addressed him with the formal usted or called him “doctor,” and pretended not to notice the boy’s stammer.
“Your friend Tomás is talented, but he lacks drive and could benefit from a more winning demeanor. It’s the only way to get anywhere,” Fermín said to me one day. “Alas, that’s the scientist’s mind for you. Just consider Albert Einstein. All those prodigious inventions, and the first one they find a practical application for is the atom bomb—without his permission. Tomás is going to have a hard time in academic circles with that boxer’s face of his. In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.”
“Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That’s the intrinsic blueprint for our ‘ethical behavior,’” he argued. “It’s pure biology.” “Aren’t you exaggerating?” “Sometimes you’re so naïve, Daniel.”
Fermín, in particular, did not share Mr. Aguilar’s enthusiasm for the army experience. “The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population,” he would remark. “And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there’s no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church, and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.”
I watched them leave arm in arm and disappear down Calle Santa Ana, hoping there was somebody on duty up in heaven who, for once, would grant the couple a lucky break.
In a shop window, I saw a Philips poster announcing the arrival of a new messiah, the TV set. Some predicted that this peculiar contraption was going to change our lives forever and turn us all into creatures of the future, like the Americans. Fermín Romero de Torres, always up to date on state-of-art technology, had already prophesied a grimmer outcome. “Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist,
Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.”
Disarmed, I realized how easily you can lose all animosity toward someone you’ve deemed your enemy as soon as that person stops behaving as such.
He begged the Lord to send him a signal, a whisper, a crumb of His presence. God, in His infinite wisdom, and perhaps overwhelmed by the avalanche of requests from so many tormented souls, did not answer.
“Dear friends, life is the stuff of drama, and even the noblest of the Lord’s creatures can taste the bitterness of destiny’s capricious and obstinate ways. Last night, in the small hours, while the city enjoyed the well-deserved sleep of all hardworking people, Don Federico Flaviá i Pujades, a well-loved neighbor who has so greatly contributed to this community’s enrichment and solace in his role as watchmaker, only three doors down from this bookshop, was arrested by the State Police.”
I know that Don Federico is a man of faith, always very devout and involved in parish activities, but all his life he has had to live with a hidden compulsion, which, on very rare occasions, has got the better of him, sending him off into the streets dolled up as a tart. His ability to mend anything from wristwatches to sewing machines is legendary, and as a person he is well loved by every one of us who knew him and frequented his establishment, even by those who did not approve of his occasional night escapades sporting a wig, a comb, and a flamenco dress.”
“Poor thing, he has a heart of gold, and he always minds his own business. So he likes dressing up as a Gypsy and singing in front of people? Who cares? People are evil.” “Not evil,” Fermín objected. “Moronic, which isn’t quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn’t stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced that he’s doing good, that he’s always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around fucking up, if you’ll excuse the French, anyone he perceives to be different from
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She regarded me in silence, the way one looks at strangers on the street or in the subway. She lit a cigarette and stayed where she was, her face masked by spirals of blue smoke. I suddenly thought that, despite herself, Nuria Monfort exuded a certain air of the femme fatale, like those women in the movies who dazzled Fermín when they materialized out of the mist of a Berlin station, enveloped in halos of improbable light, the sort of beautiful women whose own appearance bored them.
The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.”
“Julián died alone, convinced that nobody would remember him or his books and that his life had meant nothing,” she said. “He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.”
“A good father?” “Yes. Like yours. A man with a head, a heart, and a soul. A man capable of listening, of leading and respecting a child, and not of drowning his own defects in him. Someone whom a child will not only love because he’s his father but will also admire for the person he is. Someone he would want to grow up to resemble.”
Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood.
“Sometimes these illustrious institutions offer a scholarship or two for the sons of the gardener or the shoeshine man, just to show their magnanimity and Christian charity,” Fermín proffered. “The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich. That is the poison with which capitalism blinds the—”
“Do you know that you look a bit like Julián when he was young?” Father Fernando suddenly said to me.
Years of teaching had left him with that firm and didactic tone of someone used to being heard, but not certain of being listened to.
“Is it true you haven’t read any of these books?” “Books are boring.” “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you,” answered Julián.
Jorge smiled at him. Julián thought he smiled the way people smile who have no friends, with gratitude.
Years later, every time he stuck his revolver into the mouth of a prisoner and pulled the trigger, Chief Inspector Francisco Javier Fumero would remember the day he saw his mother’s head burst open like a ripe watermelon near an outdoor bar in Las Planas and didn’t feel anything, just the tedium of dead things.
OMG! What a reveal!!!!
During the last year we spent together in the school, Francisco Javier tried to kill Julián with his father’s shotgun. If Miquel hadn’t stopped him…”
It occurred to me that their very presence was testimony to the moral emptiness of the universe and the mechanical brutality with which it destroys the parts it no longer needs.
“That’s what I’ve been saying from the start,” said Fermín, casting a glance at me. “Trouble is, some of us suffer from an excess of juvenile ardor and a lack of strategic grasp of the situation.” “Look who’s talking: Saint John of the Cross.”
Life on the streets is short. People look at you in disgust, even the ones who give you alms, but this is nothing compared to the revulsion you feel for yourself. It’s like being trapped in a walking corpse, a corpse that’s hungry, stinks, and refuses to die.
“Making money isn’t hard in itself,” he complained. “What’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.”
She only had to look at Antoni Fortuny to know that she would never be able to love him. Not the way she dreamed she would love somebody one day. But she found it hard to cast aside the image of herself that she saw reflected in the hatter’s besotted eyes. Only in them did she see the Sophie she would have wished to be.
