The librarian by Guillermo Sánchez León ( http://diarium.usal.es/guillermo) translated by A. Prieto
I looked at the naked bodies of a man and a woman lying on a wide bed. Their faces expressed a sense of placidity. Even being dead, she had a beautiful and smiling face. She seemed to be immersed in a pleasant dream.
I turned to a young policeman who was there and asked him:
- Do you know who they are?
- Sorry officer, but according to their ID cards, they are Elisa Cabrera and Miguel Gala; 55 and 69 years old. She is a librarian and he is an engineer, possibly retired, since he has a pensioner’s card.
- They must be rich… look at the size and luxury of this mansion.
-The house is not theirs. The owner called us this morning, he had rented it for a month and today was the last day. He was the one who found them,” the policeman answered diligently.
-I didn’t know these mansions were rented out,” I thought aloud.
The policeman gave me a wide explanation about what could have happened. When he arrived, there were some lit stoves next to the bed, the kind they put on during winter on the terraces of some bars. The bedroom door was closed; he was not surprised by how cold the house was. It was probably a natural death by asphyxia, due to carbon monoxide, winter´s most common accident. The bodies were still warm: they had been dead for only a few hours.
The cop’s conclusions were reasonable. However, several things struck me. Despite the cold, there was little point in having stoves burning, since in the same room there was a French fireplace, whose embers were still warm. It was weird that the accident had taken place the day the rent was due to end.
I inspected the room. A small, hand-bound booklet caught my eye. I read the first few lines which began like this: “My name is Elisa Cabrera. I am 55 years old. I was born in Ovando, a small town where my parents were teachers…”. I could not read much more, as the judge and the coroner entered the room.
A few hours later, the coroner’s report concluded that death had been caused by asphyxia, due to carbon monoxide. Both of their blood contained a slight amount of alcohol. I suggested to the judge to investigate whether it was a suicide or not. He replied that it did not matter whether it was natural death or suicide. Both the judiciary and the police had enough work to do without wasting time figuring it out. Besides, they had no children and all they had left was a small apartment in the town center.
Who were Elisa and Miguel?, I wondered. I obtained authorization from the judge to inspect their apartment, telling him it was a routine inquiry.
Inside of the apartment, there were two rooms with shelves full of books. On the highest shelf I saw a box, which I could reach by using a chair. I opened it. It had numerous little books, apparently the same as the one I had seen in the mansion. I began to read one of them. It said: “My name is Elisa Cabrera, I am 51 years old. I was born in Ovendo, a small town where my parents were teachers…”. I went to the last chapter, which told how she was in the library and he picked her up at the end of the day. After choosing several books at random, I noticed that they all began and ended the same way. I thought they were all copies of the same book, but I realized that Elisa’s age varied between 49 and 55; moreover, the number of pages was not always the same, so I looked at chapter 5 of several books and confirmed that their contents were different.
Apart from immense curiosity, what could I argue to the judge to keep the case open? He ruled out any artifice and said that these were deaths from natural causes. I accepted his decision, but I was not satisfied, so I made a copy of the keys to the apartment and every night I went round and read one of those little books. They all seemed to be Elisa’s autobiographies, or at least they were written by her in the first person. Although they began the same, except for the age number, each one represented a different life of Elisa and Miguel. However, in all cases they were exciting lives, full of adventures, lives that I would like to have lived myself. They were stories of a more than remarkable quality. I felt like Max Brod, to whom Kafka bequeathed his extraordinary unpublished literary work.
My curiosity to solve that case increased every day, and it already seemed to me the most amazing case I had ever faced. One day I found some handwritten pages in Miguel’s handwriting inside Borges’ El Aleph. As soon as I read the first lines, I sensed that I was about to discover the way to solve the enigma:
“When I was in what I considered to be the prime of my professional life, one day the head of my department, who was barely 30 years old, called me. He told me that the company, in order to survive, needed to renew itself with young people adapted to the latest technologies, who would be able to use social networks to convey a dynamic image. I would receive more than enough compensation to support me comfortably until my formal retirement age. What could I do at the age of fifty-something? I considered myself an excellent technician but lacked the spirit to start a business. I had dedicated my entire professional life to the same company, to the point that my marriage had collapsed because of the little attention I paid to my wife while someone else paid attention to me. When I came home from work, I only wanted to relax watching TV or going to watch movies, my passion since I was young.
My routine life was even interrupted on weekends, when I went on excursions with a nature lovers’ association, thanks to which I had become an amateur geologist and botanist. That cleared me to face the work that awaited me during the week, and now I had nothing to look forward to, which led me to depression. I had to find a way out of it, but I didn’t have much social ability. Of course, playing cards or going to ballroom dancing didn’t seem to be the way out, so I took up something I had dreamed of doing when I was young: writing a novel. However, in order to do so, I first had to read authors with a capital letter. To that end, I started going to a small library near my house, which had a large and peaceful reading room. Only in the afternoon the bustle of some children and youngsters broke the usual silence.
From the first moment, I was captivated by a very beautiful and cheerful librarian, who treated everyone with an extraordinary kindness, always accompanied by a smile. I tried to sit in a place where I could watch her. I would spend hours and hours reading and to rest I would let my imagination run wild: Who was she? Was she married, perhaps engaged? My macho prejudice told me that such a beautiful and lively woman could not be seen in any other state, although no one came to pick her up. I would linger until closing time, when I would take the opportunity to exchange a few brief words with her about what I had read. Days went by, and words turned into conversations. She told me that the library had inherited from a benefactor its extraordinary collection, with very old original texts, and even treasured some incunabula. I ascertained that she knew all the books there, and that she read Greek and Latin, which increased my admiration for her even more. Later, I dared to show her the novel I was writing. She paid attention to me and made some intelligent comment, although I knew she was doing it out of deference. One day I plucked up the courage, and at the close of the library I invited her for coffee and she accepted, and this was repeated many times. Then we started seeing each other outside the library; she would accompany me on my field trips. I couldn’t believe it! Instead of a finished man, I felt I was in the prime of life, so much so that I was convinced that I had been very fortunate to leave the company.
The truth is that he rarely mentioned his life before he met me. I only knew that he had worked in the archives of the National Library and that he had not married. Otherwise, he almost always talked about his books, stating that from a library one could lead a life as intense or more intense than that of any adventurer, since each book was nothing but an adventure. He gave the example of Jules Verne, who spent an important part of his life in libraries and had managed to create some of the best travel books in world literature.
A few months into our relationship, I asked her to marry me, to which she reacted by bursting into tears. She confessed to me that she was in that small library after leaving the National Library because of a mental illness that she believed to be hereditary. This had led her to shy away from the idea of marriage, thus preventing her children from inheriting the illness. I insisted that, whatever she suffered from, I didn’t care, and in the end, we got married and with her I lived the best moments of my life. After two or three years she began, from time to time, to call me by other names, almost always literary characters (Achilles, Othello, etc). I thought he was joking and that must have been so at first, but little by little he ended up confusing reality with literature. The psychiatrist told me that she suffered from a strange type of schizophrenia, in which she only remembered the last thing she had read as if it were real: she believed herself to be one of the characters and everything around her was part of that fantasy. It was a bewildering picture with no cure. I felt desperate, but I couldn’t give up, I had to find the solution! Then I had an idea: I would write a book in which I would relate our own life, as if it were a diary written by herself. It would be the last thing she would read before falling asleep and when she woke up, her reality and mine would coincide. I carried it out and it worked. And I found something much better: while she was in the library, I was introducing modifications to the book I had written the day before; for that I recognize that computers are a great help. I would check which versions she liked best. My hope was to find a better story every day. I always finished the stories in the same way: with her in the library waiting for me at the end of the day.
When we went to bed, I would leave the book I had written that day for her to read before we went to sleep. When she didn’t arrive on time, she would use one of the books she had already written. Every day we enjoyed commenting on the last adventure as if we had really lived it; for her it was like that, and I ended up believing it. This is how we lived hundreds of lives together.
One day I began to feel that my imagination was failing me, that something in my head was not working. The doctor confirmed the worst of my suspicions: I was suffering from Alzheimer’s, which meant that I would end up losing my memory and everything that makes me a person. And that was not what worried me the most. What really made me feel despondent was wondering: what would become of her without me?
The last book would be the best of all. I would look for a mansion in which to live that last dream.”
I folded the pages and put them back into the book. The judge was right. It was a case of natural death.
