A few years ago, what I am telling you about happened to me. I had received an award in Barcelona and I was flying back to Madrid. I was traveling with my friend Alex, who had been a judge at one of the Ondas awards. We had almost everything discussed. The plane left late, and we were able to tell each other all our things in one of the airport bars. The truth is that his conversation invites conversation, and that is not a redundancy, it is simply like that. There are people who rarely say stupid things and whose way of expressing themselves is always elegant, which is why one wants to listen more than talk. My friend is one of them. I would even say more: Alex makes that very Chilean admonition desirable, which one day, after interviewing him, I heard the writer say. Jorge Edwards: “We need to meet and talk over a bottle of wine.”
Readers as we are, each of us took a book out of our luggage bag on the plane. I pointed out that I never travel without one or more books, even when I knew there would be no time to read them. It was a stubborn, inevitable effort, a habit that had become a kind of shield for life and travel. My friend, who understood me perfectly and shared this mania, only regretted that many times, due to lack of time, some of them returned to the shelf just as they came out. Unopened. Then, he said, you felt as if you owed them something. Don’t worry about it, unlike people, books are patient and know how to wait.
Don’t worry about it, unlike people, books are patient and know how to wait.
Besides being readers, some say, we both share a method, and we never travel without a pencil, a beautiful word that takes us straight to the eraser, and therefore to childhood. The pencil accompanies the right hand, which from time to time underlines or draws a small rectangle in a paragraph or notes a few words in the margin of a page already read. These are very personal, non-transferable, even committed underlinings at times, which is why Alex assures us that he never leaves a book no matter how good a friend the person who asks him for it is, that he prefers to give it away. And I understand this, because after underlining and annotating, the book is already different, it has expanded and grown with personal contributions that invade the printed letter and are transferred to the reader’s own intimate biography.
So first lesson: Never leave a book with your own notes and marks, because whoever reads it will know or imagine things about you that you want to preserve or simply not share. Furthermore, by leaving it, the cursed principle is fulfilled according to which there are two types of idiots, the one who leaves a book and the one who returns it.. The trip continued while we laughed and agreed with each other.
The story of the missing book
So, among the clouds and at a speed approaching a thousand kilometers per hour, my friend told me this beautiful story that had happened to him. He was reading Twenty-four hours in the life of a womanof Stefan Zweigand it happened that, when I was halfway through reading it, I lost it. I searched in my study, in the dining room, on the sofa, under the sofa, in the guest room and even in the car. Nothing, it didn’t appear. In a great rage I decided to buy another volume and finish reading it that way. Since it was short, I thought it best to start it. That is, read and underline; underline and read. But what a surprise it was when, when I was almost finished, the lost book turned up in the most unexpected place; someone had left it in my coat pocket. It was another curious thing because I never discovered who left it there. It hadn’t been me, and I was sure of that.
Then Alex fell silent. A long silence, as if he were remembering what he had said. BuenoI told, What happened, because it seems that the story does not end there.
Of course, of course it ended in the following way that I will tell you. In my right hand I had the new book, in my left the one I had just found. Then I opened them and discovered to my surprise that the underlines did not match. That what was highlighted in one copy was not in the other; that the marginal notes did not match, and what was even worse, that when they coincided in the same paragraph they contradicted each other, being myself the one who had read and written in both books. That frightened me. And it was not until a few days later when I finally found the answer. But that, dear Felix, you will tell us next Friday in Vozpopulithat now, as soon as we get to Madrid and in homage to Jorge Edwards, I intend to make good on his advice. Prepare yourself, then, to converse over a good bottle of wine on a table of La Monte, one of the best taverns in the capital.
And until this Friday, dear reader, when I plan to tell you the end of this true and unique story.
