Margen
Previously: Ainhoa, a restorer in Huesca, took a book listed as destroyed to the Sabiñánigo plant. There the records are signed by weight, not by title.
Two hundred and five. Ainhoa Cortabarria, restorer at the Provincial Library of Huesca, has redone the number on the back of her hand with a fresh marker, bigger than yesterday's, and she was back at trolley three by a quarter past eight. Nine titles verified before ten. She is keeping a good pace and thinking about none of them.
She is thinking about number 215, still wrapped in tissue paper inside her bag, under the desk, because she cannot bring herself to leave it on the exceptions shelf.
Mid-morning she goes up to cataloguing with the question she asked herself on the way back along the N-330: if nobody ever borrowed that book, who corrected it in pencil in 2036?
Miren Zaldúa, cataloguer in this building for thirty-one years, has two screens, a mug with the provincial council's crest and the habit of hearing a question all the way out before answering it.
"Loans are in two places," she says. "And you can check both in five minutes."
The first is the system. The library migrated to electronic records in 1998, and since then every loan leaves an entry with a date, a borrower code and a return. Miren types in the shelfmark for 215. The screen answers with a table of four columns and not a single row.
"Zero," says Ainhoa.
"Zero since ninety-eight."
The second place is paper. Miren picks up the volume with both hands, opens it at the inside back cover and lifts, with her fingernail, the corner of a card pocket glued there since it was bound. Inside is a rectangular sheet with boxes for ink stamps. It has been stamped nine times. The last one reads 14 May 1996.
"Up to ninety-six, people took it out," says Miren. "Nine times in twenty-two years, which for a book about irrigation is not bad at all. And then it stopped."
Ainhoa looks at the nine stamps. They are bunched between 1974 and 1983, one after another, and then there is a jump of thirteen years to the last one. Miren explains it without making anything of it: the Hoya canal was finished in eighty-two, and with the canal finished there were no more engineers coming in to read about how the land used to be watered.
"And then it stopped."
Ainhoa does the sum out loud, to hear it: forty-two years in which that copy has not gone out through the door.
Miren corrects her, and the correction is worse.
"It hasn't gone out and nobody has consulted it either. That's a different file."
She shows her the third one. Closed-stack holdings are not lent out: they are consulted in the researchers' room, and for that you fill in a slip with your name, your card number and the shelfmark. Every slip is kept. Since 2011 they have been scanned.
Miren filters by shelfmark. The screen takes a few seconds, because there are close to two hundred thousand slips, and it answers again with an empty table.
"215 went into the closed stacks in 1998, when they set up the local-collection reserve," she says. "Since that day it has not been on a table in this building. Not once."
"And who goes down to the stacks?"
"Staff, with a key and a work docket." Miren raises both hands, like someone handing back a parcel she never ordered. "But that isn't my file any more. The stacks belong to the floor. And the floor is Fabián."
Ainhoa goes back to page 148. The small, steeply slanted handwriting, the graphite clean and unsmudged, and the date tight against the edge: 12-XI-2036. Somebody had this book in front of them for hours, crossing out words and writing over them, two years before this morning.
And it was not here.
The door opens without anyone knocking. Fabián Oyarzun, floor manager and head of the withdrawal programme, comes in with a stapled list and does not sit down.
"Two hundred and five," he says. "You have two hundred and five left and on the thirtieth the lorries are downstairs. Yesterday you verified twelve. Today you are on nine."
"Today I'm on nine because I came up here."
"I know you came up here." He drops the list on Miren's keyboard. "I'm the one who signs the release record for the batch. If a single title is unchecked on the thirtieth, the person who certified that everything had been checked is me."
"And if the list is wrong?"
"Then I sign that too. That is exactly what I'm trying to explain to you."
He leaves. Miren waits for the door to click shut, points two fingers at the empty table of slips and says it in the same calm voice she has used for everything else, which is what makes the hair rise on Ainhoa's arm:
"This book has not left here since 1998 and nobody has ever requested it in the reading room. The notes from thirty-six were not written inside this building. So you tell me where it was."