Margen
Previously: Ainhoa Cortabarria verifies the books the State will destroy on the 30th. Copy 215 was signed out by its own author, Casimiro Lete, in 2036.
At ten past nine she had 173 titles left to verify and a box from the external depot sitting on her desk, tied with packing twine and labelled TRAMULLAS 1974. Ainhoa cut the twine with the office scissors, because the utility knife was on the inventory and she didn't want to sign another form.
Inside were typed sheets. Two hundred and something: the original of "Oficios de invierno" exactly as it left the printworks in Huesca.
"This shouldn't be here," said Otilia Bergua, cataloguer of the old collection, thirty-one years in the post. "Printer's originals went back to the author."
"Well, somebody didn't send it back."
Otilia put gloves on before touching them. Ainhoa didn't: she had spent three weeks handling books bound for a shredder and had lost the ceremony.
The first sheet had a pencil note in the margin, with the same hooked l as the notes in copy 215. It read: "I tried the legal way, 1998."
Between sheet one hundred and nine and one hundred and ten there was a photocopy folded in four. It was a letter from Casimiro Lete Arbués, resident in Ayerbe, addressed to the publisher and dated 3 February 1998. He asked for one specific thing: that the next reprint of "Oficios de invierno" carry two names on the cover instead of one.
The reply was written in ballpoint on the same sheet, underneath, with no heading and no legible signature: "Edition out of print since 1981. No reprint planned. Not applicable."
Ainhoa read it twice and laid it on the desk.
"That's why he came back," she said.
"Why did who come back?" Otilia didn't look up from the sheets.
"The author. In 2036 he signed his own book out, took it away, wrote three pencil notes and returned it eleven days later. For three days I've been thinking he was an old man going over himself. He was correcting the only copy where anything could still be corrected."
She said it out loud to hear it. It fitted the notes: "I didn't write this" on page eleven, "nor this" on page forty, "add name" on page one hundred and nine. The first two were a statement of fact. The third was an instruction, and he wasn't writing it to himself: he was writing it to whoever found it.
"Thirty-eight years between the letter and the pencil," said Otilia. "That's a lot of patience for a man of eighty-seven."
"Or no other way of doing it."
"And why do you care?" said Ainhoa. "You've got four thousand two hundred titles downstairs and they're leaving you four hundred."
Otilia laid the sheet on the desk, squared with the edge.
"They're leaving me four hundred and I pick them. I've been picking for three weeks." She put a hand on the chapter four pile. "Every time I discard one, I check whether there's another copy somewhere. There almost always is. A name that isn't written down anywhere has no other copy."
Otilia had been separating the sheets by chapter, with a paper strip between each group. She stopped at the fourth pile and lifted it against the window light.
"Ainhoa."
"Go on."
"This pile isn't from the same machine."
She put it in front of her. The sheets for chapters one, two and three had cramped type and an r split at the top, always the same, page after page. The fourth chapter's were from another machine: rounder characters, a nicked c, paper of a different weight and a left margin two centimetres wider. Twenty-two sheets.
Underneath the pile, stapled on, was the composition sheet from Imprenta Tramullas. A hand-ruled table of the kind used for commissions: chapter, number of sheets, delivery date, who brings it. Chapters one, two, three, five, six and seven carried the same name repeated in the last column: Casimiro Lete.
Chapter four carried something else. The date box read 14-I-1974; the sheet count, 22; and the box for who brings it, written by the same typesetter in the same ink, read: "original from a third party; not credited on cover".
Ainhoa rested two fingers on top of that line.
"Otilia. The 1974 edition is missing whoever wrote chapter four."
"It's missing the name," said Otilia. "Fifty-two years of missing."
She pulled off one glove slowly and looked at the table again, like someone checking a sum they have already checked.
"Someone who knew they wouldn't be credited."
"Someone with a name," said Ainhoa. "Who delivered the twenty-two sheets of chapter four?"