Margen
Two hundred and fourteen. That is the number Ainhoa Cortabarria, book restorer at the Provincial Library of Huesca, has had written in marker on the back of her hand since eight this morning. Two hundred and fourteen titles to verify before the 30th, when the lorries come.
Verifying means one very specific thing now that the National Deduplication Programme exists: checking that the copy staying in the reading room is the one the system says is staying. One title, one copy. What is left over goes up onto a lorry and off to the pulp plant in Sabiñánigo. In the rest of the country it has been running for two years. Huesca's turn came in May.
First out of the trolley is a hardback, grey cloth, no dust jacket. Studies on Irrigation in the Hoya, Casimiro Lete, 1974. Ainhoa rests it on the stand, runs the scanner over the barcode inside the back cover and waits for the short beep.
The beep is long.
On the screen, against an orange background: COPY NOT LOCATABLE — WITHDRAWN, DESTROYED.
"Fabián."
Fabián Oyarzun, head of the reading room and the man responsible for the weeding, takes exactly as long to arrive as it takes him to put down his coffee. He is sixty, he has spent since March signing lists, and he has learned to look at screens with a very still face.
"Run it again."
Ainhoa runs it again. Long beep. Orange background.
"It'll be the barcode," says Fabián. "Sometimes seventies toner eats one of the bars."
"It isn't the barcode. Look at the record."
The record is complete and internally consistent, which is the worst part. Title, author, shelfmark, year. And at the bottom, in the traceability block, three lines written by a machine with no reason at all to lie: BATCH 41 DESPATCHED — 12 MARCH 2038. RECEIVED AT SABIÑÁNIGO PLANT — 14 MARCH 2038. DESTRUCTION CERTIFIED — 14 MARCH 2038.
Fabián leans on the stand with both hands.
"That's three months ago."
"That's three months ago," Ainhoa repeats, "and I'm holding it."
She is holding it. It weighs a good nine hundred grams. There is a damp stain shaped like a peninsula on the bottom edge, and the spine is sewn, not glued, because in 1974 in Huesca they still sewed. Ainhoa has been restoring books for eleven years and she knows a volume that has been kept somewhere dry: this one has been kept somewhere dry.
"Right," says Fabián. "Right. Set it aside, log it as an incident and get on with the other two hundred and thirteen. The lorries come on the 30th and the batch has to be closed."
"And if the system has got more of them wrong?"
"Then it will have got more of them wrong."
He leaves. Ainhoa is left with the volume open at the middle, at the place where books used by someone fall open on their own, and that is when she sees it.
In the right-hand margin of page 148, in pencil, in a small, steeply slanted hand, there is a sentence: the name is missing here. Below it, two more lines in the same hand. Ainhoa turns pages forwards and backwards and keeps finding them: on 12, on 63, on 90, on 147, on 148, on 201. These are not a student's underlinings. They are corrections. Someone has read this book with a pencil in their hand and gone along mending things.
Ainhoa does what she always does when a book tells her something: she puts it under the anglepoise lamp and looks at it edge-on. The graphite of the notes is clean, unsmudged, with no ring of fingerprints. It is recent.
She goes back to page 148 and reads the whole note. At the end of the last line, tight against the trimmed edge, there are two initials and a date.
C. L., 2036.
Ainhoa looks at the title page, which says Casimiro Lete, 1974. She looks at the screen, which says destroyed on 14 March 2038. And she looks at the back of her hand, which says 214.
Then she picks up the phone in the reading room and dials the number of the Sabiñánigo plant, the one printed at the foot of every destruction certificate, the one she had never until this morning had any reason to dial.