Nobody had ever asked to have their name taken off

Previously: Ainhoa Cortabarria learned that a single title can be saved from the cull, and that the form requires the signature of the living author.

Seventy-four titles unverified and forty kilometres of road. Ainhoa Cortabarria, book restorer at the Huesca Provincial Library, parked in Ayerbe at twenty past ten in the morning with the article nine form inside an elastic-band folder and the copy wrapped in tissue paper.

The address was the one from the 1974 legal deposit and had not been updated in sixty-four years: calle Rafael Gasset, ground floor, a green door and one of those bells you have to press hard. He opened it himself. Casimiro Lete Arbués, eighty-nine years old, retired country vet, forty-one winters walking into cattle sheds between Ayerbe and Riglos. He lived on the ground floor because the stairs were no longer an option.

—I've brought you a book of yours —said Ainhoa.

—I don't have any books of mine. I gave them all away.

She set it down on the oilcloth of the kitchen table and unwrapped it. «Oficios de invierno», Tramullas printers, Huesca, 1974. Casimiro put on his reading glasses, opened it in the middle and did not read it: he ran his thumb along the edge of the pages, the way people do when they know a book by its thickness.

—Where has this come from?

—From room three. And on the 19th it goes onto a lorry, with two hundred and thirteen others, bound for the pulp plant in Sabiñánigo.

—And the other two hundred and thirteen?

—They get pulped. That's why I'm here about this one.

Ainhoa took out the form, two stapled sheets with the National Deduplication Programme letterhead, and set it down turned towards him. She talked him through box one, box two and box three: title and year; library and registration number; and certification of authorship, with the original signature in ink, inside the frame, of the author of the work while living.

—One title out of two hundred and fourteen stays —she said—. I choose it and you sign for it.

Casimiro read the small print twice, exactly as she had read it on Thursday.

—When does the Registry answer?

—Between seven and fifteen working days.

—And the lorry comes on the 19th.

—The lorry comes on the 19th at six in the morning.

—Then this doesn't arrive in time.

—The file arrives. The book doesn't, if nobody pulls it out of the batch. —Ainhoa sat down for the first time—. There's an operator at the plant who signs the records by weight, Remei Balaguer. If on the 19th she stops the line for half an hour and sets this copy aside, the paper holds out until the Registry answers. If she doesn't stop it, the file arrives in the name of a book that is already pulp.

—And is she going to stop a production line for you?

—I don't know. I'm going to ask her tomorrow.

Casimiro stood up, opened the sideboard drawer and took out a biscuit tin with two rubber bands round it. Inside were receipts, a photograph of a dog and a brown envelope with no return address. Out of the envelope he pulled three typewritten sheets, with the chipped c that Ainhoa had already seen in the library basement.

—Chapter four —he said—. Herminia wrote it.

—Herminia Sasal.

—Schoolteacher in Riglos until seventy-nine. I knew about calving and about frosts. About how you explain a frost to a child who has never seen one, I knew nothing. I asked her for three pages for the chapter on ice and she brought me twenty-one.

—And you signed it alone?

—The printers closed in August and there was room for one name on the cover. She said she didn't mind, and it suited me that she didn't mind. In seventy-four that was the normal thing, and its being normal doesn't fix it.

He stayed on his feet with the three sheets in his hand. Ainhoa said nothing, because she had been rehearsing since Thursday what to say at this exact moment and none of the sentences was any use to her now.

—Where do I sign?

—Here. The name as it appears on the cover, and the signature inside the frame.

Casimiro took a blue biro from the pot on the kitchen counter, sat down and wrote his full name on the top line, in the large, slow handwriting of a man who has filled in record books all his life. Then, instead of signing, he turned the sheet and wrote three lines by hand in the margin, squeezing the letters to make them fit, reading them out loud as he wrote them:

—«I sign this application on the condition that the heritage copy be registered under two authors: firstly Herminia Sasal Bergua, and secondly the undersigned.»

He put his signature underneath, in ink, inside the frame, and handed the two sheets back to her.

—If that can't go in, I don't sign.