Remei signs the destruction records by the kilo

Previously: Ainhoa Cortabarria, a book restorer in Huesca, found a copy that the registry lists as destroyed on 14 March at the Sabiñánigo plant.

There are 211 titles left to verify, and Ainhoa Cortabarria, restorer at the Provincial Library of Huesca, has put number 215 in her bag, wrapped in tissue paper, to take it to the plant that claims to have pulped it. It is sixty-two kilometres along the N-330. She arrives at ten past nine.

Verifying means this: open the book, check that the copy in your hand is the one on the record, put your initials in the margin of the list and move on to the next. Two hundred and fourteen times. Ainhoa manages twelve an hour when nothing happens.

The pulp plant at Sabiñánigo does not smell of paper. It smells of hot bleach and of something sweet, like overripe fruit. Remei Balaguer, a line operator for nineteen years, meets her at the weighbridge in an orange hi-vis vest, carrying a hardback notebook that is not an official one: it is hers, and it has every delivery since 2031 written into it by hand.

—I'm the one who signs the record —she says—. But I don't sign books. I sign kilos.

She shows her the weighbridge: a concrete platform big enough for a whole lorry. You weigh it full, unload it, weigh it empty. The difference is what the plant declares. Nobody opens the boxes. Nobody counts spines.

Behind the weighbridge, a conveyor climbs towards a hopper the size of a garage. Whatever falls in there comes out forty minutes later as a grey pulp sold by the tonne to a cardboard factory in Zaragoza. Remei explains it without ceremony, the way you would explain an oven.

—And the titles? —Ainhoa asks.

—The titles come from you. You send us the list three weeks ahead, with the codes and the quantities. We weigh, the system cross-checks the weight against your list, and the batch is closed.

—And if the weight doesn't match the list?

—It never doesn't match —says Remei—. If there are eighty kilos over, somebody sent more than they wrote down. If there are kilos missing, some boxes got wet. You adjust it and you sign. Nineteen years here and I have never seen a single open discrepancy.

—And who checks that the list was right?

—You do. —Remei says it without any edge, the way you would list one more step of a process—. We check the weight.

Ainhoa takes out the tissue-paper parcel and opens it on top of the notebook. It is a 1974 volume, green hardback, the edges dirtied by fingers. Remei wipes her hands on her vest before touching it. To Ainhoa, who has watched a lot of people pick up books, that gesture is the first good thing of the day.

—I've got this one down as destroyed —says Remei.

—This one is right here.

Remei turns the pages slowly, with her thumb, like someone looking for one banknote among others. She stops at chapter four. In the margin there are pencil notes, tightly packed, in small and very neat handwriting. They are not a reader's underlinings: they are corrections. A word crossed out and another written above it. On one line, somebody has struck out ‘fourteen pupils' and put ‘seventeen'. A brace spanning two whole paragraphs and, beside it, two initials each followed by a full stop:

C. L.

—That's not library —says Remei—. In a library people underline in biro and write things at the back. That's somebody correcting a text of their own.

Under the brace there is a date, in the same pencil and the same hand: 12-XI-2036. Two years before today. Sixty-two after the edition.

Her phone rings inside the bag. Fabián Oyarzun, floor manager and the man responsible for the cull, does not ask where she is: he asks about trolley three.

—I'm in Sabiñánigo —she says.

Fabián takes three seconds to answer.

—Ainhoa. The batch has to go out clean and on time. If you get stuck on one copy, you lose the other two hundred.

—I know.

—You don't, because you're not the one signing the release. I am.

He hangs up. Remei disappears and comes back with a tablet in a rubber case that has seen everything. She looks up March, turns the screen round and props it in front of Ainhoa, against the notebook.

There is the record for the 14th. At the top, a single number: the weight. One thousand nine hundred kilos. And below it, in the right-hand column, what the system deduced from that number by cross-checking it against the list the library had sent: four thousand one hundred titles destroyed. Electronically signed by Remei Balaguer, 17:42.

—Four thousand one hundred —Ainhoa reads.

—One thousand nine hundred kilos —says Remei—. That part I weighed myself. The four thousand one hundred was put there by the computer.