Casimiro Lete wrote the book they were about to pulp

Previously: Ainhoa Cortabarria is verifying the 214 titles the State intends to pulp. On the depot delivery note there is a name written by hand: Casimiro Lete.

One hundred and eighty-six. Ainhoa Cortabarria writes the day's figure on the board in room 2 and goes down to the old stacks with the delivery note folded in the pocket of her work coat, because in twenty days of verification she has learned that questions get answered downstairs, where the scanner has still not reached.

Otilia Bergua, cataloguer of the old stacks for thirty-one years, works from a wooden card index that the National Deduplication Programme does not mention on any of its forms. It isn't that she resisted digitisation: nobody ever came down to do it.

"I need to know who this gentleman is," says Ainhoa, and lays the delivery note open at the RECEIVED BY box.

Otilia reads the name without touching the paper. Then she opens the drawer for the letter L and pulls out a yellow typed card with an ink correction in the margin.

"Lete, Casimiro," she reads. "'Winter Trades', Huesca, 1974, Tramullas press. This man didn't work at the depot, love. He's the author."

"And look at the foot," she adds, turning the card round. "Author's address for legal deposit purposes: Ayerbe, Huesca. Somebody typed that in 1974 and nobody has touched it since."

Otilia sets the card on the edge of the table and keeps her hand on it, the way you hold down a banknote.

"And write something down for me in return. There are four thousand two hundred titles in this basement and the programme says three thousand eight hundred are surplus. Thirty-one years I've spent writing these cards and they're going to leave me four hundred. If this gentleman is any use to you, tell me what you need and I'll find it, because I've nothing left down here to put in order."

Ainhoa writes the name of the village on the back of the delivery note before she realises what she is doing. An author with a known address stops being a catalogue entry: he becomes a person you can telephone.

Ainhoa puts her folder down on the index and picks it straight back up. Copy 215 is 'Winter Trades': two hundred and forty pages of a book the system declared destroyed in March, with pencil notes dated 2036 and signed C. L. The card carries the legal deposit signature at the foot. The same double initial, the same way of closing the L, dropping below the line like a fish hook.

"Can I take the card upstairs?" she asks.

"You can take the whole drawer if you bring it back," says Otilia. "They're going to pulp it either way."

In room 2, with the door shut, Ainhoa lines up three things on the restoration table: the 1974 card, the 2037 delivery note and page eleven of copy 215. All three carry the same small slanted hand, and all three close the L with the same hook. No handwriting expert required. The pencil notes were written by the author of the book.

And they aren't stylistic corrections. On page eleven, beside a paragraph about the winter schools, there is a reference mark and a whole sentence in the margin: 'I did not write this.' On page forty, another: 'nor this.' On page one hundred and nine, a vertical stroke running down three paragraphs and, beneath it, two words Ainhoa reads three times before copying them into the report: 'add name'.

At twenty past eleven Fabián Múgica, haulier for the external depot, turns up in his blue overalls with a ring binder fatter than yesterday's.

"The 'thirty-six release book," he says. "It got me a telling-off, because that doesn't leave the building. It's photographed on my phone, so don't expect much."

Four landscape sheets with the columns running across: DATE, SHELFMARK, DESTINATION, APPLICANT, DOCUMENT, SIGNATURE. Fabián points out line fourteen with his fingernail.

"There's your book. Twelfth of November, 2036."

Ainhoa brings the screen closer to the lamp. In the applicant column, typed: LETE ARBUÉS, CASIMIRO. In the document column, an identity number and, in brackets, the age recorded that day: 87. And in the last column, spilling across two boxes because it wouldn't fit in one, the signature. The same hooked L.

"So nobody came to take it," says Fabián.

"He came," says Ainhoa. "Eighty-seven years old, twelve kilometres from his house, to fill in a three-copy form and check out a book he had been signing since 1974. And four months later he brought it back full of pencil."

Fabián leans on the door frame. He has spent twenty years moving pallets between the library and the depot and has never seen the applicant column filled in by the author of what was being taken out.

"Then either he had time to spare or something was missing."

Ainhoa goes back to page eleven. The mark in the margin, the hand that drops below the line, the sentence denying three paragraphs of his own book. A man who had signed that text for sixty-two years went to fetch it in order to write inside that one part of it was not his.

She copies the day's number into the header of the report, 186, and underneath writes the fact in full, exactly as they will ask for it when this reaches inspection: Casimiro Lete Arbués, eighty-seven years old at the time, signed with his own hand the release of his own book on 12 November 2036, and the form was stamped by the same office that two years later recorded it as pulped.

And under the fact, underlined twice, the only line that matters to her this morning: what did Casimiro go there to correct in a book that was already his?