As I say, I was fond of everyone who lived with me, but I was particularly fond of Aurelie. I am an old man now—an old libertine, even—and my memory commits all manner of betrayals; only a few things stay with me. Some words that made me happy because they were said by exactly the right person at exactly the right time, and some pictures because they formed their own moment. One such picture is your mother’s brilliant smile, always slightly anxious, as if even in the moment of delighting you she wonders how she dares to be so very delightful. I hope that smile is before you right now. I hope she came back to you.
Please allow me to say another useless thing: Nobody could have made me believe that Aurelie ever stole from me. The only person who could possibly have held your mother in higher esteem than I did was my brother, Isidoro. He told me I should give my library to her. Then he told me she’d be happier if I gave it to her daughter. Do it or I’ll haunt you to death, he wrote. The rest of this house is dedicated to art now; it’s been a long time since I lived here, or visited. But the library is yours. So enjoy it, my dear.
Zacarias Salazar
PS: I found Aurelie’s letter to you enclosed among my brother’s papers. I am unsure how it got there.
Aurelie’s letter made Montse stand and walk the paths between the shelves as she read, stopping to sit in the cushioned chairs scattered across the library’s alcoves. She kept looking up from the page, along the shelves, into the past.
Dear Montserrat,
I should make this quick because I’m coming back for you, so really there’s no need for it. I suppose really I’m writing this to try to get my brain working properly again. It will be hard to let you go even for a little while, but Isidoro thought that even if worse comes to worst (which it won’t) the library key will bring you back here somehow.
I’ll tell you about your key: A wish brought it to me. It was my birthday, my thirtieth birthday, and Fausta Del Olmo was the only one who knew. There are people who are drawn to secrets as ants are to jam. Fausta’s one of them. She searches out all things unspoken and unseen—not to make them known, but to destroy them so that nobody knows they ever existed. That’s what makes her heart beat faster, the destruction of invisible foundations. Why? Because she finds it funny. The master once told us about a cousin of his, a lovely, cheerful girl, but touched in the head, he said. This cousin committed suicide one day, quite out of the blue. She did it after talking to her friend on the telephone. That friend now spends her days searching her brain for those disastrous words she must have said, and has become ill herself. As our master was telling us this I watched Fausta Del Olmo out of the corner of my eye. She was laughing silently, but the master didn’t notice until Fausta’s laughter grew so great that she began to choke. She explained that she was overcome by the sadness and the mystery of it all, and she made the sign of the cross. By then I was already so frightened of her that I didn’t dare contradict her. There’s no stopping Fausta because she believes in hell. The master thinks this belief in hell keeps her on the straight and narrow, but the truth is she’s so sure she’s going there that she doesn’t even care anymore. When Fausta brought me a little cake with a candle in it and told me to make a wish I wanted to say no. It’s stupid but I didn’t want Fausta to know my birthday, in case she somehow had the power to take it away. If she made it so I was never born I’d never have had a chance to be me and to hear your father’s honey-wine voice and to fall in love with him. He ran off, your father, and if I ever find him I won’t be able to stop myself from kicking him in the face for that, the cowardly way he left me here. I didn’t yet know I was pregnant, but I bet he knew. He must have developed some sort of instinct for those things. He once said, “Babies are so . . .” and I thought he was going to say something poetic but he finished: “expensive.”