If it weren’t for books, it would be almost as if none of these names had ever existed, and if it weren’t for the booksellers who time and again rescue and put back into circulation and resell the silent, patient voices which in spite of everything refuse to fall silent entirely and forever, voices that are inexhaustible because they make no effort to emit sounds and be heard, written voices, mute, persistent voices like the one now filling these pages day by day over the course of many hours when no one knows anything about me or sees me or spies on me, and so it can seem as if I had never been born.
Among those Oxford booksellers were Mr. and Mrs. Stone, of the pleasant and seemingly infinite bookstore Titles, in Turl Street, and thanks to the deductive logic of Ian Michael and to his habitual verbal incontinence, which was more festive than busybodyish, they learned — not long after Todas las almas had appeared in English as All Souls, which allowed them to read it if they chose — that they, too, had been portrayed in a novel, at least according to my ex-boss, whose authority among his townsmen must have been much greater than any I ever saw him exert: Mr. and Mrs. Alabaster, she with a pink wool wrap around her shoulder, seated at her table in front of a gigantic book of accounts, he, well though casually dressed, perched on a rung of the ladder which the narrator always borrowed to climb up and inspect the heights — these were characters for whom I was more indebted to Dickens or Conan Doyle than to any contemporary, living being.
The Stones remembered me well, or so Ian said; he had gone to tell them the story, a copy of the English edition in hand to tempt them with (he may have read a few paragraphs aloud), and though the year was 1992 it wasn’t entirely surprising that they hadn’t forgotten me, for during my years at Oxford I often visited their shop and had gone over it from top to bottom — there was a basement — with my magnetic fingers, gloved to keep my hands from being impregnated with dust, that particular, thick dust that collects on book-bindings. I was a little worried to learn that the Stones had been frivolously informed of the existence of their presumptive replicas, since the novel said about Mrs. Alabaster, among other things: “she was smiling and authoritarian, with one of those English smiles often seen in films, beaming from famous English stranglers as they choose their next victim.” And about Mr. Alabaster the book said, among other things: “he was also a smiler, but his smile was more like that of the strangler’s anonymous victim, just before learning of his fate.” It occurred to me that these observations might not strike them as funny, if they had indeed decided to see how they looked represented in monumental alabaster, though, for the most part, both characters were treated with humor and sympathy, or so I think anyway, though what I think about my own texts is of almost no importance, or is important only to me, and sporadically.
So the second time I revisited Oxford — definitely in the summer of 1993, coinciding with my friend Mercedes López-Ballesteros’ visit there — I hesitated a good while before mustering up the courage to go into the Stones’ store, fearful that if they were to recognize me they might hold my description of those other beings against me, if they had taken it for their own, and perhaps, with pained, accusatory looks on their faces, keep me from coming in at all. I was sure they would recognize me. I brought along a copy of All Souls to give them, a friendly gesture even if they’d already bought and read it, as was entirely possible after Ian’s blithe instigations. I remember I wandered around for a bit, killing time in the neighboring marketplace, and happened to buy a bunch of grapes, I suddenly felt like having some grapes. Leaning against the counter of a repellent butcher’s stall, I leafed through the book one last time in search of positive elements: Mr. Alabaster was presented as having a “certain air about him of an aging and theoretical lady’s man (one whose social milieu or early, iron-clad marriage prevented him from putting his charms to the test), who hasn’t entirely relinquished the coquetry or the cologne of his less hypothetical years,” and was said, furthermore, to be “handsome.” As for Mrs. Alabaster, her “vehement gaze” stood out, but also — oh, no — her “capped teeth,” which Mrs. Stone — oh no — might turn out actually to have, I’d never once looked at her teeth but promised myself I would this time. The fact that they were booksellers was no guarantee of any familiarity with or understanding of the minglings and fabulations and juxtapositions of literature, some booksellers are inquiring and sagacious like Mr. Bernard Kaye of York or Antonio Méndez and his Albertos of calle Mayor in Madrid, but I’m acquainted with at least one who spends his entire life thrusting aside the things he sells, not to speak of a certain distributor who doesn’t even know how to open the products known as “books” which he carries, and is unaware that they contain pages, and among publishers some, such as Gilles Barbedette or Laurens van Krevelen or MacLehose or the elderly Einaudi, are extremely cultured and even erudite, but I’ve also dealt with others who, if not illiterate, had only an elementary grasp of five languages and chit-chatted in a kind of international pidgin lingo, which was all their vocabulary would permit. Few people are better qualified than the professors of Oxford University to understand what a novel is and not impose responsibilities on it, and yet two or three of them had had rather primitive reactions to mine; there are never any guarantees. I thought about leaning against the counter of an eggseller’s stall to write an affectionate inscription to the Stones and, in passing, accidentally break a couple of eggs, getting myself covered in white and yolk and thus inspiring them with pity when I walked into their bookstore a sorry sight, dripping with languid liquid, but I quickly gave up the idea, they’d worry about my dirtying their floor or their books and would greet me with even more forbidding countenances; Mercedes L.-B., whom I’d arranged to meet a little later at Titles, would laugh at me wholeheartedly, and furthermore I was carrying my grapes wrapped in a paper cone and the possible mixture of liquids would be too unpalatable an ooze. I wrote out their inscription, which was sincere but quite smarmy, at a less risky counter (a disgusting fishmonger’s stall) and made with slow footsteps for the store and my ordeal.
I walked in, concealing my face a little behind my high paper cone, and there, as ever, was Mrs. Stone, her glasses slipping halfway down her nose, scrutinizing the screen of the closed-circuit (black and white) television by which they kept watch on the suspicious characters who went down to rummage in the basement; in my day I’d been one of the most persistent. In their possession of this modern device the Stones did coincide with the Alabasters, and this was undoubtedly the principal fact that guided Ian Michael in his meddling inquiries and daring conjectures. I didn’t see Mr. Stone for the moment and regretted it, since, in my final, terrified inspection of the book, I had found more favorable comments on his false Alabaster twin than on hers. Mrs. Stone raised her eyes when she heard the bell, but said nothing, no doubt she thought it was up to me to make the first move. I did so immediately, calling her by her name, “How are you, Mrs. Stone? I don’t know whether you remember me.” She looked hesitant for a moment, as if she were trying to recall my name, and then with the contrived stutter that is characteristic of many Oxford residents, said “Oh yes, yes, the Spanish gentleman.” And she pointed her hand towards me, palm up. “Mr. Márias” (accent on the first syllable), “Márias, isn’t it?” When she smiled, without malice, I took advantage of the opportunity to note the condition of her teeth; they appeared to be the genuine article, which was a source of some relief.