Wet books

I told her, okay, I'll leave it to you, but give it back to me. I didn't trust it; I was backed by the experience of having lent her other books that she had never returned to me due to my friend's inexplicable natural disasters, naturally a disaster.

Now she wanted Homer's The Odyssey. I had read the book as an assignment during high school. I devoured it, and she, seeing my seventeen-year-old fascination, also wanted to immerse herself in reading. "I'll give it back to you, for sure." I didn't believe her.

I wrote down in my "Book of Books" her name, the date, a sunny day in 1997, and the number I had stamped on the spine of The Odyssey, which corresponded to the numbering of my teenage library. I kept and numbered all books with a Dymo in an effort to preserve my read life. I stopped doing it a few years later, and some of those books have disappeared in the various moves of recent decades, but they are noted in the "Book of Books," which I do keep.

Like that copy of The Odyssey which, finally, had to go through adventures similar to those of Ulysses before returning to my Penelope hands. I waited persistently, like her, because I never stopped asking my friend for it until the situation became a central anecdote of our friendship. Twenty years didn't pass, but ten did. Ten years that hid the fact that the book had been left in a deplorable state after going from bag to bag for a long time and surviving a downpour.

Like those that some bookstores have in their warehouses after the hailstorms of Sant Jordi. A sudden downpour was not expected, but the weather warning did indicate guaranteed rain at some point during the day. While I was sheltering at one of the stalls on Paseo de Gràcia where authors signed, I saw how the cardboard of a box of books darkened as the water rose from the ground. I wanted to grab it to save the books, but the cardboard at the bottom, completely soaked, broke. And through the wet hole appeared books with wavy pages, because water doesn't only cause waves in the sea.

Much has been said about these books. We give so much importance to the edition, which it certainly has, that we fall into the error of thinking that a wrinkled book is less of a book, when the essential thing is that the plot explained by the printed ink is traceable. Let's not reject books that have lived other lives. Let's love old and lived-in books. My Odyssey still shines in my 42-year-old library, wrinkled, lived-in, a testament to my adolescence, when I thought of numbering all the books I read throughout my life near a friend who always makes me fear a thousand disasters.