“How is he?”
Isabella met my gaze.
“And how are you?” she replied.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “Who’s going to stay with him tonight?”
“I am,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation.
I kissed her on the cheek and returned to the back room. Barceló was sitting in front of his old friend, and while the two undertakers took further measurements and debated about suits and shoes, he poured two glasses of brandy and offered one to me. I sat down next to him.
“To the health of our friend Sempere, who taught us all how to read, and even how to live,” he said.
We toasted and drank in silence. We remained there until the undertakers returned with the coffin and the clothes in which Sempere was going to be buried.
“If it’s all right with you, we’ll take care of this,” the one who seemed to be the brighter of the two suggested. I agreed. Before leaving the room and going back to the front of the shop, I picked up the old copy of Great Expectations, which I’d never come back to collect, and put it in Sempere’s hands.
“For the journey,” I said.
A quarter of an hour later, the undertakers brought out the coffin and placed it on a large table that had been set up in the middle of the bookshop. A multitude had been gathering in the street, waiting in silence. I went over to the door and opened it. One by one, the friends of Sempere & Sons filed through. Some were unable to hold back the tears, and such were the scenes of grief that Isabella took the bookseller’s son by the hand and led him up to the apartment above the bookshop, where he had lived all his life with his father. Barceló and I stayed in the shop, keeping old Sempere company while people came in to say their farewells. Those closest to him stayed on.
The wake lasted the entire night. Barceló remained until five in the morning and I didn’t leave until Isabella came down to the shop shortly after dawn and ordered me to go home, if only to change my clothes and freshen up.
I looked at poor Sempere and smiled. I couldn’t believe I’d never see him again, standing behind the counter, when I came through that door. I remembered the first time I’d visited the bookshop, when I was just a child and the bookseller had seemed tall and strong. Indestructible. The wisest man in the world.
“Go home, please,” murmured Isabella.
“What for?”
“Please …”
She came out into the street with me and hugged me.
“I know how fond you were of him and what he meant to you,” she said.
Nobody knew, I thought. Nobody. But I nodded and, after kissing her on the cheek, I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn’t stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn’t notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.
2
The crowd had gathered by the cemetery gates to await the arrival of the hearse. Nobody dared speak. We could hear the murmur of the sea in the distance and the echo of a freight train rumbling toward the city of factories that spread out beyond the graveyard. It was cold and snowflakes drifted in the wind. Shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon, the hearse, pulled by a team of black horses, turned into Avenida de Icaria, which was lined by rows of cypress trees and old storehouses. Sempere’s son and Isabella traveled with it. Six colleagues from the Barcelona booksellers’ guild, Don Gustavo among them, lifted the coffin onto their shoulders and carried it into the cemetery. The crowd followed, forming a silent cortege that advanced through the streets and mausoleums of the cemetery beneath a blanket of low clouds that rippled like a sheet of mercury. I heard someone say that the bookseller’s son looked as if he’d aged fifteen years in one night. They referred to him as Señor Sempere, because he was now the person in charge of the bookshop; for four generations that enchanted bazaar in Calle Santa Ana had never changed its name and had always been managed by a Señor Sempere. Isabella held his arm—without her support he looked as if he might have collapsed like a puppet with no strings.
The parish priest of Santa Ana, a veteran the same age as the deceased, waited at the foot of the tomb, a sober slab of marble without decorative elements that could almost have gone unnoticed. The six booksellers who had carried the coffin left it resting beside the grave. Barceló noticed me and greeted me with a nod. I preferred to stay toward the back of the crowd, I’m not sure whether out of cowardice or respect. From there I could see my father’s grave, some thirty meters away.
Once the congregation had spread out, the parish priest looked up and smiled.
“Señor Sempere and I were friends for almost forty years, and in all that time we spoke about God and the mysteries of life on only one occasion. Almost nobody knows this, but Sempere had not set foot in a church since the funeral of his wife, Diana, to whose side we bring him today so that they might lie next to each other forever. Perhaps for that reason people assumed he was an atheist, but he was truly a man of faith. He believed in his friends, in the truth of things, and in something to which he didn’t dare put a name or a face because he said as priests that was our job. Señor Sempere believed that we are all a part of something and that when we leave this world our memories and our desires are not lost but go on to become the memories and desires of those who take our place. He didn’t know whether we created God in our own image or whether God created us without quite knowing what he was doing. He believed that God, or whatever brought us here, lives in each of our deeds, in each of our words, and manifests himself in all those things that show us to be more than mere figures of clay. Señor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost. He believed, and he made me believe it too, that as long as there is one person left in the world who is capable of reading them and experiencing them, a small piece of God, or of life, will remain. I know that my friend would not have liked us to say our farewells to him with prayers and hymns. I know that it would have been enough for him to realize that his friends, many of whom have come here today to say goodbye, will never forget him. I have no doubt that the Lord, even though old Sempere was not expecting it, will receive our dear friend at his side, and I know that he will live forever in the hearts of all those who are here today, all those who have discovered the magic of books thanks to him, and all those who, without even knowing him, will one day go through the door of his little bookshop, where, as he liked to say, the story has only just begun. May you rest in peace, Sempere, dear friend, and may God give us all the opportunity to honor your memory and feel grateful for the privilege of having known you.”
An endless silence fell over the graveyard when the priest finished speaking. He retreated a few steps, blessing the coffin, his eyes downcast. At a sign from the chief undertaker, the gravediggers moved forward and slowly lowered the coffin with ropes. I remember the sound as it touched the bottom and the stifled sobs among the crowd. I remember that I stood there, unable to move, watching the gravediggers cover the tomb with the large slab of marble on which a s
ingle word was written, “Sempere,” the tomb in which his wife, Diana, had lain buried for twenty-six years.
The congregation shuffled away toward the cemetery gates, where they separated into groups, not quite knowing where to go, because nobody wanted to leave the place and abandon poor Señor Sempere. Barceló and Isabella led the bookseller’s son away, one on each side of him. I stayed on until I thought everyone else had left; only then did I dare go up to Sempere’s grave. I knelt and put my hand on the marble.
“See you soon,” I murmured.
I heard him approaching and knew who it was before I saw him. I got up and turned round. Pedro Vidal offered me his hand and the saddest smile I have ever seen.
“Aren’t you going to shake my hand?” he asked.