“And?” I finally asked.
“I’ve told him I’ll think about it.”
“And will you?”
Isabella’s gaze was lost in the fountain.
“He told me he wanted to have a family, children. He said we’d live in the apartment above the bookshop, that somehow we’d make a go of it, despite Señor Sempere’s debts.”
“Well, you’re still young …”
She tilted her head and looked me in the eye.
“Do you love him?” I asked.
She gave a smile that seemed endlessly sad.
“How do I know? I think so, although not as much as he thinks he loves me.”
“Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love,” I said.
“Don’t you worry about me.”
“All I ask is that you give yourself some time.”
We looked at each other, bound by an infinite complicity that needed no words, and I hugged her.
“Friends?”
“Till death do us part.”
4
On our way home we stopped at a grocer’s in Calle Comercio to buy some milk and bread. Isabella told me she was going to ask her father to deliver an order of fine foods and I’d better eat everything up.
“How are things in the bookshop?” I asked.
“Sales have gone right down. I think people feel sad about coming to the shop, because they remember poor Señor Sempere. As things stand, it’s not looking good.”
“How are the accounts?”
“Below the waterline. In the weeks I’ve been working there I’ve gone through the ledgers and realized that Señor Sempere, God rest his soul, was a disaster. He’d simply give books to people who couldn’t afford them. Or he’d lend them out and never get them back. He’d buy collections he knew he wouldn’t be able to sell just because the owners had threatened to burn them or throw them away. He supported a whole host of second-rate bards who didn’t have a penny to their name by giving them small sums of money. You can imagine the rest.”
“Any creditors in sight?”
“Two a day, not counting letters and final demands from the bank. The good news is that we’re not short of offers.”
“To buy the place?”
“A couple of sausage merchants from Vic are very interested in the premises.”
“And what does Sempere’s son say?”
“He just says that pork can be mightier than the sword. Realism isn’t his strong point. He says we’ll stay afloat and I should have faith.”
“And do you?”
“I have faith in arithmetic, and when I do the sums they tell me that in two months’ time the bookshop window will be full of chorizo and slabs of bacon.”