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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Shop on Calle del Almez
The key still worked. That was the first thing that undid him.
Nicolás Olmeda had flown from Amsterdam with a folder of documents, a lawyer's telephone number, and a plan that fit on one side of a notecard: inventory the stock, settle the debts, sell the building, go. Seven days, he had told himself on the plane. Ten at the outside. He had not expected the key in his pocket — the same brass key he had carried out of Spain in 1999 and never thrown away — to turn in the lock as though it had been oiled last week.
The door swung inward. The bell above it rang once, thinly, and then the silence of the shop closed over the sound like water.
October in Granada smelled of woodsmoke and wet stone. Inside the shop it smelled of nothing but paper: dry paper, damp paper, glue, leather, dust warmed by a window. Nicolás stood in the doorway with his suitcase and let the smell take him apart. He had restored manuscripts in three countries. He had spent nine hours a day for seven years with his nose four centimetres from the seventeenth century. And no room on earth smelled like his father's shop.
Calle del Almez was a narrow street that climbed from the Plaza Nueva toward the lower edge of the Albaicín, so narrow that in summer the neighbours could pass each other a lemon from balcony to balcony. Librería Olmeda occupied the ground floor of number 11. Antiquarian books, prints, maps, binding repairs. Above it, two rooms and a kitchen, where Ramón Olmeda had died alone in the second week of September, sitting in an armchair with his reading glasses in his hand.
A neighbour found him four days later. That detail had been delivered to Nicolás by telephone in a flat administrative voice, and he had thanked the woman politely and hung up and then stood in his kitchen in Amsterdam for twenty minutes without moving.
Four days.
He set the suitcase down. Someone — the neighbour, probably, Señora Berruguete from the flower stall — had drawn the shutters and covered the front table with a bedsheet. Everything else was as his father had left it. The wooden ladder on its rail. The revolving stand of secondhand paperbacks that never sold. The counter with its scarred zinc top, the brass lamp, the ledger.
The ledger was open. Nicolás did not want to look at it and looked at it anyway.
His father's handwriting was small and upright and had not changed since Nicolás was a boy doing sums at that same counter. The last entry was dated 8 September 2006. *Sold: Ford, Handbook for Travellers in Spain, 1855, spine repaired, 60 €. Purchased: nothing. Rain in the afternoon. The grey cat came in and would not leave until six.*
Nicolás closed the ledger.
He went upstairs.
The apartment was small and scrupulously tidy in the way of a man living alone who has decided not to let himself go. Dishes washed and stacked. Bed made. A tin of quince paste in the cupboard, unopened. On the table by the armchair, a book left face down — a life of the painter Fortuny — and a glass with an inch of water in it, gone cloudy.
And on the sideboard, in a shoebox that had once held a pair of Segarra shoes, the letters.
Nicolás knew what they were before he lifted the lid. He had received one a month for seven years, forwarded from address to address in Amsterdam as he moved from a room in the Jordaan to a flat in Oud-West to the two rooms above the restoration studio on Prinsengracht. Thin envelopes. Blue airmail paper. *Nicolás Olmeda*, in that small upright hand, and then the street, and then, always, *Holanda*, as though Spain and Holland were still connected by a steamer route.
He had opened the first three. Then he had stopped opening them, because the first three had contained nothing — no apology, no explanation, no answer to the only question Nicolás had ever asked him — only the weather, and the shop, and the cats. So he had put them in a drawer. And after a while the drawer had become a shopping bag, and the shopping bag had gone under the bed, and he had not thought about them in years except in the moments before sleep, when he thought about them with a hot, sick, unexamined shame.
He had brought them with him. All of them, in a plastic bag inside his suitcase, unread. Seventy-nine of them.
And here, in a shoebox, were his father's copies — no. Not copies. He lifted one out and turned it over. It was addressed and stamped and never sent. The postmark space was blank. There were perhaps a dozen of them in the box, the last ones, written and stamped and then, for some reason, held back.
Nicolás put the letter down carefully, as if it were hot, and went to the window and opened it, and stood breathing the smoke and the stone until his eyes stopped stinging.
Below him a boy went past kicking a plastic bottle. Somewhere a woman called a name twice. The bells of San José rang the half hour, and then, a beat behind, some other bell further up the hill, always a beat behind, as it had been for as long as he could remember.
He had left at twenty-seven. He was thirty-five now. His father had been seventy-six.
They had quarrelled in this room. Nicolás could reconstruct it exactly, and had, a thousand times, in three languages. He had come home from Madrid with a job offer and a bottle of wine and, after the second glass, he had asked the question again — not angrily, at first. *Papá. It's been fifteen years. I'm not twelve. Tell me why she left.*
And Ramón Olmeda had set his glass down and looked at his hands and said, *I can't.*
Not *I don't know.* Not *she never said.* **I can't.**
Nicolás had asked again, and again, and then he had said things. He remembered one sentence with particular clarity, because he had said it standing up, with his coat already on: *You're not a father. You're a locked drawer.*
His father had not raised his voice. He had said, *Perhaps. Take the wine, it's good wine.* And Nicolás had left it on the table and walked out and gone to Amsterdam instead of Madrid, and that had been that.
He had rehearsed a reconciliation for years, in the abstract, the way one rehearses a language one has no intention of visiting. It always began with his father speaking first.
"You're the son."
Nicolás turned. A woman stood in the doorway of the apartment, sixty-odd, with a cardigan over her housecoat and a set of keys in her fist.
"Señora Berruguete."
"You've grown thin." She said it as an accusation and came in without being asked, and looked around the room, and her chin trembled once and then set. "I watered his geraniums. On the balcony. Two of them are finished, I couldn't do anything."
"Thank you."
"He talked about you all the time." She looked at him with frank, unembarrassed judgement. "All the time. He'd say, my son is in Holland, he mends books for the museums there, the good ones, the ones that are falling apart. He kept a photograph of you by the till. Did you know that?"
"No."
"Well." She put the keys on the sideboard. "These are the shop's. He gave them to me when his hip was bad. There's a man been asking about the shop, by the way. Twice this month, and once after the funeral."
Nicolás straightened. "What man?"
"Not from the barrio. Good coat." She shrugged. "He wanted to know when you'd come. I said I don't discuss the family's business in the street, and he gave me his card, and I threw it away." A pause. Then, more quietly: "You'll sell it, I suppose."
"There are debts."
"There are always debts. He never charged the students full price, not once in forty years. You know what that does to a business." She was at the door now. "Come down for supper. Nine o'clock. Don't argue, I've already put the pot on."
When she had gone Nicolás sat in his father's armchair for the first and last time. It held the shape of him. That was unbearable, so he got up.
He went down to the shop, turned on the brass lamp, took a notebook from his bag, and began, because work was the only thing he had ever found that reliably held the world still.
*Inventory. Librería Olmeda. Begun 14 October 2006.*
He wrote the date twice by accident and crossed out the second one, and then he started on the shelf nearest the door, and worked until two in the morning, and did not think about the shoebox once, except continuously.
