My first manuscripts robbed me of my last coppers, which went for the postal wrappers that invariably came back to my desk drawers torn, dirty, and bruised with postmarks. Besides the desk that served as a cemetery for my fictions, my room contained: a bed, a chair, and bookshelves—four long boards the length of the wall, buckling beneath their load of letters. The stove was usually without wood, and I without food. But I reverenced my books, as some do icons. Sell them? The thought never entered my head until…until it was forced to by a telegram: MOTHER DIED SATURDAY. PRESENCE REQUIRED. COME. The telegram attacked my books one morning; by evening the shelves were bare, and I could slip my library, now in the form of three or four banknotes, into a pocket. The death of the person who gave you life, that is very serious. Always and for everyone: like a black wedge in your life.

“When I had done the funeral days, I journeyed back over seven hundred miles to the door of my shabby abode. The day of my departure I had been disconnected from my surroundings—only now did the effect of the bare bookshelves make itself felt and enter my mind. I remember I took off my coat, sat down at my desk, and turned to face the emptiness suspended on four boards. The boards, though relieved of their burden of books, were still bowed, as if the emptiness were weighing them down. I tried to shift my gaze elsewhere, but in my room, as I said, there was only a bed and shelves. I undressed, lay down, and tried to sleep off my depression. No: the sensation, after only a brief rest, woke me. Lying with my face to the shelves, I watched a quavery moonglint dance along the denuded boards. Some scarcely perceptible life seemed to be dawning—with timorous glimmerings—in that booklessness.

“Of course, all this was playing on nerves strung too tight—and when morning loosened the tuning pegs, I calmly surveyed the shelves’ sun-swashed hollows, sat down at my desk, and resumed my usual work. I needed to look something up: my left hand reached—automatically—for the spine of a book; in its place was air, again and again. In my annoyance I peered at that booklessness, filled with swarms of sun-shot motes, and tried—with an exertion of memory—to see the page and line I wanted. But the imagined letters inside the imagined binding kept fidgeting: instead of the wanted line I found a ragtag stagger of words, the line kept breaking and bursting into dozens of variants. I chose one and gingerly inserted it in my text.

“Come evening, resting from my labors, I liked to stretch out on the bed with a weighty volume of Cervantes in hand, to skip with my eyes from episode to episode. The book wasn’t there: I remembered that it had stood in the left-hand corner of the bottom shelf, pressing its black leather with yellow corner pieces to the red saffian of Calderón’s* autos. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the book before me—between palm and eye (thus do forsaken lovers continue to meet their loves—with the help of eyes shut tight and a concentrated will). It worked. In my mind I turned page after page; but then my memory dropped some letters—they got mixed up and slipped out of sight. I tried calling to them: some words returned, others did not; so I began filling in the gaps, inserting words of my own. When, weary of this game, I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by night, a snug blackness caulking all the corners of the room and shelves.

“At the time I had a great deal of leisure—and more and more often played the game with the emptiness of my debooked shelves. Day by day they became overgrown with phantasms made of letters. I had neither the money nor the desire now to go to bookstalls and secondhand booksellers for letters.