Madrid and its Book Fair
Minutes later, an image catches her attention. She is alone. Sitting under a tree with a book in both hands. About fifteen years old. Around her, there are three paper bags, probably containing her shopping. Too many temptations in the hundreds of stands at the Madrid Book Fair not to fall for some of them. Too many marvellous corners not to feel the attraction of approaching, of staying.
She looks at her hands again to confirm the reality: they are not holding a mobile phone, but a novel. From where she is looking, she can't make out the title or the author, but she can feel the pleasure of a young woman who doesn't look up despite the bustle around her, despite the comings and goings of people and voices.
Serenity. She has created her little paradise in the immense Retiro, a space where she breathes that earthy smell that still lingers after these past days of rain; where she feels the strength of the trunk on which she has leaned her back; where she enjoys that reading that takes her to other worlds, to other stories that could be hers.
"There are those who cannot imagine a world without birds; there are those who cannot imagine a world without water; as far as I am concerned, I am unable to imagine a world without books". These words by the Argentinian writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges come to mind as he continues to watch her. And she thinks that, surely, she would share with him the importance of reading in her life, but that it would not be easy for her to give up those birds that chirp in her chosen tree, the water that revives the fields and gives her its perfume.
She is so engrossed in her pages that she is unaware of the interest she has aroused in those who look at her, that her youth has awakened the memory of another youth now distant, the memory of many a time spent alone with a good book in a chosen place waiting for dusk to fall.
She cools down and the air on her face makes her return to the bench where she is sitting in El Retiro, from where she observes. The teenager has put down her novel on the grass to put on a denim jacket and hug the paper bags to her leg, as if the books they hold were transmitting warmth to her. A few seconds before returning to her reading, to the enjoyment of a solitary afternoon full of characters.
Borges also said that "one becomes great not by what one writes but by what one reads". An idea shared by other great writers such as Arturo Pérez Reverte: "I am a reader who writes books; if I were only a writer I would be dead". Writing. To read. Dying... And she thinks again whether that teenager ever imagined her life without books; whether she dreamt of being a writer.
A voice breaks his thoughts. "I'm here, sorry I'm late," they tell her, while he thinks about the luck of those moments given to him. And they begin to stroll through the Book Fair, between the stands of small and large publishers, between well-known and lesser-known writers, between book purchases and the search for a little paradise where they can read what they have bought. As the young teenager has done. As always.