When Lérida got off the train in Cienfuegos, instead of coming to greet me, she walked straight to the express car. One of the men jumped onto the platform and took down a small piece of furniture. Then she motioned for me to help her. After giving me many kisses, she told me that the shelf was for me.
The hall of the Railway Brotherhood at the Cienfuegos station was converted into offices. Among the furniture that was discarded was that small shelf. Lérida asked Bernardo Zamora, her boss, for it and brought it to me as a gift. “Here’s your first bookcase,” she said.
Someone had tried out several stamps on it. Although some were already illegible, those from Sagua, Cifuentes, and Encrucijada were still distinguishable. It was so old that it had four metal plates: Cuban Central, Unidos de La Habana, Occidentales, and Ferrocarriles de Cuba. According to Aurelio, it could be over sixty years old.
“Who knows how many stations it has been through?” he said. At first, he didn’t like the idea of dividing the books in the house. “I prefer them all to be in one place,” he explained. But, as Atlántida and Lérida supported me, he gave in. I started to organize them.
First, I put the books by Jules Verne and Emilio Salgari, who were the authors I had the most books by. Then I put the ones by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Alexandre Dumas, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Ray Bradbury, James Fenimore Cooper, René Guillot, and Washington Irving, among many others.
Atlántida brought me a feather duster so I could dust them off. Before putting them away, I leafed through many of them. I looked for my favorite illustrations and reread some of the endings. Then I realized how many places were familiar to me from those books.
Like Aurelio’s bulletin board, my bookshelf was full of destinations and journeys. You could spend five weeks in a balloon or go to the center of the earth. You could also sail 800 leagues down the Amazon or 20,000 leagues under the sea.
When our teacher Gustavo told us about the Malaysian Sea, I already knew it by heart. I had learned it sailing with Sandokan, Yáñez, Tremal-Naik, and Kammammuri as they reconquered Mompracem. The same thing happened with the Caribbean, which I learned alongside the Black Corsair.
Aurelio never came to my room, but that day, before taking his armchair out to the porch and starting to read, he stopped by the bookcase. He looked through it from cover to cover. Then he told me he could give me some books that Lérida had brought him, but that he knew I liked very much.
He mentioned The Thousand and One Nights, the stories of O. Henry, and, of course, Winesburg, Ohio. Before getting into my mosquito net, I checked the bookcase again. I changed the order of some of the books by Verne and Salgari. I put the ones I liked best first.
I left a space for O. Henry after Ray Bradbury. I discovered that Nikolai Nosov’s The Adventures of Nadasabe and His Friends was being eaten by moths. The page with the map of the South Pole had come loose from Jules Verne’s The Sphinx of the Ice.
The next day I reorganized them again, this time by publication date. The oldest book I had was Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. It had been printed in 1967. It was the same age as me. The newest was Jack London’s The Pirate’s Expedition. It had been printed just four months earlier.
From that Friday on, that little piece of furniture Lérida had brought me became my favorite place in the house. I stopped going to sit next to Aurelio on the platform and preferred to read there, lying on the floor or sitting on the old milking stool my grandfather ended up giving me.
Every time he brought me a new book from Cienfuegos, I spent a long time looking for the right place for it. Then I would check the others to make sure they were where they belonged. From time to time, I would leaf through them in search of traces, which I would mercilessly crush.
Before, I even considered the sidewalks part of where I lived. But after the bookshelf arrived, everything was considerably reduced. That small piece of furniture was now my territory, and to defend it, I had the bravest men I had ever known.
One of them, incidentally, stood alert at my side.
It was the night of December 20, 1849, and a violent hurricane was battering the island of Mompracem in the Malaysian Sea. A large red flag with a tiger’s head in the center fluttered behind us.
[Chapter from the novel Atlántida, Libros del Fogonero, 2024]
