Lucas Folch took at random a book from the stack of copies, placed by reflex the reading glasses at the top of the nose, and without noticing it, began to move his lips, as if instead of reading perhaps was counting money. Every morning, he went to the book distributor to restock some backlist and widely-publicised frontlist titles as well, many of which were the repetition of the same old promises: you are going to be captivated by this and by that, even for what follows beyond the first page.
Those highfaluting promises were diluted pretty soon in a string of pathetic clichés and simple-minded screenwriting —with an eye to a never-ending streaming series— crammed with drivel and filler, disguised as dialogues with petty conflicts that didn’t even deserve an atmospheric reading. All the same, he still bore in mind what the hell was looking for. And the cardinal reasons why he was pouring such heart and soul into the thrill of the hunt
More than a diligent bookseller, Mr. Folch saw himself as a mere procurer, a pornographer in the proper sense of the word, whose job was to sell black-ink typeface printed over white-paper scroll, to be folded and bounded and cut as a copy, with the ultimate goal at stake, to wit: get the reader’s imagination run wild into a made-up paradise, although plausible but always forbidden, chased, hidden.
With his attention centered upon such capacity, he weighed up those first pages and ruled them out if he was not knocked out on the spot by well-aimed punches due to the narrator. Well-adjusted, and without further restraints, he eventually came to wonder about everything he read. By way of illustration, how could some historical fiction authors spend so long documenting about clothes and whatnot while at the same time, in a sex scene, they were unable to elicit a ripping boner from the reader. Not for nothing, Mr. Folch maintained, the prominent characters in which they concerned so much, passionately loved each other, did they?
All the bookseller wanted was to read for once a writer who was not the minor god of a corny garden, someone whose words would wake the colorful fantasy of hanging out with a buddy of many adventures, a true storyteller whose voice jumped from the pages, a Celtic ghost with unfinished business that in sleepless nights blew his mind beyond remedy. That was the real stuff. Otherwise, the bookseller was at risk of selling snake oil, a scam beautifully printed and so devoid of content that perhaps it found its utility as an inert decorative item, but not the required fiction by the willing suspension of disbelief.
The book that he had chosen at first sight seemed to him extremely odd, and he wanted to leaf through it; however, he could not do it since the page borders were not trimmed by the paper cutter, something usual in some poetry collections which it used an excellent paper of bone color. Although in this case, more than a poetry collection it was about an author who had ended up publishing his work, at his own risk, probably not getting the printing costs right, given that the cover —which graphic design was the map of a circular labyrinth with a clover in the center— did not credit any acknowledged imprint. That enigmatic copy went by the title The Uncut Book and the author preferred the anonymity, something unexpected in a self-publication. The bookseller Lucas Folch did without publications of this kind for many reasons: because they lacked an editor job, a proof-reader, a layout editor, and a competent printer that in the case that it came upon a mistake, immediately, he would get in touch with the publisher before starting the machinery.
That copy had a bit of particular. The bookseller certainly read for a living, but also he did it for fun, passion, and curiosity, reason enough to decide to open that book in his hands and get on with the job. The story begins openly, in some kind of aside with complicity’s ease. As if the narrator really was acting on a theater stage. A first line that (without further ado) he cooked up in a farewell from a floating world, in that case in question, a sailboat moored in the marina from which he would debark soon, not before leaving as a token to his confidant, patroness and first reader, an ambitious manuscript. Where he tried to tell the unexpected event that brought him writer’s block to his very lonely life, except for the occasions that, with her, abounded in oral tradition. And the brilliant way in which he managed to turn the tables during the first night aboard that laid awake because of the halyard’s tintinnabulation, to wit: taking her as a narratee, in such a manner that his boundless imagination could lead him —just like that!— at the edge of time.
In the same way, he would do it, Lucas Folch thought, on the off chance that his doc diagnosed him someday in a check-up terminal cancer. Whoa! He would write at full force! He was convinced that he would tell his wife Olivia things that he had never told her. All of a sudden, he raised his eyebrows reading the grand finale of that theatrical aside, where apparently the favorite meeting place of the affair between the artist without a name —halfway vagabond and guest— and his discreet patroness it was in a Barcelonian bookstore, that it might be his own or perhaps the one in the ground floor of the department store with which he shared chamfer.
The agitated Mr. Folch had no other choice but to assuage the unease by trimming the edges of that handmade paper —something that he did without further care— pulling out from the first thing that he found in his wallet, in that case, a credit card. He realized out of the blue that the story had as a protagonist someone, which it seems is his spitting image. Because he shared with that one the same occupation. However, it had not still arrived the day that obliging booksellers were characters so colorful as always had been the authors troubled with writer’s block —quite often fighting hard with the anxiety that was getting them paralysed and let their morale rock bottom until a depression swallow them— with which he didn’t take further importance to the issue.
But the circumstances that such an anonymous narrator got to detail after were a copy of his everyday life, extensive to the extreme by a realist description, sometimes poetic and always thorough. With specifics that his attention had not noticed until then, and by which he unexpectedly was feeling spellbound without achieving to explain to himself entirely, just like a mirror ink that to another dimension was able to move him, losing in this way his whole person into a phantasmagoria without bottom where he never reached to set foot even though he wanted to.