In September, Villarrasa secondary school banned mobile phones throughout the premises. They are handed in on arrival and collected on the way out, from grey lockers the pupils have nicknamed “the graveyard”. Two months later, according to a press release from the school, the library has tripled its loans. “They’ve rediscovered paper,” the head teacher, Ramón Olmedo, declared. Lucía Ferrer, a reporter for El Eco del Valle, went to check with a notebook and a healthy dose of scepticism.
Pilar Casado has run the library for thirty years and can’t remember an autumn like it. She showed Lucía the records without hiding her bewilderment. October’s most borrowed title wasn’t a novel or a comic, but a 1998 World Atlas, with the borders of a world that no longer exists: two hundred and twelve loans in a month. In second place, a thesaurus weighing almost two kilos. “Look at the length of the loans,” Pilar added. “Twenty-two minutes on average.”
Lucía stayed to watch break time from a table at the back. At a quarter past eleven, a Year 10 boy asked for the atlas, leafed through it by the window and handed it back before she had finished describing him in her notebook. A classmate took it at once. Then another. None of them spent more than three or four minutes with it, and none seemed to be looking for any particular country. “There’s no waiting list,” Pilar whispered. “They pass it from hand to hand. But it’s always back before the bell.”
In the corridor, Lucía approached a group of pupils. What was so special about that atlas? They exchanged a quick glance. “It’s very thorough,” said a girl with braces. “Greenland,” another blurted out, and the rest burst out laughing. She couldn’t get another word out of them.
When the bell rang, Lucía borrowed the atlas. Its spine was swollen from being opened so often and it smelled of eraser; tiny pink crumbs were caught between the pages. The margins were clean. Only when she tilted a page against the light from the window did she make out the grooves: minute letters, written in pencil and rubbed out, crossed by other letters written and rubbed out on top. The only thing still legible was page numbers.
Half of the page on Iceland was missing, torn out roughly. “That was last week,” Pilar said quietly. “The same day a girl in Year 9 spent the whole break crying in the toilets. Nobody would tell me anything.”
Before leaving, Lucía called in at the head teacher’s office again. Olmedo already had the headline in mind: “The School That Started Reading Again”. He asked for a photo of the kids with books. She promised to send him the article before it ran. That night, at her computer, she deleted the first line three times. The headline she kept wasn’t about reading.