at this very spot.
Stunned, he stands motionless. He glances around in every direction. The floor is deserted, a veritable Sahara of empty tables. Why has this girl chosen to sit
right there
and not somewhere else? Noah becomes suddenly aware of harbouring certain territorial instincts, a paradoxical feeling for someone who was raised at an average speed of sixty kilometres per hour.
Why has he become so attached to this table?
If Sarah were to pop up, like a genie rising out of an old silvery trailer, she would advise him simply to share the space with the girl, or else to collect his books and go colonize another corner of the library. After all, there are four more floors available, not counting the stairwells, the closets and the washrooms. But Sarah isn’t there, and Noah approaches gingerly, wonderingwhat the best way to handle this might be. Make himself at home? Beat a retreat? Fake indifference? Act like a tormented intellectual? Claim his territory?
He sits down.
No reaction. The table floats on a sea of silence. Noah fidgets in his chair and coughs. The girl finally looks at him, greets him with a brief smile and immediately reimmerses herself in her reading.
Okay,
Noah soberly says to himself.
While pretending to sort his papers, he observes his new neighbour. She has long black hair, somewhat almond-shaped eyes, and little reading glasses. A model student. She has scattered a number of bulky volumes over her territory:
La souveraineté canadienne dans le Grand Nord, The High Arctic Relocation, Culture inuit et politique internationale.
Clearly, no one on this floor takes the least interest in sea serpents.
The day passes uneventfully. Noah reads, or rather, Noah pretends to read, unable to take his eyes off the girl’s olive-skinned forearms, her angular wrists, her restless hand penning what looks like old Italian, backwards, in a small notebook. “A lefty!” he thinks jovially.
A little before noon, the stranger goes away, leaving her things behind. Noah watches her disappear behind the stacks, hesitates for a moment and then grabs the notebook. To his great surprise, everything is written in Spanish. Noah can’t help smiling.
A Spanish-speaking student doing research on the Far North in the Naval Sciences section?
Well, why not?
After that, the girl arrives every morning with the regularity of a celestial event. At eight a.m. she walks through the library’s glass doors and sits down at an Internet station. She reads the international news, paying special attention to South America and Chiapas, and jots down some notes in her little spiral notebook.
At eight-thirty she consults the library catalogue and transforms the issues she wants to focus on that day into bibliographical citations. Then she crisscrosses the library, moving from one section to another with a pile of books rapidly growing in her arms.
At around eight forty-five, she comes to Section V with her loot. She piles the books on the table, puts on her glasses as though she were putting on a diving suit, and plunges into her reading.
When Noah shows up, fifteen minutes later, all that can be seen of the girl are the air bubbles frothing at the surface. She gets up from her chair only to renew her supply of books, to stretch or to get a quick sandwich in the basement cafeteria.
She keeps up her marathon until she is driven out by the closing bell at eight forty-five p.m., at which pointshe disappears from the surface of the planet, apparently sucked into the void, only to be returned to the real world the next morning, when the library reopens. The lapse between nine p.m. and eight a.m. is the Bermuda Triangle.
The days roll by. Noah and the girl still share the big mahogany table. Little by little, the boundary lines between their territories have blurred. Their books mingle and a tacit familiarity arises, made up of silences, rustling sounds and discreet glances. After a week, Noah finds it natural to ask her, “So, what
Stunned, he stands motionless. He glances around in every direction. The floor is deserted, a veritable Sahara of empty tables. Why has this girl chosen to sit
right there
and not somewhere else? Noah becomes suddenly aware of harbouring certain territorial instincts, a paradoxical feeling for someone who was raised at an average speed of sixty kilometres per hour.
Why has he become so attached to this table?
If Sarah were to pop up, like a genie rising out of an old silvery trailer, she would advise him simply to share the space with the girl, or else to collect his books and go colonize another corner of the library. After all, there are four more floors available, not counting the stairwells, the closets and the washrooms. But Sarah isn’t there, and Noah approaches gingerly, wonderingwhat the best way to handle this might be. Make himself at home? Beat a retreat? Fake indifference? Act like a tormented intellectual? Claim his territory?
He sits down.
No reaction. The table floats on a sea of silence. Noah fidgets in his chair and coughs. The girl finally looks at him, greets him with a brief smile and immediately reimmerses herself in her reading.
Okay,
Noah soberly says to himself.
While pretending to sort his papers, he observes his new neighbour. She has long black hair, somewhat almond-shaped eyes, and little reading glasses. A model student. She has scattered a number of bulky volumes over her territory:
La souveraineté canadienne dans le Grand Nord, The High Arctic Relocation, Culture inuit et politique internationale.
Clearly, no one on this floor takes the least interest in sea serpents.
The day passes uneventfully. Noah reads, or rather, Noah pretends to read, unable to take his eyes off the girl’s olive-skinned forearms, her angular wrists, her restless hand penning what looks like old Italian, backwards, in a small notebook. “A lefty!” he thinks jovially.
A little before noon, the stranger goes away, leaving her things behind. Noah watches her disappear behind the stacks, hesitates for a moment and then grabs the notebook. To his great surprise, everything is written in Spanish. Noah can’t help smiling.
A Spanish-speaking student doing research on the Far North in the Naval Sciences section?
Well, why not?
After that, the girl arrives every morning with the regularity of a celestial event. At eight a.m. she walks through the library’s glass doors and sits down at an Internet station. She reads the international news, paying special attention to South America and Chiapas, and jots down some notes in her little spiral notebook.
At eight-thirty she consults the library catalogue and transforms the issues she wants to focus on that day into bibliographical citations. Then she crisscrosses the library, moving from one section to another with a pile of books rapidly growing in her arms.
At around eight forty-five, she comes to Section V with her loot. She piles the books on the table, puts on her glasses as though she were putting on a diving suit, and plunges into her reading.
When Noah shows up, fifteen minutes later, all that can be seen of the girl are the air bubbles frothing at the surface. She gets up from her chair only to renew her supply of books, to stretch or to get a quick sandwich in the basement cafeteria.
She keeps up her marathon until she is driven out by the closing bell at eight forty-five p.m., at which pointshe disappears from the surface of the planet, apparently sucked into the void, only to be returned to the real world the next morning, when the library reopens. The lapse between nine p.m. and eight a.m. is the Bermuda Triangle.
The days roll by. Noah and the girl still share the big mahogany table. Little by little, the boundary lines between their territories have blurred. Their books mingle and a tacit familiarity arises, made up of silences, rustling sounds and discreet glances. After a week, Noah finds it natural to ask her, “So, what
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