opinion of the book. Not wanting to find out, he burned the note along with the matter, watching the embers sputter and curl in the fireplace. When his wife returned from her shopping, threw open the windows to let in the light and fresh air, and asked why he’d lit a fire on such a beautiful day, Litvinoff shrugged and complained of a chill.
Of the two thousand original copies printed of The History of Love , some were bought and read, many were bought and not read, some were given as gifts, some sat fading in bookstore windows serving as landing docks for flies, some were marked up with pencil, and a good many were sent to the paper compactor, where they were shredded to a pulp along with other unread or unwanted books, their sentences parsed and minced in the machine’s spinning blades. Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all.
He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love (there was a flare of interest following Litvinoff’s death, and the book was briefly returned to print with Rosa’s introduction), at least one copy was destined to change a life—more than one life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. By then, Borges was completely blind and had no reason to visit the bookshop—because he could no longer read, and because over the course of his life he’d read so much, memorized such vast portions of Cervantes, Goethe, and Shakespeare, that all he had to do was sit in the darkness and reflect. Often visitors who loved the writer Borges would look up his address and knock on his door, but when they were shown in they’d find the reader Borges, who would lay his fingers on the spines of his books until he located the one he wished to hear, and would hand it to the visitor, who had no choice but to sit and read it aloud to him. Occasionally he left Buenos Aires to travel with his friend María Kodama, dictating to her his thoughts on the felicity of a hot air balloon ride or the beauty of the tiger. But he did not visit the secondhand bookstore, even though while he could still see, he had been on friendly terms with the owner.
The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love . She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called “The Age of Silence”:
The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and
Of the two thousand original copies printed of The History of Love , some were bought and read, many were bought and not read, some were given as gifts, some sat fading in bookstore windows serving as landing docks for flies, some were marked up with pencil, and a good many were sent to the paper compactor, where they were shredded to a pulp along with other unread or unwanted books, their sentences parsed and minced in the machine’s spinning blades. Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all.
He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love (there was a flare of interest following Litvinoff’s death, and the book was briefly returned to print with Rosa’s introduction), at least one copy was destined to change a life—more than one life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. By then, Borges was completely blind and had no reason to visit the bookshop—because he could no longer read, and because over the course of his life he’d read so much, memorized such vast portions of Cervantes, Goethe, and Shakespeare, that all he had to do was sit in the darkness and reflect. Often visitors who loved the writer Borges would look up his address and knock on his door, but when they were shown in they’d find the reader Borges, who would lay his fingers on the spines of his books until he located the one he wished to hear, and would hand it to the visitor, who had no choice but to sit and read it aloud to him. Occasionally he left Buenos Aires to travel with his friend María Kodama, dictating to her his thoughts on the felicity of a hot air balloon ride or the beauty of the tiger. But he did not visit the secondhand bookstore, even though while he could still see, he had been on friendly terms with the owner.
The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love . She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called “The Age of Silence”:
The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and
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