El Corredor de los Cuentos (The Story Corridor)

A children’s story by Sergio Navarro. Translated from Spanish and published here with the author’s permission.

When he finally came to learn the vowels he could identify them when he saw them but if he tried to call them by their names, strange things happened: he wanted to say ‘a’ and out came a sound like ‘o’, next he tried to say ‘e’ and it came out like ‘o’. He meant to say ‘i’ and, as he feared, it came out like ‘uuu’, and when he arrived at the ‘o’ he was so nervous that he said ‘eee’. As you can imagine, when he arrived at ‘u’, with great effort he made a weak ‘iii’ sound that seemed almost like a moan.

Later, he wanted to learn the consonants and the same thing happened, although he managed to memorise all of them, coming to a good understanding of how the vowels combined with consonants to form words, phrases, paragraphs, pages, books, bookshelves and libraries. He read enormous piles of books, but even so, his old problem still remained; he had become an avid reader, but when it came to talking, he didn’t.

His muteness transformed him into a very strange type of person. He passed hours devouring books, and I say ‘devouring’ books because on finishing each page, he ate it; reading only as much as his stomach could take. He refilled the book covers with straw and returned them to the shelves of the library, where no-one read because they only spoke, without anyone noticing the increasing number of books empty of pages.

​Books were his world; he found everything in them, including different flavours in their pages according to the quality of the paper, the type of ink and the years of aging. He was an expert in the art of gastrolibronomy, which he had invented, being capable of distinguishing the year and place a book was printed purely from its smell. When in doubt, he chewed one of its pages and got it right without hesitation.

The library with books full of straw was about to lose the last of its volumes with pages left. Not one remained except the Fabublia, a 16th century publication hand-illustrated by Saturnian monks and a cover bound in fox-fur that, although no-one had read it, was considered a jewel of the old building. They had no idea that in a couple of days it would return to its place full of straw.

Only the birds, when they came and stole the insides of the books to build their nests, revealed what had really happened there. The covers started to fall in their dozens, gliding onto the floor below like origami planes and making the librarian, who also didn’t read and passed the time watching telly, run out terrified, shouting at the display ‘the books, the books… their pages have turned to straw!’

It didn’t take long to solve the mystery. Knowing that there was only one reader who visited the library, it wasn’t difficult to identify the suspect. They caught him immediately and put him on trial. ‘What did you do with the pages?’ asked the mayor. Total silence. ‘Where did you hide them?’ rebuked the lawyer. More silence. ‘Punish him to make him speak’ suggested the priest. ‘He won’t speak, he doesn’t know how to’, said the oldest man. ‘Then expel him from our county’ proposed the Lebanese man from the shop. ‘Yeah and don’t come back’ shouted the owner of the TV channel. ‘Enough’, assured the mayor. ‘We have to vote. Who wants him to go?’ Everyone raised a hand.

So they took him to the county line and advised him ‘if you come back, we’ll punish you so badly you’ll never see the light of day again.’ The inventor of the art of gastrolibronomy was lost on the horizon and, with him, hundreds of digested books in his organism. The rest of the people returned to the library and were given the task of refilling the covers with blank pages. In the town, life went on as usual, as if there had never existed pages with letters in those books.

Sergio Navarro is currently working on this international cartoon contest: http://caricaturque.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/5th-international-cartoon-contest.html

I’m a professional vagabond. I write/draw things in notebooks with pens and occasionally I type them out or photograph them and post them here. This is my first translation.