Elías had never in his life left a book half-finished.
It was a matter of principle, almost of honor. The good ones and the bad ones, those that bored him and those that wounded him, he finished them all. Closing a book without completing it felt to him like a small betrayal, leaving someone talking to themselves.
So when he entered the abandoned library, he was already lost. He just didn't know it yet.
It was the old wing of a shuttered seminary. They had let him in because he was going to photograph the ruin for an archive, and he found himself alone among the rotting shelves, in the grey light of a dirty high window and a silence of wet paper. The books were falling apart. Fungus, damp, burst spines.
Except one.
It sat on a table, in the center, clean, without a speck of dust, as if someone had just set it there. No title on the cover. No author.
Elías opened it.
It wasn't fiction. It was a biography. The life of a man, told from birth, with the dry, assured prose of serious biography. A man born in a provincial city, son of a schoolteacher, a reader from childhood.
It rang a bell. Vaguely, it rang a bell.
He read for an hour on his feet, without feeling the cold. The life of that man was ordinary, neither heroic nor miserable, but it was written in a way he couldn't let go of. When the light from the high window began to fade, he marked the page with his finger, closed the book for a moment to rest his eyes.
And when he opened it again, the page had changed.
It wasn't the same sentence where he had left his finger.
He thought he had made a mistake about the page. He went back. He went forward. No: the text was different. Where he had read that the man's name was one thing, now it was another. Where the mother had been a village schoolteacher, now she was a schoolteacher from a city. Elías's city. The city of Elías.
He closed the book entirely, with both hands, his heart beginning to hurry.
He opened it again.
The name of the mother in the book was now the name of Elías's mother.
He closed it. He opened it.
The man in the book had had, as a boy, a dog that shared the name of the dog Elías had had as a boy, and that only Elías and a handful of dead people could remember.
Each time he closed it and opened it, the book corrected itself. It drew closer. It crossed out the stranger from the beginning and wrote Elías in his place. Chapter by chapter, his life was entering those pages the way water enters sand.
He should have left. Anyone would have left.
But it was his life. And he had never, never, left a book half-finished.
Least of all this one.
He read all night, by the light of his torch, sitting on the frozen floor.
And he discovered what was truly frightening.
It wasn't that the book told his life. It was that it told it worse.
Every episode he recognized was twisted toward its dark side. That time, as a young man, when he had been on the verge of doing something petty and hadn't done it: the Elías in the book had done it. That friendship he had saved with a timely phone call: the Elías in the book hadn't called, and had let it die. That grief he had survived: it had crushed the Elías in the book forever.
The man in the pages was him, exactly him, at all the forks where the real Elías had chosen the decent thing, the cowardly-but-clean thing, the forgivable thing. The one in the book had taken, one by one, every exit he had avoided.
It was the worst possible Elías. The one he would have been if at every crossing he had turned toward the worst.
And the book wrote it with his name, his mother, his dog, his secrets. Things he had never told anyone appeared on the pages, done, consummated, fixed.
You can't argue with a biography. A biography doesn't opine. It only reports what happened.
He began searching for the page.
The fork. The exact point where the life in the book diverged from his, where the worst Elías was born from the good one. If he found it, he thought, he could point to it, hold it, say: here, here it wasn't me, here I chose differently. Prove to himself which side he was on.
But the book was rearranging itself.
Every time he closed it and opened it to look back, the chapters had changed position, and the fork was never where he had left it. He spent the hours, the days, he no longer knew how many, in that library, hunting a page that moved.
Until one night he opened the book and read, in the present tense, a new chapter:
He spent whole days in the ruined library, barely eating, searching for the page where his life had gone wrong. He didn't understand that looking for it was already part of what was written.
Elías looked up.
The book had caught up to him. It was no longer telling his past, worse. It was telling his present. It was at his pace.
And when he lowered his eyes again, it was a little bit ahead.
He began to observe himself from the outside.
Thoughts he didn't recognize as his own passed through his mind, and shortly after he found them on a prior page, attributed to the Elías in the book. He made a gesture, a small, quiet cruelty toward the seminary guard who came to ask if he was all right; a gesture that wasn't like him, that belonged to the other one. And when he opened the book, there it was, already written, in ink that seemed still wet.
The membrane between the two Eliases was thinning.
He no longer knew whether the book was correcting itself toward him, or whether he was correcting himself toward the book. Whether the pages were copying his life, worse, or whether his life had begun to obey the pages. Both possibilities left him in the same place, which is what always happens with this kind of thing.
The only certainty was that he couldn't stop reading.
Because it was his life. Because it was getting worse. Because he had to know. Because no one in the world is capable of closing the book that tells, page by page, what they are becoming.
The last time he opened it, the page described an abandoned library.
The dirty high window. The dust. The cold. A table in the center and, on it, a book without a title. And a man on the floor, with a torch that was almost spent, reading a book whose story changed every time he closed it and opened it.
He read that it was his life, and that it was worse. He looked for the page where it had gone wrong and didn't find it, because the going wrong was this, it was now, it was the act of reading.
Elías read that sentence just as he was living it.
And below, the page continued. There was more. Lines he hadn't yet reached, waiting for him, running ahead, with the ink gleaming fresh in the light of the dying torch. What he was going to do next. Worse. And after that, more, writing itself a few centimeters ahead of his eyes, always ahead, impossible to catch by reading, impossible to stop without stopping reading.
He thought about closing it. About dropping it and running out and not finishing it, for the first time in his life.
He looked down to gather strength.
And he read:
He thought about closing it. But he didn't close it.
And it was true.
He didn't close it.
He kept reading, downward, toward what was coming, while somewhere the worst Elías and he finished, without any perceptible moment, being the same man. And the last sentence he managed to read, there on the floor, with the light about to go out, said that the last sentence he managed to read had not been written by him.