Ang Pader

Silid Aklatan shares a wall with Panaderia Luna, and the wall takes Luna's side. At four in the morning, when Nardo fires his ovens, the heat comes through the bricks into my back room, and with it the smell — pandesal first, then the ensaymada around five, then that last brown toasted note that means the day's first batch is already becoming somebody's breakfast. I have kept a bookshop beside a bakery for nineteen years. Every book in this shop has been proofing in that smell the whole time.

I mention this because of what the customers say. They say the books smell like mornings. They say it the way people report a small miracle to a bored priest — shyly, ready to be laughed at. A woman once stood at the biographies inhaling a life of Magellan and said, "Ma'am, bakit amoy almusal ang libro n'yo?" Why do your books smell like breakfast? And I gave her the only true answer I have: because they have never known anything else.

Nardo and I have run our two shops on either side of that wall since before either of us had gray hair to argue about. We have never had a contract, a partnership, or a single conversation about feelings. What we have is the ledge — the low window in the party wall, painter's-shelf width, that some sensible dead builder left there in another century — and across that ledge, for nineteen years, has moved the entire economy that matters: bread going east, books going west.

It started with a flood, the way half the arrangements in this town did. The water came into his shop and not mine — the street tilts, the street has opinions — and Nardo passed his account books through the ledge for safekeeping, and I passed back coffee, and at some point near dawn, waiting out the rain, he asked, gruff as a man asking for contraband, kung may libro ba ako tungkol sa dagat. Did I have any books about the sea.

I had thirty. I have since sold him — traded him — every one, plus every sea book I could hunt down at estate sales and Sunday markets for two decades, and I am not ashamed to say I have bought entire dead men's libraries because I spotted one storm-soaked Conrad in the carton. The baker beside me has never seen the ocean. He rises at three and feeds a town and sails, exclusively, between four and six a.m., by ladder, one shelf-window at a time.

This book is the log of the two shops: the wall, the ledge, the cat who commutes over it, the customers who came in for bread and left with poetry or came in for poetry and left, always, with bread. Nineteen years of small trades faithfully recorded. Kettle's on. The ovens are lit next door — I can feel it in the bricks, right through the local history section. Everything in here smells like morning. Now you know why.