While he was spending his lonely nights in that library, he often imagined being saved by a beautiful girl in a white dress rambling into the reading room and remaining distractedly after closing time and waiting for him; he imagined showing her over the mysteries of the bindery and cataloguing room, then moving with her into the starry night.
It never happened.
He had many dreamy moments like those, every night when he worked in the library.
There was a little for him to do. Few students made use of the evening opening; few were even aware of it.
The librarians, women for the most part, preferred not to work after five o'clock, because the campus, up on the mountainside, was too bleak and lonely at night. And went they home.
It was easy money, what he earned. But the discomfort he suffered was not inconsequential. The loneliness was heavy, the hours he spent there ticked boring. And when no one was there it was even creepy to sit down in the big room with dim lights hanging like candles, turned upside down.
Outside the wind was blowing and the dark beyond the window disquieting. He had the feeling he was the only living being on the campus.
He lived those bleak hours when he was alone in the fear that an evildoer burst into the room and waylaid him.
It never happened.
He had many disturbing moments like those, every night when he worked in the library.
To soothe the fear he used to start remembering the other moments of his boring life at the university.
And so he realized, not surprisingly, that all his life was fully immersed in nothing.
But also in the nothingness, life is proving something: he was an island; he didn't need parents, he didn't need a family, he didn't need a companion. He was solid like an island but frail like a yellow leaf on a tree's branch in November when the air is iced and the wind blows.
At night, lost in that enormous reading room, he experienced both, adrift in the hollow night, he felt the pain.
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