The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman Read Online Free PDF

the street and began walking.

CHAPTER 7
    B erta Quiñones, the poor thing, hadn’t slept a wink all night. She had been up since six in the morning, passing the time until it was late enough to call the girls, thinking about how she was going to give them the bad news, while she did the laundry, mopped the kitchen floor, watered the plants, and vacuumed the carpet.
    This wasn’t her normal Sunday routine. Berta was the polar opposite of a compulsive cleaner. When she didn’t have to go to work, she forgot about everything and everyone, stayed in bed well into the morning, alone and relaxed and happy. Then she would make milky coffee, go out to the balcony, treat the empty street to one of her best yawns, and spend the rest of the morning reading novels.
    In her case, solitude had been a conscious and appropriate choice. Of course, like all literary spinsters, in her youth she too had lived her very own story of unrequited love. You bet. The truth was—and Berta felt somewhat ashamed when she admitted it to herself—that the boy of her dreams never even suspected that Berta loved him. They never exchanged a single word. They saw each other only from a distance and he lifted his head tolook at her only once in the five years that the romance lasted, so in all likelihood he never gave a single thought to the girl with messy braids and glasses whom he once caught looking at him from the balcony of her house, the first in the village, opposite the telegraph office.
    Because she didn’t dare ask him his name, she borrowed a hero’s name for him: Robin, like the prince of thieves who stole from the rich to give to the poor. She also invented a soft voice, expert hands, bravery worthy of a fictional character, smooth lips, long kisses, and a clearing in the woods where she could love him, in secret, far from the curses of witches or the spells of fairies.
    Robin used to arrive with the mailbags promptly every morning at eight o’clock. Berta would be waiting for him, curled up at the small window in the attic room, two dreamy eyes behind her glasses, and would watch as he stopped the small Citroën—a white steed covered in dents—next to the post office. He would go in, come out, rev up, speed off.
    Berta would feel her heart exploding and have to stay still for a few minutes until her legs stopped trembling and she was able to gather the strength to stand up, collect her books from the floor, and run down the stairs, out into the street, and all the way to the square, where her schoolmates would be waiting for the teacher with their homework ready.
    Her mother complained that she had her head in the clouds. “Quite the contrary, Mrs. Quiñones,” the teacher assured her. Berta’s head was anywhere but in the clouds.
    She was a walking library. She had read so many books, had dreamed so much, had imagined Robin so many times as the protagonist of those wonderful stories that fiction and reality had become muddled.
    She was given a grant to go and study in Madrid: documentary maker cum laude, philologist, doctor of literature and language teacher, a genius.
    Six years later, when Mr. Bestman, Craftsman & Co.’s development director, interviewed her in an elegant office, he spent a long while examining her CV. He asked her three or four trick questions: What did she think of Harold Pinter? Had she read Yeats? What was her opinion on the Latin American boom and its twenty-first-century legacy. “Do you think that Mario Vargas Llosa will one day be awarded the Nobel Prize?”
    After half an hour of intense conversation with the Englishman, Berta became the brand-new editor of Librarte magazine. She left her work at the university library and reached the conclusion that you never know what life will throw at you.
    By then she had turned fifty and lost all hope of crossing paths again with Robin who, according to a friend, had disappeared from the village with three