The Book Alley

When Alan and I first met, we soon discovered that we had quite a few things in common. One of them was an absolute love of the 1960s television series Star Trek. We spent hundreds of hours watching and rewatching every episode.

Before long, we developed an even more unusual interest: collecting absolutely everything that had ever been published in print about the series.

This was 2004, back when the internet wasn't nearly as much a part of our lives as it is today. So our incredible mission was confined to the second-hand bookshops of Porto Alegre. Fortunately, we found an enormous variety of things and gradually bought them all, one item at a time.

The trouble was, two young people with no money and no jobs didn't exactly have much purchasing power. Even a handful of second-hand books was a lot for us back then.

Until we discovered what second-hand bookshops were really for: trading.

First, we gathered up every unwanted book we had at home. Then we started asking our parents, aunts, uncles and other relatives. That helped us make considerable progress with our collection.

It was around this time that we met him: Peter.

Peter owned all four Beco dos Livros bookshops in Porto Alegre, and he had an absurd amount of knowledge about absolutely every book we brought him.

Two charming youngsters could often talk certain booksellers into giving them more than their books were worth. But never Peter.

Peter always saw straight through us and put an end to our plans with a resounding:

‘No.’

Over time, our visits to the bookshops turned into a sort of reverse hunt for Peter.

Since there were four shops, all belonging to him, if we walked into one and found Peter there, we simply moved on to another.

Our goal wasn't to find Peter.

It was to find out where Peter wasn't.

Whenever we arrived at a shop and he wasn't there, we'd start negotiating as quickly as possible. We'd sort through the books, work out the figures and try to finish the trade before he turned up.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't.

On a few occasions, Peter appeared right in the middle of a negotiation. All he had to do was look at the books and see what we were trying to pull.

‘No.’

And there went our brilliant deal.

Later, on the bus, we'd spend much of the journey home discussing the operation: which shop Peter had been in, which one we'd escaped from, how much we'd managed to get for our books and, most importantly, celebrating whenever we'd won the game and walked away with a good trade.

Time passed.

The two young Star Trek collectors no longer had entire afternoons to spend wandering around central Porto Alegre. We went back to the bookshops a few times at weekends. On some of those visits, we ran into Peter.

He didn't recognise us, but then we'd never imagined he would.

This week, we took our daughter into the city centre for the first time.

More than twenty-two years later, she was walking between us, enthusiastically holding our hands as we told her about the old man who knew every book in the world just by looking at it.

Then we reached Beco dos Livros.

And found a notice on the door.

Peter had died.

Our daughter didn't understand the looks on our faces.

I don't think we understood them ourselves.

Peter wasn't a relative. He wasn't a friend. He didn't even know our names.

Perhaps he never had any idea how many afternoons we'd spent talking about him on the bus. He never knew how much we celebrated whenever we managed to win that little game. He never knew that his unexpected appearances in one of the shops had given us so many stories and so much laughter.

He never knew that, more than twenty years later, we'd be telling our daughter about him.

And we never told him.

Peter was there. He'd always been there. Until he wasn't anymore.

That notice marked the end of an era. A part of our youth had disappeared along with Peter, and with one quick glance at each other, we both knew it.

I took a few photographs of the shopfront, and we carried on walking in silence, even with a little girl holding our hands and talking non-stop.

Until she asked:

‘Where are we going? Why wasn't the bookshop open?’

We looked at each other, not quite knowing what to say.

Then I told her:

‘Because time passes, my love.’

I immediately realised that this was far too philosophical an answer for a three-year-old girl and was already preparing to explain it a little better.

But she wasn't paying attention to me anymore.

She was completely fascinated by a pigeon trying to take flight.