He told himself to forget the whole thing, and the memory of the dream began to fade. A few days later a new patron walked into the library. A man no longer young but fit. He wore a frayed tunic. He was dressed like a goatherder, and smelled like one. At the desk he asked Emilio for all his books on dreams.

“I believe we have only one.”

Emilio led him to the stacks a few steps away and pulled a book from the shelves. It was Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in a Spanish translation by Luis López-Ballesteros. The man took the book to one of the tables in the reading area. It wasn’t long before he was back. “This isn’t what I’m looking for.”

“What do you need, sir?”

“A book that talks about what dreams mean.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a book like that. It would be an interesting addition to our collection, though no one has asked for one before.”

“Don’t people want to understand their dreams?”

“Oh, I couldn’t say.”

“Don’t you want to understand yours?”

The man’s forwardness left Emilio speechless, but only for a moment. “Yes. In fact, I think I could use such a book now.”

“Have you been having strange dreams?”

“Just one.”

“That keeps coming back?”

“Yes. How did you guess?”

“So does mine,” the man said with a shrug. He gave a sympathetic nod that urged Emilio on.

The goatherder’s expression changed as Emilio recounted his dream: it looked like disbelief or suspicion. “He thinks I’m making this up to poke fun at him in some way,” thought Emilio. “I shouldn’t have mentioned the goat.”

And in the next moment the goatherder was gone, after mumbling an apology for wasting “a busy librarian’s time.”

“What a peculiar character,” Emilio thought. And one, he was sure, he would never see in his library again. It was only as he was closing that evening that he remembered he’d forgotten to ask the goatherder about his own recurring dream.

As he rode his donkey home, Felipe couldn’t keep from dwelling on the librarian’s dream. Everything seemed to fit. The low stone wall forming a broken circle. The large flat slab in the middle of the circle. And the black goat, that was clearly Carmela, his favourite. But how could the librarian have known all this? Had he been there? But when? Surely Felipe would have noticed an intruder. But most of all, what did it mean? If the librarian really had that dream – and many times, too – what did it mean? He wondered how his wife would react on hearing the story. It was she who had insisted he go into town when he told her of his own recurring dream – a voice he didn’t recognize telling him to seek the answer to his question in the village, at the library. Both he and Antonia were puzzled by this dream and its insistence. What was the question for which he sought an answer?

When he got home, Antonia stopped what she was doing and asked him what he had found out at the library.

“It’s the strangest thing,” he said. And said nothing more.

“Come,” she said, pulling him to the table. She made him sit down and poured him a few drops of sherry. “Now tell me.”

And he did, without leaving out a single detail of the librarian’s dream. He told her of his puzzlement and his initial suspicion that the librarian had been spying on them. He told her he dismissed his suspicion as groundless even before he’d arrived at home.