Long before the town of Mijas in southern Spain became a lure for tourists and home to the largest golf resort in the country, a man named Emilio led a quiet life there. He rented a room in a steep unpaved street that led straight into the mountains. There was a library in the town (a small one, of course), and he was its caretaker. “Librarian,” he claimed, “is too grand a word for what I am.” He lived alone though had been married once. It had ended, after only a few months, when the flu pandemic infamously named after his country killed his young bride. Luisa had just turned eighteen. Emilio’s grief dug a deep moat around him. He shunned company. Then fled it. He wandered throughout Andalucia and found employment as a farm labourer (olives, oranges). In Seville he bought a map of Spain and located the dots he’d visited. With a sharpened pencil he connected them. His eye lingered over mountain chains and coastlines. His shoulders and arms bore the weight of his improvised rucksack. And, eventually, his feet found their way back to Mijas. Five or six years had passed; of course, the place was unchanged. His uncle, who sat on the town council, offered him a position – the only position, it turned out – at the library. It was a large room in the basement of city hall. It soon became his second home. Books were his only company; he didn’t even keep a cat.

He finds himself walking through a field of high grass, yellowed and browned by the sun. But there is no sun; it’s a cloudy mid-afternoon in his dream…

The town council granted the library a modest budget, which he used to buy books. He ordered them from Madrid and Seville and from as far as Barcelona. Occasionally, he made small repairs to windows, stairs, whatever was needed; he took his time and never asked the councilmen to compensate him. He filled the few empty corners of the library with comfortable armchairs, giving visitors more reason to linger. He recommended books he’d read and books he knew he never would. Except for Sunday, the library was open all week. Emilio kept long hours; he didn’t even close in the early afternoon when the town had its collective nap. Year after year, the number of library cards he issued to the townspeople grew.

Then came a year of economic devastation. It was as widespread as the epidemic that had robbed him of Luisa. Even places like Mijas, which had little to begin with, were not spared. Emilio was permitted to keep his job for less pay, but the town council stopped funding the library. To his surprise, economic hardship seemed to spawn new readers. The library grew in popularity, but the councilmen refused to restore its funding. They urged the townsfolk to stop reading and start working. Once when Emilio asked for funds to buy new books, one councilman answered that it would be “foolish to pay people to flee from reality.”

Slowly things got better. On Saturday, the market was livelier. More vendors; more plentiful fruit and vegetables. At Emilio’s insistence, the council reinstated part of the library’s funding; it was a meagre sum but enough to make him hope for better days. Sometimes, however, he feared the council would change course and do away with his job altogether. How would a forty-year-old ex-librarian survive?

Then came a succession of nights that brought the same dream. He finds himself walking through a field of high grass, yellowed and browned by the sun. But there is no sun; it’s a cloudy mid-afternoon in his dream; and in the distance, a sparse cluster of trees recall his thinning hair. There’s something familiar about the locale. Following a blurred transition typical of dreams he comes to a low wall of grey stone. It forms a broken circle round a large flat slab that lies half-buried in the ground. A black goat (young, very young, a kid) trots to the flat rock, hops on, and lies there as the wind stirs its fleece. For six or seven consecutive nights, the same dream, the black goat on its stone bed, the same gust of wind. Then it stopped. Losing the dream (which was how he began to think of it) worried Emilio as much as having it. On successive Sundays he went on excursions; he was certain the countryside in his dream was real; he was certain it was somewhere just outside Mijas. He walked all day, and was surprised at how much ground he covered. The land, too, held surprises, a profusion of animals and plants and vagabonds that reminded him of his earlier life. That he didn’t find the landscape from his dream, however, came as no surprise.

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.

“What do you think it means, Antonia?”

“I don’t know, Felipe. It’s very odd. Why would a complete stranger dream of our Carmela? Perhaps, he’s bought a goat from us before.”

“A librarian?”

“No, you’re right. Let’s not think about it any more. Tomorrow, we’ll find the answer. The night, you know…”

“What about the night?”

“It brings counsel.”

Before going to bed, Felipe attended to his goats. He made sure they were safe in the barn. He left them enough water for the night. With a coarse brush he stroked their fleece. Often Antonia accompanied him in these tasks, which they performed with the care they would have devoted to children. They didn’t have any, though not from lack of trying.

That night Felipe, too, dreamt of Carmela asleep on the flat rock; when she woke, the rock was gone and she found herself lying on the grass. She seemed not a bit surprised at the stone’s disappearance. She sprang to her feet and went to play with her companions. At breakfast, Felipe recounted this new dream to Antonia.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, Felipe, isn’t it obvious? You have to remove the rock. You have to see what’s underneath.”

“What could possibly be underneath?”

“If you don’t, I will.”

“All right, but let’s not hurry. Let’s finish our breakfast and tidy up here.”

“You’re convinced there’s nothing under that rock, and you’re trying to put off disappointment, is that it?”

He merely shrugged; he couldn’t put it better than that.

“You’re right, no need to hurry. More coffee?” And she added with a wink, “But drink it fast.”

Armed with shovel, rope, and donkey, they went to Carmela’s rocky bed. For once, she wasn’t lying on it. Felipe dug around the slab to release the earth’s grip on it. He fastened one end of the rope around the stone and the other around the donkey. As the donkey pulled, he and Antonia pushed. A few minutes’ intense exertion moved the stone two arms’ lengths. Leaning against it, he took a little rest before he began to dig. It wasn’t long before the shovel struck something that produced a strange echo. It was a jar made of hardened clay, which he dug out with his bare hands.

“It’s an amphora,” said Antonia, who was the reader in the family.

They took it back to the house. They removed the coarse cloth that stoppered it. They turned it upside down over the kitchen table. Out clattered several coins, too many to count at a single glance. They were nothing like the ones in Felipe’s pocket. They shone gold and silver. They gasped in unison; it made them laugh.

“These are ancient,” Antonia said. Now she understood the meaning of Felipe’s recurring dream. The question he’d been seeking an answer for was: “How can we keep our goats?” Every year, to earn enough money, they were forced to sell two or three, heartrending but necessary. “Ancient and valuable. We don’t have to sell any of our goats any more.”

“That’s it! That’s the question. My god, how could I not think of that? I ask it every day.”

Felipe didn’t know where the librarian lived; he waited till Sunday had passed to return to the village. Surely the library would be open on Monday. In his pocket he carried a few of the coins he had dug up. When told what had happened, Emilio reacted with as much relief as wonderment. “Well, at least the mystery is partly resolved,” he said. A month later, after an exchange of letters with the Prado Museum, Emilio and Felipe travelled together to Madrid by train. The museum offered them an unimaginably large sum for their find. Felipe returned to his flock. Emilio went back to Mijas and informed the town council he would move the library into larger, above-ground premises – at his own expense.

There are many such stories of good fortune, thought Emilio, but unlike accounts of horror or tragedy, they are hardly ever recorded. He wrote the story. It survived among his papers at the library and can be read by any of the residents of Mijas or the vacationers who hibernate there, provided they know Spanish.