I
It was twilight when I went into the park. The autumn foliage was almost all gone, and there were only a few leaves on the trees. The paths, full of dead leaves, curved softly through the trees, and the air was damp with the smell of rotten foliage and the cold. I walked without any definite goal, simply turning as chance directed. Sometimes, following the path, I would find myself in a small clearing; at other times, the trees would close in on me more and more until they formed a kind of tunnel from which it was an effort to escape. The silence was only interrupted now and then by the noise of a train running through the park, but at such a distance that it was just a low murmur.
I was still walking along a path when I saw a bench in the distance. As I approached, I saw that someone was already sitting there, engrossed in a book. I hesitated for a moment before joining him, but then I sat down on the bench a little way away and lit a cigarette.
He was sitting quite still, but he couldn't have been more than a few metres from me. He had a strange air about him, something absent and indifferent, but perhaps that was just the effect of his concentration on the book. I watched his motionless body out of the corner of my eye, and at times I even looked directly at him, at the dark, almost absentminded way in which he read, turning the pages with a mechanical gesture, without lifting his eyes.
It was getting dark, and the few people who were still in the park were beginning to head towards the nearest exits. The silence was complete, and the only sound was the rustle of the leaves that we stirred with our feet.
I was feeling uncomfortable. All at once, with no connection to what had gone before, as if he were continuing a conversation that had been interrupted some time before, the man on the bench next to me declared:
"I was coming from a visit to the hospital."
I didn't say anything, because he said it in a casual way, without raising his eyes from the book.
"And I got so caught up in the book," he added, "that I forgot to tell you that a little while ago I was at Madame Henriette's."
Still he kept reading, and I was even more surprised than before because there couldn't have been any doubt about it: the man was talking to me. There was no-one else in the park, and furthermore he had said "I was at Madame Henriette's" to me in such a direct way that it was impossible for him to have been talking to someone else.
I couldn't resist and asked him: "Who's Madame Henriette?"
He looked at me with apparent surprise, and put the book down on his knees, marking the page with his finger. "Madame Henriette," he said slowly, "is the owner of the house I was in."
And after a pause he added, "I've been a regular there for many years."
Then, as if he had suddenly remembered something that he had only just recalled, he asked: "By the way, didn't I see you there once?"
I thought about it for a moment, and then replied, "No, I don't think so."
"But you were talking with Irineo, about a story that had happened to you in Lomas. Don't you remember?" he said, looking at me very intently.
"Now that you mention it, yes," I said, though now I thought back on it, I couldn't be sure.
"It's curious, very curious," he said to himself. "For days now, I've had the feeling that I'd seen you somewhere before."
And before I could say anything, he took the opportunity to introduce himself. "My name is Mario. Mario Oliver."
"Martín," I said, automatically giving my surname, which, since I'm a bit of a vagabond, didn't tell him very much.
We shook hands and he immediately offered me a cigarette, which I accepted.
"And since we've already said who we are," he said, "maybe you can help me with something that's been worrying me for some time."
I waited, and he started to explain. He had met up with Irineo just a little while ago, and during the conversation they happened to mention me, and at that moment, he said, the title of a book came into his mind, The Garden of Forking Paths, and without fully understanding why he had started to read the book as if it were a clue to something whose importance he couldn't yet discern. Now he wasn't quite sure whether he had mentioned the title to me or whether it had been my association with the name of Irineo that had brought the book to mind, but he would like me to tell him what I knew about it.
"I'm afraid that I can't help you," I confessed, "because in actual fact I don't know anything about it."
He seemed disappointed, and again looked closely at me.
"That's odd," he said. "I was almost certain that you had mentioned the title to me on one occasion. In any case, I still remember the impression it made on me, and I thought that when I spoke with Irineo, perhaps he would be able to tell me something about the book, but not at all, he looked at me in amazement, and when I asked him about the book, he didn't know anything about it either. And the oddest thing is, I'm absolutely sure that I never heard the title before. So how did it get into my head?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "It must have been a vague memory of something that you forgot about over time, or perhaps a title that you read somewhere without being aware of it."
He remained pensive, and I wondered what he could be thinking about. Then, suddenly, as though he had just remembered something, he started to laugh. "But of course," he said, "how stupid I am! I'm just realizing now that I myself gave you a copy of this The Garden of Forking Paths. Don't you remember? I left it with some books that I lent you a long time ago, and, as far as I can recall, you never even looked at them."
I felt confused. "I'm afraid that you're mistaken," I said. "You never lent me any books."
"How strange!" he said. "I remember so clearly how I gave you them one afternoon when I met you at Madame Henriette's."
"I'm sorry, but you must be mistaken," I said again, beginning to feel slightly irritated, mainly because I had never set foot in that Madame Henriette's place that he spoke of.
But Mario Oliver insisted. "I couldn't have given them to anyone else," he said, "because I haven't got any other acquaintances from the park. And there is something else, very strange, that makes me think that you've seen that book: that day, when I gave you the books, I left the volume containing the story "The Garden of Forking Paths" half-open, with a small mark so you would start reading it straight away. Just imagine my surprise when I looked for it in your library a little while ago and found that the mark was still there, which means you didn't read the story."
I started laughing in spite of myself because as I thought back on it, it all seemed so unlikely, so absurd, that I was sure that at any moment my companion on the bench would break out into laughter and shout, "Gotcha!" But he kept seriously repeating that he knew that I had read the story "The Garden of Forking Paths" and that I was going to explain the plot of it to him.
In the end I stopped laughing and suggested to him that perhaps he had been mistaken, and that it had been someone else who had given me the books, but he immediately objected that when I had returned the books to him he had even made some notes on the margin, and that it would be easy for us to check this.
Then, at last, he took out his notebook, wrote down my address, and we agreed that I should come to his place the next day so we could clear up this mystery.
II
When the following afternoon I rang at Mario Oliver's flat it was he himself who opened the door. The moment he saw me he broke into a smile and welcomed me cordially, leading me into the sitting-room where there were a lot of books, both French and Spanish. After offering me a chair he sat down opposite me, very serious, and looked at me with a thoughtful air.
"I've spent a long time thinking about what happened to us yesterday," he said, "and I'm becoming increasingly convinced that you haven't been completely frank with me."
I shrugged my shoulders. "You might be right," I said, "but the truth is that yesterday something strange did happen to me. I couldn't give you the explanation that you asked me for, but in return there are a lot of things that you will have to explain to me."
"Don't worry, we'll get to that," he said. "Just be patient, and I'm sure that all these events will make sense in the end."
Then he got up and went over to the bookcase. After a brief search, he took out several volumes and handed them to me. "Here they are," he said. "Tell me if any of these books looks familiar