Salamander by Thomas Wharton

whispered consultation in the next room, his brother suddenly appeared and stood over him, his face as expressionless as the stone archangel’s. Finally Michel leaned forward, placed a hand over Ezequiel’s mouth and stuck two fingers up his nostrils.
    His body began to scream silently for air. He closed his eyes, unable to bear Michel’s impassive gaze, then opened them again when panic overpowered him. Finally, as his vision clouded over and he felt himself sinking into black flames, the hands went away. His lungs shrieked, flooding with air.
    That evening, Ezequiel defied the doctor’s sombre prognostications, got up off the sofa as if nothingunusual had taken place, and joined his astounded family at the supper table where they had been eating their soup in morose silence. Michel, eager to forestall any mention of his little prank, led everyone in a prayer of thanksgiving for his brother’s recovery. It did not occur to Ezequiel to turn informer. Michel, like time itself, was a tribulation as inevitable and pointless to protest against as an illness or lessons in Latin.
    And there was of course his secret refuge: the library. His father used the room only on those rare occasions when he wished to impress an important visitor from France. Most days the room remained locked up, and, ever since Ezequiel could remember, forbidden to the children. His brother’s relentless persecution, however, had led him to steal the key from the steward’s cupboard and shut himself up from time to time in the library, where one day he discovered the blank books.
    Since all books were meant to be read, he assumed that these called for a particular kind of reading, one which he hadn’t yet been taught. Perhaps these books, and not the tall glass cabinet filled with frosted decanters of red and black liquor, were the reason the room was forbidden. And so he read the books, one at a time, not starting a new one until he had worked his way through every page of the one before, each volume a compact Canada of perfect snow-white pages. He would touch the cool, creamy surface of the paper with his fingertips, his cheek, his lips. From the marbled endpapers rose the faintly intoxicating, hermetic smell of binding paste.
    When he turned the pages they rattled softly, like far-off thunder.
    The vision of time he had glimpsed that day in church still haunted his sleepless nights, but now he had something, a bulwark of books to seal himself in against it. Here and there among his treasures he found a printed volume. The sight of its neat blocks of text was distressing, as if a thorny hedge of words lay between him and the other book, the one he truly wished to read. The only ordinary printed book he treasured was his father’s atlas of the world, in which the names of fabled places like London and Paris were neatly printed alongside tiny fairy-tale countries of blue and pink and green. Perhaps in one of those true places he might be something more than a figment of time.
    When he was twelve, his parents died at sea, while making a crossing to France, and Michel was now officially the master of his brother’s destiny that he has always considered himself to be. By then Ezequiel had come to understand that the blank books were not meant to be read, that they were in fact only part of the façade of gentility that was his father’s life. Still, having read through more than half of them by this time, and looking forward to making his way through those that remained, he was crushed when Michel sold off the entire library, to finance the building of a gaming salon.
    – For six years, the Abbé said, I endured the prison that my house, my city, had become under my brother’s merciless and arbitrary dominion. Michel was now the lord of time. Of the cycles of the year, the epicycles of the months, the stations of the week. Every hour of my day and every minute of everyhour circumscribed and entered in advance in his ledger. Every moment of idleness,