At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘Yes,’ said Unterholzer, taking the button. ‘Just as I thought. It’s your own button, Herr von Igelfeld. If you look at the left sleeve of your jacket, you will see that there are only two buttons sewn on behind the cuff. On your right sleeve there are three. This button matches the others. What good fortune that it fell off in your office and not outside. It could have fallen into a tramline and rolled away.’

  At this last remark, Prinzel and Unterholzer burst into laughter, although the Librarian, inexplicably, did not. Von Igelfeld, humiliated, said nothing. He did not understand what tramlines had to do with it, and it was outrageous that Unterholzer should have wriggled out of his difficulties in this way. His one consolation was that Nemesis would take note, would stalk Unterholzer, and would trip him up one of these days. It was only a matter of time.

  The Librarian realised that von Igelfeld was somehow put out by the way in which the button incident had been concluded, and decided that this would be the right time to mention the Colombian request. He did not like to see von Igelfeld humiliated, particularly when it was at the hands of his colleagues. They were so rude, sometimes; always interrupting him as if they were the only ones who had any right to speak. Well, now he would speak, and they would have to listen this time.

  ‘Herr von Igelfeld,’ he began. ‘Putting buttons to one side – and who amongst us has not at some time shed a button, Herr Unterholzer? There is no shame in doing so, in my view. But be that as it may, there was a development while you were away. I thought I might mention it to you.’

  Everybody looked at the Librarian, who for a few precious moments relished their evident anticipation. They could not interrupt him now.

  ‘I had a request a month or so ago from a foreign embassy,’ he said. ‘A very particular request.’

  The silence deepened. Unterholzer’s lips were pursed, and von Igelfeld noticed that his hands were trembling slightly.

  ‘Oh yes?’ said von Igelfeld encouragingly. ‘You alluded to something earlier on, Herr Huber. You have the details to hand now, I take it?’

  The Librarian nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’ He paused, but only for a moment. ‘The request came from the Colombian Embassy, in fact. They asked me for a copy of Portuguese Irregular Verbs, and I despatched one to them immediately. And . . . ’ Now the tension was almost unbearable. ‘And they asked me to provide a brief biographical note about yourself, including any honours already received, and to confirm the correct spelling of your name.’

  The effect of these words was every bit as dramatic as the Librarian had anticipated. The information took a few moments to sink in, but when it had, all thoughts of buttons and such matters were replaced by a real and quite tangible sense of excitement. When all was said and done, what really mattered was the reputation of the Institute, and good news for one was good news for all. There may have been minor jealousies – and these were inevitable in philology – but when there was a whiff, even the merest whiff, of an honour from a foreign institution, then all such matters were swept aside. Now, in the face of this quite extraordinarily exciting news, the only thing that mattered was that they should find out, as soon as possible, what this development meant.

  Prinzel was the first to suggest an explanation. ‘I should imagine that it is an honorary degree from a Colombian university,’ he said. ‘There are some very prestigious institutions in Bogotá. The Rosario, for example, is very highly regarded in South America. It is a private university in Bogotá. I should think that is what it is. May I be the first to offer my congratulations, Herr von Igelfeld!’

  Von Igelfeld raised a hand in a gesture of modesty. ‘That could be quite premature, Herr Prinzel,’ he protested. ‘I cannot imagine that it will be an honour of any sort. I imagine that it is just for some small article in a government journal or newspaper. It will be no more than that.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the Librarian. ‘They could get that sort of information from a press-cuttings agency. They would not need a copy of the book for that.’

  ‘Herr Huber has a very good point,’ said Unterholzer. ‘There is more to this than meets the eye.’

  ‘Please!’ protested von Igelfeld. ‘I would not wish to tempt Providence. You are all most generous in your assumptions, but I think it would be a grave error to think any more of this. Please let us talk about other matters. The Zeitschrift, for example. How is work progressing on the next issue? Have we sent everything off to the printer yet?’

  His suggestion that they should think no more of this mysterious approach from the Colombian Embassy was, of course, not advice that he could himself follow. Over the next week, he thought of nothing else, flicking through each delivery of post to see whether there was a letter from Colombia or something that looked as if it came from the Colombian Embassy. And as for Prinzel and Unterholzer, they had several private meetings in which they discussed the situation at length, speculating as to whether they had missed any possible interpretation of the Embassy’s request. They thought they had not. They had covered every possibility, and all of them looked good.

  Eight days after the Librarian’s announcement, the letter arrived. It was postmarked Bogotá, and von Igelfeld stared at it for a full ten minutes before he slit it open with his letter-knife and unfolded the heavy sheet of cotton-weave paper within. It was written in Spanish, a language of which he had a near perfect command, and it began by addressing him in that rather flowery way of South American institutions. The President of the Colombian Academy of Letters presented his compliments to the most distinguished Professor Dr von Igelfeld. From time to time, it went on, the Academy recognised the contribution of a foreign scholar, to whom it extended the privilege of Distinguished Corresponding Fellowship. This award was the highest honour which they could bestow and this year, ‘in anticipation and in the strongest hope of a favourable response from your distinguished self’, the Academy had decided to bestow this honour on von Igelfeld. There would be a ceremony in Bogotá, which they hoped he would be able to attend.

  He read the letter through twice, and then he stood up at his desk. He walked around the room, twice, allowing his elation to settle. Colombia! This was no mere Belgian honour, handed out indiscriminately to virtually anybody who bothered to visit Belgium; this came from the Academy of an influential South American state. He looked at his watch. Coffee time was at least an hour away and he had to tell somebody. He would write to Zimmermann, of course, but in the meantime he could start by telling the Librarian, who had played such an important role in all this. He found him alone in the Library, a sheaf of old-fashioned catalogue cards before him. After he had broken the news, he informed the Librarian that he was the first person to know of what had happened.

  ‘Do you mean you haven’t told the others?’ asked the Librarian. ‘You haven’t even told Professor Dr Dr Prinzel yet?’

  ‘No,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘I am telling you first.’

  For a moment the Librarian said nothing. He stood there, at his card catalogue, looking down at the floor. There were few moments in his daily life which achieved any salience, but this, most surely, was one. Nobody told him anything. Nobody ever wrote to him or made him party to any confidence. Even his wife had not bothered to tell him that she was running away; if the building were to go on fire, he was sure that nobody would bother to advise him to leave. And now here was Professor Dr von Igelfeld, author of Portuguese Irregular Verbs, telling him, and telling him first, of a private letter he had received from the Colombian Academy of Letters.

  ‘I am so proud, Herr von Igelfeld,’ he said. ‘I am so . . . ’ He did not finish; there were no words strong enough to express his emotion.

  ‘It is a joint triumph,’ said von Igelfeld kindly. ‘I would not have achieved this, Herr Huber, were it not for the constant support which I have received in my work from yourself. I am sure of that fact. I really am.’

  ‘You are too kind, Herr von Igelfeld,’ stuttered the Librarian. ‘You are too kind to me.’

  ‘
It is no more than you deserve,’ said von Igelfeld. A Corresponding Fellow of the Colombian Academy of Letters can always afford to be generous, and von Igelfeld was.

  Not surprisingly, the arrangements for the bestowal of the honour proved to be immensely complicated. The cultural attaché was extremely helpful, but even with his help, the formalities were time-consuming. At last, after several months during which letters were exchanged on an almost weekly basis, the date of the ceremony was settled, and von Igelfeld’s flight to Bogotá was booked. Señor Gabriel Marcales de Cinco Fermentaciones, the cultural attaché, proposed to travel out with von Igelfeld, as he was being recalled to Bogotá anyway, and he thought that it would be convenient to accompany him and ensure a smooth reception at the other end.

  Von Igelfeld was doubtful whether this was really necessary, but was pleased with the arrangement on two accounts. Cinco Fermentaciones, it transpired, was most agreeable company, being very well-informed on South American literary affairs. This alone would have made travelling together worthwhile, but there was more. When they arrived in Bogotá, there was no question of waiting at the airport for formalities; all of these were disposed of in the face of the diplomatic passport which the cultural attaché produced and with a letter which he folded and unfolded in the face of any official and which immediately seemed to open all doors. Von Igelfeld hesitated to ask what was in this letter, but Cinco Fermentaciones, seeing him looking at it with curiosity, offered an explanation of his own accord.

  ‘I wrote it and signed it myself,’ he said, with a smile. ‘It says that I am to receive every assistance and consideration, and any request of mine is to be attended to with the utmost despatch. Then I stamped it with the Ambassador’s stamp that he keeps on his desk and which seems to have quite magical properties. Hola! It works.’

  Von Igelfeld was impressed, and wondered whether he might try the same tactic himself in future.

  ‘Another example of South American magical realism,’ said Señor Gabriel Marcales de Cinco Fermentaciones, with a laugh. ‘Magical, but realistic at the same time.’

  They travelled to von Igelfeld’s hotel and Cinco Fermentaciones made sure that his guest was settled in before he left him. The letter was unfolded and displayed to the manager of the hotel, who nodded deferentially and gave von Igelfeld a quick salute in response. Then Cinco Fermentaciones promised to pick up von Igelfeld for the ceremony, which would take place at noon the following day.

  ‘In the meantime, you can recover from the trip,’ he said. ‘This city is at a very great altitude, and you must take things easily.’

  ‘Perhaps I shall take a look around later this afternoon,’ said von Igelfeld, looking out of the window at the interesting Spanish colonial architecture of the surrounding streets.

  Cinco Fermentaciones frowned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t do that. Definitely not.’

  Von Igelfeld was puzzled. ‘But those buildings? May one not inspect them, even just from the outside?’

  Cinco Fermentaciones shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You must not leave the hotel. It is for your own safety.’

  Von Igelfeld looked at the manager, who nodded his agreement with Cinco Fermentaciones and made a quick, but eloquent, throat-slitting gesture.

  ‘Outside is extremely dangerous,’ the manager said quietly. ‘The whole country is extremely dangerous.’

  ‘Surely not in the middle of the city,’ protested von Igelfeld. ‘Look, there are plenty of people outside in the streets.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cinco Fermentaciones. ‘And most of them are extremely dangerous. Believe me, I know my own country. Even this letter’ – and he held up his potent document – ‘even this wouldn’t help you out there.’

  ‘But who are these dangerous people?’ asked von Igelfeld.

  ‘Brigands, desperadoes, narcotraficantes, guerrillas,’ began Cinco Fermentaciones. ‘Extortionists, murderers, anti-Government factions, pro-Government factions, disaffected soldiers, corrupt policemen, revolutionary students, conservative students, students in general, cocaine producers, hostile small farmers, dispossessed peasants . . . And there are others.’

  ‘Disaffected waiters as well,’ interjected the hotel manager. ‘We regularly receive bomb threats from a movement of disaffected waiters who attack hotels. It is very troublesome.’

  Von Igelfeld said nothing. He had heard that Colombia was a troubled society, but he had imagined that the trouble was confined to lawless areas in the south. The way that Cinco Fermentaciones and the hotel manager were talking gave a very different impression. Was anybody safe in this country? Was the Academy of Letters itself safe, or were there disaffected writers who needed to be added to Cinco Fermentaciones’ intimidating list? For a moment he wondered whether he should pose this question, but he decided, on balance, to leave it unasked.

  In the face of this unambiguous advice, von Igelfeld remained within the confines of the hotel, venturing out only into the walled garden, where he sat for an hour, admiring a colourful display of red and blue bougainvillaea. That evening, after a light supper in the hotel dining room – a meal which he took in isolation, as there appeared to be no other guests – he slept fitfully, waking frequently through the night and anxiously checking that the door was still locked. There were strange noises in the corridor outside – a cough, the sound of footsteps, and at one point a muttered conversation, seemingly directly outside his door. In the morning, with the sun streaming through his window, the fears of the night receded, and he prepared himself with pleasurable anticipation for the day’s events.

  Cinco Fermentaciones called for him on time, dressed in a smart morning coat and sporting a carnation in his buttonhole.

  ‘I hope that the night passed peacefully,’ he said to von Igelfeld.

  ‘Extremely peacefully,’ replied von Igelfeld. This reply seemed to disappoint Cinco Fermentaciones, who made a gesture towards the door behind him.

  ‘This country is unpredictable,’ he said. ‘One night is peaceful and then the next . . . Well, everything comes to a head.’

  Von Igelfeld decided that he would not allow this pessimistic view to colour his experience of Colombia. Everyone in the hotel had been charming; the sun was shining benevolently; the air was crisp and clear. Cinco Fermentaciones could brood on political and social conflict if he wished; von Igelfeld, by contrast, was prepared to be more sanguine.

  They set off for the premises of the Academy and ten minutes later arrived in front of a comfortable, colonial-style building in the old centre of Bogotá. There they were met by the President of the Academy, who came to the door to greet them. He was a distinguished-looking man in his late sixties, with a large moustache and round, unframed glasses. He led them into the Hall, where a group of about forty Members of the Academy, all formally dressed for the occasion, were seated in rows, every face turned towards the new Corresponding Fellow, every expression one of welcome.

  ‘Most distinguished Academicians,’ began the President, as he faced the membership. ‘We have in our midst this morning one whose contribution to Romance philology has been exceeded by no other in the last one hundred years. When Professor von Igelfeld set aside his pen after writing the final sentence of that great work Portuguese Irregular Verbs, he may not have reflected on the fact that he had given the world a treasure of scholarship; a beacon to light the way of Romance philology in the years ahead. But that is what Portuguese Irregular Verbs has been, and that is what it has done. All of us in this room are in his debt, and it is in recognition of this, that, by virtue of my powers as President of the Academy, I now confer Corresponding Fellowship on Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, of the University of Heidelberg; Magister Artium, of the University of Göttingen; Doctor of Letters, of the Free University of Berlin; Member (third class) of the Order of Leopold of the Kingdom of Belgium.’

  Von Igelfeld listened attentively as the roll of his honours and achievements was sonorously recited. It was a matter of regret, he felt, that the P
resident saw fit to mention the Order of Leopold; he had accepted that before he realised that it was only third class (a fact which he had discovered at the installation ceremony) and he had tended therefore not to mention it. Herr Huber, as a librarian, was not one to allow a detail to escape his attention, and so he could not be blamed if he had listed it in the biographical information he had provided. After all, Herr Huber himself had nothing, and even a third-class award from the Belgians would have seemed worthwhile to him.

  Von Igelfeld had little time for Belgium. In the first place, he was not at all sure that the country was even necessary, in the way in which France and Germany were obviously necessary. It would have been more convenient all round if part of Belgium had remained with France, as Napoleon had so wisely intended, and the Flemish part could then have been tacked on to the Netherlands, on linguistic grounds. And then there was the question of the Belgian monarchs, and in particular, Leopold, whose unapologetic behaviour in the Belgian Congo left a great deal to be desired. All in all, then, the Belgian order was something which was better not mentioned, although it was likely, on balance, to impress the Colombians.

  The inauguration was simple: a medal was pinned to von Igelfeld’s lapel, the President embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks, the large moustache tickling von Igelfeld’s face, and then the Members of the Academy pressed forward to shake the hand of their new Corresponding Fellow. Thereafter, a light lunch was served, at which there was more hand-shaking, and the Members then dispersed. Von Igelfeld had prepared a lecture, just in case he should be asked to deliver one, but no opportunity presented itself. Nor did the President or any of the Members suggest that anything else should be done; the President, indeed, disappeared before von Igelfeld had the chance to thank him properly, and von Igelfeld found himself outside the Academy building, in the clear Andean sunshine, in the company only of Señor Gabriel Marcales de Cinco Fermentaciones.