The Nocturnal Library
By Ermanno Cavazzoni
Translated by Allan Cameron
Contents
Title page
Chapter A
Extract: The Whys and Wherefores
Chapter B
Chapter C
Extract: Giants of the Twentieth Century
Chapter D
Extract: The death sentence in America
Chapter E
Chapter F
Chapter G
Extract: Proto-philosophies
Chapter H
Chapter I
Extract: How philosophers are born
Chapter L
Chapter M
Chapter N
Extract: Retrogrades
Chapter O
Chapter P
Extract: Hairy women
Chapter Q
Chapter R
Chapter S
Extract: Cycle paths in purgatory
Chapter T
Chapter U
Chapter V
Extract: Twentieth Century, Chronicle of
Chapter Z
Copyright
The Nocturnal Library
Chapter A
Midnight chimed as I went through the library’s shabby little entrance. To be honest, the door would have seemed more suited to a coal-merchant’s than a library, if it weren’t for the shiny and showy embossed plate whose letters pierced my eyes and jarred their nerves. It read: Public Library. Opens at 24.00 and closes at 08.00. Closed all night on Mondays for cataloguing and inventory. A coated figure sidled up while the bells rang. Although a scarf obscured his face, I could see his feet: he wore a pair of battered slippers and pyjama bottoms rather than trousers protruded from below his coat. I instinctively peered down at my own legs and discovered that I too was wearing pyjamas, but I did have shoes. I then shuddered with the cold, even though my face continued to sweat. By the time they opened, a small crowd was huddled together and well wrapped not only in coats and jackets, but also in blankets that covered their shoulders or their heads. There were even a few who had brought a pillow held tightly under their arms. Pyjama collars, nightdresses, slippers, nightcaps protruded in various directions; they looked like refugees from their slumbers or sleepwalkers in flight from another country. The surrounding throng started to carry me inside, pushing stupidly as though we were entering a bus, while actually we were descending a flight of stairs towards a badly-lit and uncertain destination. We trod on each other’s feet as we went, to the shrieks of the barefoot who defended themselves with their elbows. I got one in the mouth that jarred a tooth, and further down the head of a shorter man was being pressed against the wall. Someone else had lost his glasses, and I could hear them crunching underfoot; then he, too, fell and they trampled over him.
Carried by the crowd, I stamped on his face, while he tried to bite people’s feet, and he must have succeeded in biting those without shoes, because I heard sudden cries, kicks and short but vicious scuffles on the ground. The flight of stairs stretched endlessly and the walls narrowed, so that we could hardly breathe or we breathed the smell of greasy hair, musty mattresses and the stale bodies of the bedridden. A head was pressed against my vertebrae with such a force that I would have been sent spinning down the stairs if it hadn’t been for those in front: a man wrapped in a nylon quilt and a bony woman in a woollen turban who constantly twisted her neck in order to stare at me.
I stopped when we finally entered a dim but spacious reading room, like the cork from a bottle, and the other bundles of humanity rushed across the room to occupy positions around the tables. There were plenty of places, but clearly some were more valued than others and arguments ensued. In the shadow of a corner, I saw two men fight over a chair, pulling at it while a third man of considerable girth came running up and sat on it. He held it tightly with his hands and his legs, until they managed to tip him over; they then proceeded to clamber over his face while continuing to tug at the armrests. Especially from the side aisles you could hear the dull sound of blows to wooden surfaces, tables brusquely moved and muffled arguments. One hapless individual was driven away from a chair under a rain of blows, and collapsed like a dead man at my feet. He peered round and, no sooner had he spied a place to his liking than he was up as though nothing had happened, dusting himself off and making himself comfortable in a chair by one of the square columns that held up the low ceiling of the reading room. In fact the room had all the appearance of a cellar, a rambling and dimly-lit cellar with little headroom. Metal tie-beams ran between the pillars at head height. The first thing I had noticed on entering the room was that chickens were promenading on the tables or perching on the chairs.
When we rushed into the room, most of the chickens leapt away, while the few that resisted had to be frightened off by waving a scarf or blanket. For a few moments the air was thick with dust, flapping wings and the occasional feather.
Gradually the arguments died out, each person found a place, brushed away the chicken droppings by hand or with a handkerchief, switched on the small table light and sat down. Many of the chickens had migrated to the metal tie-beams, and were noisy and agitated for a while longer, the remainder wandered cautiously between the tables.
Finally even the chickens settled down: some sat broodily, others scratched about and pecked at the floor.
I was there by pure chance. I had been in bed for no more than half an hour, when I suddenly awoke with a slight toothache, and remembered that the following morning I had to sit my school-leaving exam. I had to sit it again because years had passed, too many years, more years than the law would allow, without my having gone to collect my diploma. It had therefore expired. This was the reason why I twisted and turned beneath the bedclothes and came out in a cold sweat.
I sat up as this recollection afflicted me, and switched on the light which gave out only a feeble glow, as though the filament was just about to go, or the power was low at that time of night. The card instructing me to attend in accordance with current legislation lay on the bedside table. While I ran my tongue along the aching tooth and gum, I picked up the card and realised that I had not read some of the small print. The letters were so small and the light so bad that I couldn’t read the text. I wondered why the letters were so small, like the information sheets that come with medicines. I got up and switched on the main light, which also failed to illuminate the room properly; in fact I saw even less because it was very distant and the ceiling seemed higher than usual. I could only read a few words which were written on one line in bold type.
Straining my eyes and holding the bedside light very close, I felt I could just make out The …, followed by an illegible word, and then of the Twentieth Century. It was either the syllabus or the name of a course text. I heard the clock on the next floor chime half past eleven. “What if they discover that I no longer know anything?” I asked myself, “not even the basics! The twentieth century?” And so I started to ask myself elementary questions: who invented the steam engine? Who invented electricity and who the internal combustion engine, the aeroplane, the helicopter, and when? How many world wars were there in this century, and what were they called? And what changes did they bring about in mankind, generally and philosophically?
Nothing! I was struck dumb, I could not reply. “Kindly explain yourself!” I told myself for practice. “Do you mean that you have not studied for this exam?” And I couldn’t answer even this question. I paced the room, hitting my head in a useless gesture, and still straining my eyes to find something else in the syllabus, something easier. I continued to circle the room, as the questions circled in my head: around and around drawing me into a vortex – into an abyss of ignorance. All
my thought was concentrated in my teeth, in the form of acute neuralgic pain which ran through them like a pedal-driven sewing-machine.
As I circled the room prey to apprehension and recrimination, I decided to leave it and go downstairs; I wanted to find a chemist’s and get a pill to calm my aching teeth. Instead I found the library, in the street under my flat, where I had always thought there was a coal-merchant’s.
In the reading room I had entered, most people were seated near the walls and in the shadows of narrow recesses and little crypts. They congregated in large numbers around the darkest tables, while those more in view remained empty. A few people had dimmed the light by covering it with a handkerchief or some item of clothing: a vest, a pair of stockings, a bandage or a hairnet. Others had not even bothered to turn on their light, and were bent over their books or something similar, using the feeble beams coming from their neighbour’s light.
The guy who had been trampled on the stairs was the last to arrive. He wore silver and blue pyjamas, and his hair was dishevelled from the fracas. He held his twisted and lenseless glasses in his hand, and said: “Now, how do I read?” The question seemed partly directed at me and partly to himself. I took the opportunity to ask him about library procedure. “The first to arrive,” he replied politely, “get the best places where you can be left in peace.
Generally speaking everyone has their own book kept aside and they pick it up themselves. But if you are new, you should ask for one.” And he went off to take a seat with an air of resignation.
The silence was punctuated by furious sneezes and sonorous nose-blowing that resembled someone practising the chromatic scale on a bagpipe. I looked around and realised that a library official was standing rigidly to attention and so close that I could feel his breath on my neck. I stepped away as I turned, to avoid my nose brushing against his face. His hat was a moth-eaten mortarboard, and he wore a dust-grey soldier’s uniform, so threadbare as to invoke pity. Loose threads, little feathers and indeterminate stains had collected in the creases, and he appeared to have lived and aged within the uniform without ever undressing. His epaulettes barely survived with a faded and unstitched number. A badge pinned to his chest read: “Dr. Accetto, Head Librarian”.
I immediately looked for my card and showed it to him, even though it was impossible to read it in the poor light. I pointed to the line that in my opinion read: Twentieth Century. He made the suggestion of a bow by a slight forward movement of his rigid torso, and then demonstrated his perfect knowledge of the situation by a generous sweep of his arm. “Is it a book?” he asked, and after I had intimated with a nod that this was in fact the case, he continued: “Of course, but don’t be surprised by the question. People sometimes come with the most absurd requests: such as beer or wine, and they start to sing as though they were in a restaurant. This constitutes a disturbance, and we are obliged to throw them out.”
“Yes, quite,” I agreed, “but I want the book that is referred to here.”
“Very good, please take a seat and we will bring it to your table.”
“If you don't mind, I am in rather a hurry.”
“We will do all we can,” he said stiffly.
It all seemed very straightforward, as though experience had taught him to interpret my needs better than myself.
Perhaps my case was very run-of-the-mill. This was the most serene and relaxing moment during that long night crammed with troubling incidents that came one after another. I would have happily let myself fall asleep if I had not been in a library. Even the toothache seemed to have receded leaving only a slight sensation of pins and needles in my mouth.
The poor man who had been so badly trampled at the entrance was seated in full view with his desk light on, so I went across and sat next to him. He was sitting up straight as though reading, except that his head was slumped in front of him, and even the folds of his cheeks drooped with the heaviness of sleep that resonated in his nose. He was surrounded by a fog of little moths caught in a dusty halo by the light. It seemed to me that the dust fell from his head to the book like some by-product of sleep, and the insects too had been freed from the depths of his dreams.
Every so often, he would twitch his cheek just under his eye, as though he released the sharpness of his dreams from there. I rested my chin on my hand, while I watched a slug slowly climb up his sleeve. Instead of sleeping while I waited for my book, I leant over and seeing the heading halfway down the page, I blew away the ants and out of curiosity started to read.
The Whys and Wherefores
Moreover, at the beginning of the century, there was the case of the woman from Recanati. She was married, eventempered and extremely sensible, but on occasions she was unexpectedly assailed by a sense of loss that knew neither limit nor reason. Her face became quite white, as though her blood had ceased to circulate, she stiffened and stared in front of her with glassy eyes, suddenly ignoring her household tasks, the water boiling on the stove, the taps gushing water and the laundry yet to be laundered.
She would stare at her arm in anguish and repeat to herself, “Why do we have veins?” She would stare at her hands and say, “Why do we have fingers?”
This could occur at any time: while she was sewing, hugging herself in front of the mirror, or stirring the soup on the cooker. These queries came from the depths of her brain, against her will, and they took over and froze every part of her self.
She would come to a sudden halt, and stare down at her feet, while her face aged a hundred years, and say, “Why do we have weight?” Or while she was washing the sheets, she would fall prey to a terrible dismay, and ask herself, “Why is there water?” and find no reply. She would then repeat the question a couple of times in a lower voice.
She would look at the soap, the scrubbing brush; she would look at her hands, her veins. Finally she would let the question drop, or it would simply evaporate from her mind, and she would return to her washing, serene and unaware, or continue to stir the soup.
Chapter B
Before I could finish reading two heads came up from beneath the table. They looked around and studied the face and expression of my neighbour very carefully and for a considerable period of time; one of these persons waved his hands in front of the sleeper’s eyes. He then took the slug and placed it on one of those eyes. In the meantime, his companion had sealed his nose with sticking plaster so that he would have to breathe with his mouth open, and now that mouth was inhaling and expelling great clouds of small moths and other flying insects: hymenopterans, dipterans, crickets and, it seemed to me, even a few fireflies which went off leaving a trail of suggestive phosphorescence.
The two men were delighted with their handiwork and proceeded to inspect the inside of the sleeper’s mouth; it seems that they went about this business in part because it was simply a job that had to be done, in part out of natural curiosity and in part to satisfy some private whim. They were both wearing faded, rumpled and threadbare uniforms of the kind worn by errand boys or lift attendants. Then suddenly and without saying a word to each other, they bent down and pierced his neck with a needle; he jumped, writhed in his chair and forcefully exhaled. The slug fell from his eye, and the two men hunched their backs and hurried away to where they became lost amongst the tables. His breath on the book stirred up another cloud of insects and dust; there were even flying ants. The hen perching nearby started to peck and call the others which arrived in a great rush. I noted that the sleeper’s eyes were slightly open and he was looking at me through the narrow fissure. One of his eyes was glued up with the slug’s silvery slime, so the eyelids were not equally apart, and at the same time he was massaging the puncture to his neck.
“It was not me who woke you,” I said.
“Eh!” he said. “I should be in bed at this time of night, don’t you think?” There was a silent pause while both eyes looked me up and down, and then he resumed, “Listen, I have the opposite complaint: insomnia. The back payments of sleep I am owed are so colossal th
at at times I lose consciousness. You know, this could be dangerous; I could fall and break a bone… Clearly you don’t know.”
“But I do. I do know,” I said, “or at least, I can well imagine.”
To which he responded, “For me a bed is full of needles: if I lie down on it, I start to jump all over the place, as though I’ve got grasshoppers in my blood. That’s why I come here – because we’re seated, time goes by and we’re slightly less aware of it. Except on Monday, when the library is closed. Then night-time becomes a torment; I wander around this neighbourhood, rest my head against a house and close my eyes, but it isn’t like sleep, it’s ersatz and carries the risk of injury from stray animals, thieves and drink-drivers.”
“This evening I couldn’t get to sleep either.”
“There’s only one cure. Do you know what it is? … A fiancée! Do you have a fiancée?”
“I have had one on some occasions.”
“I’ve had one too, and when I was on her, that is on my fiancée, I perhaps came very close to shaking off my insomnia; she was the only one who could make me sleep and even sleep deeply, although not regularly. In other words, I was fond of her because of these advantages that accrued from our cohabitation, and this was a slightly more normal period for my repose – until she eventually got tired of me.”
And he continued to tell his story in a hoarse whisper, while waving away the swarms of midges that entered his mouth and entangled themselves in his words.
The Nocturnal Library Page 1