The Nocturnal Library

by Ermanno Cavazzoni

  One day, while lifting a shovel, he felt a pain in the intercostal region of his back, and he had to sit down in a state of breathlessness.

  From that day he started to shrink rapidly: his bones crumpled like sheets of papers, his spinal column shortened as though it were a spring and he became a hunchback with three or four humps. His neck could no longer hold up his head, and his legs could no longer keep straight. His thigh-bones bent into extremely fragile arches and his feet became wide and squashed as though they were bread dough. To look at, he seemed to be an enormous piece of meat weighing down a spongy and inert skeleton, and his head a cast-iron globe attached to an elastic stalk. Once a giant, he now became rickety and something more resembling not so much a man as a piece of meat wrapped up in greaseproof paper. If we laid him out horizontally and pulled him into position, he still measured two metres and forty centimetres, but standing up he would bend and sag all over the place, and it didn’t matter how many times we shouted, “Stand up straight!”

  His enormous bulging eyes shifted on his limp head and looked towards the bed, while he boomed deeply by way of apology and self-justification. Eventually we got round to measuring him, because he was continuing to sink in front of our eyes: he was now a metre and eighty centimetres.

  But two days later, he was a metre and sixty-five. His highest point was his back, and he looked like a willow because his head was touching the ground. This is the fate of all giants who can no longer hold themselves up.

  Professor Peter, an expert on gigantism and macrosomia at the University of Leuven, argues that giants are born as such, and it is not how tall you are that matters, but rather the hide or slough. A true giant is born very rarely – about every ten or twenty years – and the preferred location appears to be Germany. He can be recognised immediately, because he has an adult face – hideous and austere – with jet-black eyebrows and bags under the eyes.

  In antiquity, they thought that this sporadic race of new-born babies were ogres, and there was much speculation about their tastes. Today we know that they are not cannibals, although it is true that a few of them can be dangerous: they end up as state employees, some of them as the heads of ministerial departments and others as the headmasters of old-fashioned secondary schools.

  In 1935 near Koblenz, one of them was baptised with the name of Proserpine. He was slightly larger than normal, but had a pasty and grimy complexion. His expression was one of silent disapproval; on seeing him appear the midwife took a step backwards and the entire family felt cowed by his countenance and his ugliness.

  But like all other members of his race he had little need of comforts and indulgencies: they often abandoned him to the sun and wind, and he would shrivel; they would leave him in the sea, and he would float and become swollen and cyanotic, but always retained that same obstinate expression. Then the waves would drive him to the shore.

  Yet all these inclement conditions failed to weaken him and only served to create an epidermis of vellum and his characteristic impassiveness. He did not speak until he was three years old; nor would he settle for ungrammatical babbling devoid of all meaning. He waited until he had sufficient wisdom and something significant to say. One day he enunciated a very specific question in his deep voice and addressed it to his aunts, close relations and family members all gathered around his highchair: “Is it possible to be more ignorant than you people?”

  Chapter D

  “If you already know exactly which book you want or need some advice,” Natale was whispering in my ear, “just go and look for it. Have someone go with you; it is your right.

  Have yourself taken to the right place, where they have the shelves of specialist subjects; otherwise they will just continue to make fun of you, or worse.”

  “But what subject is this meant to be?” I said. “It’s not history, not mathematics, and I don’t think you could call it philosophy either. What kind of book could it be?”

  “That fellow – can you see him?” Natale said, pointing to Accetto who was wandering amongst the desks like an invigilator, “he’s a shirker. He is so pedantic, always with that ridiculous hat of his – and with his assistants. Have you seen them? How they like to give themselves airs and graces – such authorities on literature. But they’re just two thugs, two vicious bullies – them and their master. Books, as I discovered some time ago, are things they never go to look for. He keeps a few hidden immediately behind the door, and then pretends to go who knows where, to the inaccessible and remote rooms in the building, and to carry out investigations on the highest shelves that require acrobatic skills and some risk to his life; this is what he claims. But as soon as he goes through that little door down there,” and Natale pointed to a door that was difficult to see, “he immediately sits down in a kiosk he has there, close to the radiator, and commences to indoctrinate his assistants on how to simulate friendship while actually harming people. When the appropriate period of time has gone by and everything appears to be in accordance with the regulations, he then picks up one of these books, of which there can be no more than three or four, if we’re lucky. He thinks he is taking the most suitable one, but you can easily imagine how little a man without learning can understand of these matters, and off he goes with that cantankerous expression; you’ve seen that face and you’ve seen that hat, and heard his sophisms and heard his false arguments to persuade readers to keep books they do not want. He considers readers to be fusspots who are impossible to please, and pedants full of pedantry and fanaticism who come here just to abuse the books. But if you state that you don’t want that book and insist, then he will change it. True, hours or even days will go by, and don’t think that the situation will improve: he will choose another one of those close to hand and say that that is the best he can do and that another in his place would have done much worse, another would have refused, because, according to him, everyone in here is an illiterate who couldn’t give a damn. He goes on talking until he has convinced the reader by setting out the impossible obstacles and petitions to the director, the supervisory body and the arbitration tribunal.

  “But they’re not even happy with those who make no demands on them. Take me, for example: they are always coming to disturb me because they think I don’t read enough and consume the books, the chair and the table to no particular benefit. I know it’s them, even if they behave deviously when I am confused and dejected by the vice-like grip of my insomnia. ‘Leave me alone!’ I tell them. ‘I am a teacher and know what I have to do. I am not bothering anyone, I make few demands when it comes to bibliography and I’m no troublemaker; I always have the same book, and there is no need to look for it. You have it placed on the table, at my usual place or wherever you like, and I will not disturb you again.’ I reread it again and again, because reading tires me and calms the nerves in my body; it’s like listening to my fiancée. The words turn around in my head like a wheel; I don’t remember them but they cradle my mind and perhaps rock it into its dreams. It’s a cure for insomnia; it’s my medicine, otherwise I would need another woman at the very least.”

  I was rapidly reflecting on all this as he spoke: I pulled out the reading list for the exam and waved it in the air.

  When Accetto came up, I demanded to be taken to the relevant section of the library. “I want to go there in person,” I said.

  Shortly afterwards without any further problems, although a little timorous and driven by my throbbing teeth, I was walking towards the shelves for the twentieth century. Or at least this was what their reassurances had led me to believe.

  We were walking close to a wall where the ceiling came low and we had to be careful not to bang our heads or trip in the dark. Accetto was by my side or a little further ahead; I could hear his two assistants scuttling along behind me.

  “Listen!” Accetto turned to address me, “I don’t know what that Natale has been telling you, but he isn’t a teacher; he likes to say he was and look the part, but he was only an occasional supply teacher, unt
il he was suspended. They found him sleeping everywhere.

  Insomnia! You’ve got to believe it! That guy slept standing up, sitting down or while he was walking. He even slept while he was talking; if other people spoke, he would fall to the ground unconscious in the most undignified manner.

  In his classroom, it was a constant scandal, because of the example he gave, and just the sight of him was generally a disincentive – it took away all vigour, commitment and will.

  He was occasionally called upon to pacify the more turbulent classes with that enervating appearance of his.

  Isn’t this the truth?” Accetto turned to ask one of his assistants. “He got like this because of a prank, a terrible prank in which he was involved, and since then, he has never been the same. They played a joke on him during an exam, and it made such an impression and so unhinged his mind that he has stayed like that ever since. Everyone knows this in here.”

  “At an exam? A prank?” I started to show interest.

  “Precisely.”

  Meanwhile hens were scurrying off in all directions as we passed. It must seem strange that they were living in the library, but no one was taking any notice of them. I could also hear wasps flying close to my ears, and that troubled me.

  “Yes,” the first assistant broke into our conversation, “it was the exam for a permanent teaching post. He – this Natale guy – was very nervous about the exam.”

  “Well, did you hear that? He can tell you what actually happened,” Accetto said and pointed to this assistant.

  “Yes, I can tell it all,” said the assistant, and he and his companion elbowed each other. “He hadn’t been eating for a month; he couldn’t sleep and he just studied. He studied from morning to night, and during the night he kept his book under his pillow so he could repeat it in his head all night long. When he got stuck or something slipped his memory, he would take a peek with his torch and start repeating it all over again, sometimes reciting it backwards as a mental exercise, and sometimes asking himself unexpected questions to throw himself into a state of panic. And then he would go back to his studies under his sheets, so as to be the more cosy – like being inside a tabernacle. Then he would stretch himself out calmly, but this did not stop him from listening to himself until morning. He was the one who told me all this, because at the time I was his friend.

  “At mealtime he placed his book on top of his soup bowl, and as its contents slowly cooled down, he breathed in their perfumed vapours for so long that he ended up thinking he had actually had his soup. Consequently he wasted away. He lived on sugar, tea, caffeine and tranquillisers. His mother and sister occasionally managed to get him to ingest plain rice, chocolate or eggnog without his being aware of it. They got some diced boiled chicken down his throat; he chewed while loudly reading out the passages he had to revise, and he swallowed while turning the page. By the time the exam was imminent, his behaviour had become manic: he switched from one book to another and read uninterruptedly except for the spasmodic and desperate cry, ‘My God, I don’t know a thing.’ And all the subjects were churning around his brain and, according to him, leaking out all over the place. At times, he wanted to sit the exam immediately, but at others, he would claim that he needed another year or two at the very least. ‘If I think about the exam,’ he would mutter, ‘I just lose my head, my legs give way, my throat strangulates itself, my stomach rumbles and my heart suffers from a sharp pain.’ “Seeing him in this state, his friends sought to comfort him and make him laugh. ‘You need a few distractions,’ they said, ‘this will calm your brain.’ But he only wanted them to test him: ‘I want a few trick questions,’ he asked gleefully, and to keep him happy, they would pick up a book, open it at random and proclaim, ‘Page eighty, line four,’ but then read a line backwards from another page.

  He would leap with joy: ‘That’s not how it is!’ and he would recite page eighty, summarise the book and end up so satisfied with himself that he would become so calm and self-confident that he would eat a plate of pasta, drink a glass of wine, and joke with his friends about himself and his exam. ‘If you were my examiners,’ he would say, ‘I would have no problems.’ And they said, ‘We can give it a go; that way, you’ll get used to the exam and calm down.’ He laughed, ‘Of course it would be a great system; you lot feed me the questions and give me such a hard time that the real exam will be a piece of cake.’ His friends winked, ‘Don’t you worry. You just have to relax. That’s the important thing.’ Natale went home grateful, happier and even a little refreshed, but as soon as he picked up the study programme again and thought about the fast approaching date, the examiners’ faces and his own foolish and paralysed expression, he took such a fright that he was once more poring over his books, memorising passages to be recited and posing himself terrible questions in an imaginary exam. In accordance with a private superstition, he placed his open notebook on his head in the hope that some of its contents would filter down into his brain, and sang it like a psalm while striding from one room to another and around the whole house.

  “When, according to his calculations, there were still three nights and two days before the exam, the doorbell rang and a courier brought him a notification rubberstamped by the Ministry of Education that the exam was in fact to be held the following morning at nine o’clock. He looked up at the fellow and then fell semiconscious on the ground: he still wanted to do a complete revision and in that moment his head was in chaos – an inferno in which all things were blazing and nothing could be brought under control. When he finally pulled himself together, his face was still pale and gaunt like that of a condemned man, and he thought, ‘This is my ruin; I’ll come across as inarticulate and lost for words, always supposing that I manage to turn up.’ Then he reread the notification: the letter ‘n’ had been drawn by lots, and as he was called Natale, he had to go first. ‘It couldn’t get any worse!’ he thought, and his bowels felt like they wanted to release their load, and his stomach was shrieking with terror. Then he looked at the messenger who had lifted him up and was fanning him. He had the large black beard of a regular jinx, two enormous, overstated eyebrows, a beret pulled down on his head and a uniform so tight that it could hardly be buttoned up, as though it weren’t his. He looked him more carefully in the eyes, and had the feeling that the man was secretly laughing at him. So then he became suspicious, re-examined his notification and reread all of it: at nine o’clock in such-and-such a school in classroom x before the examining panel, etc., etc. and all the pompous and ridiculous names, which surely someone must have invented – Mr Terribile, Mr Suggerimenti, Mrs Bucato. He then looked at the rubber stamps, of which there were a good number, and all fresh and clearly defined; he reread the document yet again and it seemed to him that the wording did not ring true; there was something overstated about it. So he said, ‘You are supposed to be the courier?’ ‘That’s right,’ the man replied. ‘And that beard of yours is really yours?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied again, ‘is that a problem?’ Natale could easily tell that the man was laughing behind the big black beard and using it as a hiding-place, and started to understand, or so he believed. ‘Who sent you?’ he asked abruptly. ‘The educational sub-committee,’ the response was that of someone reciting a part. ‘And do you all have such beards? And are you all so expert with your rubber stamps?’ The question unsettled the courier and he took a step backwards, but Natale had seen through the prank, guessed at its authors and purpose, and he stopped. His bowels relaxed, his heart slowed down, and his memory returned to his brain.

  “The following day he turned up for the exam with a smile of mocking good humour. The panel had gathered in the gym, and when he entered, he could see them seated in a semicircle at the other end of the room on makeshift and rickety benches. They were waiting for him. He crossed the entire oversized hall and thought to himself, ‘Clearly they couldn’t find anyone better to put the frighteners on me.’ He nodded his head to suggest a bow, and he thought that he could recognise his mate Fischietti dressed
as a lady with an abundant bosom, and another friend in the part of a wrinkly, pipe-smoking professor: it was just that he was wearing a bald wig made of shiny pink rubber with a few loose hairs around the ears and the back of the neck; even the eyes had been made up to look like someone else’s.

  They politely asked him to take a seat. He just succeeded in suppressing his desire to laugh because he had just noticed that the chairman was in fact the greengrocer’s wife, Mrs. Sifone, albeit in jacket and tie, and amazingly slimmer and more masculine. So the exam commenced, to his great amusement and a prodigious display of knowledge.

  They asked very difficult questions in turn, and he replied effortlessly. He even went beyond their questions with references to questions not covered by the course, and at the same he felt that all this was a very useful exercise.

  He studied the other two examiners at length – a man and a woman – but he just couldn’t understand who they were, so effective were their disguises. But when another supposed professor came up with a question about Euler’s formula, Natale almost laughed in her face, because he recognised her voice as that of the barman at the Puccini Café, wearing lipstick and 15-denier tights, and affecting a French ‘r’ so perfectly that you’d want to wet yourself. And yet in order to get some practice and play along with his friends, he replied and went into great detail, quoting from memory. Contentment invaded his heart, as he felt calm and confident with all his faculties working in perfect order: if it were the exam, it would have been the greatest performance that anyone could humanly have wished for.

  “When they said, ‘That’ll do!’ he demanded, ‘No, no, ask me another question.’ ‘That’s enough, you can go.’ But he insisted, ‘Come on, just another little question, just one; so far this has been a piece of piss.’ ‘How dare you!’ one of them shouted in a high-pitched voce, ‘Get out of here!’ At this stage, Natale could resist no longer and overcome by laughter, he dragged himself from his seat and grabbed the woman who looked like Fischietti by the hair. It was indeed a wig, as he had expected, but underneath appeared an indecipherable creature who very probably was a woman, but completely bald. He looked at her in confusion and tried to speak to her: ‘Fischietti, is that you?’ The other four examiners jump to their feet. The examinee Natale could no longer understand where the joke was going and who was doing it, because closer scrutiny revealed that she did indeed have facial hair and a downy upper lip that had just been shaved badly and covered with face powder. He was having difficulty in determining who she was, and so he stroked her face to find out and muttered weakly, ‘Tell me if you are Fischietti in hiding.’ In the meantime he wanted to see if there was anything else that was false – that could be disassembled: he tried her nose, her chin, and eyelashes, which did actually come away in his hands, together with a tooth that bounced out of her mouth of its own volition. Then he lifted her dress and peered underneath to see what was going on, while all around there was shouting, and this creature he was manhandling was screaming herself. But he wasn’t getting anywhere with his investigations, because under her clothing there was just complete darkness and a terrible smell, so he let it fall and started on another professor by attempting to remove from his face the skin that looked as if it had been glued on. Failing at this, Natale tried to detach the professor’s hair and ears, which resulted in a violent scuffle, and he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and repeated incessantly: ‘Peppino, the game’s over. I’ve had enough.’ But unfortunately the man wasn’t Peppino, and really was Prof. Suggerimenti, and Fischietti was not Fischietti, but actually Bucato a professor of Greek appointed by the Ministry of Education in accordance with all proper procedures. The fifth professor was short, in fact tiny, and the last one Natale attempted to divest of his disguise, but even he could not recognise him however many times he turned him around or from whichever angle he studied him.