The Nocturnal Library

by Ermanno Cavazzoni

  His colleague down below was still trying to persuade me, “Perhaps you are new to the library, and don’t know these things, but arrogance is the greatest vice. An arrogant person is never content, because he loses every opportunity. He doesn’t know how to enjoy life and develop his ideas. In here you find books when you’re not specifically looking for them. That is the moment to take them and not let them go. So why are you being so stubborn and intractable? If you behave like this, you will never have a thing and you’ll be alone with your ideas and your absolute demands. And in the end you will only have regrets. Think about your future.”

  I listened to his argument and was not insensitive to it. I was arrogant, it’s true; never happy and full of disdain.

  Why did I want what wasn’t there? That was stupid; besides the hours were passing and my teeth were there to remind me. So I gave in and said, “Bring me it, then. I accept.”

  He brought me a shapeless pile of paper, all riddled with wormholes. There were even scales from a grass snake and the margins had been gnawed by rats. I sat at the one, very long table. I opened the papers where they weren’t stuck together with a slight sense of hopefulness. A little way away, there sat the distinguished-looking gentleman in a dressing-gown whom I had already noted. He was possibly deep in his thoughts or possibly, like everyone else, asleep.

  Proto-philosophies

  There was a famous sect in the West that boasted the weakest thought of them all. This is how it came about: one of their number, whose name has remained a mystery, was extremely weak-minded – beyond all our descriptive powers – and so weak that he could think of only one thing to do: to cluck like a hen.

  This then was taken as the founding proclamation. His followers gradually learnt the new philosophy and, according to where they had risen on the ladder of knowledge, would go “cheep cheep” or “cock-a-doodle-doo”.

  They held many conferences, which however always ended in fierce arguments. On one side, a faction went “bow-wow” and on the other their adversaries predictably went “meow meow”. Then the doyen of clucking, who was chairing the proceedings with various feathers stuck in his hair, would start to cluck and cackle into the microphone, “co… co… co… cockaday, co… co… co… cockaday”, thus resolving the dispute and guiding the conference towards an agreement. But on occasions, the arguments only got worse, and there would be someone who would stand up from the floor and point their finger while reading a typewritten sheet, “quack, quack, quack,” and trigger a whole henhouseful of protests and insults. Some shouted “cheep cheep”, others “baa baa”, “grrr grrr”, “chirp chirp”, so that all the chairman’s “cockadays” and “co co cos” were in vain.

  Any attempt to define the specific questions and controversies would be a trivialisation of the movement’s postulates and credo. But it was clear that there were leading figures with greater authority, and when they spoke the howling of the crowd was abated. One man in particular stood out for his brief maxims, which were so weak that everyone held them in admiration. He asked for permission to speak with a grave and dark expression, then he made a sound resembling that of a dumb duck, a kind of “hhhhh”, and then after a long interval yet another “hhhhh”, but this time measured, like a ferocious warning.

  And so in relation to that “cockaday” which might have been defined as the manifesto or programme for the entire school, this “hh” so curt and thoughtless was acknowledged as a great leap forward.

  This philosopher of the “h” was however very modest in his appearance, in spite of his great fame. His feet were flat and wide, and he was in the habit of going about barefoot.

  His forehead was almost non-existent and his cranium flattened at the top. His hair was straight and swept back over his head with oil, and was entirely waterproof.

  So we can say that up to and including his teachings was the classical period of this philosophy, and thought had been retrogressing until it practically did not exist, getting close to its mythical roots. But then came the populist turning point. One day at one of the plenary meetings, something quite unheard-of happened. There was a certain fellow who had only recently joined the sect, and was an assistant to a thinker, weak-minded like few others and also a little bit deaf, but nevertheless at the height of his career. One day he stood up and without any introductory remarks said, “Good morning… good morning… my dear colleagues… the purpose of our meeting… primarily philosophy… so let’s move straight on to the voting.” As in the face of all sensational innovations, there was a little turmoil, a little tension, which meant of course that they flapped, fluttered and pecked at each other, and there were those who wanted to challenge him and go back their ancient ways by neighing and braying and repeating “eeeeh… eeeeh…” but, all things considered, he displayed a great deal of common sense that paled beside the weakness of the other fellow.

  So the new philosophy was acknowledged as a revolution, and everyone started to speak with the alphabet and put about their argument and give speeches.

  People came in huge numbers to listen to them; initially due to excessive formalism there was only a specialist audience, but then just anyone could not understand them. Indeed, there was such weakness about that, it could be argued, this philosophy became so widespread that it governed everything anybody said and was almost a companion to every everyday action.

  …

  As for the East, we know that in the Indian region of Tamil, every house has an outside shed that acts as a lavatory: it sits on four poles a metre off the ground and has a hole in the centre. The excrement falls through the hole to the ground in a pen where a small black philosopher lives and runs across to eat it.

  A traveller happened upon a home where the householder, kindly as they can be only there, apologised for the defective hygiene he was able to offer: his philosopher had escaped six days earlier by furiously breaking through the wooden palisade, probably because something had disgusted him. Out of regard for their guest, they had tried to replace him with a Madras pig, but the animal was shy and recalcitrant, and during the night it gnawed away at the supporting poles so that the whole thing would collapse.

  Keeping a philosopher for this purpose, although an ancient custom, is now less common. One reason is that they are less loyal and diligent in their duties – even less impartial and going so far as to take a dislike to a member of the family or some passing guest who they categorically refuse to serve. The reason is a psychological one: you can see them through the hole as they grub around and look upwards. The lavatory user and the philosopher stare silently into each other’s eyes. Not to mention the habit of a philosopher rushing over as soon as he hears a guest’s footsteps and putting his face and ears through the hole.

  Once he has got into this habit, it becomes not only embarrassing but dangerous.

  These philosophers escape when they get to a certain stage in their lives. They become prey to a wild and ill-defined frenzy, and they long for the rivers, open grasslands and a life on the run in savage bands as the enemies of man. They wander about usually for a few weeks and if they are not recaptured, they get very thin and become even smaller, blacker and more disorderly.

  Some of them develop rather watery tastes and take to the marshes and the meanders of rivers like terrapins. Others go high into the mountains as far as the snowline, where they live in a hollow tree trunk or on a spur of rock exposed to the four seasons. Yet others – the majority – become ferocious wild animals with their bristles sticking up and prickly like those of a porcupine, slightly poisonous teeth and curved nails like a claw, which they use for scratching and hanging off branches.

  If however you manage to recover them shortly after their escape, they will return to their simple and useful duties after a few days of resistance and stubborn refusal, albeit without spirit or enthusiasm. Superficially one might say laziness. But when they look up and stare at you through the hole, you feel that you are looking at a sleepwalker whose eyes contain a faded unc
ertainty about the meaning of this fragile existence.

  Chapter H

  I have to admit that this was not an easy text to read.

  Partly because it unsettled me: was this all the much vaunted philosophy was about? But of what school and what era? Was this the latest scholarship or was it all invention? I was a little distracted by the young woman talking to the seated man, who was however immobile and giving no signs of life. The young woman was on a walkway where she was dusting books and putting them back on the shelves. Her voice, which was pleasant and very attractive, overlaid my philosophical reading. I heard her complaining about the infestation of animals. If it had only been a question of insects – even, she said, moths, bed bugs and so on – you’d only have had the stench or itchiness; they would have nibbled away at the corners, which, when you think of the damage caused by fire in the past, is almost a good fortune. But the fact is, she repeated several times, that much larger animals have been seen wandering around; some people have seen monkeys. “Not myself,” she admitted, “but my colleague in hall no. three and corridors thirty-one, thirty-two and thirty-three, Mrs Beltrami, saw several of them leaping over her head while she was looking for a pressmark at the highest shelf and was at the top of the ladder. Well, that could only be called a health-and-safety risk.”

  The gentleman down below looked as though he were being cradled, while the pencil held by three fingers was on the point of slipping from his hand. The young woman continued to chatter and ask him for his own opinion.

  “Don’t you think that we should be covered by insurance?” she said “And not just for falls or landslide of books, but also for bites, because Mrs Beltrami in hall no. three says that the monkeys grabbed her by the legs and started to scream; they scream when they want to bite. She thought they looked like undersized baboons, and the red they have under their tails wasn’t really red but white streaked with red. What do you think?” This last question was also directed at me, given that the other guy wasn’t saying a word. “It must be because of the lack of sunlight.

  A baboon’s face is very similar to a barking dog, but they were tiny, tiny, just like dwarfs, and they ran along the shelves; there was a whole pack of them, that much was clear, and who knows where they came from. Because they never came here in such numbers, as the rooms are badly heated and in winter they’re freezing, and these monkeys are used to Morocco, where it is as hot as a boiler room – forty degrees, the boiler-man told me, or even fifty. So these monkeys, when they saw the ladder and her standing on the ladder, God knows who they took her for? Perhaps they were looking for bananas or imagined that in nature trees were just like her. They grabbed hold of her legs and pinched her, she says to taste her or maybe bite her. Then they sat on the books she was holding, as though they were palm leaves, and when she tried to put the books away, there was already a monkey sitting on the shelf between the books just where that pressmark was meant to go. And if she tried to put the book in its place, the monkey stood up and deliberately stopped her by pushing with its hands and revealing its teeth. If she persisted and tried to frighten it off by waving the book around, the monkey became incredibly agitated and screamed until all its comrades came running over and leapt on the volume.

  They would bite into the binding and her hand, and with indescribable yelling they would run up her arm and if she hadn’t defended herself by hitting them and sweeping them away with her other hand, they would have scratched her face and eyes, and put knots in her hair that would have to have been cut to unravel. She had to give up what she was doing and leave the books scattered where they fell. She was lucky she didn’t fall, and there is a terrible mess in those sections and no one wants to go there. And do you know what they’re saying?”

  The gentleman was saying nothing, nor did he make any disagreeable noises. In my opinion, he was sleeping, but that may not have been the reason why he was not hearing. “You know what they’re saying,” she continued, having decided to ignore him and speak only to me, “they’re saying that there is even an orang-utan in the hall with the globes, which is always damp and warm. They only send Mrs Bucato there, when it is absolutely necessary. She doesn’t have to go there, because she’s not an attendant but a teacher.”

  I interrupted, “You mean Mrs Bucato who teaches Greek?”

  “Yes, do you know each other?”

  “I’ve heard of her.”

  “Well, she’s the only one the animal is in awe of. It abducted her, the first time, and took her to its nest, because it has a nest just like a bird’s nest, but much much bigger. Mrs Bucato wasn’t at all frightened because, she told us, it didn’t look like a monkey, but made her think of a solicitor, as its fat, baggy cheeks were identical to those of elderly solicitors – according to her. She says it was covered with long ginger hair and had a beard, a great bushy beard, and it just watched her continuously but never raised its voice or got physical. She says that even its eyes did not have a ferocious expression, that they were the eyes of a solicitor, by which she meant completely lacking any opinion. So she felt relaxed, even there in that nest with someone she didn’t know. She would have liked to have known its thoughts, because it continued to study her in silence. She’s a bit hairy too, but being a woman not excessively, and she bleaches her hair so that it doesn’t show. But it studied the hair without touching it, and it looked over the whole of her. She says that it appeared undecided; deeply affected but undecided. She was dressed as she usually was, because she had never thought that one day someone would abduct her and she had never heard of an orang-utan. But in any case she is not in the habit of changing her clothing, because she has only one dress, one pair of tights, and also just one pair of slippers – very comfortable ones, she says. So the orang-utan scrutinised her untiringly for an hour or so; it was well past midnight and it studied one of her brown warts covered with a whole lot of hairs.

  It was fascinated by the hairs, and went around her back to study the other side. Her back is not very striking, and actually very similar to her front; perhaps, she thought, it is trying to work out what is her front and what is her back, so as not to make any mistakes. She stayed there the entire night, and the monkey never stopped brooding; basically it seemed rather inexpert and troubled by many uncertainties. The abduction had been a moment of madness, and certainly not motivated by hunger, because all orang-utans are strictly vegetarian, and now that its yearning had been calmed and there was more light, it probably felt the weight of its responsibilities. Mrs Bucato told me that she would never have taken the initiative, even though its eyes did make her feel a little sorry for it. After all those hours nothing happened; it looked at her sheer tights and her legs, which are a bit bony but there’s nothing wrong with them, and its reaction was to scratch its head in an entirely inconclusive manner.

  The sun was up when it left its nest, and Mrs Bucato followed it down. She saw it look around with a crestfallen expression and set off down the corridor, according to her, in search of shoots and ants which are its food. Since then, Mrs Bucato has always been the one to go to the hall where they keep the globes, and when this orang-utan hears her coming, hears her slippers padding along and the key in the lock, it runs to the highest shelf and lies flat in a corner. It observes her from a distance and respects her.”

  “Excuse, young lady,” I said, “but what’s your name, should I ever need it.”

  “Iris.”

  “Mine’s Jerome, even though nobody calls me that during the day, as it is no longer fashionable. In fact, I generally forget that I was ever called that, but it that’s how I was baptised.”

  “I like it. It suits you. Sounds like a saint’s name – the patron saint of books.”

  “Really?” I was a little incredulous; it was flattery but still pleasing. “Iris is better: the name of a flower and it clearly suits you because it resembles you.” Then I didn’t know what else to say, and nor did she. I thumbed through those dusty and tattered pages infested with mites, with a pang in
my guts over the time that galloped by without my making any progress. But this sensation was now joined by another of frenzied desire that affected my bowels. It was caused by the young woman’s attractions.

  I could not fail to notice Accetto’s assistants who were seated on the ground and had got out a roll with salami.

  There was just the one, so Fischietti shared it out by eating the salami and leaving the bread and skin for Santoro, who started to whine and wanted to recover the salami from Fischietti’s mouth. Fischietti bit his finger and held it in his teeth like a dog with a bone, while the other tried to extract it and hit him in the face with a shaving brush. This would have gone on for some time had an inattentive hen not wandered by and come so close that they grabbed it. They held it still with its beak open and fed it the pieces of skin.

  Then they made it eat the paper the roll had been kept in, once they had screwed it up into many little pellets.

  Fischietti occasionally gave one to Santoro, who was happy with this and drew the hen’s face close and muttered something to it.

  When they started to pluck it, Miss Iris heard the rumpus and came down to sort it out. She said some just and very sensible things not only about the hen but also the fact they were disturbing people. She looked at me, only me and not the others when she said, “Some people are trying to study here, move along.” “We’re the attendants,” Santoro said. “Then let that hen go,” and she lifted a book as though she was going to hit him with it.

  “They’re not your hens,” Santoro grumbled, “they belong to everyone.” But Fischietti obeyed, bowed at her several times and gave Santoro what was left of the paper, which he continued to sniff every time he ate a little bread. The young lady smiled at me, and I would have liked her as my attendant rather than those two tormentors. She seemed very patient and sensible. Then I was affected by her perfume that swirled around her and enveloped me and the bookshelves. I would have preferred to look at her than think about my exam because she soothed me – not only my anxiety of lost time but also my toothache. She wore the loose and slightly wispy clothes of summer, even though summer was still a long way off. She, however, carried some remnants of the last one around with her. I was not in love, but I was enjoying the temptation although, in all conscience, I should have only been thinking about my studies.