The Nocturnal Library

by Ermanno Cavazzoni

  …

  When a thinker is born, there are recognisable signs: for example a state of apparent asphyxia. After that, behaviour becomes increasingly different from that of humankind.

  One of the most quoted thinkers, for instance, walks by jumping with his legs bent in a state of timorousness and tremulousness. He twitches his nostrils and lips to scent the air, which is one of the reasons why he can be mistaken for a rabbit – another being his timidity. When he gets frightened, he bangs his right foot as rabbits do, and if you look at him from below, he sprays your face with saliva and snorts. But as soon as you knit your eyebrows, he flees with huge leaps and goes off to lay down his head in cavernous tunnels in the walls or the burrows he digs in the ground. He goes wild for accordion music, and he delights in suffocating hens if they are the weakest ones.

  He hates cockerels. Another of his favourite games is to detach putty from the windows and eat it, for which reason he is not beloved of housewives.

  During pregnancy his mother had had a dream of which she was terrified, and when the above-mentioned thinker was born, she recognised him with just this difference: in the dream he had white fur and very long ears.

  Chapter L

  In the meantime I could hear activity under the table and feel my foot being pulled. I bent down and there was Fischietti who trying to tie one of my feet up.

  “If someone has an ingrown toenail, I’ll medicate it for him,” he said as he pulled out a carpentry saw. “If someone has a corn, I’ll cut it out for him,” and he showed me his screwdriver. At the same time his comrade was sitting on the ground and laughing happily and smugly. “Do you have corns, Mr Jerome?” he stared as he asked the question.

  “No, no, I’m absolutely fine.”

  “Shall take a little look at your feet?”

  “There’s no need,” I said.

  “Take off your shoes,” Fischietti said, “feet can get gangrenous from one moment to another. You wouldn’t like to lose them?”

  “Not today,” I said terrified, “tomorrow! We’ll do it tomorrow,” and I saw Santoro widening the jaws of vice by turning the screw in the opposite direction, and already enjoying the idea of applying it to my foot and closing the vice. “I can’t at the moment,” I said, “I have to study and I cannot be distracted. I can’t do pedicures.”

  “Your health must always come first,” said Fischietti. “If you’ve never had one, then a check-up is required sooner rather than later. Would you like an anaesthetic?”

  On hearing these words, Santoro brimmed over with happiness and enthusiasm, and waved his vice in the air, “You should never procrastinate when it comes to corns; they can poison your life.”

  “That’s true,” I said, “but I don’t have any.”

  “What does that matter?” said Santoro. “Sooner or later you’ll get them. It would be in your own interests to remove your shoes, as you wouldn’t want your sole coming away during the operation. You wouldn’t want us to tear the stitching. It would be in your own interests to remove your shoes, leather is never very resilient and it won’t last if there’s some tough work to do.”

  They had undone my laces: “Would you like an injection first?” I started to kick my legs around as hard as I could.

  “Calm down, Mr Jerome, this is a free service provided by the library.” As I had stood up, they too stood up, and having grabbed hold of my laces, they pulled on them like reins. To avoid falling therefore, I jumped up and down on one foot and followed the other one. And I would have suffered a proper torment if they had not been miraculously distracted by the sight of Professor Rasorio fast asleep or deep in his cogitations. While I was leaping around I had wandered over towards him and grabbed the back of his chair. One of his hands was hanging down.

  They let go of my laces, and quickly tightened his hand against the table with their vice, which they turned as far as they could. Professor Rasorio woke with a jump and started shouting and pulling his hand, which had become livid and swollen, perhaps already suffering trauma to the metacarpi and phalanges. The fingers took the greatest pressure, and if he had continued to pull, he might have lost one of them; but because of the pain, he did not have the presence of mind to unscrew the vice. The two attendants were now bent double under the table; I could see but he couldn’t. They were prodding that hand with a fork where it was most red and swollen. Fischietti held the fork, and Santoro had a Bakelite pen dipped in ink which he used for pricking the hand. These activities, which had the professor writhing, appeared to delight the both of them.

  No one was in the room was doing anything, and yet this was a human being. So I released the vice, and I immediately felt the fork and pen pricking my calves and ankles. They pulled down on my pyjama trousers, but I resisted by holding the string with my hand. It was lowered slightly on one side, as though the elastic were broken, and I felt embarrassed just at the thought of the young lady turning up. Professor Rasorio had now freed his hand and was blowing on it and trying to loosen its joints. It was of course covered in ink scribbles. I was in danger of losing my pyjama bottoms, because they were now pulling with greater force and I imagined the undignified scene, and the shame was increased by the mere idea that I had turned up in pyjamas at all. So I picked up the vice that had been abandoned and used it like a truncheon on something – I am not quite sure what, perhaps a head or a horizontal wooden bar – but I did hear a whimper and they stopped their tugging.

  “How can we study in peace?” I said. “This is not a library, but a conspiracy against scholarship. It is a place of damnation.” The professor was of the same opinion, and I continued respectfully to vent my anger. “Even the books aren’t books, but waste paper,” and I showed him the chaotic pile of papers I had before me – full of feather, eggshell, hairballs and even the tiny bones of frogs and lizards. “And then they contain such things that are quite impenetrable. You don’t know whether to believe them, whether they are scientific or absurd jokes played by some bibliophile who wants to confuse us – to get us lost and make us fail our exams.” He continued to agree with me, and looked at me with approval while flapping his hand in the air to cool it down. I showed him a bone and he said, “There are even bigger ones; in some of the rooms there are giant bones, piles of lower jaws and even whole skeletons, but don’t be alarmed.” Under the table dogs could be heard chasing cats, unless of course it was just Fischietti and Santoro trying to attract attention. A bird was leaning out high up on one of the shelves; it was not a hen, but could have been a carrion crow. It was looking at me and the nocturnal panorama. “This is a jungle or it was one; it is a siege by demons in animal form.”

  He reflected for a little while and then, as though he were giving a lecture, he suddenly started to expound with considerable calm, “In actual fact, this library is extremely ancient. It was formed by natural sedimentation, but at a certain stage, a mistake occurred. And libraries are not immortal: they are made of glue, string and cellulose.

  Initially this library settled quietly and forgotten, like a tomb. This happened some time ago, when my father was a child or perhaps many centuries before that. It lay in a penumbra covered with a thin layer of dust, and because of a lack of funding it was kept closed. It had a caretaker who, for want of a better expression, took care of it. He had the right to live in the two rooms of his lodge, but as there was no money in the budget and in fact no budget at all or even an entry in some other budget, he was the responsibility of a religious charity for the disabled, which appointed the caretaker from their most needy beneficiaries with a minimum pension. Whether by chance or simply because of a lack of other applications, they chose a blind man to be caretaker. And so it was for the last one too, but then it is said that it has always been thus, that it was an established custom, at least since the library came under state control, and no one knows exactly when that was. The ministry entered into an agreement with the charity for the transfer of the two rooms in the caretaker’s lodge, but the rest – that is
to say the rooms with the books – was not taken into consideration. This status quo persisted, as the areas in question were inventoried at the Land Registry as uncultivated state lands.”

  I was thinking that it was getting late; I wanted to interrupt him, but he just went on undeterred, as though he were reading a piece of paper written inside his head.

  “This caretaker was there, but he never interfered with the books, never aired the rooms and never touched a thing. His sole duty was to keep the doors closed and not to sub-let or allow a third party to use the rooms as accommodation. Occasionally, he would leave his apartment and wander around the corridors without turning on the light: he had no need, and he listened always for that same perfect silence. Then he bolted the doors, not to stop anyone getting in but make sure nothing got out, but exactly what was never known.

  “In those early times, there lived a silverfish in the midst of all that paper, without giving anyone any trouble. It was tiny – no more than a centimetre long and belonged to the Lepismatidae family of the order of Thysanura: flat, shiny, with three tails and very clean in its habits, it was in its own way a very gentlemanly and sober-minded insect that slept during the day and was up at night, because it had little liking for the light. It was joined by a few others and they lived in small communities scattered amongst the books; they drank the humidity where it appeared and gnawed imperceptibly at the surface of the papers and the corners of the vellum, linen, cotton and rayon covers. It was the era in which time had not begun and everything was still in a miraculous equilibrium. There were no draughts, changes in temperature or electric lighting. It was as though it were always six o’clock in a Sunday morning in the early spring, when there was still no light but darkness had already withdrawn, and it was neither hot nor cold: the early birds had not yet got up and the night owls had already gone to bed.

  “It is not easy to imagine what happened first – what was the primary fluctuation. Some people say that the origins of time and the current ecological imbalance were the work of the three hens that the caretaker kept at his lodge together with a cockerel, for the simple reason that his pension was small and the hens laid eggs. He allowed them to scratch around in the library as he didn’t have a courtyard of his own. He kept them under control with a long lead tied to their claws. They grubbed around amongst the shelves and ate the silverfish: in a way they did good to the books, but they could not avoid defecation, and being blind, the caretaker was not aware. So this led to the appearance of cockroaches. The Germanic cockroach, the American periplaneta, the common cockroach or Blatta orientalis and various other members of the family of Blattidae all made their way up through holes and the waste pipes. They eat everything, but especially dirt, feathers, cardboard and even printed paper, while leaving behind little faeces that look like commas or exclamation marks without alphabetical significance, but which confuse the reader and ultimately mark entire pages with exclamations. For their part, the hens ate up the cockroaches with relish and grew plump. We don’t know exactly what happened next; there is a theory that the contented hens started to lay a great quantity of eggs, which they left around the place, especially on the radiators, where they incubated and hatched. But there is a rumour that the cockerel escaped, and in the attempt to trap it using the hens as bait, the three hens also escaped and in no time they had returned to their wild state. The wild chicken is a proud and extremely enterprising bird, and they soon populated the entire library. On the one hand, this was a boon as it kept the number of cockroaches down, but on the other, it led to the arrival of mice, lice of the liposcelidae family, and then mosquitoes, flies and arachnids, which covered the entire place with spiderwebs. The era of the silverfish and the three hens appeared to have been lost forever. When the library was opened to the public and they brought in that zoological species we call the staff, there were already worms, moths, centipedes, ants and termites: the latter ones, typically light-averse isopterans, emptied the library from the inside of its books, floorboards, bones, ivory and metal, and constructed pinnacles of cellulose and cement. There was no money for chemical disinfestation, so some people used their initiative and imported cats against the mice, and a pair of foxes and a pair of weasels against the chickens.

  The hens went to live on top of the beams and bookcases, while down below the larvae and insects multiplied out of all proportion. Then, a little irresponsibly but with good intentions, it was unanimously decided to introduce the woodpecker, the golden oriole, the bat, the nightingale and the hoopoe, whose diet consists of lepidopterans, ichneumon wasps, froghoppers, silkworms, crickets, brown-tail moths, grasshoppers and other such insects. These measures were then reinforced by the introduction of green lizards, toads, common lizards, tortoises and chameleons, whose numbers, along with those of the birds grew exponentially and had to be controlled by the introduction of the hedgehog and various species of colubrids, corvids and diurnal and nocturnal birds of prey. Once you have gone down this road, there is no turning back, and to impede the hypertrophy of individual species, they had to introduce the entire zoological food chain. Thus the exuberant and sanguinary confusion of living things, whose remnants you see before you, grew from the inert substrate of books in the semi-darkness of the cellars or the light of a few electric bulbs.

  “For the terrible calamity of the red ant, the Argentinean ant and several hundred other species there was no possible solution other than the pangolin, the numbat and the giant anteater, which in turn needed to be controlled by the spotted hyena and the African wild dog. Vultures and stray dogs took on the task of cleaning up the mess.

  “Naturally small habitats were created according to the mix of light, temperature and humidity, because the library covers a vast area and many people were moving around it.

  The climates varied: ventilated near the grates, warm and damp around the radiators and cold to the north, where you could find pine martens and mountain hares. In some rooms there was desert and scorpions ruled, while in others a slight vegetation attracted small herbivores in large numbers. Cherry trees grew in a temperate corridor, and persimmons ripened in autumn. But vegetation was rare, because of the lack of sunlight. During some nights vast expanses became covered with mushrooms and moulds.

  At some stage, the staff decided to use snakes against the invasion of mice. Unless you provoke them, it was said, snakes don’t bite humans, and if you play a single note on a pan pipes or a bewitching berceuse, snakes can become man’s loyal friends. So they introduced the rattlesnake, the coral snake and the king cobra: clean and spectacular, but who could trust them? Some reckless fool released vipers close to the reference rooms. The humidity was such that tree frogs proliferated, which in itself was not harmful, but they mated so often and made such a noise in doing so that they could be heard everywhere, and this was not appropriate for a library; it was like living at the edge of a pond. However, you could wander amongst the books without danger if you played a piccolo, which made all the snakes withdraw. But as their numbers increased, it was difficult not to step on them. More than one scholar was bitten while he was studying and consequently died. What could you do? Obviously they thought about mongooses, secretary-birds and herons. There were also pigs, because someone said they are immune to poison and the instinctive enemies of snakes. But what didn’t these pigs get up to! Everywhere defecation, effluent and smell; they rooted around the lower shelves in search of truffles, or just ate the books. If only, people would say, we could go back to the silverfish age! So the pigs were slaughtered and cut up for meat. What a horrendous thing! The screams in the reading room seemed just like those of human beings.

  The scholars trembled as they looked at each other. No one could read, no one could sleep; every now and then an attendant would appear, gloomy and covered in blood.

  Vicious rumours were heard when it came to sharing out the salami. Some people were so shaken that they slunk out and were never seen again. The others noted their empty seats and asked, ‘So and so, what
happened to him?’ Rather unkindly the attendants would say, ‘Who cares?’ And so legends started to spread about obscure satanic rites and exemplary punishments relating to the handling of books. Nightmares were frequent, as were screams during sleep. People remained seated but always on the alert, which was extremely detrimental to their studies. They strained their ears worriedly: howls, roars and a continuous barking in the distance. The doors were always kept closed to avoid invasions, but every now and then a grass snake would come by, or a swarm of insects, bats, snails or lizards.”

  By now, I too was rather affected, and asked, “Are there any giraffes?”

  “Of course there are giraffes; some people have seen them, but they are dwarf ones. As they are fearful of the cold, they huddle around the radiators. Many animals in here have undergone genetic mutations: there are fierce sheep that bare their teeth, enormous, lanky cats without claws or hair; there are philosophical panthers that yawn and weary of life. There is an elderly lion that is frightened of everything, including the fleas on its back, and there are wild boars that nibble the walls. In a cupboard which should be for brooms, there is an elephant that can no longer get out of the door: it eats paper and cardboard, is pale, bloated and toothless, and it has no proboscis. Some people talk of incongruous animals that breed only in libraries amongst books: tiny hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses that are so ethereal they resemble sparrows, fallow deer made of red powder, and solitary ants without powers of reason that waste their time singing in the company of grasshoppers. There is even talk of self-sufficient wolves that eat their own paws, their tails and very gradually the rest of themselves, until all that’s left is the lower jaw which dies of hunger. Yes, this is what people say, but we don’t know where such animals make their homes, whether they are inside or outside books.”