The Nocturnal Library

by Ermanno Cavazzoni

  What exactly is retrogradation or retroambulation? We can now assert that it is the entrance to the famous kingdom of the dead.

  There is a group of beliefs or traditions spread over a vast area running from the Caucasus to the Carpathians, from Asian Siberia to the Iranic Plateau and the Asiago Plateau, and from Inner Mongolia to Friuli and Venezia Giulia. These belief systems all agree that the descent into hell is always done walking backwards: the dead suddenly get up and are no longer themselves, but unknown beings who retrograde; the back of the head and neck are the new face that moves ahead of itself without seeing and descends the steps of the hereafter. Hell is simply a place in which the dead bump into each other with the terrible and grating sound of bones clattering against each other, because they wander around aimlessly and backwards and all appear to be utterly befuddled.

  Thus whoever walks backwards during their life is by analogy in communication with the dead, even the dimwitted man who might as well have been blind as his eyes were no use to him. He wandered the woods, it is said, in a state of torment and sonorously collided with tree trunks.

  When he reached the end of a wood, he wandered around and often fell off a cliff. There he lay until he woke up again and went back amongst the living. He rediscovered the ability to go forward and using his hands and eyes, he climbed the mountains, crossed the woods and one day reappeared at home like someone back from the dead.

  From then on he was held in great esteem and considered to have powers of second sight.

  We have reached the point in the argument in which should discard all ambivalence: does a land of the dead exist? Yes, it does exist, but not in any particular place.

  The land of the dead has been put upside down in time, and there everything is going backwards: the grass snakes, cats and geese that live there all go backwards, as do the donkeys, goats and sheep. But trees also go backwards, given that from dried up they become green and vigorous, then grow smaller and finally become seeds. The rivers – and there are many of them – flow upwards and back to their springs. The rains go up from an enraged sea and evaporate into black clouds, which in turn fly backwards.

  Even the winds blow in the opposite direction and are like profound inhalations. Night comes before day, and a kind of sunset sun appears in the west and goes back over the hours until it is midday and then morning, dawn, and the first glow on the horizon. Then the cockerels can be heard calling “cock-a-doodle-do”, and the dead drink their coffee, shave their beards and leap into bed.

  Moreover the dead swallow horrible and pestilential excrements through orifices in their posteriors and then they expel them from their mouths in the form of excellent foods: salami, cotechino sausages, spaghetti, wines from Orvieto and Frascati, roast chicken and boiled fish. At lunchtime, the dead sit down at table and everyone vomits on their own plate and spits in their own glass, until the table is entirely laid out with sumptuous foods. Then the waiters appears – they are also dead of course – and walking backwards they carry all plates and food into the kitchen, where the cooks put it in different pans on the cooker to cool it down very slowly: the fish is then returned to the sea and the salad to the vegetable garden. When the dead talk, you can imagine that first comes the reply and then the question. When they meet, they say goodbye, and then stop to have a chat. It is only at the end that they make a show of recognising each other with exclamations of joy and embraces. After that, each goes his or her own way, still backwards and entirely oblivious of each other.

  This upside-down world is neither more beautiful nor uglier than our own one, but it is still more incomprehensible.

  For example, anyone who has a swollen black finger must instinctively reach for a hammer and a nail stuck in the wall, as a medicine. By putting the affected finger between the nail and the hammer, it is immediately healed, although the reason is not at all clear. But if the nail comes away and there has been a picture hanging on it, this is taken back to the framer who takes off the frame and gives money to the customer.

  The dead believe in absolute determinism, and can in fact foretell everything that is about to happen, except things that are too far away or indistinct. On the other hand, they forget every event in the instant it occurs. For example, they are entirely aware of all the people they are yet to meet, but as soon as they meet them, they completely forget them and think they don’t exist. For them the past is a land of vague hopes, and the future is perceived as an irrevocable destiny, so they often say disconsolately, “What could I possibly have done in the past to end up as badly as I am going to end up?” they have cities that spring up like mushrooms during an earthquake, but to have them removed they need architects. Amongst the dead, they make it up before they argue furiously, and then they forget everything, as though it had never happened. As for the court system, the general practice is that for no particular reason they serve a period of time in prison, then go through a regular trial, at the end of which they are always released. And in all this process there is some obscure justice, because the accused in the land of the dead spontaneously and secretly returns the stolen goods or, on seeing the victim, removes the blade or bullet, and the victim is cured. Afterwards, the victim and the culprit go innocently on their separate ways, their memories freed of all viciousness.

  In conclusion, however, even the dead cannot go on forever: as time passes, they lose cognition of their own future, until they curl up and eventually produce a vagitus inside a leaded box in the company of their poor bones.

  Chapter O

  Evidently I had fallen asleep while reading. I woke up suddenly with an acute pain in my mouth. Fischietti, seated on top of the back of my chair, had his feet on my shoulders and was holding my mouth open with a hook.

  Santoro was on my knees and keeping my hands still with his legs, was hammering one of my teeth, the very one that had been causing me so much pain. They had tied my ears to the chair with string, and one had been tied so tightly that the blood could not circulate and was already almost completely deadened. I pulled and screamed in pain; that ear was on the same side as the tooth, so the combined agony rose to my head and thundered in the cavity of my left hemisphere. They appeared happy, as though it were a game, and they invited me in mime and in their exclamations to take part. Fischietti repeated, “How wonderful, how wonderful!” and Santoro laughed, while with every blow of his hammer he would say, “There you are; sir has been well looked after.” I roared with my mouth open and I tried to wriggle free, but they interpreted this as meaning that I was enjoying myself – that I was saying “enough, enough, stop it please” as a joke or to make the company laugh.

  When Santoro got hold of the blacksmith’s tongs and started to wobble all my teeth on the left side of my jaw, Fischietti was so overjoyed that he beat his fists on my head. The pain was such that tears of despair were not enough; in fact it seemed that I was laughing as loud as I could, and laughing so much that I had both tears and hiccups. I have no idea how long this torture went on for; three times I heard the chimes for five o’clock, and Fischietti underscored each chime by rapping his knuckles on my cranium and counting them in a loud voice. Santoro happily repeated the number and echoed it with his tongs.

  A little door opened and out of the corner of my eye I could see Miss Iris returning with the Greek teacher, just as she had promised. Her reappearance was enough to disconcert my tormentors a little.

  “What’s going on?” she said and her expression was stern. Santoro stopped, and then so did Fischietti. “Miss Iris!” they said. I now only had the ear that continued to pulse under the knot they had tied around it. I too said, “Miss Iris!” with tears in my eyes and I would have liked to get down on my knees before her. I could smell her fragrance in the air. She smiled at me like an angel sent by our merciful God to free me. Behind her in the entrance of the door, the Greek teacher Albonea Bucato was listening to us. I had heard so much about her that I knew her. She was the thin woman with a woollen turban who had come into the l
ibrary at the same time that I did. Iris had picked up the volume that was in front of me and was using it to deliver heavy blows mainly to Fischietti, who had fallen off the back of the chair, saying “What am I supposed to have done?” and then she turned on Santoro who had leapt off my legs whimpering, “I was helping him, assisting him – that’s all.” The pages were flying all over the place, and then the box disintegrated. Miss Iris clearly had authority over them that could not be challenged, and this was more important than the force or weight of the volume. I was able to free my ears. The Greek teacher was now providing backup, and was pushing them away, while assertively flourishing her dress. Fischietti went behind her and attempted to light its hem, but only created black smoke and no flames. Whimpering Santoro started to laugh and wanted to use his tongs. In fact he succeeded in gripping her dress with them and pulling, almost unravelling the whole of it. The teacher rebelled, but the dress was now up to her knees and you could see her suspender belt. Not a pretty sight. Fischietti set fire to her hair from behind, and it went up in a blaze. She just took the flaming hair off, as it was a wig, and used it as a weapon against them, finally driving them away, and their instruments of torture with them.

  Then she put out the flames and returned her hair to her head, as the wig was not that damaged. There was only one area where the hair had melted together and looked like twists of wood shavings. She adjusted her tights and her dress, and stayed in the background with the expression of a person accustomed to such things, and interprets them as the sexual vicissitudes that women generally have to put with.

  Possibly drawn by the commotion and my screams, the two card players had come over for a closer look, and also two young female attendants who were perhaps just passing by. They had formed a small crowd around me and my chair. They touched my ear to feel its temperature and came out with some very high numbers, almost in admiration. The women examined the Greek teacher’s dress and hair. “This library is dangerous for women – and men too,” they pointed at me at this stage, “but more for women.” I sought out Iris’s eyes; she smiled and said yes.

  “There are dangers of every kind,” they said, “but for us women they are nearly all of a sexual nature.”

  “I understand, of course,” I said, “you shouldn’t talk to me about it, as I am not involved. You should speak to the arbitrator Pantani; he is very responsive to this argument.”

  This triggered a unanimous chorus of “Oh yeah, he’s just the guy you need!” Even the Greek teacher pulled a face that expressed both commiseration and contempt. The two card players laughed.

  So in spite of the confusion of voices and everyone’s desire to have their own story heard, I was made aware of the following: when he is close by – at a distance of about one or two metres – this arbitrator Pantani is the perfect gentleman, dignified, respectful and buttoned up. In other words, an upright and moral man, even in what he says.

  The Greek teacher said that up close he is a real coward.

  As the distance increases, he becomes more and more brazen. As soon as he is in the far distance, for example at the end of a corridor and believes he can see a woman fifty metres away, he immediately exposes his sexual organs and then maintains that position for hours, irrespective of whether someone is there or not. Given that in here it is generally dark, he carries a candle about and holds it low and close so that it always throws light where he wants it.

  It seems that he started off on this career many years ago in the country. He was the mayor and at the same time an alderman. If he saw a peasant woman or a holiday-maker in the distance but was able to guess her sex vaguely from her clothing, he exposed himself and stood there challenging her for hours, even when she had gone and there was no one on the horizon. The only thing that concerned him was that the sun should not put his genitals into the shadow as it travelled across the sky. He did nothing else: no ugly gestures or signals, partly because the distance was such that it would have been a waste of time. It would even have been a waste of time to point to his tabernacle and assert that it existed. This habit, they assured me, is often found in arbitrators and aldermen, and goes with the habit of holding rallies and engaging in propaganda activities. While they expose themselves, they shield their eyes with a hand and look elsewhere, towards an ideal point a few degrees higher in the sky along the ecliptic. They remain in that pose as though they had seen an aerostatic balloon and were consequently desirous of getting as must as possible out of it. They do not lean on a tree or sit on a bench; they can continue to stand for very long periods. The value of distance varies according to the visibility: less distance is necessary when there is fog, heavy rain, sleet or a whirlwind or when the sun has not quite risen. During clear days of high wind they position themselves a kilometre away from the houses and look into the air as though there were nothing odd about this behaviour.

  As he got older, Pantani naturally found that his eyesight was fading, which put him into a permanent and exhausting state of alarm: he always suspects that there is a woman or something similar that has become confused with the landscape, and he is there making no use of her, no better than someone who simply goes into the countryside to dig and rake the ground. So narrowing his eyes and shielding them with his hand – for he has no wish to demean himself by wearing glasses – he spends the entire day examining the distance while turning in a circle. If a piece of clothing flaps, he immediately adopts his pose and stays there; equally if he hears a voice at the top of a hill, he thinks that some woman must have appeared on the ridge. He is often wrong. So he can be seen at midday in August, far far away at the end of a newly harvested wheat field with those genitals on display again, static in the windless summer air. He perhaps does not know what is going on; he has the appearance of someone who simply does what has to be done, and doesn’t know how to do anything else.

  In the end they transferred him to the library, where he is a member of the management board, arbitrator and watchdog. He is not a real danger, but in the long run he is tiresome; it is not clear what he wants, nor what he is supposed to represent.

  “Perhaps it is a love of creation,” I said.

  “Look over there!” Everyone started shouting and getting excited. There was a little light in the distance, a cemetery light and nothing else. Iris whispered to the Greek teacher whose eyes were flashing. The small gathering dissolved.

  Everyone rushed off, including Iris, in whom I placed so much hope. “Wait for me, Iris; I need your help,” I managed to mutter in time. She turned with her smile, as though it would be a pleasure to give me a hand and perhaps much more. “Come with me,” I heard her say before she rushed into the corridor. I jumped to my feet with such emotion that the table jumped with me, and Professor Rasorio, who had his head finely balanced on his forearm, had broken free of his moorings because of the undulatory tremor, and fallen on his side. “Wait for me, Iris,” I said while I tried to pull the professor up and rebalance him. He was very heavy and kept falling back on top of me: this was not normal sleep. Eventually I managed to raise him up and prop him up against the back of the chair with his arms hanging down and once more dead to the world. Because of the exertion of lifting him, the tooth that Santoro had been hammering was pulsating once more and I was conscious of the pain.

  I entered the corridor, but it was so dark that instead of running, I had to feel my way along, my hand touching the wall and my feet checking out the floor. In the far distance, there was the light of a candle – no more than a speck – and perhaps a human shape. It was easy to surmise, if everything that had been said was true, that there was the arbitrator Pantani in pose and illuminating himself. But you would have needed binoculars. But perhaps that meant that Iris had come by and I was therefore on the right path. “Miss Iris,” I called out, “Miss Iris.” But the only response was an owl in the distance, and even further away I could hear a donkey braying. I nearly fell down some steps and the trolley used by Fischietti and Santoro whizzed between my legs.

>   The light became slightly brighter as I slowly made my way along the corridor. Then I got the whiff of something; initially I didn’t know what it was – perfume or natural smell. Then I felt a hand taking mine, and a flash of sensation in my nostrils. Full of happiness, I recognised her. “Iris,” I said. No answer. She did not a say a thing, but she held me tight. “Iris, is that you?” And she just said, “Sssshhh!”; it was an imperceptible shush. “What’s up?” I said under my breath, but she just continued to shush me very quietly and lead me along. “Where are we going?” and she shushed once more, but not to keep me silent, as it was her confidential way of speaking in the dark; words and a voice generally ruin everything, while in some cases a shush and silence make women feel closer and more attached to a man. Her fragrance was particular, and I could not exactly define it. In part, I recognised her splendid and noble perfume, but in part it was new and more persuasive, as though the number of airborne molecules then unknown to me, raised to the second power, could tickle my mouth and, rising through the mucous membranes of my nose, warm them for me. Not only did they suggest flowers – so much so that I was almost stupefied – but also and more subtly truffle, cheese, pepper, wild quail and hare. They were fragrances that rose up into my imagination and lit my way.

  The night, however, was so dark that I could not see a single thing. She held my hand and I went with her, unsure of my feet because of the darkness that covered the floor and the aromatic trail she left behind her, which I drank in with an open mouth. I don’t know what was under my feet; it felt as though I was crushing the pages of broken books, but I took little notice. Even my exam had disappeared into a very remote area of my thoughts, where it lingered enervated and locked away together with my toothache.