“Don’t be ashamed,” he said, “you’re just naive.” As I stood there speechless, he explained that the Greek teacher did the same with everyone. She had taken some soft and well-sprung boxes to a small room in the basement. From his account, it appeared that everyone knew this. She made sheets with newspapers and occasionally takes the director there. When she can, she takes novices there when they get lost in search of a bibliography. “She is there every night,” said Guastalamenti, “and it is not clear what art she uses, because she is incontestably one ugly old woman. There are those who say she knows the books that make people lose their heads, full as they are of double entendres that excite male eroticism. But I know what she uses to get her way: she uses the sexual attraction of pheromones!”
I frowned on hearing this obscure term, “Pheromones?
What are they?”
He was happy to show off his expertise, “If you want, I can refer you to the appropriate books, but equally I can tell you myself.”
“Keep it brief,” I said. “You tell me, but keep it short and while we’re walking.”
But instead he sat down on the remains of an encyclopaedia and obliged me to sit down as well. “There is not a great deal to be said about Bucato, but you, my dear sir, should know that her story contains an unhappy love affair, as always in these cases. She was much younger, only just qualified as a teacher, and a little less hairy, but above all innocent when it came to the question of pheromones. He, on the other hand, was a famous seducer with his own method; in fact he founded his own particular movement. You know, of course, that the males of many species of animal mark their territories with olfactory messages that either dissuade competitors or sexually arouse females.
“In the specific case of this seducer, Tito Sedulio by name, he would walk around surreptitiously disseminating his own waste materials, in which, as we all know, are concentrated the sexually alluring pheromones. He didn’t know this scientifically, but answered to the primal dictates in his blood. He felt that all other systems were insincere and unnatural, and posed considerable problems of interpretation for women. ‘I want to be clear,’ he would say, ‘no circumlocutions!’ In the evening he would go around depositing his messages on young ladies’ doorsteps so that they had time to think about it and undergo the effects of his airborne pheromones. If invited, he would go without further delay to the home of the young lady in question. He entered her flat with the courteousness and correct manners of a real gentleman. He made no hints, paid no compliments and gave no compromising presents.
He did not stoop to the exchange of promises or penetrating looks, minor forms of titillation, the use of feathers, hand-kissing or pinching. At the moment in which he felt something for this woman – a definite inclination – he simply stood up, apologised with proper solicitude, and went off to the bathroom to lodge his marriage proposal.
“What he did with Mrs Bucato is now well established fact. He entered her house very respectfully. She was greatly impressed by his savoir faire and refined diction.
Moreover she felt that he was a paragon of self-restraint.
They talked of high-minded things and meanwhile the lady looked at his hands: she liked them, they were slender – those of an educated man. The young Bucato had him sit down and offered him an iced citron squash, which he drank as he had a terrible thirst. ‘Another juice?’ she asked, and he said, ‘Yes, thanks,’ because he had decided to make his feelings known. Bucato, it was clear, was deeply affected and almost in trepidation. She stood up to go and get the bottle from the kitchen, and asked to be excused in a voice that could only mean, ‘Propose and the answer will be yes.’ Thence she left a little red in the face.
How long was she away? One minute, one and a half minutes? Just long enough to check her lipstick in the hall mirror, pull up her petticoat that had become crimped, and take in the overall effect of her dress: the zips, hooks, buttons, neckline and maybe a few other things. Two minutes at the most, or perhaps three. Then she returned with the citron squash and there was a smell that terrified her. Meanwhile he was gaping at her expectantly! Later she would tell her girlfriends and colleagues confidentially that he never spoke. The smell did not evaporate, in which case it could have been forgiven, but became increasingly vicious and inexorable. She went red in the face, stammered and could not manage to pour water into the glass. The ice tongs slipped from her hand, and then the ice bucket and the ice inside. And he did nothing. He did not speak; he just looked at her. Eventually tears came to her eyes. She had already been married once but, she said, she had never come across a smell like that. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, placed in front of her mouth and looked at him in bewilderment as though he were an executioner and she a child. And yet she was not that young. But the stunning thing is this: he stood up as though he had already said everything, like someone who has already declared himself and awaits an answer. Such eyes he had! Wide open and fired up with passion. Then she thought he had an ailment because of all that ice, and she smiled slightly as though to say, ‘It’s nothing; I understand.’ Sedulio’s face lit up and he stood up sure that the pheromones were at work. Bucato also stood up and could not fail to see an enormous lump of faeces between the sofa and the lamp. Now she turned white and pointed to it with her finger. If she had not been in her own home, she would have run away screaming. Sedulio did not even turn. He did not say, ‘It’s mine.’ Still less did he say, ‘I’m sorry.’ He stood as still as a stockfish, and waited.
She had no idea what he was waiting for. After a while, she rushed to the bathroom and shut herself in. Sedulio banged on the door: ‘Open up! I have expressed my feelings. What do you have to say?’ She did not come out until it was well into the night, after Sedulio had left.
“Afterwards, she suffered his courtship, and her neighbours were all complaining. ‘Who is that delinquent?’ they would say when they saw him declaring his love in the garden, up the stairs and on the doormats. She knew, but shame stopped her from saying. Nevertheless, she thought about him constantly. It was a fixation, it was love. But being shy and naive, she feared her neighbours’ opinion.
She stayed at home tormenting herself and dreaming. She never gave him a reply.
“Besides, Tito Sedulio had a polymorphous sexuality, which could not restrict itself to a single object of desire and the resulting lack of variety. At night he went to the courtyard of the girls’ upper secondary school and deposited his Easter eggs, as he vulgarly liked to call them, on the steps to the main entrance. Then he rushed over in the morning when the school opened to see the young chicks who recoiled and squealed and said, ‘God, that’s disgusting! What a stench! What kind of creep could have done this?’ Deep in his heart, he cried, ‘It was me. It was me that did it. You can see, no?’ He rejoiced at having caused disarray amongst that gaggle of geese, because in his opinion it was as clear as daylight what his messages meant, ‘I adore you.’ He also liked to follow the fate of his artefacts, by pretending to wait at the bus stop opposite the school. The headmistress came out and looked severely at his two or three relics. The girls by this stage had all gathered in the courtyard, talking animatedly and keeping their distance as though the area were a minefield. Others came up on scooters with books strapped to saddle, and were immediately informed of the news. ‘You wouldn’t believe it. This morning. On the steps!’ They couldn’t believe it and wanted to see, ‘You’ve got to be joking!
Where?’ They went over and looked down, ‘That’s disgusting! That’s so gross!’ and then they rushed off to comment on it with others and list the names of wellknown Lotharios, lovers and boyfriends. He listened to all this in ecstasy. The headmistress called some of the staff; janitors appears, and they too were shocked, ‘But who would do this? When? Just now? Last night?’ ‘Some good-for-nothing, that’s what he is!’ ‘Who let him in?’ ‘The gate was open.’ ‘So anyone can wander in and do exactly what they want!’ The debate involved everyone, all there in a circle: on one side the
grim-faced headmistress and the worried janitors, and on the other, the pupils who didn’t want to go near but laughed and enjoyed whispering certain words to each other.
“The headmistress had the faeces covered with sawdust and then ordered, ‘Inside!’ to the girls. And they shunned the offending material, some with a leap and others by circling round while carefully holding their skirts. From his position at the bus stop, Sedulio observed all these movements and the pile of sawdust under which he felt his longa manus could still ogle.
“After this, dustpans and brushes rapidly appeared, and the headmistress oversaw the cleaning and decontaminating operations, so that there remained no trace, no distant memory. However, the pheromones, once released into the air, continue to act in the strangest and most unpredictable manner. For example, the headmistress sits down very gravely on returning to her office, and then she feels a very reluctant and tremulous thought rise up her aorta, squeeze her jugular and flow into her head through the cerebral arteries. She thinks that she is thinking it, but she is wrong. The molecules of Tito Sedulio’s pheromones are contaminating her synapses and inducing these thoughts in her brain. The headmistress thinks that she would like to look the author of these abominations in the face. But she doesn’t think this calmly, but with a kind of laboured breath. She cannot stand it, opens her private cabinet and, after looking around, drinks a liqueur.”
“That’s enough. I got the message,” I said. Time was passing.
Guastalamenti would not give up, “It has to be said, though, that Sedulio, whether we like it or not, always won the occasional heart, sometimes aiming directly at the target and sometimes bouncing off the wall. Bucato learnt this method from him, to your cost. When she can, she applies it to whoever comes to hand – not to the letter, as she is a woman, but adhering to the chemistry very closely.”
I stood up, “That really is enough. I have got the picture: it’s all down to her pheromones. Would you let me go now?”
“Don’t you want to know about Mrs Bucato’s glands, her deoxyribonucleic acid, and those gametes of hers? I could give you a lesson and provide many examples, because I confess to being a little nerdy about this subject. I have done some experiments and statistical analysis, which I will use in a learned paper.”
“No, thank you,” I was exasperated. “This is interesting, but I am a bit of an outsider. I really know nothing about it; I am just a victim.”
“Well then, read this. I am collecting data,” and he put a small notebook in my hand. “If you’re short of information, you’ll find the fundamentals in here.”
To indulge him, I opened it, but I did not sit down.
Hairy women
A pretty and plump, thirty-six-year-old German woman from Baden-Baden was in every way a perfect and promising woman, but she had a brown rounded beard which was incredibly long and looked like a broom. She came from a hairy family: her father had hair on his nose and the whole of his face, but it was short like that of a dachshund.
Her mother was covered in long, straight hairs, and naked she looked as though she was wearing a shirt. Both parents were born in the same town close to the Baltic Sea, where everyone is even hairier, and the hairs form a hirsute mantle so thick that it is difficult to believe they are human beings. In old age, they become white and resemble polar bears, with the one difference that they are bald in the manner of the rest of us, i.e. only at the top of the head. However, the bald patch has a shiny yellow appearance, like something that has had its lid removed.
This is a not infrequent of endemic hypertrichosis. The Mexican, Julia Pastrana was also covered with a thicket of long, wiry hair. She died in Europe in 1860 after having given birth to a boy with jet black hair on his body and the suggestion of a tail, who would not marry. There was however an amiable and graceful English lady of Greenwich, who at about twenty years of age had a very fine beard of golden locks, four or five centimetres long. She stroked it slowly and softly, like caressing a lover, and she smiled with passive pleasure on feeling a woman’s soft hand on her face. It appears that in the intimacy of her own thoughts, she was rather pleased with that lovely ornament.
A fourth observable case is that of a fifty-year-old gentlewoman of Orvieto. Her family were unaware of the beard, as she shaved herself every morning until there wasn’t the slightest sign of a single hair. When she became ill and had to stay in bed for several months, the beard, which had been cut for so many years, grew with such vigour that the general practitioner who came to examine her, thought he was in the presence of a capuchin monk.
Chapter Q
I angrily closed the notebook and gave it back to him, saying, “How very clever of you! Congratulations, but I’m afraid I must be off.” Such was my desire to get away from those misleading and exasperating follies, I ventured off on my own, thinking that I would eventually get somewhere. I read the subject labels written in a lopsided hand: mathematics, chemistry, accountancy, history of art. I picked up a book and black sawdust fell out. It looked like letters and they separated out like flakes of dry paint. I brushed them off my clothes, and the book was illegible. I opened others: one was an empty box, except for a few newspaper cuttings and insect remains. I tapped on a line of books, and they all sounded empty. Some sparrows flew out of one of them, another was full of straw, and yet another nutshells, perhaps left by squirrels.
These were corridors where you didn’t see a living soul, and the disorder just got worse and worse: piles of books on the ground, as though it had been ploughed or was undergoing some upheaval. Table legs, glass, cupboard doors and splinters of wood were mixed up with the paper.
It looked like a Pre-Cambrian volcanic eruption, when magmatic and early sedimentary rocks were formed, the earth’s crust started to fold, oxygen in the air was below one per cent and it was the kingdom of the prokaryotes.
The air was so oppressive and sweaty that you almost felt ill. There was a smell of decomposing wood. Here the books were black; they crumbled like peat if you touched them; they were full of methane and other gases, which made me feel delirious when I breathed them. I would occasionally see the flicker of a light in the distance and thought that arbitrator Pantani must have been down there. I ran towards him in the hope that he could help me to get out, but I just became increasingly lost. There were wooden doors which had been boarded or walled up, and beyond them I could hear growls, hissing, roars, galloping and incessant barking. I was afraid that these thin walls of single, hollow bricks could start to crack or that the nails in these nailed-up doors would start to loosen under the pressure of that poisonous zoological maelstrom behind them. I was fearful that the supports would give way and there would come pouring through an infernal jungle of harpies, basilisks, crocodiles, dragons, hernias, weasels, bogeys, herpes, ibises, witches, myrmicoleons, sexton beetles, shadows, peacocks, quadrumanes, suckerfish, satyrs, mermen, groundless fears, foxes and mosquitoes.
In a wave of dust, they would have swept away me and my last hopes of finding my way out of that indecipherable and inescapable solitude. I would have drowned in its grimy ferment.
A stray dog came out of a hole barking hysterically, and tried to bite my feet and ankles. Although it was tiny, it was so importunate and snarling that I couldn’t get away from it. It had attached itself to the bottom of my pyjama trousers and kept pulling. I tried to kick it away, but as I walked back, I ended up sticking my foot into a slimy hole.
It was not deep and only my shoe went in, but I could not get it out and the dog continued to snarl at the other leg, bite it and tear ferociously at the hem of my pyjama leg.
The hole contained some kind of sticky tar, a flytrap. The shoe was completely glued up. And there, right next to the hole, was some guy I hadn’t previously noticed. He was staring and only said, “Good morning.”
“For Christ’s sake,” I then said, “could you get this bloody bastard dog off me?” I was frightened of losing my balance and falling down without a chance of defending myself and perh
aps getting even more caught up in the gluey substance. He had an air of empathy and understanding but he didn’t move an inch. All he did was introduce himself by his forename and surname with deliberate and inappropriate courteousness, while I tried to kick in the air with one foot and pull the other one out of the hole. This was the guardian Bisolfo of whom I had already heard so much talk, and hurriedly going through what Pantani had told me, I scrambled around for money – in spite of my other activities – and promised to give him some.
“No, no, don’t go any trouble,” he said; “just a little small change or perhaps the odd note. It always comes in handy – on the bus or in the bar.”
“Hold on, I’ll give you some,” but the dog was not releasing its grip, and the gluey material was turning into cement. But, God knows how, my pockets had been sewn up. I tried to put my hands in, but to no effect, like when you try on a new suit at the tailor’s. “I don’t have pockets any more,” I said confused and breathless.
“No worries. No worries at all,” this Bisolfo replied without stirring from his seat, “take your own time.”
In the meantime, by patting myself all over I found a small pocket that I didn’t even know I had, suggesting my jacket had suddenly become someone else’s. To my surprise, I took out pieces of paper, threads, a brooch, a small comb, bingo numbers, a wax seal and curtain ring.
“What is this stuff?” I was saying.
“It’s all stuff that could come in handy, you never know.
Hand it over, hand it over. Thank you.” The dog had calmed down a bit. Then a cork, a nib and a match. “This is useful for lighting a fire,” he said, as he took everything, “this is useful for writing, this could be useful in case of need.” When I gave him a button and a silver badge, he looked at the badge carefully and seemed happy with it.
The Nocturnal Library Page 15