The Nocturnal Library

by Ermanno Cavazzoni

  You look like half an ox. Well, what have you got to say for yourself?’ I stood up, ‘Well then?’ and I said many more hard-hitting things, in part for his own good and appearance. My anger boiled up with increasing ferocity and impatience. I went up to him and muttered, ‘You don’t reason; you offend me,’ and seeing him there so fat and argumentative, I slapped him. That was wrong of me; one should not slap one’s employees. Besides, what reason did I have? He was right: his being transparent or not transparent was not my concern. He trembled in his corpulence, and the poor man’s cheek was red, as was the back of his neck, which I also hit repeatedly. I pulled his ear as hard as I could, almost tore it off. I pulled it almost under his eyes, so he could see it, as though he were a schoolboy. I pinched his nose and twisted it, while shouting, ‘Is it transparent?’ I twisted it with pleasure and great force as though I wanted to unscrew it, and insulted him nigglingly, without knowing how to contain my anger to the smallest degree. He defended himself weakly.

  “At some stage he said, ‘What difference would it make if I were thin?’ “These arguments were repeated not every day, but very often, because when I was alone in my office I remembered – who knows why? – that he was down there in his room and convinced of being transparent, while in fact he was a hundred kilos of lard bundled up in those grey and worn trousers of his. I remembered this cock-and-bull story devoid of any sense, and I imagined him down there sitting peacefully in the midst of this error perhaps a little smugly.

  Then I was seized by anger and this need to convince him of his folly. I ran up stairs and along corridors and through reading rooms and up a small, out-of-use stair that served as a short-cut and across a terrace and down a tiny, dark hallway and finally entered his room, not with bad intentions, but to make him aware of his obvious mistake.

  It was this lack of logic that made me so free with my fists.

  At the same time, however, I could not say that he had done anything wrong. I was brought up with the principles of liberalism, and why then did I have to get involved?

  What had I to do with another person’s beliefs?

  “I entered without knocking to catch him out, and there he was behind his desk and entirely visible. He gave a start, because from the very beginning his wonderful theory was having to measure up to reality. I sat down and spoke to him as a friend, ‘It’s very nice up here. I thought I would pay you a little visit. Well then? Have you got rid of those silly ideas?’ I put my hand on his shoulder and spoke in a tone of fraternal jocularity, ‘Okay, so you got there in the end!’ He recoiled and did not answer – in either the affirmative or the negative. He merely got on with the job of wrapping up a half-eaten roll and a chocolate bar and putting them back in a drawer.

  “‘… oh, don’t tell me you’re still a little transparent? Is that it?’ “He made a small gesture of apology, but my voice had already started to change in tone. Inevitably an argument broke out.

  “‘What is this transparency of yours supposed to mean?

  You’re not made of glass, by any chance?’ “‘No,’ he said, walking backwards to the corner as a precaution, ‘no, it means that one is not opaque.’ “When I heard such expressions, I just lost my powers of reason. There was nothing to be done, and I wanted to extort his retraction, for while the errors of this world are many, as are the deceits, as is only natural, his arguments would have turned the world into a Babel of wasted words, if they were ever allowed to spread.

  “‘You might,’ I replied, ‘get away with such talk when you speak to others, but not to me! Opaque! But where?

  Who?’ I got so carried away with my cause that I ran at him. He covered his head with his arms and tried to disappear into his jacket, but I took him by his cheek and pinched it. Through his clothes I pinched his chest, his stomach and his hips, in part to demonstrate my arguments and in part with the clear intention of covering him with bruises and giving him an extravasation of blood that would bear witness, in the days to come and also in private, to the absurdity of his claims.

  “‘So you’ve got it at last,’ I cried, ‘you’re not made of air.’ He massaged his bruises, and settled back in his chair.

  “‘So we’re back to square one,’ I followed up my argument. ‘In your opinion, is all this fat something or is it nothing?’ and my fist came down with threatening force on the table, causing the pens, rubbers and glue bottles to bounce up on the table, and increasing the disorder that was already considerable – on the verge of being intolerable in an employee. But I would have liked to really give vent to my feelings: smash up his chair and the table, hurl him and the furnishings about, tear up the books, throw them against the wall, hit him over the head with them and then climb up on him with my feet until he was finally persuaded. Bodies are heavy and broad, and are provided with considerable mass, both of us included, and one cannot go on forever using words illogically and randomly without them rebelling, and then there’s no telling what will happen. I was very restrained, to avoid putting myself in the wrong; I only threw as hard as I could a pencil, a screwed-up piece of paper and some paper clips. Then I went off, but for the rest of the night I was on edge and continued in my mind to argue with him and hit him. I couldn’t get any more work done.

  “I believe that following my attentions he started to be more circumspect and to keep out of my way so as not to have any arguments, which would have meant giving in to the evidence. He obstinately wanted to cling to his antiscientific persuasion. I asked myself: is he here at the moment? Or is he not here? Who knows? Does he come in?

  Does he leave? It appeared so. It was his duty, and his signature in the register confirmed that he was here. He always left the light on in his office, but it was now impossible to find him in there. Sometimes towards the morning, I would think about those ridiculous and misplaced claims, which were so irritating and contemptible, and I could resist no longer. I would run over to his room and, to tell the truth, I wanted to surprise him, to catch him out and reason with him, to find out whether he had reformed and finally given in to common sense. I would find the office open and the radio on, which frankly was not a sign of due diligence. I also found mess and dust, a complete chaos of overturned chairs, a table with a wobbly leg near to collapse, papers, scraps of paper, labels, paper clips, rubber filings from erasing, cuttings partly on the floor, open and crumpled books, bottles of dried glue and bottles of God knows what, certainly nothing to do with office business.

  Well, what else do you think I found amongst all this Babylonia, which was only a tiny part of the laxity and neglectfulness found everywhere he was responsible for, including the corridors? I found breadcrumbs, salami skins, chicken bones, roast-meat leftovers, sauces, pickles and the remains of drinks in a flower vase – not coffee, which would have been permissible, but beer and wine. There was the unmistakable smell of cooking. Clearly he is not only eating but also bivouacking in his office or in the immediate area around it. There is oil and vinegar in the ink pot! And thus his wastepaper bin contains not only those modest objects any conscientious clerk will throw away – rejected writing paper, carbon paper, pencil shavings – no, in his wastepaper bin I have found rotisserie wrappings, tablecloths, napkins, dirty cutlery, plastic plates, greasy packaging and pizzas that were still warm. I know that he is not far away. In that area, the library is primarily a warehouse. There are converted rooms with implausible layouts, low ceilings and plenty of twists and turns. Everything is so contorted and uneven that a fat man – even a man twice as fat as he is – could certainly pass unobserved if he stood still in a corner, between two bookshelves, in a broom cupboard or up a passageway that has been blocked off, particularly because of the bad lighting.

  I then started to wander around, walking very quietly because I wanted to see if he was working and in what manner, find out if he still had that absurd idea in his head and remove it once and for all. I looked up and down the corridors and occasionally caught a whiff of hot soup, which is his typical smell, and
I searched the surrounding area, behind the doors and in the window openings. I took a ladder and inspected the beams and the highest bookshelves, because he is evil and capable of anything. I have even looked in the cupboards and underneath them.

  Even though he is fat, he is capable of flattening himself out and slipping through a slit, simply in order to avoid being answerable to me for his conduct. I heard the calls of game birds and wild animals: that is him with his devices designed to spread fear and humiliate me. A rabbit or a clutch of turtle doves can suddenly appear, because he has created a private poultry pen amongst the books. He knows where to go to collect the eggs. He has ingratiated himself with the hens by giving them dried bread and leftovers. So the chickens are proliferating and there are more of them than there are books. The library has become his kingdom, his vegetable garden, and the hens are everywhere. He has encouraged them, because he cooks them, makes soup from them, and has them roasted.”

  The director Perbeni said these words with a furious intensity that made his voice hoarse. As he spoke, he plugged the fan back in and stood next to it with a proud expression, like an artist next to one of his creations.

  Meanwhile the table drawer was open and the pages of Rasorio’s Very Modern Encyclopaedia were flapping about.

  When he felt that he had spoken long enough, he looked at his watch and pushed a button in the wall. In that precise moment it struck seven o’clock: it appeared that he had caused the bells to chime with his finger, but he had in fact pressed a buzzer, because a tiny attendant came running up, breathless and full of zeal.

  “Put that back in its place,” the director said, indicating the encyclopaedia with evident distaste, “we work in here; we don’t fool around.”

  The attendant seemed fearful of the director, as though expecting him to be free with his fists, and he never looked him in the eyes. I seem to remember that his name was Caper, or perhaps I just imagined it after having looked at his face. I thought that the encyclopaedia could actually be very useful. Why didn’t I think of it beforehand? I said, “Just a moment! Couldn’t I take a look at it, seeing that it is already here…”

  The director looked very unhappy; he said nothing, but turned his back on me. While I was settling into the chair with great solicitude, the director had retrieved from under the table with the listless assistance of Accetto’s son an enormous and battered sheet of metal with some traces of paint still on it, perhaps a car bonnet or a plane fuselage.

  He sat it on the table and started to pummel it with a massive blacksmith’s hammer, which produced a deafening noise. And perhaps because it was not taking the shape he intended, he swore and cursed the type of iron used, accusing it of being some vile aluminium alloy of little worth, which only made him pound it more violently with increasing anger and bitterness. In the midst of this infernal racket, whose source was but a metre away and spraying me with shards of paint, the letters of the alphabet became all jumbled up in my deafened brain, so I ended up flicking backwards and forwards through the book on a rather random basis. The attendant bowed down to hide himself behind me, as though to shield himself. I could feel his tremulous breath on the back of my neck and it did not smell nice. It was like a gas leak. I was, therefore, caught between two fires, and on top of that, there was the cold wind from the fan that I found very unpleasant when it came my way. For a second, I saw what I was looking for, the twentieth century, but then a shard went in my eye and a hammer blow came down close by, so I probably got confused about which page or turned over several unintentionally. What I read, in the midst of all my difficulties, was this:

  Cycle paths in purgatory

  During the Bordeaux-Parigi bicycle race, the automatism of the Englishman Mills was such that he had to be grabbed at the end of each leg, and placed on a stretcher with his legs in the air. He would continue to pedal in the air and to see the road and dust in front of him. They gave him water and a restorative syrup to drink with a pump.

  Then they put him back on the saddle: four men attempted to hold his legs still and a fifth one quickly strapped his feet to the pedal cranks. This was a perilous moment both for the men and the bicycle.

  Then they launched him off on the road once more.

  He would occasionally regain consciousness and look to the left and the right, and if there was nobody there, he would shift to the side and, still pedalling furiously, answer the call of nature. Immediately afterwards his automatism would once more take over, and he would maintain the same identical rhythm both uphill and downhill. In general, he tended to go in a straight line, but he was able to predict the bends through an unerring sixth sense, and he took the bend on a fixed radius, as though he were calculating it and seeing it, but he never altered the force of each pedal stroke.

  After the finishing line, they lowered him into a bathtub full of water and covered his head with snow. Then he appeared to wake up and stopped pedalling. The contracture of his muscles ceased, he smiled and he said a few kind words to his friends and his trainer.

  He could not remember anything. But on just one occasion, he said he had often dreamt of purgatory where everyone was on a bicycle, but the dream was so full of dust and rubble that he could not say anything very definite about the landscape.

  Chapter T

  The page I had just read was yellowish, a few millimetres narrower than the rest – perhaps a photocopy – and not bound into the book, but fixed there with a rusty pin.

  I had no sooner thought it might be one of Vincenzo Gallo’s interpolative jokes, or one perpetrated by someone working on his behalf, than the director smashed the book in two with a blow of his hammer. I feared that he was going to hammer me as well, such was the passion and the frenzy that had taken hold of him. But the two or three blows that followed only struck the drawer and the book glancingly, as though it were an enemy whose ostentation he could no longer put up with.

  But he did pick on me, “So you too are giving in to the mafia! You too have signed up! Away the lot of you! Clear out, you delinquents and counterfeiters, you swine.” He seemed completely mad, and there was good reason to be frightened. He went out to see Feltpad who, being more accustomed to his boss’s behaviour, carried on smoking his cigarette and leaning lethargically against the door jamb.

  Caper and I withdrew hastily. “Now look what you’ve done! You’ve made him angry,” Caper said.

  “If a person can’t read in a library,” I retorted, “where in the world can he?”

  “He’s got other ideas in his head, and you should not provoke him or hang about in front of him in an insolent manner. That’s the way it is.” He was carrying the sorry remains of the encyclopaedia under his arm; it was Volume X, the letters “s” to “t”.

  “I would like to consult it in peace,” I said.

  “That’s all right, sir.”

  However, I could not get out of my head the idea of a Vincenzo Gallo, a fat man in hiding who hissed, roared, had imitation flies and bats flying around the place, sprinkled erogenous powders that caused horrible blunders, possibly gnawed at books, muddled up papers and deliberately spread misleading information, so that we can no longer be very sure of anything. “But could a man ever become transparent?” I surprised myself with the thought.

  Incautiously, I had actually said it out aloud.

  “Who?” Caper immediately replied, “Vincenzo Gallo?” He saw that I was not denying it, and went on, “One would should really consult a doctor or a vet… Very well then, it’s rare, but it can happen.”

  “Impossible,” I said in order not to encourage further learned disquisitions. I wanted to read the encyclopaedia; it was my last hope and I tried to take it from under his arm.

  But I must have touched on a delicate subject, which perhaps for him was a real thorn in the flesh, because his eyes opened wide and became clearer, and he started to talk. Instinctively he moved his arm away with the book under it, and brought his mouth closer with its gaseous breath that acted as his own bell jar
, a shield. In the meantime, the hammer blows were off again, and they reverberated behind my ears like acute otitis.

  “It is never daytime here and we become depressed,” said Caper with conviction. “If someone has a happy youth in the open air, in here they become disheartened. And then, yes, it can happen. It can happen that a man in particular conditions of stress, subjected to constant psychic pressure which in the long term can build up to tens of tons per cubic centimetre, eventually desires with all his body and all his soul to escape, but at the same time undergoes an equal and opposite force within his heart of hearts that immobilises him in the exact spot he currently occupies – for example, the desk in his office.

  And if that man is repressed and vilified, and particularly if he is fat, then it can happen that one fine day he can no longer stay within his skin, he loses his unity as a human being and he is dispersed into the environment in unidentifiable forms. His organism loses all cohesion, and his organs, like autonomous, responsible beings capable of locomotion, slip stealthily away, some go one way, some the other: the spleen over here and the kidney and bowels over there, and so on with the thyroid, coronary arteries, oesophagus, pylorus, tongue and teeth.”

  “This is all rubbish,” I said, “will you put a stop to it.”

  “No,” he said, “if you want to understand the phenomenon, then you have to start with the idea that a human being is a cluster of animals that live one on top of the other in a state of absolute contiguity. I would have liked to study medicine, and I say this with some knowledge of the subject. When well-being reigns, they too are packed together in a harmonious embrace, as in a nest, but if the life becomes ugly, some of them become irritated, agitated and angry enough to bite. For example, the heart starts to give an occasional kick, the lungs deflate and become depressed, and the bladder will not listen to reason and spill water in protest. None of them want to stay in their proper place: initially there is animosity between them all, but then there is a general stampede. It’s rare, I admit, from a histological point of view, but it does happen. In such cases, we do not talk of the person’s disappearance, but rather of the diaspora of their entire being. Nose, throat, tongue, soft palate and uvula all fly off and mix with the sparrows, barn owls and bats. You can hear them singing on a branch, if there is one, or on a gutter or an exposed nail. They imitate all sorts of birds and after a bit, they are on friendly terms and love to go on excursions together. Ears go off in pairs and look like hummingbirds hovering together. An eye can be lost on the ground, and withdraws into its eyelid, timid as a snail. Nerves spread out all over the place, very fine and insubstantial like a spider’s web: on the spines of books, from one bookshelf to another, on the floor between the tiles, so that you get entangled in them. The heart, on the other hand, follows its own particular nature and runs off like a hare, leaping as far as it can go. Once it is out in the fresh air and feels itself free, it makes a tremendous leap and no one can hold it back any more. No one knows where it goes, except when it darts between the director’s legs or his secretary’s, with its ears erect, and then it loses itself in the distance, where you can only hear some thuds.