The Nocturnal Library

by Ermanno Cavazzoni

  The lungs are mammoths whose muffled roar is cavernous.

  They go in search of air or they will die out. If it is cold, steam comes out with their breath. Glands look like toads and salamanders. They lie under stones and secrete mucus and poison. And the bowels? Well, the bowels slip out of a person’s backend and go downwards; they’re looking for dampness and maybe pass an old latrine or find an old disused sewer, and there they reign like the royal python at the mouth of the Brahmaputra, swimming in the black mud and feeding on rats, frogs and tadpoles, but going up to the surface at dawn to enjoy the view.

  “What about the head, though! Its case history is the most unpredictable. During the period of pain and stress, when sufferers are convinced that they are about to explode but haven’t exploded yet, it appears that their heads exude some kind of liquid – an acidulous, spirituous product of the pressure in their brains – through the pores of the forehead, temples and neck, and they can smell like a kind of yogurt of millions of micro-organisms fermenting within it. Then one night this so-called human brain goes outside, like leaving an anthill, and its contents swarm on the pillowcase and initially remain within a small radius.

  Then they gradually explore further afield but still in the area: the bedstead, the wall and the bedside table.

  Sufferers have the sensation of being in a wonderful, spacious and evanescent dream that lightens their load, and in the meantime their brains are wandering off in single file, as though they were ants going up an electric wire. Thus the lamp is giving off a tiny amount of light, in spite of being switched off. Even the brass knob on the chest of drawers, the iron one on the bed, the hinges and handle of the door are also giving off this very weak light, like so many brushstrokes of phosphorus. When these myriads of insects dry, they leave behind minute silver husks, which at the slightest breath of air lift up in a cloud of fine dust like icing sugar, but the sufferers’ heads are left empty. The insects move away in swarms that are increasingly rarefied, variable and free from any obligation to be intelligent. Finding themselves in the open with a generous food supply, these insects can grow up to visible dimensions. They grow legs, wings, wing cases, and occasionally pincers or aculei, according to what they have specialised in. They spread and reproduce. They can easily be mistaken for normal insects, but a naturalist would not know how to classify them, even though they resemble better-known species. If they gather together under the bark of a tree, in a hole in a piece of wood or within a hollow, and if they are also in large numbers, tightly packed together and a little syrupy, then they can still produce a glimmer of intelligence, perhaps some vague childhood memory, which cannot however express itself, except through a faint, luminescent dream isolated from everything else.

  “At the same time, all the skin sags like a paper bag, but remains within the person’s clothes, which however are carelessly thrown in the dirty-clothes bag to be sent to the laundry.

  “These cases are extremely rare. Perhaps the only one was that of our ex-employee, Vincenzo Gallo. In any event, they elude clinical observation because they occur when there is no one around. In bed at home, on the chair in the office or behind the desk in school, all that is left is just a few flakes of cutaneous tissue, the odd chewed nail, a fluffy hair or two, a shirt, a jacket and little else. They say all that remained of Vincenzo Gallo was his complete skin on the coat stand along with his clothes, always supposing it isn’t a rubber joke or a very modern diver’s suit.

  “It could be said that Vincenzo Gallo is still in the library’s employ, but scattered all over the place under various animal guises. It is highly unlikely that they will all come back together again: they are frightened of the director Perbeni, and besides they have now gone wild.

  They are taking their revenge: they gnaw the books and the shelving, they frighten the staff, and they sting and torment those who fall asleep, but not just them. Perhaps one day the whole place will come tumbling down and here will be open country again with the appropriate fauna, and when people look at a grasshopper, a worm, a chicken flea or a spider, they will never know whether or not they were once part of Vincenzo Gallo.”

  While Caper was talking, I managed to penetrate the barrier of natural gas that surrounded him and take the book off him. There was a door open, and we entered a long and narrow box room. There, to my surprise, was Iris – yes, none other – and she was looking in the mirror, combing her hair and preparing, it would appear, to go out.

  “Are you talking about Vincenzo Gallo?” she said on hearing Caper’s last words.

  I didn’t want to take any notice of her and lowered my head, because in my opinion she most certainly had been an accomplice of Albonea Bucato at great cost to myself.

  Instead I had opened the encyclopaedia and had placed it on the only chair, which had an overcoat on it. There were other coats hanging from hooks on the wall, and umbrellas in the umbrella stand.

  “You, my little Caper, do not know everything,” Iris told him.

  I wanted to study the twentieth century and was leaning over the book as I thumbed my way through it. I suddenly found, “Twentieth Century, Chronicle of”. But on one side I had Caper whose sickly breath forced me to turn the other way, towards Iris. I was between them, and their words had to pass through me. Iris was as lovely as ever. “Ah! If only I didn’t have this exam,” I thought. Instinctively I cast a furtive eye on her mouth which was soft, pink and glabrous – if anything spring-like. And her voice was a fox trap.

  Chapter U

  “You, my little Caper,” said Iris close to my ear, “don’t know the celebrated story of Vincenzo Gallo’s childhood, when he was thin and could pass through a keyhole.”

  “I did once know it, I did,” said Caper close to my other ear.

  “If you don’t know it, then I’ll tell you: Vincenzo Gallo, at the age of four, was a skinny and delicate little scamp, who drove his nanny crazy. At the age of five he started to upset people. He used to attach lighted catherine-wheels and stink bombs to their clothes as they were passing by and, while they were screaming and struggling to put out the flames that were spreading across their clothing, he would steal their hats, gloves and purses. He did this in response to a congenital instinct of his.”

  I stared at the encyclopaedia in despair, with time inexorably beating its rhythm in my epiglottis. I pretended to be reading in order to reclaim a little silence, but my eyes could not get past the title, because Iris’s voice was permeating my ear and left cortex like a hemiplegia. “God willing she will get this over and done with quickly,” I said repeatedly to myself, having noticed that she had started this story from the man’s childhood.

  “When the time came for Vincenzo Gallo to go to school,”

  Iris continued, “there was this teacher who was supposed to educate them; he never stopped talking from the moment he entered the class in the morning, but on the whole no one listened to him because they didn’t want to be distracted from their principal occupation, which was stealing. The older children set an example and educated the smaller ones, so that the class made enormous progress in the arts of dissembling, nimbleness and sleight of hand. There was a hive of activity under the desks, with recourse, where necessary, to sneezing powder and itching powder. They even practised on the teacher, but mainly for the spectacle this produced: for instance, they would hurl flies towards his mouth, which interposed themselves between his words, buzzing as they did so and altering his phonemes, and then suddenly flew off like incorrect consonants. This was a little frightening for the poor teacher, who started to stammer. He thought it was a weakness of his own, a sign of his advancing years.

  “Anyway Vincenzo Gallo was one of the most accomplished pupils before three months were out. He could hide small objects in his teeth, nose and folds of his eyelids, and what he hid were needles, drawing pins, breadcrumbs, threads, nibs, tiny strips of paper, tissues and blotting paper. He hid other objects between his toes, under his tongue or between his cheeks and his gums.
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  Under his armpits, for example, he would keep salami, bread and two fried eggs; he had a locker in his ear. His hair was very long and thick, and in a sense acted as a strongbox. If everyone in class fell asleep during the siesta period, the janitors would come in creeping along in complete silence, and rummage around in pencil boxes, folders and dust jackets, but their hands were like air, so light and cautious were they, and even if someone woke up, they did not notice. They stole off Gallo a watch that he had swallowed, and a tooth that looked as if it were made of silver off another boy, and their takings included fountain pens, money, pencils, combs, elastic bands, laces and even shirts and other items of clothing that were being worn at the time. The fact is, however, that these janitors were never caught in the act, and no one ever saw them.

  All this was mere speculation, because some objects, especially the minuscule ones, disappeared never to be seen again. For this reason, the janitors were looked up to at school as the supreme ideal of perfection, everyone’s shared aspiration to become invisible.

  “One day at the school gate, Vincenzo Gallo was going about his business of attaching smoke and flashes to a group of virtuous ladies, when two policemen saw him and gave chase. In a single movement he was hidden under one of their skirts, for he was still very short and as thin as a stick. But the policemen could see his feet, and to avoid capture, he set fire to the skirt. In the ensuing melee, he just managed to make his escape, taking with him a soft tulle ribbon and shoe buckle. With the policemen at his heels, he leapt on a tram which came by at high speed. But his mania for matches caused a fire to start on one of the seats. The passengers screamed, as did the driver because he couldn’t find the brake pedal. At the bottom of the hill he was caught at a roadblock set up by the police and fire brigade: he was found hidden in a briefcase with two locks under a gentleman’s arm. This is just to show how skilled he was even then. When they brought him out, four policemen were holding him as tight as they could. They took him to the chief of police, but all of a sudden he slipped up a trouser leg of one of the officers who had brought him in, because the officer was busy with the exacting act of standing to attention. Another officer caught sight of Vincenzo Gallo’s clever move and had grabbed the first officer’s knee, thus neglecting the decorum required by good discipline. The disorders occurring in chief of police’s office were turning him red in the face. But Vincenzo Gallo did not want to come out.

  They pulled from above and pulled from below, and eventually a fire lit from behind forced him out of the trousers. It seems unbelievable, but you have to remember that he was as thin as an anchovy and besides, these were just trifles compared with what happened later. While the chief of police was writing Gallo’s personal details in the register, the nib disappeared, then the pen, then ink from inside the ink pot; they searched him, but found nothing.

  They wanted to ascertain his height with a measuring tape, but in the meantime the register had disappeared. They sent for another one, but now there was no measuring tape. The chief of police was beside himself with anger, and he still could not get his hands on the boy.”

  Iris spoke well, like someone reading aloud, and all the time, she carried on combing her hair and looking at herself in the mirror. I gawked at her lips and almost forgot my own existence.

  “Once he had started down this road, Vincenzo Gallo inevitably spent his teenage years going in and out of prison and institutions for young offenders, but as the years passed, it became increasingly difficult to apprehend him, put him inside and keep him there. To tell the truth, the justice system is completely impotent when it comes to characters like this, because there was no padlock, no bolt and no window that he could not open. He could escape when and how he liked, and could always avoid capture by camouflaging himself in a fraction of a second or by actually disappearing in front of policemen’s eyes. He often just did it for practice or amusement. He was twelve. He was impudently lingering so that they could surround him with ten or twenty men – the number made no difference – who would handcuff him and attach those handcuffs with a double chain to the wrists of two massive officers of the law, one on each side. Two more officers went ahead and four followed behind. These latter four were champion runners, swordsmen and lassoers. The two on either side were wrestling instructors. Those ahead of him were consummate sharpshooters, and they were armed. Vincenzo Gallo waited for a crowd to be formed, as he had already developed an instinct for the theatrical: passers-by stopped to take a look, the shopkeepers ran into the street because his name was becoming famous, and then people gathered at the windows – whole families with children, aunts and a grandfather who took up their positions in the front row. And then it happened: quite suddenly Vincenzo Gallo was gone and all the athletes and wrestlers were quite superfluous, because they never saw him escaping.

  People simply turned to look at each other, and they realised that he was no longer where he had been. You have no idea: the applause! And the tricks he used always changed and were invented in the very moment they were implemented. You might say that on each occasion he produced a work of art: handcuffs, padlocks and chains, it was as if they didn’t exist. He slipped them off like someone who had no bones, and then he simply disappeared. For example, he would make a feint as though to escape and the policemen would close their ranks around him, but he was no longer there. They speculated that he had escaped down a manhole, that he had entered a hatchway down a tube, or that he had dressed up as a policeman and was still there amongst them. They came up with the most absurd and unlikely hypotheses: that he could make himself small, dry himself out and get into someone’s pocket, or that his capture had been an optical illusion, all smoke and mirrors. They even thought that the real Vincenzo Gallo was remotely operating a rubber puppet that looked like him to deceive people, then at the appropriate moment he would deflate it.

  The police officers wrote in their reports that there was a piece of bowel left over on the ground, some nylon threads, and they found clothes pegs, a smear of methylated spirits, and threads from his jacket. Sometimes his hat was left on the ground, sometimes a shoelace and they were irrefutable evidence that he had been there, and that for a short while they had caught and tied him up. But no more than that.

  “When he reached the age of fourteen, a magistrate, who thought himself more astute than the others, summoned him for trial and swore that no one would lay a finger on him until the sentence had been read. Gallo promptly went to sit down at his place in the dock. But then the clerk of the court’s pen disappeared, sheets of paper flew off, ink was spilt on the floor but then got back into the ink pot or on the judge’s chair. A lawyer’s wallet vanished and was found in another man’s pocket, causing mutual recriminations and police charges. Eggs and chicks appeared amongst the legal papers. Chickens were flying about the place and the court officials were unable to catch them, and everything was turned topsy-turvy in the pursuit, which the public, witnesses and prosecutors joined in. At some stage, it then appeared that another Vincenzo Gallo in ermine was seated in the presiding judge’s chair and the presiding judge was handcuffed and seated in the dock. The jury were all wearing the threecornered hats of the carabinieri. The confusion was at its climax: no one could find their own jacket, hats were floating in the air, quite possibly on invisible threads with hooks; the owners of the hats were attempting to leap in the air to retrieve them, and they clambered up on table or one would go on another’s shoulders forming human pyramids. The ushers were required to form the base, but the poor fellows could not hold up that weight and the whole thing collapsed and crashed down on benches, crush barriers and onlookers, from which Vincenzo Gallo’s innocent and ironic face popped up. At this stage the public prosecutor went back on his word and screamed, “Hold him still! Arrest him! Handcuff him!” The carabinieri stopped running after the hens and sought him out in the midst of that crush of bodies and pile of chairs. Thinking they had seen him seated and barefoot in the public gallery, they rushed to grab him, but
it was the judge who was wearing Gallo’s meagre jacket and started to squawk like a magpie calling for help. Meanwhile Vincenzo Gallo appeared and disappeared, producing smoke as he did so – smoke from which he would re-emerge on each occasion stupefyingly transformed: he looked like an old lady, a bishop, a swimmer, the man-in-the-street, the king, queen and jack of hearts. In the end, when the hunt had also been joined by the lawyers, witnesses, judges, typists and jurors, he shot into a drawer like a rocket or so it appeared. They immediately opened it, but there was no sign of him. On such occasions, all they could expect to find were an egg, talcum powder or smoke bombs.