Caper blinked and sighed. I shifted away from the infernal breath this produced. Iris had not yet finished; it seemed that she never would.
“Well,” she continued, “it occasionally happens that childhood is something glorious and the rest of one’s life is exactly the opposite. This is what happened when Vincenzo Gallo started to put on weight. Initially he tried to prevent this: he ate bran, chicory and hayseed, but with such an appetite that it was all absorbed, included wood fibres. The rabbit, duck and doves looked on as he swelled up almost in front of their eyes. His clothes were tight, the stitching ripped and the buttons popped off his waistcoat, trousers and jacket. He could no longer do up his shoes. Even the birds – blackbirds, chaffinches, hoopoes, etc. – abandoned their accommodation, because there was no more space and they didn’t want to die. They perched on the chairs and wires, and studied him sullenly. He went on a diet, but that was not the point, because getting fat was now his destiny, and in the absence of anything else, he grew fat on air and the smell of roast meat. Only the fleas found room to stay, but then even they started to be fearful and went to live above his ear, because they could hear the clothing splitting and sense that his skin was incredibly taut. They felt pity for him. He said to people, “Tie me up”, and then lay there all tied up like a salami. He had himself put in a box, and said, “Handcuff me.” They waited ten minutes or half an hour, and reopened the box. He was still there, red in the face with just the strain of thinking about it. He would mutter, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ He had himself tied up and thrown in the sea, but he just floated like a boat and was in no danger. Some children swam out, climbed on board him and started to row.
“Yes, all this will sound a little over the top, but it was Vincenzo Gallo himself who told me it in strictest confidence. As he was now too fat to pursue the career of conjurer, he was shut up in here to work as a clerk.”
Chapter V
When Iris got to this point, it was as though I was coming round after a period of unconsciousness, because a piercing siren was ringing and a great crowd of people were coming through the door. They were looking for their coats and umbrellas; it was going-home time for the employees.
Time was up and I had to get a move on. It was eight o’clock and it was daytime. I had achieved precisely nothing, and all night I had been continuously distracted.
My anxiety and torment returned, and I quickly tore five or six pages from the encyclopaedia. I looked up: there was the head of the arbitrator Pantani sticking out of a small window in the ceiling just above me. He was looking at me and said, “Not that!” but there was already such a crush that the chair was knocked over, and the encyclopaedia fell and was trampled underfoot. I too was caught up in the midst of the crowd. Caper was entirely swallowed up by it and could no longer be seen. On the other hand, Iris and I had become pressed one against the other, face to face, and completely adherent in all our other parts, like sardines in a tin, so that I became intimately aroused. In the crowd, I could see Accetto, Tiraboschi, Rasorio, Santoro, Fischietti and Guastalamenti. I also saw Natale being manhandled and squeezed like a cork, and the director Perbeni who, being smaller, tended to disappear below people’s shoulders. I nearly brushed Iris’s mouth, but she did not respond. Next to me, Feltpad whispered, “I’ve such a headache!” I held on tight to my pages under my armpit and inside my jacket. But in that throng, there was someone pinching me, someone pulling my hair and someone sticking straws in my ears. Someone was tickling me and fumbling with fingers that felt like feathers. I had the taste of salt in my mouth, and my naked foot was constantly being trodden on. We were pushing each other, but staying in exactly the same spot. Once again I was about to be slave to my senses.
Then I saw Pantani in the distance, followed closely by Mrs Bucato. He was floundering about in the middle of the crush and trying to open a path in my direction. He was making some threatening gestures, but I couldn’t hear what he was shouting over the hum of voices and the shuffling of feet. Perhaps he was saying, “Thief, stop thief!”
I knew that I would never get out of there, even though everyone was looking at me with benevolent expressions. I made a supreme effort and managed to detach myself from Iris and force my way through the crowd. I was in fact breathing laboriously – in fact I was snoring.
I pushed so hard that I eventually found myself outside and in front of the door to my own house. Strangely, no one else had come out of the library.
I went in. The bed was unmade and I was a complete mess: dressed like a beggar, covered in dust, feathers, threads and spider webs. I had no buttons, my pockets were torn and my elastic broken. Flying insects were caught up in my hair, and the sole was off one of my shoes. My mouth was numb and swollen with the residual toothache. However, I did have the pages torn from the Very Modern Encyclopaedia.
I lay on the bed, opened them, and tried to read them in the little light there was in the room.
Twentieth Century, Chronicle of
1901 marked the beginning in the Great Book Explosion.
Up to that time, the average time per capita devoted to reading in Europe was below 0.05%, which means just 43 seconds every 24 hours. Between 1900 and 1910, the figure leaps up to one hour and 22 minutes per person per day. The further progression was vertiginous: in 1911 one hour and 40, in 1912 two hours, then steady growth up to 1935 (7.15 hours) and slower growth until the highest ever result of 8.49 in 1959. As the figures were arithmetical averages, this means that some sections of the population were reading for 14 or 15 hours per day between 1950 and 1959. With a slight delay the other continents followed the European pattern, the first amongst them being North American and Japan. It could be said that this was the most striking feature of the Modern Era.
In the evening during the fifties, very few people would be seen in the streets because the majority were at home reading, and even the very few who were wandering around in the night carried small paperbacks. Social habits were changing rapidly: families ate in a hurry, and then rushed back to their books, one family member on the sofa, another in the armchair, another on a chair in the kitchen and yet another perhaps on the lavatory seat. The maid curled up under her bedclothes would read the books already read by the lady of the house, who would pass the small hours with the bedside lamp on. The gentleman of the house, on the other hand, would spend the whole night in the drawing room, only falling asleep at dawn with his face down on the last page of a crime thriller. These were the follies of the time. But the same was true of daytime on the building sites, on the trams and in the offices: everyone had their book ready with its bookmark, and as soon as there was a break, everybody picked up their book and returned to their reading, and there was a general sigh of disgruntlement when the end of the break period was signalled. This illustrates very well the moral climate of the time.
You could not say that political meetings and conferences were either successful or a failure, because attendance was very good when they coincided with working hours, but it was clear that there was little interest in the matters under discussion, as everyone was distracted by some book hidden under a newspaper, in a folder or stuck to the back of the chair in front. The members of the government, the party’s central committee or whatever body was involved, would keep one eye on a book held on their knees, while continuing to take part in the panel and nod their agreement with their heads, and the speaker, irritated himself by the sheer volume of his own words, would stand in silence behind the microphone reading some novel with the excuse that he was looking for a quotation, while all around everyone was happily reading. The sound engineer, the translator, the personnel director and the staff on duty at the doors, they were all reading. Eventually there would be complete silence in these political meetings, like the reading room in a library, and occasionally it would continue for a considerable period to everyone’s great satisfaction.
Then came the famous crash of 1959: in the space of a few days everyone had stopped reading, indeed people felt
a certain repugnance for books and they all wanted to get rid of them.
To give an idea of the gravity of this situation, suffice it to say that some 54 million writers suddenly found themselves without employment, and on top of that there were more than three times that number who were economically dependent on writers (3.4 individuals for each writer). It has been estimated that during the fifty years of unprecedented and quite insane growth, Italy reached a density of writers out of the total population of 6%, about 1,800,000. The figures were similar in France and Germany. In England they rose to 7% and 8% in Ireland. The European average settled at about 5.5% with highpoints of 12% in the cities of Prague and Vienna. The rural percentages were much lower for Austro-Hungarian writers, close to 0.3–0.2%. The phenomenon was equally widespread and extreme in Asia, which, it’s true, had extensive areas that were still empty of writers for climatic reasons, such as the Turanic Plateau, the Sub-Siberian Steppes, the Salt Desert of Takla Makan and Karakum Desert, but this was more than compensated for by the very high figures for India, Japan, China and Siberia. The same can be said of South America, Australia and Oceania: there were islands – the Solomons, the Fijis and the Marquesas – which produced the unique phenomenon of an overwhelming majority of writers from ethnic minorities (70%), who during that fifty-year period imposed themselves on the local population, which was often illiterate and resistant to continuous reading. Part of this local population fled to the mountains, taking refuge in volcanic craters and in the dense tropical vegetation, and part of them accepted literacy, schools and books, and like the rest of the world, ended up slaves to this extreme mania for reading. Having forced reading of their books on that 15-20% of the indigenous population, these writers also imported the diseases typical of sedentary life and the inhalation of stuffy and stale air: arthritis, colitis, ulcers and luxations caused by decubitus, not to mention ophthalmological and cerebral illnesses. Following the recession and overcome by a pernicious neurasthenia and a sense of insecurity, writers started to migrate, driven by rumour and hope, and pour into Italy and the Mediterranean area. German writers, along with Dutch, Swedish, Finnish and Czech ones, went up the Rhine, the Meuse, the Danube and the Elba, and crossed the Alps at Brennero or Tarvisio on foot or by car. 50% travelled with their family, 10% with one or two pupils who were not yet writers however, 20% with a sexual partner, and the remaining 20% on their own or with a companion. The French, English, Basques, Spanish and Moroccans, who gathered in the Rhone valley, came over the San Gottardo, Sempione, Moncenisio, Frejus and Tenda passes. Many of these then set off in the direction of Rome. Bands of ragged and half-starved writers terrorised the course of the Tiber.
You came across some yellow faces that looked like they had come straight from prison; these people with foulsmelling hair could be seen tearing up wild chicory and rocket, and cutting a slice of bread with a penknife. Many slept or lived in their cars, and many others in the Colosseum, the Caracalla Baths and the ancient Forum, where they had little sanitation and few means of support.
It is startling to think that within a few months the population of Rome rose from three to thirteen million.
These are estimated figures, given both the impossibility of any precise quantitative verification of this flood of immigrant writers and the progressive abandonment of the city by its previous residents. By the beginning of the summer holiday of 1959, the immense and vociferous horde of writers had taken possession of the city and its suburbs.
The fact is that the critics too found themselves unemployed and in a state of unrest. It may seem incredible but there were even more critics than writers, but they were less visible and more respectable. As a rule of thumb, the growth rate of critics in normal times has an average coefficient slightly higher than the rate of growth of writers.
If, for example, the writers’ coefficient is an annual +1%, which means that in a hundred years their number has been multiplied by a factor of two, the critics with an absolute coefficient of 1.01, or in other words 0.01 higher than that of the writers, will double in just 92 years. This is true if the rate of growth remains unchanged over a period of time, which in reality does not happen: there are periods in which there are demographic explosions for critics while writers undergo a decline, or vice versa. There can also be joint fluctuations at the same rate with sudden rises and falls which can, in particular conjunctures, reach 2.8%. During the fifty years of vertiginous growth for writers, the rates for critics were initially below those recorded over the last 120 years, as though the critics were behind their times. But then they made up for it and overtook the writers’ European and North American record by 0.04.
The critics usually have a more non-migratory temperament, but their abnormal numbers did put pressure on the administration of public services, mortgages, public transport and subsidised canteens, and this created widespread intolerance, but also a sense of shared responsibility: “We allowed this growth to happen,” people would say, “we cosseted them, we treated them as the jewel in the crown, and now we find that we don’t have the resources to pay for them.” Others, like ecologists and environmentalists, said that it could have been predicted that this insane and irresponsible growth would eventually reach the point where it would seriously compromise the future viability of our planet. Several thousand tons of critics needed to be disposed of (this was the expression used at the time) without causing damage to existing human settlements. Large-scale retraining proved impossible, because senior office workers refused to work with them. The few that were recruited proved to be lazy, gossipy, bad at spelling and always smelling of onions. The majority – and the figures are staggering – stayed at home or on the stair landings spreading false rumours on the expenses for the joint maintenance of apartment blocks.
Or they would crowd into the periodicals room at the library or the waiting rooms at bus and railway stations.
There were always some seated at bus stops, on the underground, in the shopping arcades and reading the newspapers and playbills pasted to the walls. They were always arguing and questioning the price of things with a phraseology that the normal population found extremely wearying. There were, it’s true, those who continued to joke about it and did not see the first sign of the coming war. “Be careful, or you’ll find a critic in your soup,” used to be said with excessive frivolity. No one could do anything without a small crowd of critics forming around them and then starting quietly or loudly to pass judgement, give advice, shake their heads and then after a while to needle each other, divide into factions, and inevitably down came the slaps, fists, curses, shoves and stones, as is easy to imagine in the case of idle good-fornothings.
A few statistics will help: the greatest concentrations of critics were in the large conurbations, where the figures rose to 13.3% (Turin, Milan and Genoa), 12.2% (Bologna, Piacenza, Rome and Naples) and 11% (Catania, Lecce and Venezia). There were lower levels in the small cities with populations of less than 200,000, but went up again in small towns, occasionally with percentages higher than those of the large metropolises (Sanremo, Imola and San Severo). This is to restrict ourselves to Italy, but the situation was similar in the rest of Europe and the four continents, which excludes the Antarctic where only very few forms of animal and vegetable life can survive.
The first skirmishes and warnings of the war to come occurred just before Ash Wednesday in 1960, when 140 writers on two coaches were passing through the town of Vimercate, bare-chested, chanting loudly and waving their flags. They passed a bar under whose canopy there was a small group of critics displaying well-developed sneers of disapproval, and as they had some tomatoes in an advanced state of fermentation, they did what any writer would have done if they came across a critic with that typical expression crying out for a well-aimed slap or, supposing some are handy, tomatoes. More critics ran out of the bar, others came to the windows, others were wandering about or watching the television. As it was a sleepy little town, the shouting could be heard everywhere.
There was another version of this first incident: a writer was travelling the hills of Chianti on his motorbike. It was the first Sunday of Lent and there were three critics on a hay cart, on which they had got a lift. They were eating cherries and on seeing the writer behind them blowing his horn and screaming that he was in a hurry, they though it amusing to spit their cherry stones at him. Naturally the writer was overcome by a wave of anger and indignation.
But what could he do? Being the reckless fool he was, he took out his lighter and set fire to the hay cart. The only survivor was the tractor driver who was pulling it.
Whether there is any truth in either story, or whether they were simply rumours that came out of nowhere, there was a succession of vendettas, assaults and massacres throughout Italy. In Milan, 15,000 critics were drowned with their children. In Genoa the critics were masters of the city, but four thousand writers landed on the coast and did another Saint Bartholomew’s Night. A column of Hungarian and Bohemian writers was stopped at Treviso and massacred under a motorway flyover. Other militarily inexpert writers were lured into the marshlands of the Po and there they were gunned down like woodcocks.
The Nocturnal Library Page 21