The Nocturnal Library
Page 22
In other words, all Italy was in flames, and shortly afterwards France, Great Britain, Austria and the German lands. The conflagration spread beyond the Danube and the Bosphorus, and then like wildfire throughout Asia as far as the Bering Strait, the China Sea and Ceylon. And in Africa, even in the forests of Zambia, the Congo River basin and the deserts of the Ténéré, you could see critics and writers battling it out.
The war lasted fourteen months, but those fourteen months were the equivalent of an apocalypse. All kinds of things were used as arms but, particularly in the early stages, fire was used where the enemy had amassed large forces. Gas was the favoured weapon of the writers, and they released it wherever there was a smell of critic. They walked around with canisters on their backs and rubber tubes for flamethrowers. In this way they burnt entire neighbourhoods and tens of thousands of critics. If they suspected that just one critic was hidden in a wheat field, they would burn the lot just to flush him out, and thus immense tracts of arable land, woodland and pastureland were destroyed by fire, resulting in the slaughter of cattle, horses, sheep, goats and birds, with the subsequent scarcity of supply of butter, cheese, eggs, wool and meat; such was the collapse of civilisation. Propane and methane were used in car bombs against the critics’ conferences and other gatherings.
In Paris, when the entire population was at home to stay out of danger and there were only armed critics on the streets, the underground network was filled with an odourless gas and this was one of the most heinous crimes, because 600,000 people died like rats down there.
The few thousand survivors were left to die of hunger in the court of the Louvre. After just two months, there was no longer a single critic in Paris.
The writers set off with a large liberation army along the railway line that goes from Lyons to Marseilles. They were singing as they marched along in single file, when a whole train driven at full speed by a critic surprised them from the rear and crushed many of them horribly over a distance of ten kilometres. There were 22,000 dead. The survivors, confused and terrified, scattered in small groups around Bourgogne and the Franche-Comté, where they were easily overcome and butchered. The estimated figure is 1,200,000, of whom 125,000 were women and camp followers.
The critics defended themselves with fire-extinguishers.
Initially they were just used for putting out fires, but then it was noted that carbon dioxide in particular could lead to suffocation if used in sealed environments. It was used as a weapon, and we can only guess at the resulting massacres. They used extinguishers based on both powder and foam, and this created panic amongst the crowds of writers, with deadly consequences for all involved. They learnt to spray copper sulphate, sulphur, pesticides and fungicides, which enter the body through pores or inhalation and paralyse the central nervous system. They did also use conventional weapons, although they were never typical of this conflict. Principally they resorted either to means of extermination, as one does with mosquitoes, fleas and moths, or to hand-to-hand fighting and bare fists in an undignified scrum.
But enough of anecdotal evidence; we can divide the campaign into three phases: the first was characterised by large-scale massacres on both sides, and lasted from March 1960 to the end of June, leading to the formation of territories under the control of one side or the other. The second phase was more sluggish but still a very bloody war across battlefronts. The third phase commenced in November and can be defined as one of mutual genocide: the final invention was the so-called bacteriological warfare. The critics captured a writer, injected him with meningitis, scarlet fever, whooping cough and hepatitis, and then sent him back amongst his own people. Given those miserable times of famine and indifference to human life, epidemics broke out with fatality rates running at fifty to sixty or even seventy per cent. The European example was imitated around the world: a black and purulent plague spread amongst the writers, and it lasted three months from December to February, leaving very few alive.
The critics were hit by cholera which proved more virulent than ever before: it dehydrated them, squeezed their stomachs and left them like dried-out entrails. It was the greatest scourge that ever hit mankind. However, the civilian population was miraculously unaffected. They were incredulous onlookers who tried to contain the damage to themselves and their property.
So no armistice or peace treaty was signed, partly because there was no principle of representation. The more authoritative or, perhaps one should say, the more vicious of their leaders died in the first week of the war, victims of gas. The survivors suffered from delirium, jaundice, scurvy and stereotypy.
By the end of March of 1961 in the northern hemisphere with the sun entering Aries, a generally milder climate deprived the few critics and writers still alive of every last remnant of vitality. The season was a kind of universal antibiotic. In the other hemisphere there were still some lingering cases of leprosy, distemper and even the odd brawl, but they were now overcome by hunger. So what was the result of the war? The percentages went back down below their historic levels, and there were neither victors nor vanquished. The dead were close to one hundred million, with equal numbers on each side. There were horrifying piles of partially buried skeletons near all the capital cities, but every city and every town had its socalled literary cemetery, an ossuary without writing and without names, in which the bones were all mixed up together and no longer belonged to any flag. Critics and writers lie in these artificial mounds like ants and flies.
The more serious problem were the maimed, crippled and shell-shocked, who altogether number between thirty and forty million, with a prevalence of mentally disturbed and atrophic writers (16% more) and a corresponding prevalence of critics who had gone blind, lost limbs or suffered third-degree burns to 40–50% of the body. They were a pitiful sight: in enormous hospitals for the chronically ill, you can still find them today seated alongside each other with vacant and stuporous expressions, like pieces of dried wood, and nearby critics promenade to the sound of the mechanical joints and wheels of which their prostheses are made. Arguments occasionally break out, but very rarely. In a hospital in Dortmund, four writers covered a critic with a nylon bag and let him suffocate. In Lille the writers, who were the majority, got their fun from swelling up some asthenic critics with a pump and throwing them into a fountain to see them float. In Krakow a critic systematically poisoned the writers’ soup with lead oxide, causing several deaths.
There was an inquest and the critic was put in isolation. It appears that he was not convinced that the war was over.
But these were isolated incidents.
The outcome was that during the first few years after the war, writers were almost nowhere to be found. In the whole of Europe, there were only thirty who were ablebodied and capable of rational thought (i.e. 0.00001% of the population). Some states were entirely without writers:
Belgium, Austria and North America, where the war had been at its most ferocious, and descended in the final month into a daily round of hand-to-hand fighting through the entrance halls of houses, in the lifts and up the stairs.
The race of critics was also nearly lost: there was a report of a few in Bermuda, and one on an atoll in the Coral Sea, who was however debating the literary concerns of fifty years earlier. Still others, but very few, lived silently in the countryside, feeding on vegetables.
Chapter Z
It was after eight o’clock. “Perhaps Perbeni was right,” I thought, “you cannot trust encyclopaedias: they’re in the hands of the mafia.” I was outraged.
The window was open to let a bit of air in. But dawn seemed not to have arrived that morning, or at the very least it was late, because outside it was still dark. Anguished and perplexed, I put those useless pages down on the bedside table. My head and my teeth ached; I closed my eyes for a second.
I don’t know how much time passed; perhaps half a minute or perhaps a whole one. When I felt a puff of air, I opened my eyes and suddenly there was broad daylight, which I found quite ast
onishing. That was not the day’s only incomprehensible surprise. The light bulbs were working normally and producing their usual brightness. I looked on the bedside table, on the floor, inside the drawer, under the sheet and under the pillow, but the pages torn from the encyclopaedia were nowhere to be seen. It was as though they had disappeared into the ether. There was a dusty notebook. The alarm had gone off some time ago.
And what day was it anyway?
Copyright
Translation copyright © Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd 2010
First published in 1991 as Le tentazioni di Girolamo © Ermanno Cavazzoni
E-book edition published in March 2013
Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd.
3 Sulaisiadar
An Rubha
Eilean Leòdhais / Isle of Lewis
Alba / Scotland HS2 0PU
ISBN 9781908251237
The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.
This translation has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
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