The Club Dumas

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  "I like trains," she said.

  "Me too."

  The girl was still facing the window, touching it with the fingertips of one hand. "Imagine," she said. She was smiling nostalgically, obviously remembering something. "Leaving Paris in the evening to wake up on the lagoon in Venice, en route to Istanbul..."

  Corso made a face. How old could she be? Eighteen, twenty at most.

  "Playing poker," he suggested, "between Calais and Brindisi."

  She looked at him more attentively.

  "Not bad." She thought a moment. "How about a champagne breakfast between Vienna and Nice?"

  "Interesting. Like spying on Basil Zaharoff."

  "Or getting drunk with Nijinsky."

  "Stealing Coco Chanel's pearls."

  "Flirting with Paul Morand ... Or Mr. Barnabooth."

  They both laughed, Corso under his breath, she openly, resting her forehead on the cold glass. Her laugh was loud, frank, and boyish, matching her hair and her luminous green eyes.

  "Trains aren't like that anymore," he said.

  "I know."

  The lights of a signal post passed like a flash of lightning. Then a dimly lit, deserted platform, with a sign made illegible by their speed. The moon was rising and now and then clarified the confused outline of trees and roofs. It seemed to be flying alongside the tram in a mad, purposeless race.

  "What's your name?"

  "Corso. And yours?"

  "Irene Adler."

  He looked at her intently, and she held his gaze calmly.

  "That's not a proper name."

  "Neither is Corso."

  "You're wrong. I am Corso. The man who runs."

  "You don't look like a man who runs anywhere. You seem the quiet type."

  He bowed his head slightly, looking at the girl's bare feet on the floor of the corridor. He could tell she was staring at him, examining him. It made him feel uncomfortable. That was unusual. She was too young, he told himself. And too attractive. He automatically adjusted his crooked glasses and moved to go on his way.

  "Have a good journey."

  "Thanks."

  He took a few steps, knowing that she was watching him.

  "Maybe we'll see each other around," she said, behind him.

  "Maybe."

  Impossible. That was another Corso returning home, uneasy, the Grande Armée about to melt in the snow. The fire of Moscow crackling in his wake. He couldn't leave like that, so he stopped and turned around. As he did so, he smiled like a hungry wolf.

  "Irene Adler," he repeated, trying to remember. "Study in Scarlet?"

  "No," she answered. "A Scandal in Bohemia." Now she was smiling too, and her gaze shone emerald green in the dim corridor. "The Woman, my dear Watson."

  Corso slapped his forehead as if he'd just remembered.

  "Elementary," he said. And he was sure they'd meet again.

  HE SPENT LESS THAN fifty minutes in Lisbon. Just enough time to get from Santa Apolonia Station to Rossio Station. An hour and a half later he stepped onto the platform in Sintra, beneath a sky full of low clouds that blurred the tops of the melancholy gray towers of the castle of Da Pena farther up the hill. There was no taxi in sight, so he walked to the small hotel that was opposite the National Palace with its two large chimneys. It was ten o'clock on a Wednesday morning, and the esplanade was empty of tourists and coaches. He had no trouble getting a room. It looked out onto the uneven landscape, where the roofs and towers of old houses peered above the thick greenery, their ruined gardens suffocating in ivy.

  After a shower and a coffee he asked for the Quinta da Soledade, and the hotel receptionist told him the way, up the road. There weren't any taxis on the esplanade either, although there were a couple of horse-drawn carriages. Corso negotiated a price, and a few minutes later he was passing under the lacy baroque stonework of Regaleira Tower. The sound of the horse's hooves echoed from the dark walls, the drains and fountains running with water, the ivy-covered walls, railings, and tree trunks, the stone steps carpeted with moss, and the ancient tiles on the abandoned manor houses.

  The Quinta da Soledade was a rectangular, eighteenth-century house, with four chimneys and an ochre plaster facade covered with water trails and stains. Corso got out of the carriage and stood looking at the place for a moment before opening the iron gate. Two mossy, gray-green stone statues on granite columns stood at either end of the wall. One was a bust of a woman. The other seemed to be identical, but the features were hidden by the ivy climbing up it, enfolding and merging with the sculpted face.

  As he walked toward the house, dead leaves crackled beneath his steps. The path was lined with marble statues, almost all of them lying broken next to their empty pedestals. The garden was completely wild. Vegetation had taken over, climbing up benches and into alcoves. The wrought iron left rusty trails on the moss-covered stone. To his left, in a pond full of aquatic plants, a fountain with cracked tiles sheltered a chubby angel with empty eyes and mutilated hands. It slept with its head resting on a book, and a thread of water trickled from its mouth. Everything seemed suffused with infinite sadness, and Corso couldn't help being affected. Quinta da Soledade, he repeated. House of Solitude. The name suited it.

  He went up the stone steps leading to the door and looked up. Beneath the gray sky no time was indicated on the Roman numerals of the ancient sundial on the wall. Above it ran the legend: OMNES VULNERANT, POSTUMA NECAT.

  They all wound, he read. The last one kills.

  "YOU'VE ARRIVED JUST IN time," said Fargas, "for the ceremony."

  Corso held out his hand, slightly disconcerted. Victor Fargas was as tall and thin as an El Greco figure. He seemed to move around inside his loose, thick woolen sweater and baggy trousers like a tortoise in its shell. His mustache was trimmed with geometrical precision, and his old-fashioned, worn-out shoes gleamed. Corso noticed this much at first glance, before his attention was drawn to the huge, empty house, its bare walls, the paintings on the ceiling that were falling into shreds, eaten by mildew.

  Fargas examined his visitor closely. "I assume you'll accept a brandy," he said at last. He set off down the corridor, limping slightly, without bothering to check whether Corso was following or not. They passed other rooms, which were empty or contained the remains of broken furniture thrown in a corner. Naked, dusty lightbulbs hung from the ceilings.

  The only rooms that seemed to be in use were two interconnecting reception rooms. There was a sliding door between them with coats of arms etched into the glass. It was open, revealing more bare walls, their ancient wallpaper marked by long-gone pictures, and furniture, rusty nails, and fixtures for nonexistent lamps. Above this gloomy scene was a ceiling painted to resemble a vault of clouds with the sacrifice of Isaac in the center. The cracked figure of the old patriarch held a dagger, about to strike a blond young man. His hand was restrained by an angel with huge wings. Beneath the trompe l'oeil sky, dusty French windows, some of the panes replaced with cardboard, led to the terrace and, beyond that, to the garden.

  "Home sweet home," said Fargas.

  His irony was unconvincing. He seemed to have made the remark too often and was no longer sure of its effect. He spoke Spanish with a heavy, distinguished Portuguese accent. And he moved very slowly, perhaps because of his bad leg, like someone who has all the time in the world.

  "Brandy," he said again, as if he didn't quite remember how they'd reached that point.

  Corso nodded vaguely, but Fargas didn't notice. At one end of the vast room was an enormous fireplace with logs piled up in it. There were a pair of unmatched armchairs, a table and sideboard, an oil lamp, two big candlesticks, a violin in its case, and little else. But on the floor, lined up neatly on old, faded, threadbare rugs, as far away as possible from the windows and the leaden light coming through them, lay a great many books; five hundred or more, Corso estimated, maybe even a thousand. Many codices and incunabula among them. Wonderful old books bound in leather or parchment. Ancient tomes with studs in the
covers, folios, Elzevirs, their bindings decorated with goffering, bosses, rosettes, locks, their spines and front edges covered with gilding and calligraphy done by medieval monks in the scriptoria of their monasteries. He also noticed a dozen or so rusty mousetraps in various corners.

  Fargas, who had been searching through the sideboard, turned around with a glass and a bottle of Remy Martin. He held it up to the light to look at the contents.

  "Nectar of the gods," he said triumphantly. "Or the devil." He smiled only with his mouth, twisting his mustache like an old-fashioned movie star. His eyes remained fixed and expressionless, with bags beneath them as if from chronic insomnia. Corso noticed his delicate hands—a sign of good breeding—as he took the glass of brandy. The glass vibrated gently as Corso raised it to his lips.

  "Nice glass," he said to make conversation.

  Fargas agreed, and made a gesture halfway between resignation and self-mockery, suggesting a different reading of it all: the glass, the tiny amount of brandy in the bottle, the bare house, his own presence. An elegant, pale, worn ghost.

  "I have only one more left," he confided in a calm, neutral tone. "That's why I take care of them."

  Corso nodded. He glanced at the bare walls and again at the books.

  "This must have been a beautiful house," he said.

  Fargas shrugged. "Yes, it was. But old families are like civilizations. One day they just wither and die." He looked around without seeing. All the missing objects seemed to be reflected in his eyes. "At first one resorts to the barbarians to guard the limes of the Danube, but it makes the barbarians rich and they end up as one's creditors.... Then one day they rebel and invade, looting everything." He suddenly peered at his visitor suspiciously. "I hope you understand what I mean."

  Corso nodded, smiling his best conspiratorial smile. "Perfectly," he said. "Hobnail boots crushing Saxony porcelain. Isn't that it? Servants in evening dress. Working-class parvenus who wipe their arses on illuminated manuscripts."

  Fargas nodded approvingly. He was smiling. He limped over to the sideboard in search of the other glass. "I'll have a brandy too," he said.

  They drank a toast in silence, looking at each other like two members of a secret fraternity who have just exchanged sign and countersign. Then, moving closer to the books, Fargas gestured at them with the hand holding the glass, as if Corso had just passed his initiation test and Fargas was inviting him to pass through an invisible barrier.

  "There they are. Eight hundred and thirty-four volumes. Less than half of them are worth anything." He drank some more and ran his finger over his damp mustache, looking around. "It's a shame that you didn't know them in better days, lined up on their cedarwood shelves.... I managed to collect five thousand of them. These are the survivors."

  Corso put his canvas bag on the floor and went over to the books. His fingers itched instinctively. It was a magnificent sight. He adjusted his glasses and immediately saw a 1588 first-edition Vasari in quarto, and a sixteenth-century Tractatus by Berengario de Carpi bound in parchment.

  "I would never have dreamed that the Fargas collection, listed in all the bibliographies, was kept like this. Piled on the floor against the wall, in an empty house..."

  "That's life, my friend. But I have to say, in my defense, that they are all in immaculate condition. I clean them and make sure they're aired. I check that insects or rodents don't get at them, and that they're protected against light, heat, and moisture. In fact I do nothing else all day."

  "What happened to the rest?"

  Fargas looked toward the window, asking himself the same question. He frowned. "You can imagine," he answered, and he looked a very unhappy man when he turned back to Corso. "Apart from the house, a few pieces of furniture, and my father's library, I inherited nothing but debts. Whenever I got any money, I invested it in books. When my savings dwindled, I got rid of everything else—pictures, furniture, china. I think you understand what it is to be a passionate collector of books. But I'm pathologically obsessed. I suffered atrociously just at the thought of breaking up my collection."

  "I've known people like that."

  "Really?" Fargas regarded him, interested. "I still doubt you can really imagine what it's like. I used to get up at night and wander about like a lost soul looking at my books. I'd talk to them and stroke their spines, swearing I'd always take care of them.... But none of it was any use. One day I made my decision: to sacrifice most of the books and keep only the most cherished, valuable ones. Neither you nor anyone will ever understand how that felt, letting the vultures pick over my collection."

  "I can imagine," said Corso, who wouldn't have minded in the least joining in the feast.

  "Can you? I don't think so. Not in a million years. Separating them took me two months. Sixty-one days of agony, and an attack of fever that almost killed me. At last, people took them away, and I thought I would go mad. I remember it as if it were yesterday, although it was twelve years ago."

  "And now?"

  Fargas held up the empty glass as if it were a symbol.

  "For some time now I've had to resort to selling my books again. Not that I need very much. Once a week someone comes in to clean, and I get my food brought from the village. Almost all the money goes to pay the state taxes for the house."

  He pronounced state as if he'd said vermin. Corso looked sympathetic, glancing again at the bare walls. "You could sell it."

  "Yes," Fargas agreed indifferently. "There are things you can't understand."

  Corso bent to pick up a folio bound in parchment and leafed through it with interest. De Symmetria by Diirer, Paris 1557, reprinting of the first Nuremberg edition in Latin. In good condition, with wide margins. Flavio La Ponte would have gone wild over it. Anybody would have gone wild over it.

  "How often do you have to sell books?"

  "Two or three a year is enough. After going over and over them, I choose one book to sell. That's the ceremony I was referring to when I answered the door. I have a buyer, a compatriot of yours. He comes here a couple of times a year."

  "Do I know him?" asked Corso.

  "I have no idea," answered Fargas, not supplying a name. "In fact I'm expecting him any day now. When you arrived, I was getting ready to choose a victim...." He made a guillotine movement with one of his slender hands, still smiling wearily. "The one that must die in order for the others to stay together."

  Corso looked up at the ceiling, drawing the inevitable parallel. Abraham, a deep crack across his face, was making visible efforts to free the hand in which he held the knife. The angel was holding on to it firmly with one hand and severely reprimanding the patriarch with the other. Beneath the blade, his head resting on a stone, Isaac waited, resigned to his fate. He was blond with pink cheeks, like an ancient Greek youth who never said no. Beyond him a sheep was tangled up in brambles, and Corso mentally voted for the sheep to be spared.

  "I suppose you have no other choice," he said, looking at Fargas.

  "If there was one, I would have found it." Fargas smiled bitterly. "But the lion demands his share, and the sharks smell the bait. Unfortunately there aren't any people left like the Comte d'Artois, who was king of France. Do you know the story? The old Marquis de Paulmy, who owned sixty thousand books, went bankrupt. To escape his creditors he sold his collection to the Comte d'Artois. But the Count stipulated that the old man should keep them until his death. In that way Paulmy used the money to buy more books and extend the collection, even though it was no longer his...."

  He had put his hands in his pockets and was limping up and down along the books, examining each one, like a shabby, gaunt Montgomery inspecting his troops at El Alamein.

  "Sometimes I don't even touch them or open them." He stopped and leaned over to straighten a book in its row, on the old rug. "All I do is dust them and stare at them for hours. I know what lies inside each binding, down to the last detail. Look at this one: De revolutions celestium, Nicholas Copernicus. Second edition, Basle, 1566. A mere trifle,
don't you think? Like the Vulgata Clementina to your right, between the six volumes of the Polyglot by your compatriot Cisneros, and the Nuremberg Cronicarum And look at the strange folio over there: Praxis criminis persequendi by Simon de Colines, 1541. Or that monastic binding with four raised bands and bosses that you see there. Do you know what's inside? The Golden Legend by Jacobo de la Voragine, Basle, 1493, printed by Nicolas Kesler."

  Corso leafed through The Golden Legend It was a magnificent edition, also with very wide margins. He put it back carefully. Then he stood up, wiping his glasses with his handkerchief. It would have made the coolest of men break out in a sweat.

  "You must be crazy. If you sold all this, you wouldn't have any money problems."

  "I know." Fargas was leaning over to adjust the position of the book imperceptibly. "But if I sold them all, I'd have no reason to go on living. So I wouldn't care if I had money problems or not."

  Corso pointed at a row of books in very bad condition. There were several incunabula and manuscripts. Judging from the bindings, none dated from later than the seventeenth century.

  "You have a great many old editions of chivalric novels."

  "Yes. Inherited from my father. His obsession was acquiring the ninety-five books of Don Quixote's collection, in particular those mentioned in the priest's expurgation. He also left me that strange Quixote that you see there, next to the first edition of Os Lusiadas. It's a I 789 Ibarra in four volumes. In addition to the corresponding illustrations, it is enriched with others printed in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, six wash drawings and a facsimile of Cervantes's birth certificate printed on vellum. To each his own obsessions. In the case of my father, a diplomat who lived for many years in Spain, it was Cervantes. In some people it's a mama. They won't accept restoration work, even if it's invisible, or they won't buy a book numbered over fifty.... My passion, as you must have noticed, was uncut books. I scoured auctions and bookshops, ruler in hand, and I went weak in the knees if I found one that was intact, that hadn't been plowed. Have you read Nodier's burlesque tale about the book collector? The same happened to me. I'd have happily shot any bookbinder who'd been too free with the guillotine. I was in ecstasy if I discovered an edition with margins two millimeters wider than those described in the canonical bibliographies."