Don Ecuménico, that incredible bug, paused theatrically. He’d cackled these last words in a tone that rang pitifully false, redolent of who knows what rancid literatures; and yet his words resonated with poetry and humour as well. Then he continued:
– It was some demon that led me by the hand to the House of Books, no doubt about it. A venerable old Buenos Aires mansion with an oil-painted facade and barred windows, it looked the most innocent place in the world. As the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances later told me, the philanthropic founder of that species of institute had gathered there tome upon tome, in the grip of a strange compulsion – perhaps the passion of a genius or a miser who mindlessly amasses his treasure; or perhaps simply the collectionist mania of the empty man who mechanically fills the hours of his day. The bust of the Founder, moreover, graced the hall of the library; and I can assure you neither his marble features nor his hollow eyes nor his clothing, which the sculptor had respected right down to the tie pin, allowed me to discern whether the man had been an intellectual or an idiot.
”The first reading room was devoted to children, and was usually populated by a legion of restless brats fidgeting among their childish papers under the bovine gaze of a woman security guard whose neckless head appeared to be screwed directly into a torso exuberant in its haunches and udders. The second room was spacious, with ceiling-high stacks, comfortable reading tables, and ancient woodcuts on the walls; there I met the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances; and there, in a clear well-lit space, I first tested my mettle as a reader, not suspecting the future disaster in store for me as a result of this innocent exercise. Let me clarify that Room Number Two specialized in literary works – novels, plays, and poetry lined its shelves. And I began to devour everything, my soul wading in up to its knees in those fictitious worlds. But, gentlemen, I had previously renounced the deceitful parade of images, passions, and sentiments that constitute a human existence – and what did literature do, if not multiply those images, stylize the passions, and fictionally prolong the colourful lie of worldly things? Yes, yes! What my being longed for was to live within a hermetic cube, amid figures and solids invented by geometry, and to surrender myself to abstract ideas, where not even the ghost of a rose might intrude! I had a fight pending with the Eternal, and I could only fight it on enemy territory, which is to say, on the wide, glacial, silent plains of the Abstract. That was when, without intending to, I began to look at the little padded door.
”It was a neatly quilted little door; an insignificant little door off in one corner of the second room; an almost invisible little door, like the ones concealed in catacombs, pyramids, and secret alchemical fortresses. It was quite plausible that behind the little door lay only a poky little storage room filled with brooms, feather dusters, and the like. But if that was the case, why the severe padding on the little door? For an entire week I obsessed over this mystery. Finally, I resolved to sound out the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances. The Librarian was a man of indeterminate age with no discernible tendencies, a strictly neutral man about whom nothing could be affirmed or denied. He was enveloped in the deep but calming silence of plants; he expressed no emotion, ever. His cold, moist eyes seemed to slide over things, alas, smoothly, without penetrating them, the way a stream slips over pebbles. Was he dull-witted, or was some secret concealed within the reserve of that obscure man? When I gently broached the subject of the little door, the Librarian, as I recall, remained stubbornly mute. But hadn’t two strange glints flashed in his eyes? Be that as it may, he turned on his heels without a word and returned to his metal filing cabinets. The next day I again asked about the door, and again the man listened to me with vegetable indifference. But this time something began to slacken inside him, something like a strict resolve that has not quite decided to relax. At last, as distant as ever, he proffered these four words: What do you seek? He uttered them with a sort of tired, rusty voice, as though for all eternity he’d had no other mission than to ask of men: What do you seek? Then, in a fit of trustingness, I told him all. And the Librarian Who Peered Out from Hazy Distances listened for a long while, as coldly as a pair of scales that receives and registers weights. He didn’t encourage me to tell my tale; neither did he approve or disapprove of its terms. When I finished, he made no comment at all, turned his back on me, and went back to his olive-green filing cabinets. But the following day, that fateful man, that inscrutable man, that absurd man opened the little padded door for me; and he did so as mechanically as a guard, without breaking his silence, not a single line of his face stirring.
”Behind the little door loomed a foggy space lit by a kind of glass skylight whose near opacity might have been due to the caretakers’ negligence or just to the ineluctable grime that time continuously deposits on things destined to die. But once accustomed to the ghostly light, I observed not neglect but a state of almost exaggerated order reigning in Room Number Three. Against the walls rose the imposing architecture of three full bookcases. Opposite the skylight was a desk of carved wood, furnished with a lectern, an ancient friar’s chair, and a green lamp. The floor was covered by a large carpet, which swallowed the sound of footsteps and seemed to admonish one to use stealth. Neither paintings nor prints distracted one’s eyes; on the contrary, the furniture, books, rug, even the sky-blue damask covering the walls had lost their original colours and faded to a single tone, indefinite, shabby, dead. Such was Room Number Three, the room hidden behind the little door, the laboratory of a risible transformation, of an evil without glory, of the obscure metamorphosis you behold in me now. But what abomination lurked in that room?
”In Room Number Three, the Founder had collected thick, stiff-spined volumes with yellowed pages: books containing all the illuminations of the soul, all the mad flights of the intellect, all the prudent discourses of reason and the blasphemous audacities come up with by mortal man in his attempts to plumb the Absolute. Well then, gentlemen, I was seeking the Absolute, whether on the wings of love or of rancour, I wasn’t too sure; and I threw myself into reading those books with a voracity that grew keener every time I found an image of what I felt or an answer to my old inner questions. And, sure enough, it was a well-laid road to perdition.
”Before telling you what happened in Room Number Three, I must explain something about the insurance broker called Don Ecuménico, still subsisting within me. At first, my incursions into the Mansion of Books took place in the afternoon and evening. In the mornings, I’d take a run through the oyster beds of my clientele, then rush to the office, deposit the fruits of my labour, and make myself scarce until the next morning. Even though my new work habits weren’t exactly orthodox, I was still good enough at my job that the company didn’t get alarmed; I brought in the normal amount of business, and nobody asked what Don Ecuménico was up to when he was off work. But things changed after the revelation of the little door and what lay behind its precious quilting. I would read till nightfall, at which point the Librarian would drive me out. Then I’d eat something at my rooming house; meals took place amid phantom faces, with me chewing away on Doña Consuelo’s stews along with the latest problem I’d brought from Room Number Three. After supper, I went straight to bed, and the problem bedded down with me, getting into my dreams, keeping me awake, gnawing at my grey matter, and finally releasing me at the threshold of the new day. Exhausted in body and soul, I went back to my morning rounds; but an unspeakable force dragged me against my will back to the Mansion of Books, a force I struggled with for a long time before it finally overcame me. At first I gave in once a week, then twice, finally three times. At the Insurance Company, astonishment and consternation reigned. They began by gently admonishing me, then came the bitter tirades, and then a shameful dismissal that left me jobless and without benefits. Fortunately, I had my savings and lived a very frugal life. I decided then to steer clear of all occupations except the one that took me, morning and afternoon, to Room Number Three. For my bliss was now summed up in the fol
lowing luxuries: to sense, with a shiver of pleasure, the little door closing discreetly behind me; to feel how my soul opened its petals to the unreal luminosity coming from the skylight; to breathe in the odour of bindings, ancient papers, and disinfectants against gnawing insects; to place a book on the lectern and then wrestle with the Divinity, in a struggle of unequal arms but inebriating in that very disparity.
”It was a marvellous road to perdition! It was a mortal leap of pride, in three somersaults which I will now briefly describe:
”First somersault: Immersing myself in the texts of orthodox theologians, I go back to the infantile notion of a Divinity who regards us tenderly. I weep with love over the delectable old pages. I fall into an unctuous piety that makes me laugh at my former self-flagellation and leads me now into subtle ways of temptation. Yesterday, as I passed through the children’s room, I caressed the dear little head of a child cutting out figures; today I looked at the jugs of the woman security guard with the merest hint of indulgence. Careful, Don Ecuménico! Watch out for the big lie!
”Second somersault: I’m now devouring the big series of books in folio format. Strange conceptions about the Divinity. What’s this? God is no longer absolutely impassive, but rather the Being obliged to exteriorize his possibilities of manifestation! And I, Ecuménico, am one of those possibilities! Bravo, Ecuménico! That’s putting it to the old boy Up There! Give’m the old one-two! I go striding around Room Number Three. Then I stand in front of the skylight and let fly with a metaphysical speech that rattles its glass panes. The Librarian from hell unexpectedly comes in, glances around, and goes away. He hasn’t noticed anything, or pretends not to notice!
”Third somersault: a ravenous hunger has me exploring the moth-eaten tomes shelved in the stacks at the back. I laboriously reconstruct lines of prose riddled with holes. And my mind is dazzled, it staggers, it lurches into unfathomable abysses. Great God, what has your vast divinity been reduced to! They used to say you were Being, beyond which nothing existed. And now it turns out there is a Non-Being anterior to you, a Non-Being fabulously rich in metaphysics, a Non-Being of which you are only an affirmation! How brainy those damned Orientals are! Laugh, Ecuménico! And, sitting on the friar’s chair, I laugh my head off, long and loud, till I’m weeping and sniffling with laughter. What a victory, Ecuménico! A lowly insurance broker! And again the Librarian comes in, examines the room, and turns back. He’s heard nothing, or pretends he’s heard nothing.
Here the infernal bug paused, panting. Madness flamed and sparked in his faceted eyes; his spiral-proboscis, completely out of control, alternately slackened and wound itself back up; his thorax was thudding erratically, and a slimy sweat oozed from the fat rings of his abdomen. Then he began to speak in an insufferably shrill, pedantic voice:
– Silence, everyone! Here begins the Book of Don Ecuménico’s Transformations. A hurrah for Being, and two more for Non-Being! Hip-hip-hurrah! Would anyone care for a cup of ambrosia bottled and zealously sealed by the Eternal?
He paused again, as if disoriented. Clearly, Don Ecuménico was raving and he knew it. With an effort of human will, he restored order to his agitated insectoid physique. Then he spoke thus:
– We come now, gentlemen, to the hardest part of my story. It’s no big deal to recount the metamorphosis of a soul, but to describe a body’s transformation is a monstrous task, and thankless to boot, for the narrator must deviate from the usual laws that govern the famous human biped and thus risk foundering on the reefs of his listeners’ incredulity.
”I’d be lying if I claimed to know at just what point my metamorphosis began, though I sometimes wonder if the transformation both in body and soul didn’t start at the same time and develop in tandem. My first clue that something was out of the ordinary was in the behaviour of the Librarian, about whose true identity – man or demon – I was beginning to have my doubts. He’d been in the habit of suddenly showing up in Room Number Three, slipping in stealthily with some excuse that poorly concealed his intent to spy on me; we would sneak oblique glances at one another, then he’d leave shrouded in his eternal air of indifference. But later I noticed that my man, upon entering, would stand there looking perplexed, his eyes searching the entire room until they located me. And yet, there I was, right in front of his nose, sitting as always in the same chair under the skylight! What was wrong with him? Was he going blind? Things came to such a pass that one morning, facing the Librarian, I had to shout to get him to notice my presence. I immediately questioned him about his eyesight – and I’ll never forget the needling irony in his voice when he assured me that it was excellent! I got worried. If there was nothing wrong with the man’s vision, it was logical to suppose that the cause of his optical aberrations wasn’t in him but in me. At once, a clear suspicion, an unutterable fear invaded me. I used to carry around this little mirror for the purpose of inspecting my teeth; well, I spent the better part of the morning fending off the temptation to look at my face in the mirror. Finally, half frightened, half curious, I overcame my qualms and took a look. At first, I couldn’t see my face at all. Straining my sight, I eventually picked out my eyes, nose, mouth, and hair, but they were faded and ghost-like. Then I observed my bottle-green suit, my blue overcoat, my chestnut shoes, and realized they too had lost their factory-made colours and had taken on the unique, indefinable, dead tone characteristic of all things in Room Number Three. No doubt about it! It was a case of mimetic adaptation, comparable to the way certain varmints adopt the ambient colour of the foliage, stones, or stagnant water of their habitat.
”Far from alarming me, the phenomenon redoubled my sense of security and so my confidence. By this point I was spending the whole day in Room Number Three, minus a fifteen-minute break to go out for a glass of milk with vanilla biscuits. My life had organized itself into two isochronic phases: one of metaphysical voracity, which inevitably declined into another of profound lethargy. The truth is, at first, under cover of my recently discovered invisibility, I had fun startling the Librarian, sneaking up on him and blowing a raspberry right in his ear. But finally that little game got boring, and I ended up giving myself over entirely to reading and sleeping. When night fell, I went home to the rooming house, my last link to the realm of men. But one day that link broke, too. It happened like this:
”After one of my spells of post-reading lethargy, I woke up as usual in Room Number Three, curled up in the leather armchair in the light of the green lamp. I stood up, went over to the skylight, and was surprised to discover that outside it was as dark and still as midnight. I opened the famous little door, went into the second room and then on to the children’s room: I roamed through the entire mansion. All was dark and empty, the doors locked, the balconies bolted. No doubt about it: the Librarian, at closing time, hadn’t found me in Room Number Three and, assuming I’d left, had inadvertently shut me up in the big deserted house. Midnight! Alone! The whole mansion was mine! You can’t imagine the dark rapture that came over me at this realization, the intellectual orgy to which I then abandoned myself throughout that night of nights. What legendary proportions, what mythological hues graced the poor little insurance broker called Don Ecuménico!
”From then on, I didn’t go back to my rooming house. I don’t know whether my definitive eclipse alarmed Doña Consuelo, whether she reported it to the police, or whether they looked for me in morgues and hospitals. Henceforth, day and night, Room Number Three was my only residence, the place of my banquets and fits of lassitude. I still went out for fifteen minutes a day to the dairy bar. But later I managed to do without those outings by stocking the pockets of my blue overcoat with enough chocolate, biscuits, and caramels to last me two weeks. Whether negligently or wisely, the Librarian almost never looked in on the room. Moreover, a hard winter had arrived and not many readers were coming to the library. Settled deep in my armchair, I listened to the pitter-patter of the rain on the panes of the skylight. My periods of being awake were growing shorter, my lethargies longer
and deeper.
”One night I awoke with a start: in my soul I felt more lucid than ever before. But my body felt a tremendous weakness. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep, and with increasing alarm I noticed my clothes were ridiculously big on me, my bottle-green suit was falling off my shoulders, my extremities were either no longer there or had shrunk prodigiously within their sleeves and trouser cuffs. Was it a nightmare or not? Careful! My intelligence was wide awake, my eyes registered no other reality than the very reassuring presence of Room Number Three, with its reading table, green lamp, familiar bookshelves, and the skylight drummed by the rain. And yet, it was as though I were tied to the armchair; something held me in place, an inertia dominating my little bit of a physique and prudently warning it against any attempt to stir! But I had no intention of staying stuck there like an oyster; come what may, I had to snap out of it and get back to my studies. Up you get, then, Ecuménico! Back to work! And when I tried to get up, the second revelation of the night occurred. I attempted to place my hands on the table and my feet on the floor, like any creature trying to stand up from a sitting position. But my arms and legs wouldn’t obey the order. Actually, it wasn’t just that my limbs weren’t responding; it felt as if they were no longer even there. As my body attempted to right itself, I lost my balance, tumbled out of the leather armchair, and fell in a muffled, insignificant little heap, the softness of my landing due, I thought, to the ample padding of my clothes. And what a pile of clothes! I felt trapped and suffocated inside them, as if a tent had fallen on top of me. Twisting and turning with a rather disconcerting flexibility, I clambered my way through the stack of familiar garments until I emerged into the light and saw myself naked on the carpet. And what I saw was certainly curious: Don Ecuménico, former insurance broker, had been transformed into a beautiful little creature with a vermiform body, a worm with plump rings gazing in wonder at his new structure!
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 76