(…)
On his way to the Public Library, he stopped off at the Post Office to see what had appeared. One cheque, three months late. A book to review; that would be three hundred words saying what it was like, and three hundred words saying what it wasn’t like: fine. An invitation to a conference.
Several letters from Elsa – a birthday batch of correspondence. These days he always suffered from a temptation to put her letters straight into the bin, because over the last few years there had been nothing new. She had the same job, the same flat, and she employed the same expressions of concern and coaxing. He would have thought she would have got as tired of writing these sugardrops as he was of reading them but no; they were her roundabouts.
But then Elsa was tenacious and that was only one of her virtues. Crunchy, you can’t expect me to make the first move, was a phrase that turned up every fifth letter and was, he surmised, totally unironic despite Elsa having made every move from one to a thousand, and having used every weapon in the feminine arsenal from the smooth pebble to the shoulder-launched missile.
A wake of pink envelopes, cabinetloads of cards and other affection-heavy baubles had trailed him around the world: marzipan hippos, beanbag lions, furry diaries, a Bible keyring (surely the peak of incongruity since he had nowhere to live), chocolate breasts, tins of baked beans, inflatable lips, wind-up miniature Christmas trees, all bearing the message of softness. During periods of intense activity, she wrote almost every day; the bestial incarnations of the heart hunted him down: smiling bears, cheery dolphins came with the messages for someone special, thinking of you makes me happy. Along came the dejected rabbits, lugubrious moles and forlorn kittens with the tag, missing you. Elsa’s supply of any object or animal capable of an alliance with endearment was apparently endless despite her being a university graduate, thirty-two, a woman of good taste and half of her communications failing to reach him.
No real reason why she had chosen him. He knew his chief merit was that he had no demerits. He wouldn’t beat her, he wouldn’t go chasing after other women, he wouldn’t drink or blow their money at the bookie’s, he wouldn’t make her watch football on the television, or defecate on the floor. Like the legless tortoise in the joke, you would find him where you left him. He had been tempted by Elsa’s repeated insistence that there was room aplenty in her flat, that he could do his work there. He wouldn’t take up much space, and his upkeep was minimal. It wouldn’t be a bad arrangement.
The only reason he didn’t take it up was that he didn’t want it; and he knew if he yielded it would remove the possibility of her finding a proper happiness. Was it nobility or just recognition that he would be nulling her life?
Every now and then silences of a few months’ duration opened up, while Elsa’s unsuccessful romances would be digested. A male silhouette would be spotted peripherally after Elsa went off on a holiday. A one-off reference to a forester met on a beach, a promoter met on a cruise. Her liaisons seemed to be only as long as hotel beds.
It was good to see that Upstairs didn’t just punish the freaks. While Elsa’s looks would never stop traffic, she was intelligent, employed, considerate, a good cook, had a job in which she met people all the time, but she still spent nights prowling a double bed, although all she wanted to do was to hose a man down with tenderness.
He never understood those who thought being different was stimulating or valuable. Anyone who had been on the outside knows how cold it is.
He went over to the Public Library, found a quiet corner and loaded up. In the right Three Weeks in Mopetown, in the left If I Were God. People often looked at him, but no one said anything.
The academic roundabout came, as it did nearly every day.
Why hadn’t he got an academic job? Probably because he didn’t want one. But he loved stepping out of the dark and shooting them in the back. Repeatedly. He loved the unfairness of it.
(…)
He had never explained his mission to anyone, because he didn’t want anyone to know if he failed, and because he wasn’t sure what the point was. He sensed there was an answer at the end, but he had no idea what it would be or what he would do with it. Perhaps he would write something original. After all how can you write something original if you haven’t read everything before?
The numbers are daunting. A few hundred books to 1500. Some ten thousand to 1600. Eighty thousand to 1700. Three hundred thousand to 1800. Then things go crazy. Much of it was recloaking. Much of it was dross. Much of it was brief. But if he hadn’t come up with the two book technique, simultaneously reading one book in his right hand and one book in his left, he wouldn’t have got anywhere.
It occurred to him that he might appear pitiful. After he had been living in North London bookshops for four years, subsisting on reviews and marrying Japanese women who wanted nationality lifts, although he felt fine, he could see that people might think spending your whole life in either bookshops or libraries was wretched. He decided he couldn’t spend all his time in bookshops in North London since he didn’t want his horizons stunted. So he started touring: France, Germany and finally America.
What had he learned so far? Motion looks like progress. German bookshops had champagne, but only in American bookshops could you get frappuchino. And hope. Hope. Books were made of hope, not paper. Hope that someone would read your book; hope that it would change the world or improve it; hope that people would agree with you, hope that people might believe you; hope that you’ll be remembered, celebrated, hope that people would feel something. Hope that you would learn something; hope that you’ll entertain or impress; hope you’ll catch some cash; hope that you’ll be proved right and hope that you’ll be proved wrong.
Unfortunately there was the problem that even if you read everything, you don’t read it as the same person. When he first read the Iliad, the opening was just the opening: an explanation. The anger of Achilles: people always thought it referred to Achilles’ rage at losing his favourite slave-girl, or losing his sidekick Patrocolus.
When he had read it first at eleven, he hadn’t read it. At seventeen when he reapplied it was beginning to come into focus.
Yet only when he was thirty and he had been stuck in a lift, and he had gone in for the third time had the meaning dripped through like portly raindrops infiltrating a roof.
It was no accident that the first word in Western literature was anger. Achilles anger. He now saw it was anger at being alive, anger at having no choice. The Iliad was the truth, the Odyssey the sale brochure, where you dally with tricky women, get home and slaughter all the people who have been giving you grief. The Iliad was the scoop: stuck in a way you didn’t ask for, working with chumps who couldn’t even find Troy in the first place, unable to forget that your mother left you and that a centaur made you eat entrails, no choice, no challenge and the knowledge that you’re not going home and that nothing is going to make you feel better.
When he read reports of spree-killers topping themselves he saw it wasn’t because of remorse or desire to dodge the penal system, but despair because their actions hadn’t made them feel any better, that they had leapt over the edge and the anger was still there. And it ran all the way through. Gilgamesh was angry. Jahweh was angry. Moses was angry. Pharaoh was beside himself. Electra was incandescent. Oedipus frothing. The Ronin were hopping mad. Hamlet was miffed. Orlando was furioso.
The problem was Upstairs . . . Karma. Kismet. Destiny. Fate. The Fates. Parcae. Namtar. The Norns. Doom. Fortune. Providence. Luck. Cosmo. Allah. Book of Fate. Threads. The words turned up again and again; they were the clichés he read over and over, not because the writers were unimaginative but because there was no other way of putting it.
Fulhams were what you got. The dice were loaded but you had to throw them to see how the numbers fell.
He strolled to the Barnes & Noble on Union Square.
Generally the bigger they were, the easier it was. You found a quiet stretch of shelving just before closing time and made yourself scarce until everyone had gone and you could get bookcrunching. He hadn’t been caught very often. Over the years he had only been apprehended four times and had been let off.
They had looked at him in a way he didn’t like to think about, which suggested that either he was a failed burglar who couldn’t get it right, or too failed an individual to want to be close to. Only the woman in Nuneaton had called the police. ‘I’m calling the police,’ she had hissed. He could easily have run off but he waited, not understanding why the woman had said that if he had been possessed of criminal intent or a guilty conscience it would have primed him to get going or to get heavy. He hadn’t run off, chiefly, because he had nowhere to run to. He had read twenty pages of North and South before the constabulary showed up. They weren’t able to get very excited with no sign of damage, forced entry or theft. ‘We’ll say no more about it this time,’ one said, since there really was nothing more to say.
It was not being prepared. You would fumble for a sentence in your pocket and come out with what was there or carry on fumbling. Walking home from school when he was eleven, two girls his age whom he had noticed regularly walking home the other way on the other side of the street, crossed over. ‘Is it okay if I hit you?’ the blonde had asked. He had been thinking about the question and an answer, when the blonde’s fist impacted unpleasantly on his jaw. He then thought what he should do. He smiled and walked away.
Without preparation it was sticky. In Portland once, he had been deep into Phlegon of Tralles’ Book Of Marvels and the Emperor Hadrian’s centaur, so engrossed and not expecting anything since it was a humid summer two o’clock in the morning, sleepy in a sleepy town, that he hadn’t registered another presence in the bookshop.
His attention was disturbed by the owner, a large man clutching a camp bed, pleading not to be killed. ‘Please don’t kill me,’ the owner repeated, sinking to his knees; puzzling since he was only armed with a 215-page paperback and the incident with the girl had taught him he didn’t have a fearsome aspect.
‘The air conditioning packed up at home. It’s just too hot. I have money here, I’ll show you. I won’t tell the police anything. Just let me live.’ He had wanted to roll out his standard story of having been accidentally locked in, but he never had been any better at lying than he had been at telling the truth, and the owner was having none of it. Taking the money was the easiest option, so he did and went to a hotel with enough books to get himself through the next day. He could see how he might be perceived as criminal, but he couldn’t fathom how he had made it to dangerous, but the incident left him splattered with interestingness and power.
As Barnes & Noble closed, he hunkered down in Politics and waited an hour for the building to clear of sounds. There had never been a book that hadn’t contained fibres of other books; to write you have to read first. Could he be a person who had nothing of others in him? Was there anyone else who worried about no one eating fish in the Iliad? And who remembered the thirty-three terms of abuse for tax collectors gathered by Pollux of Naucrates? At the same time wondering if Apuleius’s lost novel Hermagoras would ever turn up? While not forgetting to ponder if the De Tribus Impostoribus Mundi had ever existed?
He then made for the luxurious armchair that had endeared Barnes & Noble to him so much and plunged into (on the right) Singularly Deluded and (on the left) The World’s Desire.
He got tired of it sometimes, but he kept going because he had gone too far to go back. A bout of weakness had made him take a job for two months, but it hadn’t made things better.
Una traducció
His concentration couldn’t have been that good because he heard coughing. For a few moments he sat motionless as if that might change something. Faintly, he detected it again. He thought about letting coughing be coughing, but couldn’t get back into left or right.
Reluctantly investigating, on the first floor, he could see a thin woman dressed in mixed black. Attractive. He knew she wasn’t staff, he was familiar with the assistants and also she had an . . . unstaffy manner. She was reading.
Not only was she reading intently, but she held a book in her left hand, and another in her right.
His steps startled her. Promptly, she closed the books, and slotted them back into the shelves. ‘You must be closing,’ she said in an appealing way. Her skin was pale, her lips gotcha red.
He wanted to say that he didn’t work here.
‘Don’t look at me that way,’ she snapped.
She set the alarms off as she left.
He concluded that he felt OK but he feared he would feel bad, and that the badness was on its way.
Tibor Fischer. “El tragalibros”. En: No apto para estúpidos. Trad. Daniel Aguirre Oteiza. Tusquets, 2002
