In the subway, sitting between a woman thin as a bag of bones and a man sleeping with his head between his knees, Heribert thinks that usually by this time of day he would already have been at work in the studio for three hours. Then he finds it strange to have thought “usually,” since lately he is there less and less, and he finds it easier and easier to come up with excuses, again “usually,” not to be there.
Across from him, a man is moving in syncopated time: he is drumming on the ground with his feet, as if following the rhythm of a song, but he isn’t wearing earphones and there is no radio on. At the next stop, this man and the man sleeping with his head between his knees get off with Heribert. The man moving in syncopated time stays on the platform, waiting for the express, and Heribert goes out into the street.
He walks into the bookstore and, as he goes through the turnstile, realizes that at no point had he been aware where his steps were leading him. Going in there was always dangerous; an afternoon might go up in smoke, as it could very well be (and, in fact, always is) several hours before he goes out again. That bookstore, divided into two enormous spaces on either side of the street, with two big splendid floors in each of the spaces, draws him like a circus show. He has always found libraries and bookstores more seductive than the books themselves. He likes to look at the rows of bindings. He likes to run his hands over the covers of the encyclopedias and dictionaries, open a volume at random to see the illustrations, stroke the glossy coated paper, peer closely at the letters till they reveal their hairy edges, their distortions. Ever since he decided, two months before, never to attend another art exhibit (they were all so mediocre), he sees everything around him as if it were an art exhibit and discovers unsuspected facets to every object.
The children’s books were on the ground floor. Children’s books bother him. It bothers him precisely that they are for children. He has never understood by what rights someone decides there is a dividing line that makes some books for children, some for adults, others erotic, still others porno, and, finally, those even farther beyond, romance. And it also bothers him that a whole line of shelves should display the title poetry. What do they mean by “poetry”? Or “romance”?
As soon as he sets foot on the escalator, he turns around so as to go up backwards and watch as the ground floor gets farther and farther away: the entrance, the turnstiles, the cash registers, the two immense tables of bargain books. When he realizes he has thought bargain books, his stomach turns. Isn’t that definition just as presumptuous as one that attributes amorous, poetic, or mysterious qualities to books while — nevertheless — he finds the former to be quite reasonable? At least until now. He feels like a child, playing at discovering already discovered things. When he turns around to get off the escalator and step onto terra firma, however, he realizes (as one enlightened, not knowing why) that the really childish thing is to refuse to admit that it is good for things to be classified; despite the imperfections of the labels, this is the only way to delimit them, understand them, control them, grasp them. (And to have designated that thought as childish is equally childish: no doubt about it; and the fact that he has to resort to another adjective in order to dismiss the first series of adjectives as stupid confirms it.) When he reaches the top, and lets his eyes wander over the signs in the different sections (cooking, home improvement, pocket books, textbooks, mysteries, art, fiction, new releases, bestsellers. .), he feels that the most logical thing in the world is precisely for them to be classified. If not, what chaos! Even the sign that says poetry seems coherent and logical. Everyone knows what is to be found under that caption, and it is precisely that which makes it not merely valid, but indispensable. He even understands that the books on the shelves labeled mystery must, of necessity, be far from the shelves of the bestsellers. And if the book is both a mystery and a bestseller, it must be found under bestsellers, as this is the characteristic (additional, and thus more evident) that distinguishes it quite beyond its intrinsic mysteriousness. Always and ever, the surface of things: the part that can be touched and seen without need of opening and destroying it to find out what its innards are like. How is it possible that until now he has not perceived the wisdom of these classifications? It is evident, moreover, that the books in the fiction department must of necessity be there, and by no means in literature. He feels as if a long time has elapsed since those classifications so annoyed him with their arbitrariness, and yet it isn’t so: he was still laboring under that absurd misconception when he stepped on the escalator. (But he isn’t entirely wrong: for three weeks now — or perhaps a month — he has not been so sure of things as he used to be; it seems as if he has been changing imperceptibly and is no longer the same person: it could be, then, that what he was thinking as he stepped on the escalator was simply a thought born of his former self-assurance, and what has happened as he rose on the escalator is that, imperceptibly, he has begun to realize that the thought no longer jibes with his present state.) Once, in the beforehand that is becoming — more and more, and without his knowing why — irremediably distant, he had tried to figure out the systems and expose the contradictions hidden among the bookcases: Steinbeck was under fiction, and Hardy under literature. In those days he had found it arbitrary and had deduced that they considered literature to have died in the nineteenth century and, from that moment on, everything was fiction. But there were also flaws in that line of reasoning: Kafka was under literature. What was he doing there? He had reasoned that perhaps those twentieth-century authors whose lives had a certain, let’s say, tragic quality were sent to swell the shelves of literature. But now it is all clear to him: it’s obvious that Hardy and Kafka are literature, and Steinbeck, fiction. Why rock the boat? Even more to the point: in order for things to be useful to us, they must not be resisted, but accepted just as they are. He feels a chill at the nape of his neck. He pulls up the lapels of his coat but then realizes he’s hot: the heat is on so high that he’s sweating. He takes off his coat.