Today I'll do Voyage d'hiver (Lyon, 1902). Gaston Laforgue is rather pedantic and grandiloquent, but I've gotten six cards out of him. One very nice one about the nature of art. But he didn't understand anything about the life of Schubert. And, starting tomorrow, the complete works of Dario Longo (author's edition, Trieste, 1932), which promised some surprises, as he had seen when he used the letter opener on it the day before yesterday. 1 shouldn't have told her to do ORIENTAL POETRY because she's distracting me. I should have sent her to CENTRAL EUROPEAN MORALISTS, 18th19th cent., which needs cleaning just as badly.
Because she'd left a rag on top of the fu books from the Han dynasty, Victoria had to go back up the ladder, and Sr. Adria found that the girl's buttocks were in his range of vision and figured they were what he imagined Adromache's buttocks must be like in the Cambridge edition: generous and discreet at the same time. She's finally leaving, he sighed to himself, and concentrated on his reading as Victoria went out of the reading room with the bucket, the rags, the duster, the ladder and Adromache's buttocks, in silence, and she could see that he was still involved with that thing about Schubert and she went down the hall full of books thinking, There's no way, no way: a few days ago he was eagerly reading a philological dictionary of Italian, and before that he finished The Emotions and the Will by Alexander Bain, which left him looking dazed for a couple of days. Who's Bain? she said. What the hell are you talking about, answered Toni, who got irritated when Victoria talked about work when there was nothing else to do. As far as he was concerned, Sr. Adria was crazy, period. And Victoria held her tongue because she was beginning to accept that it was getting harder and harder to connect with Toni. Because the perfect Toni would have the education, the taste for culture, the discretion and the intellectual curiosity that Sr. Adria had. Why was Toni so different? She didn't know how to answer that question. Or how to explain why in that house there was nothing by Magris, Garcia Marquez, Goethe, Pedrolo, Gaarder or Mann. Why did Sr. Adria read Ludwig Tieck (Kaiser Octavian), Giuseppe Spalletti (Saggio sopra la bellezza) or Jacob de Montfleury (Lecole des jaloux)? Why did he collect sentences from those authors and he'd never even bought a single Faulkner? One day she copied out a few titles at random to find out if they had them in the library, and of course they didn't. Tere herself, all the years she'd worked there, had never heard of them. Ever.
And tea. On top of the books, tea. He drank six or seven cups a day. He drank green tea because, according to him, it relaxed the body and kept the mind alert. What she didn't know was that Sr. Adria was a vegetarian, as long as it didn't interfere with reading. There was no way she could know that; it was enough to know that he was clean, he paid well, at Christmas he paid her double, he never scolded her and he talked very little, as if he were aware that at his age he didn't have much time to waste. Never anything out of line. Ever. The perfect man, even if he was thirty years older.
Now the perfect man had taken out the magnifying glass and was looking at a sepia photograph in which the unfortunate author of the biography and some other people were being immortalized next to Schubert's tomb. With the magnifying glass he examined the inscription at the base of the monument. SEINEM ANDENKEN DER W1… It was impossible to read because the right leg of a smirking Laforgue hid the rest of the inscription. It upset him to think that the person in the way was keeping him from reading a text he'd never, ever, be able to finish. He turned the page: in the next illustration Laforgue, with his sepia smile, was pointing to the building where the composer had died. The unpaved street was muddy and the sky looked leaden. Sr. Adria left the illustrations and said, Victoria, bring me some tea, and Victoria, from TRAVEL BOOKS, EUROPE, said, Yes, sir.
"Hours and hours shut up in an apartment with a man," Toni had said, one day when he was being particularly hard to take. Offended, she had answered that Sr. Adria was a gentleman, and she had said nothing about those enigmatic glances that sometimes landed on her buttocks, because she was convinced, and that's why she admired him, that Sr. Adria was an angel who was above human problems. If Toni had known about those glances, he would have gotten furious and tried to get into a fight with Sr. Adria. Toni did look her over, from top to bottom, and actually his desire flattered her and sometimes she imagined it was Sr. Adria who was doing it. Why couldn't Toni think about other things? Why couldn't he get around to reading a book sometime? In Toni's house, the only actual book was the phone book (2 vols.). From one extreme to the other, she thought. Because never having read a book sometimes seemed impossible to her. But nothing was impossible for Toni. Except getting around to telling her what he'd done the last three Monday afternoons.
"Seventeen thousand five hundred fifty-two with this Schwartz that 1 just received and haven't catalogued yet," answered Sr. Adria, hiding a touch of pride.
"You have more than the local library."
"Yes." And he gave her the week's wages with a gesture just like that of Phine when he pays the traitor at the end of Verjat's Les merovingiens (Lyon, 1899).
"And they're not the same. They're different kinds of books."
"Yes." He looked at her with a touch of reticence, with the cross-eyed gaze of the traitor (Verjat, ibid.), wanting the fog to lift because the first pre-cataloguing look at Die Natur von der Mang by a certain Klement Schwartz (Leipzig, 1714) awaited him. But Victoria asked a couple of other questions, which he answered, to put an end to things, with Maybe I'll explain it to you someday, and she disappeared down the stairs, her eyes bright like Raquel's in Raquel by Felip Cornudella (Barcelona, 1888), half embarrassed, half liberated. Schwartz's book was a treatise on the sounds of nature and musical instruments, from which he imagined that he could get a lot of cards, as usually happened with works halfway between scientific studies and poetic appreciations of the world. Once he had it in his hands, he realized that, half stuck to the inside cover, there was a very worn bookmark, a leather one, that was still a kind of yellow color and was decorated with the embossed figure of a fantastic and unrecognizable animal. He noted carefully in the incident book what book he'd taken it from, and forgot to deposit it in the objects case next to sixteen other bookmarks, dozens of dedications, folded papers with profound thoughts from anonymous readers (two of which had been worthy of cards), shopping lists, bills, and his favorite of all the documents imprisoned, like a sudden death, between the pages of a half-read book: a letter written in Yiddish, dating from the spring of '29 in Warsaw, in which Moishe Lodzer, a jeweler, communicated to the recipient his happiness and that of his wife at the engagement of their only son Josef, recently graduated from medical school, to Miriam Levi of the Levis of lerussalimskaia Street, and his prediction of happiness, prosperity and long life for the new couple. With almost liturgical respect for his beloved objects, Sr. Adria passed a loving hand over the case, sighed, and initiated the first contact with Schwartz's book.
As she went down the stairs, Victoria congratulated herself on having been able to broach that subject. She'd been practicing for days: why don't you have anything by Balzac or Oller or Green? Why don't you have Foix or Hardy but you have De la Tapinerie, Laforgue, Triclinis and Schulz? That's how the conversation would begin. From there, he'd diverted her with the number of books and then, though he resisted, they'd gotten back to the nature of those books. But it was one of his laconic days and the conversation didn't flow. She dared to ask Sr. Adria, Why do you buy books like that?