11
As had become customary, Padilla didn’t wait for Amalfitano to answer before he sent another letter. It was as if after putting a letter in the mail, a zeal for accuracy and precision compelled him to immediately send a series of explanations, particulars, and sources intended to shed further light on the missive already dispatched. This time Amalfitano found neatly folded photocopies of the covers of the Literary Gazette, the Literary Journal, the Journal of Night Watchmen, and the Literary and Trade Journal of the Grocers’ Guild. Also: photocopies of the articles cited and of the poems and stories by the barbaric writers, which upon brief perusal struck him as horrible: a blend of Claudel and Maurice Chevalier, crime fiction and first-year creative writing workshop. More interesting were the photographs (appearing in the Literary and Trade Journal, which looked as if it were printed by professionals, unlike the Journal and the Gazette, surely put out by the barbarics themselves, not to mention the Journal of Night Watchmen, mimeographed in the manner of the 1960s and full of crossings-out, smudges, spelling mistakes). There was something magnetic about the faces of Delorme and his gang: first, they were all staring straight at the camera and therefore straight into Amalfitano’s eyes, or the eyes of any reader; second, all of them, without exception, seemed confident and sure of themselves, especially the latter, light-years from self-doubt or a sense of their own absurdity, which-considering that they were French writers-might not have been so surprising, and yet it was, despite everything (let’s not forget that they were amateurs, though maybe it was precisely because they were amateurs, thought Amalfitano, that they were beyond any awkwardness, embarrassment, or whatever, drifting in the limbo of the naïve); third, the age difference wasn’t just striking, it was unsettling: what bond-let alone literary school-could unite Delorme, who was well into his sixties and looked his age, and Antoine Madrid, who surely had yet to turn twenty-two? Confident expressions aside, the faces could be classified either as open (Sabrina Martin, who seemed to be about thirty, and Antoine Madrid, though there was something about him that spoke of the tight player, the man of reserve), or closed (Antoine Dubacq, a bald man with big glasses who must have been in his late forties, and Von Kraunitz, who might just as easily have been forty as sixty), or mysterious (M. Poul, nearly skeletal, spindle-faced, cropped hair, long bony nose, ears flat to the skull, prominent and probably jumpy Adam’s apple, maybe fifty, and Delorme, by all lights the chief, the Breton of this writerly proletariat, as Padilla described him). Without Rouberg’s notes, Amalfitano would have taken them for advanced students-or simply eager students-of a writing workshop in some blue-collar suburban neighborhood. But no: they had been writing for a long time, they met regularly, they had a common writing process, common techniques, a style (undetected by Amalfitano), goals. The information on Rouberg came from Issue 1 of the Literary and Trade Journal of which he seemed to be the editor in chief, though his name didn’t appear on the masthead. It wasn’t hard to imagine old Rouberg-retired, though only spiritually, and under the stigma of who can say what sins-in the Poitou. The journals, of course, were from the collection of Raguenau, who each month received copies from all over the world. And yet, added Padilla, when asked about the four journals in question and the complete collection (Issues 1 through 5) of the grocers’ organ, Raguenau admitted to Padilla and his nephew Adrià, who was digitizing his library with the occasional assistance of Padilla, that he didn’t subscribe to any of them. How, then, had they come into his power? Raguenau couldn’t remember, though he advanced a hypothesis: perhaps he had bought them at an antiquarian bookshop or a bookseller’s stall on his last trip to Paris. Padilla affirmed that he had subjected Raguenau to hours of interrogation before coming to the conclusion that he was innocent. What had attracted him to the magazines was probably their air of kitsch. And yet it was too much of a coincidence that all of them contained information on the barbaric writers and that Raguenau had bought them at random. Padilla ventured another hypothesis: that Raguenau had gotten them from one of the barbaric writers, working among the other stall keepers. But the interesting thing, the truly interesting thing about this business, was that Padilla (astounding memory, thought Amalfitano, more and more intrigued) had previously come across references to Delorme. His name was mentioned by Arcimboldi in an old interview dating back to 1970 published in a Barcelona magazine in 1991, and also by Albert Derville in an essay on Arcimboldi from a book on the contemporary French novel. In the interview Arcimboldi spoke of “a man named Delorme, an amazing autodidact who wrote stories near where I was living.”
Later he explained that Delorme was the concierge of the building where he lived in the early 1960s. The context in which he referred to him was one of fear. Fears, frights, attacks, surprises, etc. Derville mentions him as part of a list of bizarre writers handed to him by Arcimboldi just before the publication of The Librarian. According to Derville, Arcimboldi confessed that he had grown afraid of Delorme, believing that he cast spells and performed Satanic rituals and black masses in his cramped concierge quarters, by means of which he hoped to improve his written French and the pacing of his stories. And that was all. Padilla promised that he would delve further and report back soon. Was Arcimboldi’s disappearance related to the barbaric writers? He didn’t know but he would keep up the investigation.
12
That night, after rereading the letter for the fourth or fifth time, Amalfitano had to get out of the house. He put on a light jacket and went for a walk. His steps led him to the center of the city, and after wandering around the plaza where the statue of General Sepúlveda stood with its back to the sculpture group commemorating the victory of the city of Santa Teresa over the French, he found himself in a neighborhood that, though only two blocks from the city center, displayed-even flaunted-every stigma, every sign of poverty, squalor, and danger. A no-man’s-land.
The term amused Amalfitano, eliciting feelings of bitterness and tenderness; he too, over the course of his life, had known no-man’s-lands. First the working-class neighborhoods and the industrial belts; then the terrain liberated by the guerrilla. Calling a neighborhood of prostitutes a no-man’s-land, however, struck him as felicitous and he wondered whether those distant danger zones of his youth weren’t simply giant prostitution belts camouflaged in Rhetoric and Dialectic. Our every effort, our long prison revolt: a field of invisible whores, the glare of pimps and policemen.