Spending money was a serious business in those days. And they were serious, too, about teaching a child he couldn’t have everything he wanted. ‘I can’t stand cabbage soup,’ I’d tell them—and it was true, for God’s sake; cabbage made me sick. But they never said: ‘Skip the soup today, then, and just eat your meat.’ We may have been poor, but we still had a first course, a main course, and fruit. No.
It was always: ‘Eat what’s on the table.’ Sometimes, as a compromise, my grandmother would pick the cabbage out of my bowl, stringy piece by stringy piece. Then I’d have to eat the expurgated soup, which was more disgusting than before. And even this was a concession my father disapproved of.”
“But what about the trumpet?”
He looked at me, hesitant. “Why are you so interested in the trumpet?”
“I’m not. You were the one who brought it up, to show how the Object of Desire is never what others think.”
“The trumpet … My uncle and aunt from *** arrived that evening. They had no children, and I was their favorite nephew. Well, when they saw me bawling over my dream trumpet, they said they would fix everything: tomorrow we would go to the department store where there was a whole counter of toys—wonder of wonders—and I’d have the trumpet I wanted. I didn’t sleep all night, and I couldn’t sit still all the next morning.
In the afternoon we went to the store, and they had at least three kinds of trumpets there. Little tin things, probably, but to me they were magnificent brass worthy of the Philharmonic. There was an army bugle, a slide trombone, and a trumpet of gold with a real trumpet mouthpiece but the keys of a saxophone.
I couldn’t decide, and maybe I took too long. Wanting them all, I must have given the impression that I didn’t want any of them. Meanwhile, I believe my uncle and aunt looked at the price tags. My uncle and aunt weren’t stingy; on the other hand, a Bakelite clarinet with silver keys was much cheaper. ‘Wouldn’t you like this better?’ they asked.
I tried it, produced a reasonable honk, and told myself that it was beautiful, but actually I was rationalizing. I knew they wanted me to take the clarinet because the trumpet cost a fortune. I couldn’t demand such a sacrifice from my relatives, having been taught that if a person offers you something you like, you must say, ‘No, thank you,’ and not just once, not ‘No, thank you,’ with your hand out, but ‘No, thank you’ until the giver insists, until he says, ‘Please, take it.’ A well-bred child doesn’t accept until that point.
So I said maybe I didn’t care about the trumpet, maybe the clarinet was all right, if that’s what they wanted. And I looked up at them, hoping they would insist. They didn’t, God bless them, they were delighted to buy me the clarinet, since—they said—that was what I wanted. It was too late to backtrack. I got the clarinet.”
Belbo looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. “You want to know if I dreamed about the trumpet again?”
“I want to know,” I said, “what the Object of Desire was.”
“Ah,” he said, turning back to his manuscript. “You see? You’re obsessed by the Object of Desire, too. But it’s not all that simple…. Suppose I had taken the trumpet. Would I have been truly happy then? What do you think, Casaubon?”
“I think you would have dreamed about the clarinet.”
“I got the clarinet,” he concluded sharply, “but I never played it.”
“Never played it? Or never dreamed it?”
“Played it,” he said, underlining his words, and for some reason I felt like a fool.
And finally nothing is cabalistically inferred from vinum save VIS NUMerorum, upon which numbers this Magia depends.
—Cesare della Riviera, Il Mondo Magico degli Eroi, Mantua, Osanna, 1603, pp. 65–66
But I was talking about my first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, had exchanged a few words at Pilade’s, but I didn’t know much about him, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but serious publisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at the university.
“And what do you do?” he asked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far end of the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He used the formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by the familiar tu, even students and professors, even the clientele at Pilade’s. “Tu—buy me a drink,” a student wearing a parka would say to the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was like Moscow in the days of young Shklovski.
We were all Mayakovskis, not one Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but he used it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he was responding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyss between acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu with real affection only a few times, only to a few people: Diotallevi, one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people he respected but hadn’t known long. He addressed me formally the whole time we worked together, and I valued that.
“And what do you do?” he asked, with what I now know was friendliness.
“In real life or in this theater?” I said, nodding at our surroundings.
“In real life.”
“I study.”
“You mean you go to the university, or you study?”
“You may not believe this, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I’m finishing a thesis on the Templars.”
“What an awful subject,” he said. “I thought that was for lunatics.”
“No. I’m studying the real stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about the Templars, anyway?”
“I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he’s almost always a lunatic.”
“Don’t I know! Their name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. How do you identify the others?”
“I’ll explain. By the way, what’s your name?”
“Casaubon.”
“Casaubon. Wasn’t he a character in Middlemarch?”
“I don’t know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we’re not related.”
“The next round’s on me. Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”
“And that covers everybody?”
“Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”
“Idealtypen.”
“Very good. You know German?”
“Enough for bibliographies.”
“When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese.”
“My German’s poor, so I’ll graduate. But let’s get back to your typology. What about geniuses? Einstein, for example?”
“A genius uses one component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the others.” He took a sip of his drink. “Hi there, beautiful,” he said. “Made that suicide attempt yet?”
“No,” a girl answered as she walked by. “I’m in a collective now.”
“Good for you,” Belbo said. He turned back to me. “Of course, there’s no reason one can’t have collective suicides, too.”
“Getting back to the lunatics.”
“Look, don’t take me too literally. I’m not trying to put the universe in order. I’m just saying what a lunatic is from the point of view of a publishing house. Mine is an ad-hoc definition.”
“All right. My round.”
“All right. Less ice, Pilade. Otherwise it gets into the bloodstream too fast. Now then: cretins. Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble. You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against his forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It is for a cretin. Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come to publishers’ offices. So let’s forget about them.”
“Let’s.”
“Being a fool is more complicated. It’s a form of social behavior. A fool is one who always talks outside his glass.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like this.” He pointed at the counter near his glass. “He wants to talk about what’s in the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He’s the guy who puts his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how’s your lovely wife to someone whose wife has just left him.”
“Yes, I know a few of those.”
“Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don’t interest us, either. They’re never creative, their talent is all secondhand, so they don’t submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent. It’s a dying breed, the embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a Verdurin salon or even
