If you fill the world with children who do not bear your name, no one will know they are yours. Like being God in plain clothes. You are God, you wander through the city, you hear people talking about you, God this, God that, what a wonderful universe this is, and how elegant the law of gravity, and you smile to yourself behind your fake beard (no, better to go without a beard, because in a beard God is immediately recognizable). You soliloquize (God is always soliloquizing): “Here I am, the One, and they don’t know it.” If a pedestrian bumps into you in the street, or even insults you, you humbly apologize and move on, even though you’re God and with a snap of your fingers can turn the world to ashes. But, infinitely powerful as you are, you can afford to be long-suffering.
A novel about God incognito. No. If I thought of it, somebody else must have already done it.
You’re an author, not yet aware of your powers. The woman you loved has betrayed you, life for you no longer has meaning, so one day, to forget, you take a trip on the Titanic and are shipwrecked in the South Seas. You are picked up, the sole survivor, by a pirogue full of natives, and spend long years, forgotten by the outside world, on this island inhabited only by Papuans. Girls serenade you with languorous songs, their swaying breasts barely covered by necklaces of pua blossoms. They call you Jim (they call all white men Jim), and one night an amber-skinned girl slips into your hut and says: “I yours, I with you.” How nice, to lie there in the evening on the veranda and look up at the Southern Cross while she fans your brow.
You live by the cycle of dawn and sunset, and know nothing else. One day a motorboat arrives with some Dutchmen aboard, you learn that ten years have passed; you could go away with these Dutchmen, but you refuse. You start a business trading coconuts, you supervise the hemp harvest, the natives work for you, you sail from island to island, and everyone calls you Seven Seas Jim. A Portuguese adventurer ruined by drink comes to work with you and redeems himself. By now you’re the talk of the Sunda, you advise the maharajah of Brunei in his campaign against the Dayaks of the river, you find an old cannon from the days of Tippo Sahib and get it back in working order.
You train a squad of devoted Malayans whose teeth are blackened with betel. In a skirmish near the coral reef, old Sampan, his teeth blackened with betel, shields you with his own body; I gladly die for you, Seven Seas Jim. Good old Sampan, farewell, my friend.
Now you’re famous in the whole archipelago, from Sumatra to Port-au-Prince. You trade with the English, too; at the harbor master’s office in Darwin you’re registered as Kurtz, and now you’re Kurtz to everyone—only the natives still call you Seven Seas Jim. One evening, as the girl caresses you on the veranda and the Southern Cross shines brighter than ever overhead—ah! so different from the Great Bear—you realize you want to go back. Just for a little while, to see what, if anything, is left of you there.
You take a boat to Manila, from there a prop plane to Bali, then Samoa, the Admiralty Islands, Singapore, Tenerife, Timbuktu, Aleppo, Samarkand, Basra, Malta, and you’re home.
Eighteen years have passed, life has left its mark on you: your face is tanned by the trade winds, you’re older, perhaps also handsomer. Arriving, you discover that all the bookshops are displaying your books, in new critical editions, and your name has been carved into the pediment of your old school, where you learned to read and write. You are the Great Vanished Poet, the conscience of a generation. Romantic maidens kill themselves at your empty grave.
And then I encounter you, my love, with those wrinkles around your eyes, your face still beautiful though worn by memory and tender remorse. I almost pass you on the sidewalk, I’m only a few feet away, and you look at me as you look at all people, as though seeking another beyond their shadow. I could speak, erase the years. But to what end? Am I not, even now, fulfilled? I am like God, as solitary as He, as vain, and as despairing, unable to be one of my creatures. They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.
Go in peace, then, William S.! Famous, you pass and do not recognize me. I murmur to myself: To be or not to be. And I say to myself: Good for you, Belbo, good work. Go, old William S., and reap your meed of glory. You alone created; I merely made a few changes.
We midwives, who assist at the births of what others conceive, should be refused burial in consecrated ground. Like actors. Except that actors play with the world as it is, while we play with a plurality of make-believes, with the endless possibilities of existence in an infinite universe….
How can life be so bountiful, providing such sublime rewards for mediocrity?
Sub umbra alarum tuarum, Jehova.
—Fama Fraternitatis, in Allgemeine und general Reformation, Cassel, Wessel, 1514, conclusion
The next day, I went to Garamond Press. Number 1, Via Sincero Renato, opened into a dusty passage, from which you could glimpse a courtyard and a rope-maker’s shop. To the right was an elevator that looked like something out of an industrial archeology exhibit. When I tried to take it, it shuddered, jerked, as if unable to make up its mind to ascend, so prudently I got out and climbed two flights of dusty, almost circular wooden stairs.
I later learned that Mr. Garamond loved this building because it reminded him of a publishing house in Paris. A metal plate on the landing said GARAMOND PRESS, and an open door led to a lobby with no switchboard or receptionist of any kind. But you couldn’t go in without being seen from a little outer office, and I was immediately confronted by a person, probably female, of indeterminate age and a height that could euphemistically be called below average.
She accosted me in a foreign language that was somehow familiar; then I realized it was Italian, an Italian almost completely lacking in vowels. When I asked for Belbo, she led me down a corridor to an office in the back.
Belbo welcomed me cordially: “So, you are a serious person. Come in.” He had me sit opposite his desk, which was old, like everything else, and piled high with manuscripts, as were the shelves on the walls.
“I hope Gudrun didn’t frighten you,” he said.
“Gudrun? That … signora?”
“Signorina. Her name isn’t really Gudrun. We call her that because of her Nibelung look and because her speech is vaguely Teutonic. She wants to say everything quickly, so she saves time by leaving out the vowels. But she has a sense of justitia aequatrix: when she types, she skips consonants.”
“What does she do here?”
“Everything, unfortunately. In every publishing house there is one person who is indispensable, the only one who can find things in the mess that he or she creates. At least when a manuscript is lost, you know whose fault it is.”
“She loses manuscripts, too?”
“Publishers are always losing manuscripts. I think sometimes that’s their main activity. But a scapegoat is always necessary, don’t you agree? My only complaint is that she doesn’t lose the ones I’d like to see lost. Contretemps, these, in what the good Bacon called The Advancement of Learning”
“How do they get lost?”
He spread his arms. “Forgive me, but that is a stupid question. If we knew how they got lost, they wouldn’t get lost.”
“Logical,” I said. “But look, the Garamond books I see here and there seem very carefully made, and you have an impressive catalog. Is it all done here? How many of you are there?”
“There’s a room for the production staff across the hall; next door is my colleague Diotallevi. But he does the reference books, the big projects, works that take forever to produce and have a long sales life. I do the university editions.
It’s not really that much work. Naturally I get involved with some of the books, but as a rule we have nothing to worry about editorially, academically, or financially. Publications of an institute, or conference proceedings under the aegis of a university. If the author’s a beginner, his professor writes the preface. The author corrects the proofs, checks the quotations and footnotes, and receives no royalties. The book is adopted as a textbook, a few thousand copies are sold in a few years, and our expenses are covered. No surprises, no red ink.”
“What do you do, then?”
“A lot of things. For example, we publish some books at our own expense, usually translations of prestige authors, to add tone to the catalog. And then there are the manuscripts that just turn up, left at the door. Rarely
