They had gained a little weight and some gray in their hair, but I felt that the Scotch-on-the-rocks in their hands was the same one they had held ten years ago. They were sipping slowly, one drop every six months.
“What are you up to? Why don’t you come by and see us?” one of them asked me.
“Who’s us nowadays?”
He looked at me as if I’d been away for a century. “The Cultural Commission at City Hall, of course.”
I had skipped too many beats.
I decided to invent a job for myself. I knew a lot of things, unconnected things, but I would be able to connect them after a few hours at a library. I once thought it was necessary to have a theory, and that my problem was that I didn’t.
But nowadays all you needed was information; everybody was greedy for information, especially if it was out of date. I dropped in at the university, to see if I could fit in somewhere. The lecture halls were quiet; the students glided along the corridors like ghosts, lending one another badly made bibliographies. I knew how to make a good bibliography.
One day, a doctoral candidate, mistaking me for faculty (the teachers now were the same age as the students, or vice versa), asked me what this Lord Chandos they were talking about in an economics course on cyclical crises had written. I told him Chandos was a character in Hofmannsthal, not an economist.
That same evening I was at a party with old friends and recognized a man who worked for a publisher. He had joined the staff after the firm had switched from novels by French collaborationists to Albanian political texts. They were still publishing political books, but with government backing. And they didn’t reject an occasional good work in philosophy—provided it was in the classical line, he added.
“By the way,” he said to me then, “since you’re a philosopher—”
“Thanks, but unfortunately I’m not.”
“Come on, in your day you knew everything. I was just looking over the translation of a book on the crisis of Marxism, and I came across a quotation from Anselm of Canterbury. Who’s he? I couldn’t even find him in the Dictionary of Authors.” I told him it was Anselmo d’Aosta, and that only the English, who had to be different from everybody else, called him Anselm of Canterbury.
A sudden illumination: I had a trade after all. I would set up a cultural investigation agency, be a kind of private eye of learning.
Instead of sticking my nose into all-night dives and cathouses, I would skulk around bookshops, libraries, corridors of university departments. Then I’d sit in my office, my feet propped on the desk, drinking, from a Dixie cup, the whiskey I’d brought up from the corner store in a paper bag. The phone rings and a man says: “Listen, I’m translating this book and came across something or someone called Motakallimûn. What the hell is it?”
Give me two days, I tell him. Then I go to the library, flip through some card catalogs, give the man in the reference office a cigarette, and pick up a clue.
That evening I invite an instructor in Islamic studies out for a drink. I buy him a couple of beers and he drops his guard, gives me the low-down for nothing. I call the client back. “All right, the Motakallimûn were radical Moslem theologians at the time of Avicenna.
They said the world was a sort of dust cloud of accidents that formed particular shapes only by an instantaneous and temporary act of the divine will. If God was distracted for even a moment, the universe would fall to pieces, into a meaningless anarchy of atoms. That enough for you? The job took me three days. Pay what you think is fair.”
I was lucky enough to find two rooms and a little kitchen in an old building in the suburbs. It must have been a factory once, with a wing for offices. All the apartments that had been made from it opened onto one long corridor. I was between a real estate agent and a taxidermist’s laboratory (A. Salon, the sign said). It was like being in an American skyscraper of the thirties; if I’d had a glass door, I’d have felt like Marlowe.
I put a sofa bed in the back room and made the front one an office. In a pair of bookcases I arranged the atlases, encyclopedias, catalogs I acquired bit by bit. In the beginning, I had to turn a deaf ear to my conscience and write theses for desperate students. It wasn’t hard: I just went and copied some from the previous decade. But then my friends in publishing began sending me manuscripts and foreign books to read—naturally, the least appealing and for little money.
Still, I was accumulating experience and information, and I never threw anything away. I kept files on everything. I didn’t think to use a computer (they were coming on the market just then; Belbo was to be a pioneer). Instead, I had cross-referenced index cards. Nebulae, Laplace; Laplace, Kant; Kant, Königsberg, the seven bridges of Königsberg, theorems of topology …
It was a little like that game where you have to go from sausage to Plato in five steps, by association of ideas. Let’s see: sausage, pig bristle, paintbrush, Mannerism, Idea, Plato. Easy. Even the sloppiest manuscript would bring twenty new cards for my hoard. I had a strict rule, which I think secret services follow, too: No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.
After about two years in business, I was pleased with myself. I was having fun. Meanwhile I had met Lia.
Sappia qualunque il mio nome dimanda ch’i’ mi son Lia, e vo movendo intorno le belle mani a farmi una ghirlanda.
—Dante, Purgatorio, XXVII, 100–102
Lia. Now, I despair of seeing her again, but I might never have met her, and that would have been worse. I wish she were here, to hold my hand while I reconstruct the stages of my undoing. Because she told me so. But no, she must remain outside this business, she and the child. I hope they put off their return, that they come back when everything is finished, however it may finish.
It was July 16, 1981. Milan was emptying; the reference room of the library was almost deserted.
“Hey, I need volume 109 myself.”
“Then why did you leave it here?”
“I just went back to my seat for a minute to check a note.”
“That’s no excuse.”
She took the volume stubbornly and went to her table. I sat down across from her, trying to get a better look at her face.
“How can you read it like that, unless it’s in Braille?” I asked.
She raised her head, and I really couldn’t tell whether I was looking at her face or the nape of her neck. “What?” she asked. “Oh. I can see through it all right.” But she lifted her hair as she spoke, and she had green eyes.
“You have green eyes.”
“Of course I do. Is that bad?”
“No. There should be more eyes like that.”
That’s how it began.
“Eat. You’re thin as a rail,” she said to me at supper. At midnight we were still in the Greek restaurant near Pilade’s, the candle guttering in the neck of the bottle as we told each other everything. We did almost the same work: she checked encyclopedia entries.
I felt I had to tell her. At twelve-thirty, when she pulled her hair aside to see me better, I aimed a forefinger at her, thumb raised, and went: “Pow”
“Me too,” she said.
That night we became flesh of one flesh, and from then on she called me Pow.
We couldn’t afford a new house. I slept at her place, and sometimes she stayed with me at the office, or went off investigating, because she was smarter than I when it came to following up clues. She was good, also, at suggesting connections.
“We seem to have a half-empty file on the Rosicrucians,” she said.
“I should go back to it one of these days. They’re notes I took in Brazil….”
“Well, put in a cross reference to Yeats.”
“What’s Yeats got to do with it?”
“Plenty. I see here that he belonged to a Rosicrucian society that was called Stella Matutina.”
“What would I do without you?”
I resumed going to Pilade’s, because it was like a marketplace where I could find customers.
One evening I saw Belbo again. He must have been coming rarely in the past few years, but he showed up regularly after meeting Lorenza Pellegrini. He looked the same, maybe a bit grayer, maybe slightly thinner.
It was a cordial meeting, given the limits of his expansiveness: a few remarks about the old days, sober reticence about our complicity in that last event and its epistolary sequel. Inspector De Angelis hadn’t been heard from again. Case closed? Who could say?
I told him about my work, and he seemed interested. “Just the kind of thing I’d like to do: the Sam Spade of culture. Twenty bucks a day and expenses.”
“Except that no fascinating, mysterious women have dropped
