I said there was a lot of stuff here, but none of it was worth much. I slapped the least felicitous examples onto the table: foxed pages, moisture stains, weak joints, morocco bindings that looked as though they had been sanded, pages wormed to lace. Look at this one, Dottore, Sibilla said. Once they’re warped like this you can never get them back to normal, even with a press. I mentioned the Sant’Ambrogio market. «I don’t know if I can even place them all, Signora, and you realize that if they remain in stock our storage costs skyrocket. I’ll offer fifty million for the lot.»
«You call it a lot?!» Oh, no, fifty million for that splendid library, her husband spent a lifetime assembling it, it was an offense to his memory. On to phase two of our strategy: «Well, Signora, look, the only ones really of interest to us are these ten. I’ll tell you what, I’ll offer you thirty million just for them.» The signora does the math: fifty million for an immense library is an offense to the sacred memory of the departed, but thirty million for just ten books is a coup; she’ll find another book dealer who is less picky and more munificent to look at the rest. Sold.
We came back to the studio as gleeful as kids who had just played a practical joke. «Is it dishonest?» I asked.
«Of course not, Yambo, così fan tutti.» She quotes too, like me. «She would’ve got even less from one of your colleagues. And besides, did you see the furniture and the paintings and the silver? Those people are filthy rich, and books mean nothing to them. We work for people who truly love books.»
How would I manage without Sibilla? Tough and gentle, wise as a dove. The fantasies began to haunt me again, and I reentered the terrible spiral of the day before.
Luckily, the visit to the widow had completely worn me out. I went straight home. Paola remarked that I seemed more unfocused than usual, I must be working too hard. Better to go into the office only every other day.
I tried to think of other things: «Sibilla, my wife says that I collected writings about fog. Where are they?»
«They were horrible photocopies, little by little I transferred them to the computer. Don’t thank me, it was fun. Watch, I’ll find you the folder.»
I knew computers existed (just as I knew airplanes existed), but of course I was now touching one for the first time. It was like riding a bicycle: I put my hands on it, and my fingertips remembered on their own.
I had gathered at least a hundred and fifty pages of quotes about fog. I must truly have taken the subject to heart. Here was Abbott’s Flatland, a country of just two dimensions, inhabited only by planar figures: triangles, squares, polygons. And how do they recognize each other if they cannot see each other from above and so perceive only lines? Thanks to fog: «Wherever there is a rich supply of Fog, objects that are at a distance, say of three feet, are appreciably dimmer than those at the distance of two feet eleven inches; and the result is that by careful and constant experimental observation of comparative dimness and clearness, we are enabled to infer with great exactness the configuration of the object observed.» Blessed are these triangles who wander in the mist and can see things-here a hexagon, there a parallelogram. Two-dimensional, but luckier than I.
I found I could finish most of the quotations from memory.
«How is that possible,» I asked Paola, «if I’ve forgotten everything that has to do with me? I made this collection myself, with a personal investment.»
«It isn’t that you remember them because you collected them,» she said, «you collected them because you remembered them. They’re part of the encyclopedia, like the other poems you recited to me on your first day back home.»
In any case, I recognized them on sight. Beginning with Dante: Just as the gaze commences to rebuild, as soon as the fog first begins to clear, all that the mist that filled the air concealed, so I, piercing that dense, dark atmosphere…
D’Annunzio has some lovely pages on fog in Nocturne: «Someone walking by my side, noiselessly, as if in bare feet… The fog enters my mouth, fills my lungs. Toward the Canalazzo it hovers and gathers. The stranger becomes grayer, fainter, turns to shadow… Beneath the house of the antiquarian, he suddenly disappears.» Here the antiquarian is a black hole: what falls in never comes out.
Then Dickens, the classic opening of Bleak House: «Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city…» And Dickinson: «Let us go in; the fog is rising.»
«I didn’t know Pascoli,» Sibilla said. «Listen to how lovely it is…» Now she had come quite close so she could see the screen; she could have brushed my cheek with her hair. But she did not. She pronounced the verses with a soft Slavic cadence:
Motionless in the haze the trees; the long laments of the steam engine rise…
O pallid impalpable fog, hide what is far away; O vapor climbing the sky of a new day…
She balked at the third quotation: «Fog… per colates?»
«Pe r colates.»
«Ah.» She seemed excited to have learned a new word:
Fog percolates, a puff of wind filling the gully with strident leaves; lightly through the barren stand the robin dives; beneath the fog the cane field pales, giving voice to a fevered tremor; above the fog there rise the bells of the far tower.
Good fog in Pirandello, and to think he was Sicilian: «You could slice the fog-Around every streetlamp a halo yawned.» But Savinio’s Milan is even better: «The fog is cozy. It transforms the city into an enormous candy box, and its inhabitants into pieces of sugar candy… W omen and girls pass hooded in the fog. A light vapor huffs around their nostrils and at their halfopen mouths… Y ou find yourself in a parlor stretched by mirrors… you embrace, each still fragrant with fog, as the fog outside-discreet, silent, protective- presses against the window like a curtain…» The Milanese fogs of Vittorio Sereni:
The doors flung vainly open onto evening fog no one getting on or off except a gust of smog the cry of the newsboy- paradoxical-the Tempo di Milano the alibi and the benefit of fog things hidden walk under cover move toward me veer away from me past like history past like memory: twenty thirteen thirty-three years like tramcar numbers…
I collected everything. Here is King Lear: «Infect her beauty, you fensucked fogs, drawn by the powerful sun.» And Campana? «Through the breach in the red, fog-corroded ramparts, the long streets open silently. The awful vapor of the fog droops between the palazzos, veiling the tops of the towers, the long streets as silent and empty as if the city had been sacked.»
Sibilla was enchanted by Flaubert: «A whitish day passed beyond the curtainless windows. She glimpsed treetops, and in the distance, the prairie, half-drowned in fog that smoked in the moonlight.» And by Baudelaire: «The buildings sank into a sea of fog, / And deep in hospices the dying heaved…»
She was speaking other people’s words, but for me it was as if they were rising up from a fountainhead. Someone may pluck your flower, mouth of the wellspring…
She was there, the fog was not. Others had seen it and distilled it into sounds. Perhaps one day I really could penetrate that fog, if Sibilla were to lead me by the hand.
I have already had several checkups with Gratarolo, but in general he approves of what Paola has done. He likes the fact that I have now become almost self-sufficient, thus at least eliminating my initial frustrations.
I have spent a number of evenings with Gianni, Paola, and the girls playing Scrabble; they say it was my favorite game. I find words easily, especially esoteric ones like ACROSTIC (by adding on to TIC) or ZEUGMA. Later, incorporating an M and an H that were the first letters of two words going down, I start from the first red square in the top row and go all the way past the second, making AMPHIBOLY. Twenty-one times nine, plus the fiftypoint bonus for playing all seven of my letters: two hundred and thirty-nine points in a single play. Gianni got mad. Thank God you’re an amnesiac, he yelled. He said it to boost my confidence.
Not only am I an amnesiac, but I may be living out fictitious memories. Gratarolo mentioned the fact that in cases like mine, some people invent scraps of a past they never lived, just to have the sensation of remembering.
Have I been using Sibilla as a pretext?
I have to get out of it somehow. Going to my studio has become torture. I said to Paola, «Pavese was right: Work’s tiring. And I always see the same old part of
