The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana Read online

  I thought I was going to be able to handle living with so many People I do not recognize, but this is the greatest hurdle yet, ever since those senile fantasies entered my head. What pains me is that I might cause her pain. So you see, then… No, it is natural for a man not to want to hurt his own adoptive daughter. Daughter? The other day I felt like a pedophile and now I discover I am incestuous?

  And after all, my God, who said we ever slept together? Maybe it was just a kiss, a single kiss, or a platonic attraction, each understanding what the other felt but neither ever speaking of it. Round Table lovers, we slept for four years with a sword between us.

  Oh, I also have a Stultifera Navis, though it does not look like a first edition and in any case is not a first-rate copy. And this De Proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus? Completely rubricated from top to bottom-too bad the binding is modern, antique style. We can talk business. "Sibilla, the Stultifera Navis isn’t a first edition, is it?"

  "Unfortunately no, Monsieur Bodoni. Ours is the 1497 Olpe. The first is also Olpe, Basel, but from 1494, and in German, Das Narren Schyff. The first Latin edition, like ours, appears in ‘97, but in March, and ours, if you look at the colophon, is from August, and in between there were also April and June editions. But it isn’t so much the date, it’s the copy; as you can see, it’s not terribly appealing. I won’t say it’s a reading copy, but it’s nothing to ring the bells about."

  "You know so much, Sibilla, what would I do without you?"

  "You were the one who taught me. To get out of Warsaw I passed myself off as a grande savante, but if I hadn’t met you I’d be just as stupid as when I arrived."

  Admiration, devotion. Is she trying to tell me something? I murmur, "Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères …" I anticipate her: "Nothing, nothing, a poem popped into my head. Sibilla, we should be clear about something. Perhaps as we go forward I’ll seem almost normal to you, but I’m not. Everything that happened to me before, and I mean everything, you understand, is like a blackboard that’s been sponged clean. I am immaculately black, if you’ll pardon the contradiction. You should understand that, and not despair, and… stand by me." Did I say the right thing? It felt perfect, it could be understood in two ways.

  "Don’t worry, Monsieur Bodoni, I completely understand. I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. I’ll wait…"

  Are you really a slyboots? Are you saying that you are waiting for me to get back on my feet, as of course everyone is doing, or that you are waiting for me to remember a certain thing? And if the latter, what will you do, in the coming days, to remind me? Or do you want with all your heart for me to remember, but will not do anything, because you are not a slyboots but a woman in love, and you are holding your tongue to avoid upsetting me? Are you suffering, not letting it show because you are the marvelous creature you are, yet telling yourself that this is finally the right time for the two of us to come to our senses? You will sacrifice yourself, never doing anything to make me remember, not trying to touch my hand some evening as if in passing so that I might taste my madeleine-you who with the pride of all lovers know that although no one else can make me smell the scents that will be my Open Sesame, you could do so at will, simply by letting your hair brush my cheek as you lean over to hand me a form. Or by speaking again, as if casually, that banal phrase you spoke the first time, which we spent four years embroidering, quoting like a magic word whose meaning and power only we knew, we whom our secret set apart? Like: Et mon bureau? But that was Rimbaud.

  Let us try at least to get one thing clear. "Sibilla, perhaps you’re calling me Monsieur Bodoni because it’s as if today I were meeting you for the first time, even though after working together we may have begun to use tu with each other, as often happens in such cases. What did you call me before?"

  She blushed, emitting again that modulated, tender hiccup: Oui, oui, oui, in fact I called you Yambo. You tried to make me feel at ease from the start."

  Her eyes glittered with happiness, as if a weight had been lifted from her heart. But using tu does not mean anything: even Gianni-Paola and I went to his office with him the other day-uses tu with his secretary.

  "Well then!" I said cheerfully, "we’ll pick up exactly where we left off. You know that in general picking up where I left off may be helpful to me."

  How did she take that? What did picking up where we left off mean to her?

  Back home I spent a sleepless night, and Paola stroked my hair. I felt like an adulterer, yet I had done nothing. On the other hand, I was not troubled for Paola’s sake, but for my own. The best part of having loved, I told myself, is the memory of having loved. Some people live on a single memory. Eugénie Grandet, for example. But to think you have loved, yet not be able to recall it? Or worse still, you may have loved, you cannot remember it, and you suspect you have not loved. Or another possibility, which in my vanity I had not considered: Madly in love, I made an advance, and she put me in my place, kindly, gently, firmly. She stayed because I was a gentleman and behaved from that day on as if nothing had happened, in the end she enjoyed working there, or could not afford to lose a good job, maybe was flattered by my move; indeed, her feminine vanity, without her realizing it, had been touched, and although she has never admitted it even to herself, she is aware of having a certain power over me. An allumeuse. Or worse: This slyboots took me for a ton of money, made me do whatever she wanted-clearly I had left her in charge of everything, including the revenue and the deposits and maybe even the withdrawals, I sang cock-a-doodle-doo like Professor Rath, I was a broken man, I stopped going out… Maybe this lucky disaster will allow me to get out of it, every cloud has a silver lining. How wretched I am, how I sully everything I touch, she might be still a virgin and here I am making a whore of her. Whatever the case, even the mere suspicion, disavowed, makes things worse: If you cannot remember having loved, you will never know whether the one you loved was worthy of your love. That Vanna I met a few mornings ago, that was a clear case-a flirtation, a night or two, then perhaps a few days of disappointment and that was all. But here four years of my life are at stake. Yambo, could it be that you are falling in love with her today, when maybe nothing existed before, and are now rushing toward your ruin? All because you imagine you were damned then and want to rediscover your paradise? And to think that there are lunatics who drink to forget, or take drugs, Oh, if only I could forget it all, they say. I alone know the truth: Forgetting is dreadful. Are there drugs for remembering?

  Maybe Sibilla…

  Here I go again. If I spy you passing at such regal distance, with your hair loose and your whole bearing august, vertigo carries me off.

  The next morning, I took a taxi to Gianni’s office. I asked him straight out what he knew about Sibilla and me. He seemed floored.

  "Yambo, we’re all a bit infatuated with Sibilla-myself, your fellow dealers, lots of your clients. There are people who come to you just to see her. But it’s all a joke, schoolboy stuff. We all take turns kidding each other about it, and we often kidded you: I have a feeling there’s something between you and the lovely Sibilla, we’d say. And you’d laugh, and sometimes you’d play along, as if to imply outrageous things, and sometimes you’d tell us to lay off it, that she could be your daughter. Games. That’s why I asked you about Sibilla that evening: I thought you’d already seen her and I wanted to know what impression she’d made."

  "So I never told you anything about me and Sibilla?"

  "Why, was there something to tell?"

  "Don’t joke about this, you know I’m an amnesiac. I’m here to ask you if I ever told you anything."

  "Nothing. And you always told me about your affairs, perhaps to make me envious. You told me about Cavassi, about Vanna, about the American at the London book fair, about the beautiful Dutch girl you made three special trips to Amsterdam to see, about Silvana…"

  "Come on, how many affairs did I have?"

  "A lot. Too many, I thought, but I’ve always been monogamous. Abou
t Sibilla, I swear to you, you never said a thing. What’s got into you? You saw her yesterday, she smiled at you, and you thought it would have been impossible to be around her and not think about it. You’re human; I certainly wouldn’t have expected you to say, Who’s this hag,… And besides, none of us ever managed to find out whether Sibilla had a life of her own. Always relaxed, eager to help anyone as if she were doing him a special favor-sometimes a girl can be provocative precisely because she doesn’t flirt. The ice sphinx." Gianni was probably telling the truth, but that meant nothing. If something had happened and Sibilla had become more important to me than all the others, if she were The One, I certainly would not have told even Gianni about it. It would have had to remain a delicious conspiracy between Sibilla and me.

  Or not. The ice sphinx, in her off-hours, has her own life, perhaps she already has a man, keeps it to herself, is perfect, does not mix her work and her private life. I am stung by jealousy of an unknown rival. And someone will pluck your flower, mouth of the wellspring, someone who won’t even know, a fisher of sponges will take this rare pearl.

  "I have a widow for you, Yambo," said Sibilla with a wink. She is gaining confidence, how nice. "A widow?" I asked. She explained that antiquarian book dealers of my stature have certain methods of procuring books. There is the fellow who shows up at the studio asking whether his book is worth something, and how much it is worth depends on how honest you are, though in any case you try to make a profit. Or the guy is a collector hard up for cash, he knows the value of what he is offering, and the most you can do is haggle a little over the price. Another technique is shopping the international auctions, where you can get a bargain if you are the only one to realize a book’s worth, but your competitors are not fools. Thus the margin is minimal, and things get interesting only if you can set a very high price for your find. Then too you buy from your colleagues: one might have a book that is of little interest to his sort of client, so his price is low, but you know a collector who is lusting after it. Then there is the vulture method. You identify the great families in decline, with the old palazzos and the ancient libraries, and you wait for a father to die, a husband, an uncle, at which point the heirs already have their hands full selling the furniture and the jewels, and they have no idea how to appraise that hoard of books they have never examined. "Widow" is just a manner of speaking: it could be a grandson who wants to turn a quick buck, and if he has problems with women, or drugs, so much the better. Then you go look at the books, spend two or three days in those great shadowy rooms, and formulate your strategy.

  This time it actually was a widow. Sibilla had received a tip from someone (my little secret, she said with a pleased, mischievous air), and it seems I have a way with widows. I asked Sibilla to come along, since by myself I ran the risk of not recognizing the book. What a lovely house, Signora, why thank you, yes, perhaps a cognac. Then off to browse, bouquiner, hojear… Sibilla was whispering the rules of the game. Typically you find two or three hundred volumes of no value: you immediately spot the various pandects and theological dissertations, and these will end up in the stalls of the Sant’Ambrogio market, or else the eighteenth-century duodecimos of The Adventures of Te l e m a c h u s or the Utopian journeys, all bound identically, perfect for interior decorators, who will buy them by the meter. Then lots of sixteenth-century small-format stuff, Ciceros and rhetorics for Herennius, cheap junk that ends up in the stalls of A lazza Fontanella Borghese in Rome, where people pay twice what it is worth just so they can say they have a sixteenth-century book. But we look and we look, and there-even I noticed it-a Cicero, true, but in Aldine italics, and no less than a Nuremburg Chronicle in perfect condition, and a Rolewinck, and Kircher’s Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, with its splendid engravings and only a few pages browned-rare for paper of that time, and even a delicious Rabelais by Jean-Frédéric Bernard, 1741, three quarto volumes with illustrations by Picart, splendid red morocco bindings, gold-stamped covers, gilt bands and decorations on the spines, green silk doublures with gilt dentelles- the deceased had kindly covered the volumes in light-blue paper to protect them, so they made no impression at first glance. It’s certainly not the Nuremburg Chronicle, Sibilla murmured, the binding is modern, but collectible, signed Rivière amp; Son. Fossati would snap it up-I’ll tell you about him later, he collects bindings.

  By the end we had identified ten volumes that at good prices would have netted us, conservatively speaking, at least a hundred million lire: the Chronicle alone would fetch an absolute minimum of fifty million. Who knows how they got there-the deceased was a notary, his library was a status symbol, and he apparently had been a miser, buying only books that didn’t cost him much. He must have acquired the good ones by accident forty years earlier, in the days when people would throw them at you. Sibilla told me how we handle these situations, I called the signora over, and it was as if I had always done this job. 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, b
ut 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…