The Infinite Library Read online

  He must have noticed that I noticed him, for he spoke to me without raising his head from the meal: “care to join me, traveler?” His accent was a mix of sultry French washing over the harsh rocks of a Slavic tongue, but even this was amorphous. There was no consistent accent; I was guessing and not half as worldly as I would liked to have been.

  I felt a bit flush and embarrassed, but curious all the same. His choreography ceased, and he merely raised an eye and eyebrow hung in the complete stillness of his body to see if my reply would be to take him up on his offer. I motioned to the server that I would be changing seats, and the server grunted assent. Upon closer inspection, the man seemed and sounded like a baroque dandy - or at least some bastard derivation thereof made possible by an appetite for anachronism. He was most likely a crazy person, and yet I was choosing to sit with him for no defensible reason other than laggard, desultory curiousity.

  The man gestured with an inviting sweep to the empty chair across from him, now resuming his brusque and voracious attention to his meal. I can only paraphrase a conversation that was far more awkward and filled with the gaps and lapses of my slow thought-to-speech ratio.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Without any small talk preamble, he went right for it: “Yes, and so you are here to do research at the library, I take it?”

  “Which?”

  “There is only one library, extended in its parts, but all part of a whole. But I really mean the Pope’s not-so-secret textual booty. You have to wonder just how many of those books were acquired a poignard. Inquisitions always seem to increase knowledge for some. Oh, well. Book acquisition doubled after the Lateran Council in 1215… The invention of penance made it so. Full of guilt? Murderer? Rapist? Forgiveness conditional on serving in his Holiness’ Crusade. Endless bulls, diplomas, indulgences for labour traded, remissions of penance during Lent, and so forth. Dreary stuff, so blandly historical! And without an inch of humour or an inkling of character and style. The Church was one of the first bodies to effectively practice information control.”

  “How did you know that I was at the library?”

  “Nothing happens in Vatican City without my knowing it, it seems. As well, you are festooned with books and notes, and your eyes seem bleary with text. I know your type well, and one does not need some sort of special radar to pick you out of the crowd. Come now… no one who lives here actually reads! Unless one is a member of the College of Cardinals, what point is there? Life is simple. Texts only increase upon the burdens, giving us new puzzles to occupy our time.”

  “I don’t know if I would agree with you.”

  He sat back, corking me with a mischievous grin, dabbing now at the corners of his mouth with a napkin. It seemed like he was all bones, wrapped tautly with skin, perhaps too tight, which made his eyes seem to bulge slightly which made him seem as comical as it also made him appear like a regulation nightmare nemesis. He lit another cigarette and was about to, if his gestures could be read, launch into a schoolmaster's lecture.

  “Listen,” he said, “I am not an enemy of books and their retinue of paramours; quite the contrary. But it will always astound me that so many of you wander into deserts in search of trees when the forest is all around you.”

  “What do you mean? Are you saying the Vatican’s holdings are sub par? That would be a controversial statement. A bit glib, maybe arrogant. I’m sorry, but I’m not following what you’re driving at.”

  “You’re right. I should remember well to qualify my statements. Cigarette?”

  He pointed the open pack at me; I politely and mutely declined with a low wave of my hand. I was currently on one of my short-lived jags of quitting that would invariably fail soon.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “what is a library?”

  “Are you asking me to provide you with a definition? Of what kind?”

  “Oh, any definition will do,” he said as if it didn't matter.

  “I presume that this is your Socratic way of demonstrating to me that I have no conception of what a library is?”

  “If you prefer… You may be sharp, but a bit defensive. It seems that one follows the other. How refreshing it would be to hear someone who has been in libraries all his life to declare that he had no real idea what a library actually was! Oh, I would relish that day! But men are arrogant and full of words, and they think that by making noises with their mouths and so much pen scratching they will somehow stumble upon the truth.”

  “And you are not among men?”

  “I am one among them, yes, but I know the limitations of words in whatever shape they contrive to take. We are both lovers of books, and so it should come as no surprise to either of us that we have made a lot of noise in history. We collect the noises that are in our heads and mouths into these bound objects meant to carry a species’ legacy, all the nominal fluctuations of thinking. To explain, to refute, to prove, to describe, to express, to indicate, to lament, to polemicize, to editorialize, etcetera. We collect these things into libraries and conflate having with knowing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How easily our vanity deceives us! Go to a library and note that it purports to be the record of all our knowledge, gained from so many millennia of strife and discovery. Now, we may have this record, but consider the individual who wanders into the library - does he know it all?”

  “If he did, then this would make libraries redundant and useless. We can only potentially know all that is recorded, but it is highly implausible that we'd have the time to do so.”

  “Don’t be so daft,” he scoffed. “Not all the libraries in this world can approximate the smallest slice of all our knowledge. It is all vanity and imposture! And what of this ‘potential knowledge’? That is as valuable as an empty plate when one is hungry. Say, do you read either Plotinus or Leibniz?”

  “I have occasioned their works in the past, back in my undergraduate days. Nothing more than a passing familiarity.”

  “Well, your sense of hope still seems intact. Either you show great fortitude or your reading was loose and frivolous.”

  “I cannot say that I delved that deeply into either philosopher.”

  “Pity. You know, I reject Leibniz. In my line of work--”

  “Which is?”

  “Oh, I am a librarian. We will get to that later. Anyhow, Leibniz holds to the view that all matter is composed of itty-bitty things called monads, and each monad is distinct. There are no windows through which one monad can affect another. All monads proceed by their own nature, and it just so happens that everything works out because of that copout Leibniz inserts something called the pre-established harmony. The raillery of that court buffoon and his contested calculus! There is a central monad that governs all the others - it commands while lesser monads obey. I like to think of Leibniz’s theory of monadology as an analogy of the perfect library where all the books are distinct, and the harmony is the cataloguing system that allows each book to stand in its own nature, never affecting its neighbouring books. The central monad of the library is not the librarian, but the ordering system - the librarian is just a higher monad in the library, subject to the command of the harmony set down by the highest monad. This is the way in which libraries are generally conceived - and it is all bosh. It is the one version of Leibniz I despise the most, and I am sad that this one existed, for if this is the best of all possible worlds as he asserts, then this is proof that this notion is corrupt. I have read much more intriguing Leibnizes in my time, much more compelling than this court dandy! This was not the best of all possible texts by Leibniz.”

  “You speak of Leibniz in the plural. Was there more than one philosopher by that name?”

  “Plenty. There are as many of them as there are monads, both potential and actual.”

  “A multiple worlds view?”

  “Somewhat, but that sounds quite crude. Perhaps I should tell you about the Plotinian effect which constitutes libraries, that all Libraries are derived from the on
e Library.”

  “And so you have had access to reading a different Leibnizian text than the rest of us? Or is this just a figure of speech, a different interpretive perspective on the same text?”

  He just smiled at me, a broader grin than before.

  “My name’s Gimaldi,” I said, a late introduction for what it was worth.

  “Castellemare - pleasure,” he returned, wiping his hand briskly on his pants and jutting out his hand.

  “Apart from research and deciphering code, I also specialize in the buying and selling of antiquarian editions,” I said, making an embarrassing plug.

  “Fabulous! So you are both the lover and the whore of books. Books as mental and actual capital…I’ll never understand the fixation some have in bandying books around like a mercenary stock market exercise, but I suppose they’re as much a commodity as anything else – a dying one given the internetizing of everything…”

  “One has to make a living.”

  “Oh, of course. This may be impudent of me, but have you considered a career change?”

  “Many times, but I find that careers involving books is the only thing that holds my interest; hence, my research and my business.”

  “Maybe there is money in becoming a Publish-On-Demand publishing house. Seems as though everyone is writing and no one is reading! It would be far more profitable to get play on people's vanity. Simple economics... There is no demand, only supply, and the industry may as well call itself 'publish-for-supply'! What a failure to produce an infinite library, one stuffed with the works of intolerable amateurs and their narcissistic diarizing!”

  “I can't say that I have much care or knowledge about any book after 1800.”

  “Have you ever considered becoming a librarian?”

  “Yes, once or twice. I romanticized this position in my youth, thinking of how the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, spent his days in the service of the national library, reading so voluminously.”

  “And then he went blind! Ha! Where is the Greek chorus when you need it? Well, do go on.”

  “Yes, I had considered becoming a librarian, but I love books too much to merely be a functionary who must fight a losing battle of maintaining order in a collection that constantly expands, and the gruff disrespect of the patrons who would wrongly re-shelf at will.”

  “Oh, brilliant contradiction! You love books so much that you sell them off! O ho ho! What a card you are! I love it! Well… let me be frank for a moment. I am looking for someone to play my Faust for a while, and you intrigue me. If I may ask, are you faring well financially?”

  “I make do.”

  “Are you familiar with library sciences?”

  “I know the basics.”

  “Hm. Well, I can retrain you, removing all that hooey you may have already been infested with in terms of how one should work in a library. I am willing to pay a handsome wage if you are interested in working in my library.”

  “This is an enticing offer, I’m sure, but I would need to consider it and have all the conditions of my potential employment revealed before making any serious commitment.”

  “But of course,” he beamed almost as though he already knew that I would take him up on his offer. “Neither of us should make a rash decision. Ask away.”

  “Where is this library located?”

  “Everywhere and nowhere, but to satisfy the naggingly boring demands for places and spaces, I have holdings in various locations around the globe… and some in-between.”

  “What would my duties be?”

  “That is negotiable. For the now, I can take you under my wing and school you in the way in which this library is to be tended. Later on, once your skills have significantly improved, you will assist me in acquiring very rare and obscure texts that your current sleuthing ability would never locate, all to the purpose of restoring the girth of my collection. Of course, I have the biggest collection in the world, as you shall soon see. I will not ask you to put the entirety of my vast library in order, for it is its own order, in and from time. This all sounds very vague to you, I can tell, but should you opt for this, soon you will glean exactly what I mean.”

  “Wage?”

  “Ah! The real question! Money! I am a modestly wealthy man, and I can afford to pay you as an assistant, but it would most likely be a limited contract basis. Usually ranging in the thousands of euros to about a hundred thousand per assignment, pending complexity and difficulty in acquisition.”

  I nearly choked on my wine. I never grossed that sum in five years’ worth of hard book-selling labour or luck.

  “And,” he continued, “you may continue to do your research on the side, for I think you will find more than enough material to furnish your endeavours by indirect pursuit. Perhaps I may be so kind to allow you a little peek at a few of my own books... Well, at least under my supervision and with extremely limited access, of course. Some books are not to be opened for any reason. Do you have any other questions?”

  “Why me? I mean, I haven’t give you a CV and I may not have the qualifications you are looking for. You’ll have to forgive me but this all feels rather sudden and unnatural. I am not accustomed to being approached by strangers with job offers.”

  “I see good things in you, and so I follow my intuition. You seem the sort to take the mission of the Library seriously. I do not need to sift through self-serving entries on a CV to confirm a choice I have already made. Besides, this is no ordinary job and so why should the recruitment be ordinary?”

  “When do I start?” I asked, incredulous at my own credulity. This was likely the deranged fantasy of a lunatic, and I would be right.

  “You already have. Your first lesson begins now. Between two books is what?”

  “Space?”

  Castellemare emitted a sharp and tinny laugh. “You do have much to learn! Listen, between any two books is... a book.”

  “An invisible book?”

  “Infinitesimal calculus and Zeno both bear this out, my new assistant to the Craft. As does Leibniz in his own way, and Plotinus. Between two books is always another book - the trick is to know how to remove it from the continuum… for all libraries issue from the same source, the One Library, and all books on those shelves are in an infinite continuum. I am simply using these terms in a way that can be expressed in imprecise, conventional language. Most people have an infantile understanding of the infinite, and have no clear idea what a continuum is.”

  A clatter erupted from the kitchen with a cook’s fiery expletives in pursuit of the event.

  “Anyway,” Castellemare resumed, “what you see in a conventional humdrum library is merely what is on the surface of perceptibility. But what of all those minute and infinitely imperceptible books? You must train your eyes as one should train the ears to hear both the whole of the tide and each of its droplets. First, let me give you something to read - two things in fact.”

  My initial enthusiasm had crested and was now beginning to wane. His affectations and seemingly mystical statements were causing me to doubt if his offer was genuine or just a product of the delusions of mental illness. As if to dispel any doubt as to his credibility, Castellemare slipped a hand into his black coat draped on his chair and fetched two volumes that he placed by my elbow. I replaced my fork on the table and scanned their titles.

  “Since,” he continued, “you mentioned Borges, perhaps you will fancy this work. It is the entirety of his story, ‘The Library of Babel’, but written as one extended novel; this is volume number 8,230 of you-don’t-want-to-know-how-many, and the other is volume 45,781.”

  “But, he never wrote a novel by this name. Where did you find this? Is it really his? This must be fan fiction, or a bad emulation passing itself as being written by Borges. He only wrote short fiction and essays, as is my understanding,” I said, not concealing my instinctual, hardened doubt.

  “Precisely: as is your understanding.”

  The book felt like a precious object, and I could not help
thinking two things: that the text was a forgery by someone inspired by and purporting to be Borges, and that if it were genuine it would fetch an obscenely high price among Borges scholars. The problem was, apart from this text not existing in any known catalogue or bibliography of works Borges bequeathed to history, the binding, paper, and type dated the book to be printed in the 1780s. The second volume was more perplexing. It smelled old. The binding was leather with ribbed spine, placing its publication most likely in the 17th century, which further embroidered on the implausibility since Borges was a 20th century author. The spine was blank. I opened it delicately and there was no title and no author. I turned another page and the text immediately began: it was nothing more than MCV repeated for 410 pages. I knew exactly what this book was, for it was mentioned in Borges’ short story, of which I was now in possession of the entire novel thereof. I recall Borges’ line: “All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV’s cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectal or rudimentary it may be.”

  “How?”

  Castellemare just gave me a wink. But the enigma was staggering: my reason tried to pave over the contradictions with justifications. How could a text, described by Borges, antedate his invention of it some three hundred years? Unless Borges actually discovered this text and incorporated it into his fiction… but it seemed absurd that anyone would have sank money into the publishing of a text of this nature that has no author, title, or intelligible sense. Was it anecdotal? No, it was indeed published…A splendid Elzevir edition, or an impeccable copy of their trademark style. I knew it not to be a code, and so was amazed that such an old text would actually sport this glyptolalia. It all seemed too fantastical to me. I thought to myself that some enterprising individual had been able – at considerable cost – to acquire the skills of a very good book binder with all the genuinely dated materials to perpetrate a very convincing hoax. I had read about this in the popular book by Perez-Reverte, The Dumas Club. The one good wrinkle of realism to the tale was the explanation of how difficult it is to counterfeit books.