The Infinite Library Read online

  Castellemare leaned over and whispered, “I have the entire contents of Borges’ library of Babel, and much more. Take these with you tonight, and I will expect you soon. Here is my calling card. Do not lose these books.”

  He gave me an elegant maroon card with his name in gold leaf:

  Tho. VON Castellemare, Esq.

  Chief Bibliomarch of the Library of Enigmae

  Consultant of the Obscure

  2-9065-3966

  190 Rue Velasquez

  He departed, tossing a heap of bills in his place. I merely sat there, dumbfounded and in dire need to regain my bearings after such a bizarre chance meeting. I resolved to call him the next day, but to first consider if this was just an elaborate hoax by a master charlatan. Once I returned to my hotel, I asked the concierge to send up the necessary connections for my laptop so that I could do an exhaustive search on Castellemare and any mention of these two impossible editions he saddled me with.

  The results of my careful examination of the two texts Castellemare had entrusted me with did indeed verify the age of the material, the ink, and the like. I have made it habit when mulling over the purchase of a rare antiquarian text to bring with me a very portable lab composed of a few select chemicals to determine the authenticity of a text in question. The results were positive, but I could not rule out that these two books were not somehow expertly created, and if so it would have cost a fortune to do so convincingly enough to fool an expert in my field. However, given the examples of financial largesse Castellemare demonstrated by promise and deed, I could not rule out that these books were forgeries commissioned by him for the purposes of some joke. Unlike others in my field, I pay divided attention to both the use of paper and of ink. I believe that these should be studied separately, and to resist conflating the two into a single flattened product, or privileging one at the risk of dismissing the other.

  The insoluble riddle in the existence of these two books taunted me, almost as much as Castellemare had. Why did he choose me? Why was I even considering so favourably to take up his offer?

  2

  Magic as Realism

  My most general project has been in the quiet murmurs and inconsequential findings I have fed into a variety of extremely niche journals. It is rather clear that my meagre scholarly reputation has lived off these few occasional scraps of effort, and that I financially rely on using my skills as a book sleuth to supplement my income. Mercenary in a book speculation enterprise, more like. I had never anticipated, prior to meeting Castellemare, that mystery could take such an uncanny path, something that would adumbrate my sense of what was real. Perhaps more crucially, and although I had long lived it without realizing it, was the fact that mystery and tragedy always appear entwined in a narrative braid. For so long I had conformed to a set series of rules and expectations, never submitting myself to that graven predilection of more poetic minds to evaluate existence by other, less staid means. I knew that, in Shakespearean terms, tragedies began in a lighthearted way and ended in heavy complication (and casualties). The opposite was true for comedies. My meeting with Castellemare seemed to have elements of both.

  Rescheduling my flight, I made telephone contact with Castellemare who agreed to meet me the following week at his flat above the Bidaccio Building near Genoa, and I came armed with an arsenal of questions and the two editions he lent me. He was on the second floor of a very cramped room. It was crammed with antiques and curiousities. To the right of an old oak desk, within reach of the one who would sit there, was a sagging bookcase built into the wall, lined with old volumes. The carpet was faded, but seemingly of fine quality. There was a print framed at the top left of the room depicting a disembodied translucent eye looking into a sphere. There were Flemish decorative touches to the room which half made me expect to see a mappa mundi ominously occupying an aristocratic room with a parqueted floor. When I arrived, I noticed that someone else was already with him, a gruff man in a comically oversized greatcoat bearing sergeant stripes that were curling off the upper sleeve. The man appeared somewhat scurrilous and rat-like, and his character - as I would later realize - seem to be a perfect fit for his appearance. Some people were as they appeared, fingers in a perfect glove.

  “This is Angelo,” Castellemare introduced us. “Angelo, this is Gimaldi. The two of you will be working together.”

  “How many assistants do you have under your employ?” I asked. I tried not to acknowledge Angelo, as if I could talk over him. But some people cannot be ignored, like a hideous lamp in the midst of a cultured décor.

  “Just the two of you. Angelo has been with me for a few years now, haven’t you?”--Angelo nodded, bearing small rat’s teeth to confirm my mental description. “Angelo has a good nose for books, and he is my public front, in a way, and also an agent I deploy. He has a remarkable memory and an incredible instinct when it comes to books. He can walk into any old, dusty crèche stuffed with books, and walk out being able to tell you the entire contents. He has a synaesthetic memory. He is my best employee, entirely indispensable. Why, if he were to be pushed to his death by some ridiculous idiot, I'd be incensed beyond all calculation!”

  I nodded, pretending that I was impressed. Surely, such ability is impressive, but there was something I did not like about Angelo, a kind of distrustful aura that only emanates among those who make their living acquiring rare books at any cost, a bit too much like myself. There were the unmistakable marks of ambition and treachery in his features. He sat by Castellemare like a smug witch’s familiar.

  “I truly mean it,” he said, as if the point required further emphasis. “I would be in such a rage that woe be the man who would dare kill my Angelo, and I wouldn't care where it was written that it would be done, that it would be necessary that it would be done.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, not sure why Castellemare was going on about this. “So, what is it that you do for Castellemare?” I asked, trying to be inclusively polite. There was an air of conspiratorial camaraderie that I did not want to dispel. Small talk would do.

  Angelo shifted in his seat and gave me a spiking smirk, his face twisted like a growly drunk: “I catch slips.”

  Castellemare explained: “You see, Gimaldi, some of my books slip from my library and end up in other libraries. This is potentially very dangerous and, as you cannot imagine, horribly embarrassing. Angelo here retrieves them for me and places them where they belong. This will constitute the majority of your services for me.”

  “You must have a sizable library to lose track of books in the hands of others. Could you not just ask for them back after you lend them?”

  “Oh, I don’t lend them. As you will soon learn, books travel. Remember that I told you that there is only one library, and the divisions you see between them is as illusory as the differences between books themselves. Other peoples’ libraries are just modifications of the One Library. It is Spinozism: Librara librarata - libraries library themselves… But all the same, there are certain texts that must not appear in any other modified library but the One. They must remain in the virtual lest untold confusion occurs. You see, there are rifts in every library that led directly to the One Library; sometimes books slip out…”

  “Oh, yeah,” Angelo suddenly remembered, “I located the Voynich; that joker left it at a bus stop… after all that trouble you went to in letting him have it.”

  “Excellent. I will replace it in the library later on. Gimaldi, you are familiar with the Voynich?”

  “Vaguely,” I lied; in fact, I had spent the better part of a decade trying to decode it as a side project. It has been one of many continuing failures, buoyed only by the dim hope that I could one day crack it. The facsimiles I had ordered from the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library were now buried under a multitude of more achievable projects. I had had enough of twisting myself over 13th century mysteries.

  “Well, then, you might not have heard the whole story. As you may not know, the Voynich manuscript has changed hands many times, as
many times as a well-worn coin. I allowed a particularly gifted and intriguing individual to have it, even though he believes that it was by his agency that he acquired it. He had a master forger produce a counterfeit and switched the original with the copy at Yale. He then traveled with it, failing to crack its code. He had problems with various secretive groups, and now it seems that he has decided to part ways with it - even after I offered him my most generous blessings that he be its custodian until I found a more suitable party. The Voynich is yet to be translated, and is reputed to be written by the clever medieval mathematician, Roger Bacon. What no one seems to realize is that Bacon was one of the few to know about the existence of the One Library, and so he exploited what powers he had to write a text that would straddle both the virtual and actual milieus of the world. What I mean to say is this: Bacon had access to the One Library, and he drew his resources from it. He wrote a manuscript where only the surface text shows, but one has to conceive of it in three dimensions…The orthographical mark one sees is an entire sentence seen on its side, like looking at the pages from their edges. Attempts to translate it will always fail on the grounds that one would have to be able to dip into the One Library and read it from its non-oblique side.”

  I was sideswiped by the possibility. If what he said was true, all my efforts were to no avail - as they certainly already were.

  “I don't entirely understand. You say you let this person have the Voynich, but it was already in the Yale Library? Are you the librarian at Yale?”

  At this both Castellemare and Angelo guffawed.

  “The librarian at Yale? The Librarian at Yale? 'Swounds, Gimaldi, you are a riot!” Castellemare said, still laughing. “No, it wasn't that way. You see, my copy of the Voynich happened to emerge at Yale, right beside theirs! Imagine the odds... I saw to it that the fellow would pluck my Library's copy, that he would have it forged, and then I would arrange for Angelo to replace the forgery with the original, destroying the counterfeit. It is in every way the same as the original but with one slight difference I need not trouble you about. The Library was adamant that this fellow have its copy of the Voynich, and I was hardly in any position to deny the order of the Library.”

  “You have a copy of the Voynich Manuscript? Were there two?”

  “No, you silly boy! You miss the point entirely! There is not one Voynich – there are infinite Voynich manuscripts.”

  I let the response and its implications drop for the moment. I happened to let my eyes wander to the bookshelves over his shoulder, stuffed with thick, ancient volumes like dark, intimidating leather-bound pillars of the unknown. He caught me gazing in wonder.

  “Ah, so you have noticed one of my many manifestations of the One Library. I keep a few volumes here as a portal, you understand, and so these books here are both a representative and non-representative of my collection.”

  “May I see your entire collection?”

  “That is both possible and impossible. This modest collection is as good as a million collections under one roof. As a portal, I can access any book. If there is at least one book on a shelf, I can access any book. You name it, I will produce it.

  I was game: “Okay, let me see your copy of the first tome of C. A. Lobeck’s Aglaophamus. And perhaps, as well, the text on palingenesis, Villoison, De Triplici Theologia Mysterlisque Commentatis - the Paris 1784 edition.”

  I could tell that Angelo was visibly impressed with the titles I selected - just obscure enough to challenge any specialist rare book collector. Castellemare turned his back, stuck in a hand to ruffle the volumes a bit, and then produced two books for my inspection. Alarmingly, they were exactly what I specified.

  “I was going to ask if you wanted this edition of the Aglaophamus rather than the reprint with the missing inscribed flyleaf, but I suppose any copy will do,” Castellemare stated, not missing a beat with that permanent grin.

  “This is incredible! Who would have known that you would have these exact texts here? I mean, coincidence alone -”

  “Gimaldi, in the library there are no coincidences; there is only order, and one has only to learn how it works to find what one is looking for.”

  “Well,” I reasoned aloud, hoping for confirmation. “If you have such a vast collection where editions seem to frequently 'slip' as you say, perhaps you need the services of an archivist to catalogue the entire collection.”

  “There is a catalogue, of sorts, but it is only accessible in truncated versions, and only when the Library deems it fit to have it in my possession.”

  “You are the librarian and you don't have unlimited access to the full catalogue?”

  “That's right. The fact that I have any access at all does grant me considerable privilege.”

  “Then how are you able to pluck books from that... portal... without having to search a catalogue?”

  “So many questions in your quiver of curiousity... I have only to will which book I want, and the Library will provide. Of course, it may restrict borrowing privileges for some texts for reasons known only to it. As for returning the books to their right places, you will find the Library quite accommodating to the task... but we are moving far ahead of ourselves.”

  “Do the trick,” Angelo prompted Castellemare like an eager child.

  “Well, it might be a bit early, but so be it. Gimaldi, demand of me any book, but I urge you to be as ridiculous as possible. That is, I want you to make up fictional author names and their works. You will see that I have anything you could possible contrive, any book that could ever possibly exist.”

  I replaced the two books on the desk and thought for a few moments before issuing a number of fictitious names: “Padre Pistolas’ Caligula’s Computers, Esther Loyola’s Why I hate Céline, Emmanuel Goldstein’s Orgasthmatics and Excommunicon…”

  “Excellent choices!” beamed Castellemare who quite adeptly pulled those exact volumes from the shelves for my inspection. It was unbelievable. Any lingering doubt I had about this fantastical library was only maintained by the thought that I may have been the victim of a hallucination.

  “How about some books written by you?” he asked. “How does a four volume collected works sound? Or, let’s make it eight. With the letters in the title gold-stamped, with a dedication page to Genghis Khan and his writings on aeronautics and polite dinner discourse at 30, 000 feet as the chief source of your inspiration? Name it, and it shall be. How about books written about your conquest of the Andes? Or perhaps on your grandson who became the King of Botswana? How about your epistolary confessions on being a Saxon transsexual or a Renaissance communist? Or perhaps a treatise you wrote on the merits of being a nautiloid? Or perhaps your deep-sea adventures with Napoleonic online banking? Or maybe a copy of Measure for Measure written by you in the year 1291? Or your signing of the Magna Charta whilst riding an elephant to the castle of Hitler, emperor of Atlantis?”

  Anything I could possibly conceive of, no matter how ridiculous, he was able to furnish. His small library was an aleph of pure possibility. This was but one small manifestation and modification of an infinite substance, a One-All library he had hired me to work in. Noting the infinite possibilities of this library, I would have worked for free.

  If the metaphysics of this held, then the library was proof that we were living in a world of textual idealism governed by a transcendent order of a different kind. No doubt, the Library had a book precisely on this, and a million proofs alongside their refutations. I would also learn that the Library had several books on the theory of the Library itself, and books on those books, books on those books on those books, and so on. It was maddening, for if the truth that supported the existence of this Library were in the constituent books along with proof against it, how could it be proven either way? How could a truth of a unity be dependent upon its parts, those parts granted truth by its unity? It was paradoxical, an Uroburos.

  I was going to ask if there were any books about him in the Library before realizing that this would have be
en a ridiculous question; of course there were… potentially an infinite number of them, just as there were an infinite number of books about, or written by, us all.

  “So, you see, Gimaldi, it is of the utmost importance that the ingress and egress of pure possibility remain… controlled. One cannot shut the door to pure possibility without stopping the flow of time and becoming. Nothing would change if there were not small portholes into the sublime, you see. The delicate balance always entails controlling the access points, to only let a certain amount flow into the mundane to make it marginally more interesting. The rates and flow of this are in constant flux, depending on the needs of the world - or the Library - are at any given time - whatever time is,” he finished with an impish grin.

  “There must be no time and all time in this library, distinctions of past and future being meaningless,” I said, musing aloud. “Does this make you… God?”

  Castellemare almost fell over in laughter. Angelo followed suit by aping him.

  “Oh, Gimaldi, you will make my ribs crack with the strain of your hilarious inquiries! I never suspected that you were a comedian! In answer to your question, supposing that you want a serious reply, I can always provide you with a book saying that I am God, and another saying that I am not! Ah, humanity... so quick to assign some mystical supremity to what it cannot explain or understand. Imagine me: some kind of manifestation of the divine!”

  This was followed by another round of sharp laughter. The short of it was this: any possible truth could be maintained or contradicted, but only in reference to the Library whose truths were infinite, and could infinitely exhaust any potential subject infinitely. Making any inquiries into the Library would prove effectively useless, and render all questioning impossible. It would be enough to drive more sensitive philosophers to despair and suicide. I was beginning to understand why Castellemare always seemed to speak ambiguously about almost everything.