Exchange Place

L’aspirateur

Kilpatrick exited Passage des Panoramas into Rue Vivienne. Here, as in Passage des Panoramas, were stamp shops and coin shops, and he thought again of Walter Benjamin’s obsessive collecting — of stamps, picture postcards, books, children’s toys, among other things. Kilpatrick himself had been a stamp-collector — philatelist, rather — in his teens, and intended to devote a section of his Paris book to those many shops which catered for collectors of whatever hue. He had transcribed into his notebook a passage entitled ‘Stamp Shop’, from Benjamin’s One-Way Street, a text which Benjamin termed a notebook:

‘There are collectors who concern themselves only with postmarked stamps … The pursuer of postmarks must, like a detective, possess information on the most notorious post offices, like an archaeologist the art of reconstructing the torsos of the most foreign place-names, and like a cabbalist an inventory of dates for an entire century … Stamp albums are magical reference books; the numbers of monarchs and palaces, of animals and allegories and states, are recorded in them. Postal traffic depends on their harmony as the motion of the planets depends on the harmony of the celestial numbers … Stamps bristle with tiny numbers, minute letters, diminutive leaves and eyes. They are graphic cellular tissue.’

Kilpatrick walked along Rue Vivienne in a reverie, stopping here and there to look into a shop window. He saw himself at the age of fourteen or fifteen with a jeweller’s loupe screwed into his eye-socket, scrutinizing a stamp. He would compare its characteristics to the description in the philatelists’ bible, the Stanley Gibbons catalogue. He would mount it in his loose-leaf stamp album along with others of the set; underneath, in a calligraphic round-hand written with an Osmiroid italic pen, he would transcribe the relevant catalogue details. Like all collectors, he had begun with generalities, collecting everything and anything — the stamps of the world, in this instance. As he learned more he began to realise how much there was to learn. He bought books about stamps and borrowed books about stamps from the Belfast Central Library. He subscribed to philatelic journals. He learned to make ever finer discriminations, focusing on the stamps of the British Commonwealth, Great Britain and Ireland before specializing in those of Ireland and those of Victorian Britain.

Victorian stamps were ostensibly modest in appearance but bore a wealth of graphic detail. To the untrained eye, one Penny Red looked much like another, but they existed in hundreds of variations of ink colour, paper, perforations, die, plate numbers, type fonts, watermarks — shades of meaning that constituted a potentially vast field of study, not to speak of the abiding interest of postmarks, each recording a date, a place, the instant when a stamp became a used stamp. Some collectors specialized in stamps on covers, noting place of origin and destination in the context of the railway network of Victorian Britain. It was detective work, and, like Sherlock Holmes, these philatelists had frequent recourse to Bradshaw’s railway guide. Kilpatrick was pleased to learn that in 1820 George Bradshaw, originator of the guide, had set up an engraver’s shop in Crown Entry in Belfast, before moving to Manchester two years later.

Kilpatrick had visited Manchester in December 1968 at the invitation of Danny Fisher, an old school friend who now worked as a library assistant in the Manchester City Library. It was Kilpatrick’s first time away from Ireland, and Manchester struck him as a Belfast constructed on a larger scale, with massive brick-built office blocks, hotels, derelict warehouses and factories some six or eight stories high, cavernous streets and black canals running between the buildings. It was three o’clock when he arrived at the centre, and dusk was already falling. As he walked down a sombre street, huge flocks of starlings wheeled above the glittering slate roofs, thousands of birds twisting, turning, swooping in perfect unison as if orchestrated by telepathy, and Kilpatrick imagined himself conducting them as he would an aerial symphony, waving his arms to synchronize their movements. He was unsure of his whereabouts. Many of the houses in the street were boarded up, and he was glad to come to the yellow light of a shop window where he got directions. He still remembered Fisher’s address: 27 Bloom Street. He had not been in touch with him for years.

As Kilpatrick turned a corner he bumped into a passer-by. He muttered an apology and glanced up at the blue and white street sign: Rue Daguerre. He was far from Rue Vivienne. Lost in the past, he had no memory of how he had got there. He went into a bar café. It was still morning. The bar was empty. He ordered a coffee. The sound system was playing Kind of Blue. He lifted the cup to his lips. The track came to an end. There was a lull before the next track. He recognized it immediately: Glenn Gould’s playing of Contrapunctus XIV. As he listened, he became aware of a hum in the background. A woman was vacuuming, the sound growing louder as she approached his table, drowning out the music. As if oblivious to his presence, head lowered, intent on her task, she vacuumed around his feet before retreating into the darkness at the back of the bar. The music was still playing, and he recalled Glenn Gould’s anecdote of how, in his teens, he was learning Mozart’s Fugue in C Major when the housekeeper came in and began to vacuum round the piano; on purpose, according to Gould. Gould couldn’t quite hear himself, he said, but began to feel what he was doing, the tactile presence of the fugue as represented by finger positions, and also by the kind of sound you might hear if you stood in the shower and shook your head with water coming out of both ears. It was luminous, said Gould, the most glorious sound. It took off. He claimed that all of the things Mozart couldn’t quite do, he was doing for him. And he suddenly realized that the particular screen through which he was viewing this, which he had erected between Mozart and his fugue, was exactly what he needed. As he came to understand later, said Gould, a certain mechanical process needed to come between himself and the work of art he was involved with. It was one of the great moments of his life.

The vacuum cleaner stopped. Gould’s playing was nearing its end. Kilpatrick had closed his eyes, bracing himself for the impact of that gunshot of explosive silence, when he heard a voice beside him. Wonderful thing, don’t you think, said the voice. Music of the spheres. Kilpatrick turned round. It was the man he had met in the Irish bar, the James Joyce. Same red face. Black Hugo Boss overcoat. Black briefcase. It was the same man all right. If I may, said the man. He sat down beside Kilpatrick, and placed the briefcase on the floor at his feet where a moment ago the housekeeper had been vacuuming. Vacuum cleaner, what was the word? L’aspirateur.