Winter Journey

Dust

he'd wondered many times how many thousands of books there were in that house. But because she was on her best behavior as soon as she walked through the door, respectfully afraid to make a mistake and end up without a job, she'd never dared to ask Sr. Adria that question. She just did what she'd been told: Monday, Wednesday and Friday, fill out cards in her careful handwriting. And Tuesday and Thursday, dust, because a layer of dust on a book is a sign of disrespect and carelessness. She started out doing it with a damp cloth, but the spines were black from years of neglect and the water made a dark paste that was even worse. So Tere told her it would be better to use the vacuum cleaner or, if that didn't work, an old-fashioned feather duster. She ended up with the old-fashioned method because it didn't even occur to her to ask Sr. Adria if he had a vacuum cleaner. The books she was cleaning now had a good layer of dust on them, which she was trying to get rid of before he noticed it.

Sr. Adria was a mystery. Maybe a millionaire, certainly a loner. He never went out, and he was always reading, going through books, writing cards or going over them, or unpacking, with obvious relish, boxes of new acquisitions, most of them old, worn books, some of them very old. He was obsessed with books. Toni was obsessed with sex, but Sr. Adria was obsessed with books. Today, a dusting day, she'd end up exhausted, with her nose and her throat dried out and the taste of dust in her mouth, because in that house the bookshelves went on and on and the dust stuck to everything.

She felt him behind her as he turned a page of the book on the lectern, and she thought it was impossible for anybody to spend his life like that: people have to move, breathe fresh air, talk to other people, go out to eat, whatever. He didn't.

Victoria got down off the ladder she'd had to climb to do ORIENTAL POETRY. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she could see Sr. Adria watching her. When she checked to be sure, he was already deep in a book.

On the first day, when he opened the door with the lack of interest he showed for everything that wasn't a book, he asked how old she was. Victoria told him twenty and thought he would send her away because she was too young. And she needed the work because they were supposed to get married next fall. Age wasn't a problem, or lack of experience. Almost having gone to library school surely hadn't helped. She knew that what had made Sr. Adria decide had been the delicate way she had taken the book that he handed her by surprise: she took it delicately, almost lovingly, just as Elisa picked up the embroidery box when she found out about the death of her lover in Elisa Grant by Ballys (Pittsburg, 1883). And on top of that, it turned out that she had beautiful handwriting. It was a good idea to get help because 1 can't keep up with things alone.

Today I'll do Voyage d'hiver (Lyon, 1902). Gaston Laforgue is rather pedantic and grandiloquent, but I've gotten six cards out of him. One very nice one about the nature of art. But he didn't understand anything about the life of Schubert. And, starting tomorrow, the complete works of Dario Longo (author's edition, Trieste, 1932), which promised some surprises, as he had seen when he used the letter opener on it the day before yesterday. 1 shouldn't have told her to do ORIENTAL POETRY because she's distracting me. I should have sent her to CENTRAL EUROPEAN MORALISTS, 18th19th cent., which needs cleaning just as badly.

Because she'd left a rag on top of the fu books from the Han dynasty, Victoria had to go back up the ladder, and Sr. Adria found that the girl's buttocks were in his range of vision and figured they were what he imagined Adromache's buttocks must be like in the Cambridge edition: generous and discreet at the same time. She's finally leaving, he sighed to himself, and concentrated on his reading as Victoria went out of the reading room with the bucket, the rags, the duster, the ladder and Adromache's buttocks, in silence, and she could see that he was still involved with that thing about Schubert and she went down the hall full of books thinking, There's no way, no way: a few days ago he was eagerly reading a philological dictionary of Italian, and before that he finished The Emotions and the Will by Alexander Bain, which left him looking dazed for a couple of days. Who's Bain? she said. What the hell are you talking about, answered Toni, who got irritated when Victoria talked about work when there was nothing else to do. As far as he was concerned, Sr. Adria was crazy, period. And Victoria held her tongue because she was beginning to accept that it was getting harder and harder to connect with Toni. Because the perfect Toni would have the education, the taste for culture, the discretion and the intellectual curiosity that Sr. Adria had. Why was Toni so different? She didn't know how to answer that question. Or how to explain why in that house there was nothing by Magris, Garcia Marquez, Goethe, Pedrolo, Gaarder or Mann. Why did Sr. Adria read Ludwig Tieck (Kaiser Octavian), Giuseppe Spalletti (Saggio sopra la bellezza) or Jacob de Montfleury (Lecole des jaloux)? Why did he collect sentences from those authors and he'd never even bought a single Faulkner? One day she copied out a few titles at random to find out if they had them in the library, and of course they didn't. Tere herself, all the years she'd worked there, had never heard of them. Ever.

And tea. On top of the books, tea. He drank six or seven cups a day. He drank green tea because, according to him, it relaxed the body and kept the mind alert. What she didn't know was that Sr. Adria was a vegetarian, as long as it didn't interfere with reading. There was no way she could know that; it was enough to know that he was clean, he paid well, at Christmas he paid her double, he never scolded her and he talked very little, as if he were aware that at his age he didn't have much time to waste. Never anything out of line. Ever. The perfect man, even if he was thirty years older.

Now the perfect man had taken out the magnifying glass and was looking at a sepia photograph in which the unfortunate author of the biography and some other people were being immortalized next to Schubert's tomb. With the magnifying glass he examined the inscription at the base of the monument. SEINEM ANDENKEN DER W1… It was impossible to read because the right leg of a smirking Laforgue hid the rest of the inscription. It upset him to think that the person in the way was keeping him from reading a text he'd never, ever, be able to finish. He turned the page: in the next illustration Laforgue, with his sepia smile, was pointing to the building where the composer had died. The unpaved street was muddy and the sky looked leaden. Sr. Adria left the illustrations and said, Victoria, bring me some tea, and Victoria, from TRAVEL BOOKS, EUROPE, said, Yes, sir.

"Hours and hours shut up in an apartment with a man," Toni had said, one day when he was being particularly hard to take. Offended, she had answered that Sr. Adria was a gentleman, and she had said nothing about those enigmatic glances that sometimes landed on her buttocks, because she was convinced, and that's why she admired him, that Sr. Adria was an angel who was above human problems. If Toni had known about those glances, he would have gotten furious and tried to get into a fight with Sr. Adria. Toni did look her over, from top to bottom, and actually his desire flattered her and sometimes she imagined it was Sr. Adria who was doing it. Why couldn't Toni think about other things? Why couldn't he get around to reading a book sometime? In Toni's house, the only actual book was the phone book (2 vols.). From one extreme to the other, she thought. Because never having read a book sometimes seemed impossible to her. But nothing was impossible for Toni. Except getting around to telling her what he'd done the last three Monday afternoons.

"Seventeen thousand five hundred fifty-two with this Schwartz that 1 just received and haven't catalogued yet," answered Sr. Adria, hiding a touch of pride.

"You have more than the local library."

"Yes." And he gave her the week's wages with a gesture just like that of Phine when he pays the traitor at the end of Verjat's Les merovingiens (Lyon, 1899).

"And they're not the same. They're different kinds of books."

"Yes." He looked at her with a touch of reticence, with the cross-eyed gaze of the traitor (Verjat, ibid.), wanting the fog to lift because the first pre-cataloguing look at Die Natur von der Mang by a certain Klement Schwartz (Leipzig, 1714) awaited him. But Victoria asked a couple of other questions, which he answered, to put an end to things, with Maybe I'll explain it to you someday, and she disappeared down the stairs, her eyes bright like Raquel's in Raquel by Felip Cornudella (Barcelona, 1888), half embarrassed, half liberated. Schwartz's book was a treatise on the sounds of nature and musical instruments, from which he imagined that he could get a lot of cards, as usually happened with works halfway between scientific studies and poetic appreciations of the world. Once he had it in his hands, he realized that, half stuck to the inside cover, there was a very worn bookmark, a leather one, that was still a kind of yellow color and was decorated with the embossed figure of a fantastic and unrecognizable animal. He noted carefully in the incident book what book he'd taken it from, and forgot to deposit it in the objects case next to sixteen other bookmarks, dozens of dedications, folded papers with profound thoughts from anonymous readers (two of which had been worthy of cards), shopping lists, bills, and his favorite of all the documents imprisoned, like a sudden death, between the pages of a half-read book: a letter written in Yiddish, dating from the spring of '29 in Warsaw, in which Moishe Lodzer, a jeweler, communicated to the recipient his happiness and that of his wife at the engagement of their only son Josef, recently graduated from medical school, to Miriam Levi of the Levis of lerussalimskaia Street, and his prediction of happiness, prosperity and long life for the new couple. With almost liturgical respect for his beloved objects, Sr. Adria passed a loving hand over the case, sighed, and initiated the first contact with Schwartz's book.

As she went down the stairs, Victoria congratulated herself on having been able to broach that subject. She'd been practicing for days: why don't you have anything by Balzac or Oller or Green? Why don't you have Foix or Hardy but you have De la Tapinerie, Laforgue, Triclinis and Schulz? That's how the conversation would begin. From there, he'd diverted her with the number of books and then, though he resisted, they'd gotten back to the nature of those books. But it was one of his laconic days and the conversation didn't flow. She dared to ask Sr. Adria, Why do you buy books like that?

"What's wrong with them?"

"They're weird. They're…" And she let the stigmatizing adjective slip out: "unknown."

When they'd gotten to that point, Sr. Adria opened the door of the apartment and waited impatiently for the buttocks of Andromache from the Cambridge edition to step onto the landing.

"Maybe I'll explain it to you someday," he said as she was descending, posing as Raquel for a few steps. When Victoria turned, hopeful, the door had already silently closed.

For a few days Victoria thought that Sr. Adria would never explain the why of those books, and that made her frustrated, she who considered herself to be somewhat cultured, with fairly good English and a little French and a high pass on the college entrance exam. In any case, when she left work, she made a point to forget all about Sr. Adria, since the thing she really wanted to find out was why Toni was at Lourdes's house every Monday, if according to him he didn't even know her, and how Lourdes, who claimed to be her friend, could do something like that to her. If anything was going on, which she couldn't be sure of. Or why her mother kept getting sadder and sadder. Sr. Adria could go to hell, when she wasn't there. But she thought about him.

Six hundred twelve books later, Victoria was able to verify that Sr. Adria had learned to be even stingier with words, and he didn't mention the conversation on the landing even once, and she admired him more and loved him in an open but intangible way. They had begun, with various quotes, some three or four thousand new cards, which he went over patiently on Saturday mornings as if he intended to memorize them. Saturday and Sunday were his favorite days because he was alone in the house, without Victoria's unpredictable presence. During this period of books, she, making an effort to get to know him better, had tried to find out how long it had been since the last time he went to the movies or the theater, how long it had been since he was in a bar, and important things like that. As a result, she was slipping a few points in his ranking. And because they didn't talk, Sr. Adria had no way of knowing that Victoria's wedding had been postponed a couple of times: the first time because the explanations for the presence of Lourdes in Toni's house hadn't been satisfactory at all and the second, once they'd made up, because of her mother's sudden death. In fact, because of not knowing, Sr. Adria didn't even know that Victoria had a boyfriend. But now he looked more insistently at Andromache's buttocks and had begun to notice, with surprise, Ariadne's breasts. Victoria had a prominent and well-structured bust, which he'd always ignored. But all that dust, all that going up ladders next to Sr. Adria, all those cards, all that leaning over the paragraph he was pointing out with his finger, had ended up making Ariadne's breasts available for observation, and he imagined that he was Ponquiello about to caress the torso of the shepherdess Fida in Pastorale by Campdessus (Anvers, 1902).

One stifling day, Sr. Adria fell ill. Sr. Adria, in bed, in pink pajamas. This was certainly a novelty. He almost seemed to be a different man, except that he had five or six books spread out on his wide bachelor's bed. Had his beard gotten whiter? Maybe it was because of the light. Sr. Adria invited her to sit on the side of the bed, because now there would be time to do cards. And he stuck out his arm for a few seconds, in silence, and then said, Don't get too close, 1 don't want you to catch anything. Just like Toni, she thought, the day he had a little cold he spent the whole afternoon telling her to get in bed with him, to help him warm up because he was freezing.

She could only remember one time she'd felt sick at Sr. Adria's house. She was up on the tall ladder, dusting BALTIC NOVEL, 19th cent., and thinking that what connected her to Sr. Adria was an intangible link. This moved her so much that her hand froze above the spine of a little book by Lautanias and she was overcome with dizziness. Sr. Adria, who officially was reading Cobra by Marcel Gibert (Montreal, 1920), was observant enough to notice the girl's hesitation and to keep her from falling, practically by grabbing her. He made her lie down on the sofa, fixed her tea, and ordered her to take a taxi and not come back until the next day. In fact, the fainting had been produced not by the discovery of an invisible link between two noble souls, but by getting her period all of a sudden. She spent two days in bed with a hot water bottle on her stomach, and Toni didn't even drop by because he said she looked so weak that it killed him, he couldn't take things like that. In fact, he had tickets to a basketball final. He went with Lourdes, 1 think. What a difference: Toni didn't have pink pajamas. He didn't wear pajamas.

"Do you know why?" asked Sr. Adria from inside his pink pajamas, taking up the conversation that had foundered on the landing six hundred and twelve books ago.

"No. 1 have no idea."

"Because I'm searching for wisdom… Because wisdom is shy and it likes to throw up smokescreens so people will leave it in peace. 1 pursue the unknown wisdom that always hides…"

"Where?"

He had fallen silent, his mouth open. For at that moment, laid low by fever, he had become aware of Victoria's real presence, as if a goddess had been sitting on the side of his bed for the last two centuries. And he started thinking she was beautiful, because her eyes had sparkled with curiosity as intensely as if they were wellcut diamonds. Sitting on the bed, her head bent towards him, her body turned sideways, emphasizing her splendid bust and the curve of her hips. He'd read over and over that there's an age at which everything comes together, when life seems pleased with you and all things enhance your beauty, for example in Guinizzelli's song in 11 ragno e la farfalla (Milan, 18oo). Victoria was at that age. Sr. Adria tried to concentrate.

"In apparent mediocrity. Look."

He picked up one of the books on the bed and she, reacting professionally, couldn't help but notice that there was a dark patina of ancient dust on the front cover. It was Pauvre Dido by Abbe Renouaud.

"An epico-lyric poem made up of three thousand alexandrines."

"Is it good?"

"It's terrible." He opened it thoughtfully. "No matter how you look at it, it's awful."

"So why do you waste your time reading it?"

"And what's a good use of time, do you think? Going to the movies with your boyfriend?"

He said the thing about her boyfriend for rhythmic reasons, so as not to end the question too abruptly, not because he thought that a virgin like Andromache was interested in sexual matters. And he heard himself say, without meaning to: "Because you have a boyfriend, right?"

"Yes, sure."

So what did you think? That Ariadne wandered through the world alone, desolate, virginal, trembling at the memory of Theseus?

"Going to the movies with your boyfriend is a good use of time for you?"

"I don't know. But you said that Pauvre Dido is a terrible poem…

"Worse than terrible. But 1 didn't say that I'm wasting my time by reading it. What's your boyfriend's name?"

"Toni. He's an EMT, an emergency medical technician."

Envy has changed the world; it has moved crowns from one head to another and taken heads from bodies. They say that, at bottom, Macbeth and his wife were moved not by ambition but by envy. Envy has made the rich unhappy, the poor wicked and the apathetic sinful. Envy has stirred up the basest passions and has affected every human activity, as demonstrated by Saint Alonso Rodriguez S.J. and documented in Leven, doorluchtige Denghden ende Godturchtige Offeninghen von Alphonsus Rodriguez by L.Jacobi S.J. (Antwerp, 1659). Despite these recorded precedents, for the first time in his life Sr. Adria felt envy. Envy that was dark, hard, twisted, acid, cruel, bitter — the same adjectives that Clemenceau used to describe Virginie's rage in Terre de Feu (Orleans, 1922) when he discovers that the boat with Colette on board has just left. Envy because when Toni caressed his Dido from top to bottom, his fingers came away, in the words of Anuat lbn Al Bakkar (Trois gazelles, Paris, 1858), filled with dahlias and scented roses. He too could go over poor Dido from top to bottom as many times as he wanted. But his fingers came away dark, blackened by the accumulated dust. And Sr. Adria wished to be Toni the EMT.

He concentrated on making an effort. For the moment, he had to set aside that new feeling (new feeling? Marta had wondered in Les gavines del port by Bartomeu Cardus, Reus, 1881, when she found the criminal hole in the net she was repairing) because the conversation was about something else and between his discovery and her body there was an unbridgeable thirty-year gap. It helped him a great deal to think of the words of T.S.Taylor, who affirmed that thirty years is the exact span of ridicule. It helped him to think of their two bodies nude and to imagine her laughing at his old age. And he came out with:

"I read Pauvre Dido and every now and again 1 find in it a thought that can be of use to humanity."

"And you write it on a card."

"And I write it on a card, or you do. For example…" He opened the book and flipped past many pages until he came to the one he wanted: "I'm translating," he warned, and cleared his throat, "'I love you so that 1 want to marry you, oh, queen,' said the prince, `and if you do not wish it, 1 will cleave your teeth with my fist and your liver with my knife. And if anything is left of you, oh, beloved, I will wage war on you unto death.' Because you know, oh, human, that between love and hate there is the thinnest of barriers, as delicate as skin. And so Dido, who already knew this, lighted the pyre and plunged the knife into her stomach."

A few seconds of silence. Regretful, Sr. Adria: "1 didn't know how to translate it into alexandrines…" And more energetically: "The unknown wisdom of this fragment that everyone knows, because it's based on the Aeneid, doesn't lie in bringing to life poor Dido, desperate because Aeneas has left her, but in the hidden `who already knew this'. Dido, the new Ariadne, is eternally deceived, because the fate of a good-hearted woman is to allow herself to be taken in by masculine tricks. Do you understand?"

"No."

And they were quiet for a space of five pages, the girl with her mouth open. Until she shook her head skeptically.

"1 can't believe it."

"You can't believe what?"

"That you spend your fortune looking for phrases like `which she already knew' Sometimes it's more educational and fun to go to the movies."

"With your boyfriend."

"It's more useful to watch TV than to look for a `which she already knew' in a book five-hundred pages long."

They were silent again. How could it be that he hadn't noticed what a pretty woman Victoria was until then? Now, exasperated as she was, she reminded him again of sad Andromache. More silence. Eetion's daughter took a breath and he dreamed that now he would declare his love for her.

"And also," Victoria said, almost as a rebuke, "you say the books you have are mediocre."

"Most of them. And unknown. And it's possible that no one has ever taken a careful look at them in search of great truths. Somebody has to do it."

Hector's beautiful wife stood up and smoothed her librarian's smock with a very feminine gesture and his heart leapt for the first time. She, with her hands on her hips, a little defiantly:

"What, exactly, is unknown wisdom?"

"Perhaps it's something you can't yet understand."

Andromache didn't back down; she looked at Pyrros with queenly pride and said, imprudently:

"Looking for unknown wisdom isn't everything."

The sick man was taken aback. Did she dare to contradict him? Sure of herself, she continued:

"You read these books because you're sad that no one's ever going to read them. Forgetting and forgotten people make you sad."

He said nothing. Andromache had pulled his great secret from him as easily as Belisario had torn the heart from his enemy in Oro en rama by Perez]aramillo (Buenos Aires, 1931).

"You want to bring them back to life by reading."

And without waiting for him to react, she said she was going to make tea and left the room. Instinctively, Sr. Adria patted his chest to see if he still had his heart. Resignedly, he observed that when Andromache left, Troy went, inevitably, dark.

In the kitchen, she let the water heat up little by little as she thought about snippets of the conversation and the many thoughts that stayed with her more every day and furrowed, in a still invisible way, the God-given softness and texture of her young skin, which Toni had so far failed to notice. Some far-off words reached her, like the echo of Roland's distant horn:

"And style, do you hear?"

It was Sr. Adria calling her, from the other side of the mountains, his voice hoarse because of his sore throat. She went to the room, a little rattled. For the first time, she noticed almost physically that, down the hall, through FRENCH THEATER, 18th cent., she was getting nearer to his room because he was pulling on the ethereal thread that united them, like Theseus on his way back to Ariadne's haven after having slain the minotaur.

"Why style?" And in the sick man's bedroom the light went on again.

"I said it's a matter of style." He lifted his arm. "If a work is well written, the person who created is there in the words."

She didn't get the whole thing, but she was impressed by the image. As if he could read her mind, Sr. Adria continued.

"It's not an image; it's reality. The soul is part of style. A wellwritten book cannot be forgotten. I love you."

"What did you say?"

"That an expression as banal as `1 love you' can form part of a soul if it's well placed within a sentence with purpose and style. See? I love you."

"Yes, but if you say it out of context…"

"Of course, if we take it out of context… Here, you say it."

"1 love you."

And Sr. Adria melted. Happiness paralyzed his blood, and a tremendous shock shook his memory to its very foundation. Sorrowful Andromache had declared her love for him. Then the whistle of the boiling water woke them up. She stood up and he made a gesture like that of Aeneas, meaning yes, she should put out the light, but somewhere else that was not in his heart.

Dido left the room a little disconcerted. He'd just said that he loved her, right?

Sr. Adria, in bed, trying to decipher the sounds made by the goddess in the kitchen, regretted his cowardice, because he was incapable of grabbing her by the arm, pulling her into bed, undressing her and adoring her as Ignatius did to Laura in Laura and Ignatius by Lottar Martin Grass (Munster, 1888).

"It's not that I'm a coward. It's that she has a boyfriend."

He said it out loud, to see how it sounded, but he couldn't believe it.

"What?"

Victoria, silently, was coming into the room with the tray and the teapot of steaming beverage. And they weren't even in the Trojan winter but in high summer in Sr. Adria's bedroom.

"Nothing. I haven't been sick in ten years."

Without realizing what she was doing, she put her hand to his forehead.

"You're burning up, Sr. Adria."

"Do you know how to apply cool cloths to the forehead?"

That afternoon, Andromache didn't fill out cards or dust. She was the consolation of the afflicted, the sinner's refuge, paradise, the queen of the angels, the ivory tower, Saint Victoria, melancholy Ariadne, virgin of virgins, sad Andromache. She finally managed to get the new lover to drift off. As in a mystic revelation, as if in a celebration of the mysteries, as she cooled Sr. Adria's burning forehead, Victoria like a new Nike, like a superior version of the worthy apprentice of Der Zauberlehrling, she felt herself to be gradually and firmly anointed, invested, consecrated to a new, profound and great power (cf. Ahnlund's Skog). Even her gaze changed, beautiful priestess invested with a new power.

"`Gonzaga said to Isabel,'" said Victoria in a deep voice, officiating for the first time, "`I take the fever from you and you offer up your suffering' The novice looked at him sweetly and loved him even more.'"

Sr. Adria suddenly opened his eyes, as if he wanted to be sure that it was Victoria who had uttered those words. A few lines of silence. She took it as a reproach and hastened to finish:

"Forse the no by Giuseppe Grilli, Naples, 1912."

Thirty-five new old books and some mysterious inquiries later, when his sore throat was a distant memory, Sr. Adria knew that Toni was named Toni Demestre, was not an EMT but a nurses' aide, was twenty-five years old, often went whoring, and was fooling around with somebody named Lourdes Coelho. He knew all of this, but he wasn't sure he should explain it to Victoria. Spying was ugly, but making accusations was even uglier. So the only thing holding him back was aesthetics? And Victoria's happiness? Wasn't it more important to sacrifice his image as a discreet person if by doing so he was saving Andromache from the error of a bad love?

Now he heard her working in the hall and wondered if it was a good time to tell her everything he knew. But doubt made him hesitate. For the last few days he'd noticed a different, more powerful, brightness in her gaze. Twice when he'd gone in afterwards, he'd been able to confirm that Victoria had taken a book with her into the bathroom. Sr. Adria dreamed that perhaps one day he would convert Andromache into a reader. Because emergencies take precedence over important things (cf. Feliz Resolucao by Antonio Albes, Lisbon, 1957), Sr. Adria asked himself again what he should do, tell her the truth about the EMT or pretend ignorance? Would he be brave enough to expose himself to the shame of Victoria's contempt for having been a snoop? Who'd told him to start spying on other people's lives? (That's what she'd say, imitating Felisa Graves, with her hands on her glorious hips.) Or maybe not, maybe she'd be eternally grateful to him for having opened her eyes. Or not. Or…

Sr. Adria kept the secret file with information about Andromache in the big armoire, with the bedclothes, and he sailed, astonished, on an ocean of doubts. And I don't know whether to tell him I think it's strange that he's filled out only five cards in the last month, as if he no longer believed in what he was doing, as if we could allow Orokkon-orokke (Kalman Szijj, Budapest, 1922) to be buried forever with no eyes tilling the furrows of its words (cf. Letters and Papers by T.S.Taylor Jr.) to rescue it from oblivion. He's distracted, preoccupied, as if he weren't interested in reading, and it pains me to see that the last thirty-five books he's bought have gotten no more than a distracted, apathetic glance, like that of Oliver Cage's Dorothy. What about Mazzarino, Spender, Caballero-Rincon, Seabra Pinto et alteri? What's he thinking about all day long, poor Sr. Adria? Sometimes Victoria thought that the fevers of the sore throat had damaged his brain.

As if enlightened, like the anointed one she was, with the confidence inspired by knowing that what you do is just, Victoria climbed down from the ladder where she'd been cleaning AFRICAN POETRY and went into the study. She took Sr. Adria gently by the arm, handed him the feather duster, whispered that he absolutely had to finish AFRICAN POETRY, in the hall, and sat down in the chair in front of the table in the study. Sr. Adria looked at the feather duster, cast an attentive eye around him and left the room without saying anything. Andromache didn't pause, because she already knew what she had to do: Seabra Pinto's reflections on life in Coimbra between the wars would have more hidden secrets than William Spender's religious sonnets. She opened the book and realized that the spine, though it hadn't been on any shelf, was starting to attract dust. She made a grimace of disgust and wrote on a piece of paper that as soon as Sr. Adria stuck his head in, she'd tell him that the books on the table had to be clean as well. She was only on page 3 when she found a good quote: "You are not alone, Coimbra, if the windows of your houses are opened every day, making the shutters bang happily against the walls." The happiness of the shutters, the happiness of the woman who opened her home to a new day in Coimbra… Victoria would have liked to be in the presence of Seabra Pinto as he was writing this thought; she had to be satisfied with reading it many years later, with the author dead. She read it again, with respect, she transcribed it onto a card and added "Coimbra." Antonio Seabra Pinto, Lisbon, 1953. Immediately it occurred to her that it might be interesting, now that she'd broken off with Toni because putting up with him was getting harder and harder (he and Lourdes on the sofa in his house: that was the last straw), now that she had more time for herself, she could find the relationships, the indelible but ethereal links among the works: because Seabra Pinto's very direct, very latinate description (ibid.) had brought to mind "the port was covered with a thin patina of dust that only his sensitive heart was able to perceive" (cf. Selbstaufopferung by M. Haensch, Berlin, 1921).

In the hall, the dust from AFRICAN POETRY made Sr. Adria sneeze. He figured that he had a good hour of work ahead of him if he wanted to do a good job, book by book, spine by spine, and so keep Andromache's splendid library from falling into the disrespect and carelessness of oblivion.