The Infinite Library (28 page)

“Oh, right. Are things okay with you and Sigurd?”

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason other than I am always concerned about you two. Especially about Sigurd.”

“We had a parting of ways.”

“Heated words, hm? The difference between the both of you got too great, eh? Sometimes that is the case, and sometimes it happens because one or both friends outgrows the other. This is usually the case among those whose friendship is based solely on the intellect. I can probably fathom why the rupture occurred between you and Sigurd. I suspect, owing to your nature, you are the one who walked away. In fact, isn't walking away your life motif? I know more than I tell. A failed fight leads to resignation. I know that you were once a hot-tempered young man with his angry idealism threatening to cut down the enemy - most likely, as is wont for the young these days, the enemy was something large, bloated, and abstract. But now, like so many revolutionaries, you've ended up growing older and silent in the city you tried to rally and change.”

He kicked at the snow gently with the toe of his shoe.

“Is this going somewhere?” I asked impatiently.

“Yes. Where was I? Oh, yes... Sigurd. You're more... grounded, we'll say, than him. You could no longer endure his relentless barking and arm-waving, so you extricated yourself... You walked away. I know the feeling well, for I've seen so many barkers come and go, all suffering the same indignant fate. However, men like him always seem to inspire such glorifying epitaphs - why is that? Men like us slip back into the shadows, abandoning the woes of the world, the empty conquests, and the like.”

He never made eye contact with me, but with a loaded phrase where he likened himself to me, I could see why. One does not like staring into the eyes of a mirror. But there was something else – his speech felt contrived for my benefit, a bit too rehearsed to elicit a certain effect.
Was I Gimaldi?
This was not the lightest of questions.

He went on: “I would like to tell you about the past, but I'm afraid that my testimony contradicts what is written in history books. Books lie, my friend, but I rather enjoy the lies. They amuse me. I especially like the seductive lies that drag me into their fabric, forcing me to believe despite everything. Perhaps this is why the notion of miracle has not left us yet: science has worked so diligently to rid us of any trace of miracles, yet we still secretly hold the hope of them in our hearts.

“I could tell you true stories about the Histriones, of Croce, about the Templars, but it would only serve to confuse you. No, you have been brought up with the lies that books have told you, and granted they are far more comforting and aesthetically pleasing than the truth. I will not rip the illusion from you. Keep it, hold it, love it, let it give you solace on dark days. Let the truth die a noble death, with no marker, no troubadours singing its songs, no glorious parades or the trotting out of its many lustrous icons on saint days. Let the truth die with the man who holds it. If there was anything I learned while teaching, it is that truth is overrated. The lies are just as, if not more, beautiful and poetic. And after centuries, if the lies have survived, they become the truth, as such.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Your critique... It reached me,” he said, and it sounded as if he were trying to stifle sarcasm.

He began humming as the sun peeked out from behind a clogged canvas of clouds, and those clouds were heavy with impending snowfall, and the wind would be a cold, cruel whip where each lash was another of the unanswerable questions.

“Why do you not go by Ammonius anymore?” I asked, more of a mocking taunt. His eyes finally met mine, with bafflement.

“You assume too much from what you read. You make faulty connections, throwing bridges hastily over rough and complicated waters. My name is Gimaldi, not Ammonius.

But why did he so fervently insist that I research Obsalte? Was there a link to Ammonius? If so, was it his intent to have someone expose him, know him? But, in the end, he was probably right: he was simply Gimaldi and little more, having written a fiction I took to be true. Did I assume it to be a pen name of his, one that he ought to have assumed?

After a time, he began again: “Everyone has their story. This is a story I once heard or read about a monk: 'The year was 1410, and I could hear the murmur of a stream near the vineyard. Little did those theologians know, those beaked men who had taken me on to translate a translation, an exegetical work... I was not who I claimed to be. In fact, I was called upon to translate the works of a man who had translated me, but no one knew--or would believe--the original text was my own. It had felt like centuries since I had last seen these youthful words of mine, and here I was in full anonymity about to be commissioned to eat my own words at the foot of a very large, wobbly, ridiculous circle. Had I actually thought these things? For sure, the translations had been barbaric, importing the simple dialect, compromising the style and meaning I had so artfully put in them, but now its beauty and truth shredded by rough and frequent translation. And what a slow, exegetical process it must have been: from Greek to Arabic, to Latin. What was lost in this translation? 1,410 pages...”

He brought his recital to a close, looking expectantly at me as though I were to connect the elements of his fumbling allegory to derive the proper conclusion. The man was an index of coded language, ready for that one moment where he could pull the veil from history and say “voila!” Or, perhaps, like the nefariously secretive creature he could be at times, he was planning to pull the carpet out from under history's feet. Either way, the man was a master illusionist. And why not accept the lie? A magician's life is a constant lie, a continual presentation of illusions, each one more clever and astounding than the last.

“My life,” he continued, “Is an open work, meaning that it only engages those particular people willing to receive very specific information. In choosing my friends, I am very careful; this act is synonymous with choosing an audience. In choosing books, or rather that books choose me, the act of discrimination is much sterner a matter.”

I did not know how flattered a friend would be to be likened to an audience member, but this was Gimaldi's way. His talk became more elliptical and scant in detail. It was like he was trying to drive home a point he had misplaced along the way, and so I had to bear with him as he searched aloud in his mind for what precious, emphatic idea he was seeking to posit.

“I don't want to be your protege,” I said.

“You're missing the point. I'm not asking you to do that. If I may be so bold in suggesting this, in asking you plainly, I want you to write the book that will precede my counter-book.”

“You want me to do what?” I said, already suspecting that he would ask this; it seemed an imminent conclusion. Was I to look surprised?

“Come, now. A man keen and driven enough to write a critique must be predisposed to write a foundation. You'd do well to keep firmly in mind the importance of primitives, to build the refined from the rudimentary.”

He lit another cigarette, stroked his beard, and I watched as he retreated back into the recesses of what could be called his reminiscence. I knew I couldn't do what he asked, but it seemed like I was his last hope. I had the sense that the man desperately wanted to have his work given a predecessor, an anterior credibility upon which his own work would flourish. We remained in silence for awhile, for to have spoken further would have caused us to drawl interminably about nothing.

“Why did you say earlier that you were especially concerned with Sigurd?” I asked.

The directness of the question seemed to be a glancing blow that almost toppled him into the snow. I should have pushed him hard. I just wanted to. I wanted to see him fall hard on his ass into the freezing snow.

“My concern for your friend has everything to do with the fact that he is sick and essential. Before you ask for clarification, I mean that he is sick for reasons we already know. He is essential because he is going to be drawn toward a tattoo and a father. That’s all I care to say or know about your friend.”

Where my rapport with Gimaldi became discontinuous from time to time, I would find Castellemare more accommodating. Castellemare was more alive than Gimaldi, less inclined towards the sadly melodramatic. But perhaps I was initially wrong about this, or there was something more to Castellemare that hid behind the mask of enigma... How I was able to locate him is another story entirely...

[at the end of this unlikely chapter was an inserted plug of a reference to read two short texts entitled “Ghostwriter” and “The Biblioclasts” which, so the plug stated, would lead off from Gimaldi's somewhat orphaned story about the translated monk and the fate of his work. I had had enough of reading about these ponderous duo and went in search of the only other named character I had not yet met: Sigurd]

13

Frontmatter

“
H
ow quickly can you scan spines?” I asked.

“Really, I can go on with all the door-crashing and beard-kicking, thoroughly unabated in my zeal to champion just causes, so I think I can manage a little spine-reading. It'll be like divination, biblomancy, a metaphorical transport from reading the body,
as reading
bodies – you know, like the whole discourse on corporeality and the marginalization of the body as empirically filthy, messy, to be subjugated, bio-politics. So, yeah,” he said, thankfully running out of steam. That “he” was Sigurd, and he was as ridiculous in real life as he was portrayed in the book.

You see, I had been thrust by necessity back into that inky realm of mystery. The more of the
Backstory
I was able to consume, now that Setzer's message to me had brought me back to it (against my better judgement), a sort of tangled and knotted arabesque had formed between myself and the text which referred to me. I was beginning to become swayed by the lulling notion that there was a conspiracy afoot, and that I had only a small window of opportunity to make a choice. Whatever was transpiring I had no real clue as of yet, and so my decision to either prevent, promote, or alter what was written had not yet been made. Whichever way it would have turned out, I needed to get more firmly in touch with some of the actors that appeared in these texts – and, hence, I became acquainted with the rather pretentious and prolix Sigurd. A self-styled academic revolutionary, he was easy to bring on board with flattery alone – and not even much since even a little bit was akin to throwing a drowning man a floatation device. Sigurd was trapped like some kind of panicked moth between two registers, two modes of existence that clashed violently. On one side he came from a rather all-too-obvious moneyed family with their expectations worn baldly upon his sleeve. On the other, he was attempting to reject and outpace this origin story by vigourously embracing the revolutionary facade like his contemporaries. Sadly, it was a bit too much, and if he fell on hard times it was no secret to any observer that he would default to the trust fund way of life. At a distance, it was comedic in its way, but to spend any length of time with him was exhausting. He just never stopped making endless references, like some kind of exploded encyclopedia of philosophy and literature and cinema and pop culture, stringing them together all pell-mell. Doubtless, for Sigurd, it was most likely a schizophrenic exercise, a way of dampening the clamour in his head. How would he take it, I wondered, if someone actually challenged but one of his references for substance? He had all the vices of the failed academic: inability to focus, to be patient, to sustain a single golden thread of reasoning. Doubtless again, if challenged, he would reply in the only way he knew how: with another tirade with an even longer chain of references devoid of substance. Or, perhaps, his emotional volatility would result in a drunken violent episode, the kind that would see a great deal of destruction, wailing, overindulgence, and eventual hospitalization. In sum, he was a child in many ways, and so I thought it best not to displease him.

It should also be said that “Sigurd” was his “street name”. His real full name was Jakob Sigurdsson. At the time that I had met him, he was a young and confused man who dabbled a bit too often with a wide variety of drugs and writing bad poetry. Any attempt to locate the narrator of the
Backstory
came to naught if only because the narrator went resolutely unnamed throughout the text; despite all the theatrical self-referentiality, never was his name mentioned.

Finding Jakob Sigurdsson was not very difficult, and was the product of a very short internet search. He lived in the city and had pretensions to being a poet. I was somewhat surprised with the lack of congruity, however, between the book's representation and the real item: Jakob was not the son of an oil tycoon, and in no way an aspiring filmmaker. Certainly, the ostentation of his character was roughly similar to the way it was conveyed in the book. He was, instead, much different in several ways. Whereas I was presented as a paradoxically long-lived Jew that survived the extermination camps, it was Jakob who was the Jew, but of a Jewishness that goes guiltily concealed beneath a compensatory desire to be the opposite; in Jakob's case, it was the desperate embrace of the Teutonic myth, his love of Wagner, his misreading of Nietzsche, his corrupted attempts at inserting Germanic phrases in place of where English would better suffice. His overwhelming hubris and self-appraisal gave everything he said the weight of absurd, false genius. He was the sort who felt an unjustified kinship to great geniuses past, that he somehow inherited their legacy. These foolish, romantic-idealist notions only further aggrandized his ego.