“I know.”
“You do?”
“Don’t be alarmed, I was warned. Predicting the future isn’t one of my talents.”
“Who warned you? I haven’t talked to anyone.”
“We all keep track of Arzaky’s movements, along with those of his informants and servants.”
Grialet had said that to see if I would be offended and back off. I acted as if I hadn’t heard a thing. He led me into a room with yellow walls, on which the black words continued. There was malignancy in that writing, as if it were an incurable disease, a corrupting decay that would soon bring down the walls and bury the occupants. It would have been impossible to sleep in that house without fearing contagion, without the fear of waking up between the closed pages of a book.
“If I can stand one unexpected visit, I can stand two,” said Grialet.
It was then that I noticed that there was someone else in the room. I think it took me a few seconds to recognize, toward the back of the room, by the piano, Greta Rubanova, as still as a statue. We looked at each other with the mix of kindness and lack of interest strangers adopt when forced to greet each other. Grialet didn’t introduce us, as if he had guessed that we already knew each other.
“It is an honor to be suspected by all of The Twelve Detectives.
But I promise the tower is not among my concerns.”
“If you were a suspect, Arzaky wouldn’t have sent me, he would have come in person. He only wants to end this matter that Darbon started, prove that the old detective was on the wrong trail…” “And one of the trails led to me?”
“The trails lead many directions; one of them is here.” Grialet waved his hand, brushing aside my investigation as something to be dealt with later, and looked over at the young woman. “You didn’t finish telling me why you’re here. Don’t tell me that you work for The Twelve Detectives too.”
He said it sarcastically, of course.
Greta approached him as if she were going to whisper something in his ear but she spoke out loud, “I come as a representative of a certain countess whose name I cannot mention. She asked me to tell her what quotes you’ve written on the walls that surround you. She admires you and is very impressed by your aversion to books. A man who rejects books must be a saint.”
“Often names don’t mean anything to me,” replied Grialet, “but when one is withheld, I know immediately who it is. Tell your countess that I take only what I need from each book; I don’t want those extra pages tormenting my nights. I stroll through the house as if it were my memory, one day I sleep here, another there. Every book has unpleasant sentences, ideas that attack the main structure, words that cancel out other ones, and I want to eliminate all that.
The path to the perfect quote is winding and takes years to travel, but when one arrives, it justifies all the unhappiness that reading gives us.”
“Can I go through the house, copying down the quotes that strike me as appropriate?” Greta asked Grialet. “My mistress would be very happy to have just a tiny part of your vast treasure.”
It was clear that Greta was too quick for me. She was poised to find the oil-stained boots or clothes before me, guaranteeing Castelvetia’s victory. But Grialet leaned toward her and for a moment I thought he was going to bite her with his big yellow teeth.
“No, those quotes are mine alone. The countess has to find her own. These have meaning only for me; outside this house, they’re worthless.”
Greta had already gotten Grialet’s attention with some new lie.
She didn’t even have to talk much, since Grialet couldn’t take his eyes off her. Greta was wearing a blue dress that showcased the whiteness of her bosom, which was the only space in the room that wasn’t covered in letters. Grialet was distracted, just like Arzaky had asked, but I couldn’t just go looking for oil-stained shoes. Besides, I felt absurdly jealous about leaving him alone with the girl.
The sentences surrounded me and held me back, as if they were obeying a secret signal from their master. On the wall, two feet above a dusty piano, I read, “Nothing survives except secrets.”
SEFER HA-ZOHAR.
Next to that phrase, in a careless hand, Grialet had written, “The day will come when God will be a meeting between an old man, a decapitated man, and a dove.” ELIPHAS LEVI.
There were quotes in Greek, Latin, and German. Some were attributed to well-known names, like Friedrich Holderlin or Novalis, but other names were completely foreign to me: Stanislaus de Guaita, Laterzin, Guillaume de Leclerc. On the closed piano there was a messy pile of papers. I also saw a postcard, with an image of a woman swimming in a lake of ice. She was naked, covered by only a few well-placed ice blocks. When I realized that the woman was the Mermaid, I hid the photograph in my clothing. I didn’t know then why I took it, and I still don’t know. I instantly regretted it, but there was no turning back. I consoled myself by thinking that it was probably just publicity for the performance and that Grialet wouldn’t miss it.
One entire wall was devoted to a poem by Gerard de Nerval, “The Disinherited”:
I knew the poem, because a Central American poet had published a translation of it on
Perhaps Grialet had lost all hope of my leaving, because he turned away from the girl and came over to me.
“Gerard de Nerval hanged himself from a streetlight not far from here, on Vielle Lanterne street. Everything he wrote had a coded message. I spent many years discovering new meanings to the words of this poem.”
“I don’t know if it’s because I’m foreign, but I have trouble understanding it.”
“The keys are in tarot and alchemy. The speaker is not the poet, but an alchemical Pluto who represents the philosophical earth, matter prior to its transformation. The tarot is also mentioned. The fifteenth card belongs to the Devil, who is the prince of darkness and, in this case, the Prince of Aquitaine. The sixteenth card is the tower in ruins. And the seventeenth, the star.”
I read the second verse out loud.
“I understand even less of this one,” I said.
“I’m not surprised: detectives get lost in the written word. They can read what isn’t written, but when letters come into it, they go astray. The night of the tomb means the same as the black sun and melancholy: darkness, the rotting of the matter which will then be transformed. Posilipo is a red stone, which is to say, sulfur, the alchemists’ material of choice. And the sea of Italy is mercury. All in all, the entire poem speaks of the transformation of matter, the second alchemical operation.”
The sonnet continued:
“I’m not going to overwhelm you with the secrets contained in each and every word; every night I find new
