THE BISHOP’S MESSAGE
Early in the sixteenth century, the priest Piero De Lucca found volume five of
He worked for an entire year in absolute secrecy. He became known among the other priests as a loner. When finished, his creature learned to walk and to stammer a few words in pure Latin, in a monotonous, metallic voice. It could give simple answers, but whenever the question exceeded its ability, it would reply: “I cannot be certain of the answer in that regard.”
De Lucca was amazed by his work. For months he had thought of nothing but its construction; now that it was done, however, he began to consider his pride and wonder whether the creature might be an instrument of Evil. He decided to ask it, and as on so many other occasions, it replied: “I cannot be certain of the answer in that regard.”
The priest decided to consult a higher authority. He sent the creature to Milan, with a letter for the archbishop. In it, he asked his superior to carefully study the messenger and reply as to its nature.
Years went by without any word from the archbishop. The priest would sometimes think fondly of his creature and wonder where it might be: if it was living the life of a common man, was corroding at the bottom of the river, or had been burned as a heretic. He could have taught it so many things, but he needed to know whether he had done right or wrong. And so he was damned to wait for a reply.
Now old and infirm, Piero De Lucca told his confessor about his dilemma. He told De Lucca to travel to Milan immediately, so as not to risk dying in doubt and in sin.
The archbishop had by then been succeeded three times (once because of a poisoning), but De Lucca still hoped to find an answer in the underground city of the archives.
Piero De Lucca made the trip. At over eighty years of age, he was exhausted by the time he arrived. He was given a small room next to the cathedral. When the time came to meet with the new archbishop, De Lucca was so weak he was unable to get out of bed.
The thought of dying without an answer pained him. Seeing him so fragile and distraught, the other priests interceded with the archbishop, asking him to go to De Lucca.
Piero De Lucca lay dying when the archbishop came to see him. Full of interruptions, repetitions, and omissions, the priest told the story that had brought him to that dark little room. He begged for an answer to his original question. That answer came at the very moment of death, when he heard the archbishop say: “I cannot be certain of the answer in that regard.”
“I’d rather the action take place in some Oriental palace, with a caliph or a mandarin instead of an archbishop,” Hesdin said. “The Egyptians, Arabs, and Chinese never come to complain.”
“It’s fantasy. Automatons. Magic. Nothing real.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with it, either, but that means very little. In this profession, you get used to reading into things. It’s only when a book erupts in scandal and flames that we printers realize what we’ve published. In any event, leave the text with me. I’ll understand one day. After all, there’s no better way to read a book than by the light of a bonfire.”
The Human Machine
I took a room at the Auberge du Poisson, under an alias, and slept for fifteen hours. When I awoke, I began to think about my future. It had been easy to devise plans and make decisions on the trip to Paris; from far away, cities are like toy towns, where everything is easy, close, and possible. It was only when I got to Paris that I remembered that cities are full of obstacles.
There was only one way to make Von Knepper change the message: I had to take Clarissa. With my face obscured by a cloak and hat, I went to the house to spy on its inhabitants. There were signs of decay on the walls and windows, and the house seemed to age as I watched; a few more minutes and I would witness its collapse. My eyes were tired, and vitiated everything they saw. I waited anxiously for Von Knepper to go out, called by some urgent obligation. But now that his appointments with the bishop had ended, there was no reason to leave home. Everything he required was inside those walls.
While Von Knepper needed solitude and obsession in order to think, all I needed were long walks and momentary distractions. I found something of interest in every passing conversation; every notice in the street forced me to stop. There were words all around me, and I paid attention to each one, as if the city were an enormous book that could inspire my next steps. And so, in reading the words that came at me with no rhyme or reason, I discovered a poster for a book auction.
Tramont, whose appetite for books was as voracious as the Duke de la Valliere’s, was putting some up for sale. His collection was so enormous that from time to time Tramont was forced to part with duplicates or books that were no longer of interest, simply to clear a path through his house. At the bottom of the notice was a list of the most important volumes in the lot: number three was a copy of
I tore the announcement off the wall and left it under Von Knepper’s door. Fate would take care of the rest.
It was five days until the auction. Von Knepper set out for Tramont’s house at the exact time it was about to start-as if he had only just decided to go. He walked straight past without seeing me: all that mattered to him was in the past or the future, and anything along the way belonged to the vulgar present. I waited a few minutes, in case he changed his mind, and then approached the house.
I had brought enough money to bribe the maid; as soon as she opened the door, I asked for Clarissa.
“You should know where she is,” the woman said.
“Why me?”
“Monsieur Laghi told me you took her. We haven’t seen her in six days now.”
I couldn’t believe Clarissa was gone, and I strode to the back of the house. The maid didn’t bother to stop me: there was no one for her to protect.
“How did she disappear? Was she taken by force?”
“It was the middle of the night. If you don’t have her, then she left on her own, tired of being overprotected. Monsieur Laghi hasn’t been able to sleep since. I hear him pace the room all night long, repeating the same words:
The auction was running late and had just started by the time I arrived. Books were piled in great, tottering stacks. Since the nobility had acquired a passion for antique books, it was best if they looked truly old. Everyone knew that a month before an important auction, they were locked in a trunk with Amazonian spiders, to be enveloped in layers of cobwebs. The volumes were never cleaned because the accumulated filth confirmed antiquity. Publication dates simply weren’t enough: collectors liked to feel their treasure had been snatched from oblivion seconds before it came into their hands. Thus, every time the auctioneer presented a book, a cloud of dust would rise up, causing the first few rows to erupt in coughs and sneezes.
Gathered in the Tramont house were the most notable collectors from Paris, as well as dealers from Antwerp and Brussels who were trying to blend in. A few stood alone, but most were in groups of two or three. Though from the outside they may have looked like one big family, they were in fact eyeing one another suspiciously: each belonged to a rival religion and what one considered gospel was heresy to another. Those who chose books based on their bindings would laugh at those searching for Elzevirian or Roman type; experts in typography couldn’t understand what others saw in vignettes and bronze engravings; academics in search of Latin classics despised a love of a book’s material qualities, aspiring to more ethereal volumes instead.
The auctioneer had saved
