The Club Dumas

“Not at all. I suppose that’s exactly what it is.”

Fargas wrung his hands in torment. He looked around at the bare room and the books on the floor, and back at Corso. His smile seemed false, painted on.

“Yes. Sacrilege can only be justified in faith. Only a believer can sense the terrible enormity of the deed. We’d feel no horror at profaning a religion to which we were indifferent. It would be like an atheist blaspheming. Absurd.”

Corso  agreed.  “I  know what you mean.  It’s Julian  the Apostate crying, ‘Thou hast conquered, 0 Galilean.’“ “I’m not familiar with that quotation.”

“It may be apocryphal. One of the Marist brothers used to quote it when I was at school. He was warning us not to go off on a tangent. Julian ends up shot through with arrows on the battlefield, spitting blood at a heaven without God.”

Fargas assented, as if it was all terribly close to him. There was something disturbing in the strange rictus of his mouth, in the fixed intensity of his eyes.

“That’s how I feel now,” he said. “I get up because I can’t sleep. I stand here, resolved to commit another desecration.” He moved so close to Corso as he spoke that Corso wanted to take a step back. “To sin against myself and against them ... I touch one book, then change my mind, choose another one but end up putting it back in its place.... I must sacrifice one so that the others can live, snap off a branch so that the tree...” He held up his right hand. “I would rather cut off one of my fingers.”

As he made the gesture, his hand trembled. Corso nodded. He knew how to listen. It was part of the job. He could even understand. But he wasn’t prepared to join in. This didn’t con­cern him. As Varo Borja would have said, he was a mercenary, and he was paying a visit. What Fargas needed was a confessor, or a psychiatrist.

“Nobody would pay a penny for an old book collector’s finger,” Corso said lightly.

The joke was lost in the immense void that filled Fargas’s eyes. He was looking through Corso. In his dilated pupils and absent gaze there were only books.

“So which should I choose?” Fargas went on. Corso took a cigarette from his coat pocket and offered it to the old man, but Fargas didn’t notice. Absorbed, obsessed, he was listening only to himself, was aware of nothing but his tortured mind. “After much thought I have chosen two candidates.” He took two books from the floor and put them on the table. “Tell me what you think.”

Corso bent over the books. He opened one of them at a page with an engraving, a woodcut of three men and a woman work­ing in a mine. It was a second edition of De re metallica by Georgius Agricola, in Latin, printed by Froben and Episcopius in Basle only five years after its first edition in 1556. He gave a grunt of approval as he lit his cigarette.

“As you can see, making a choice isn’t easy.” Fargas was following Corso’s movements intently. Anxiously he watched him turn the pages, barely brushing them with his fingertips. “I sell one book each time. And not just any one. The sacrifice has to ensure that the rest are safe for another six months. It’s my tribute to the Minotaur.” He tapped his temple. “We all have one at the center of the labyrinth.... Our reason creates him, and he imposes his own horror.”

“Why don’t you sell several less valuable books at one time? Then you’d raise the money you need and still keep the rarer ones. Or your favorites.”

“Place some over others?” Fargas shuddered. “I simply couldn’t do it. They all have the same immortal soul. To me they all have the same rights. I have my favorites, of course. How could I not? But I never make distinctions by a gesture, a word that might raise them above their less favored compan­ions. Rather the opposite. Remember that God chose his own son to be sacrificed. For the redemption of mankind. And Abraham...” He seemed to be referring to the painting on the ceiling, because he looked up and smiled sadly at the empty space, leaving the sentence unfinished.

Corso opened the secpnd book, a folio with an Italian parch­ment binding from the 1700s. Inside was a magnificent Virgil. Giunta’s Venetian edition, printed in 1544. This revived Fargas. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He stepped in front of Corso and snatched it from him impatiently. “Look at the title page, at the architectural border. One hundred and thirteen woodcuts, all perfect except for page 345, which has a small, ancient res­toration, almost imperceptible, in one of the bottom corners. As it happens, this is my favorite. Look: Aeneas in hell, next to the Sibyl. Have you ever seen anything like it? Look at these flames behind the triple wall, the cauldron of the damned, the bird devouring their entrails....” The old book collector’s pulse was almost visible, throbbing in his wrists and temples. His voice became deeper as he held the book up to his eyes so he could read more clearly. His expression was radiant. “Moenia amnlata videt, triplici circundata muro, quae rapidus flamnis am­bit torrentibus amnis.” He paused, ecstatic. “The engraver had a beautiful, violent, medieval view of Virgil’s Hades.”

“A magnificent book,” confirmed Corso, dragging on his cigarette.

“It’s more than that. Feel the paper. ‘Esemplare buono e genuine con le figure assai ben impresse,’ assure the old cata­logues.” After this feverish outburst, Fargas once more stared into empty space, absorbed, engrossed in the dark corners of his nightmare. “I think I’ll sell this one.”

Corso exhaled impatiently. “I don’t understand. This is ob­viously one of your favorites. So is the Agricola. Your hands tremble as you touch them.”

“My hands? What you mean is that my soul burns in the torments of hell. I thought I’d explained. The book to be sacrificed can never be one to which I am indifferent. What meaning would this painful act have otherwise? A sordid trans­action determined by market forces, several cheap books instead of a single expensive one ...” Scornful, he shook his head vio­lently. He looked around grimly, searching for someone on whom to vent his anger. “These are the ones I love best. They shine above the rest for their beauty, for the love they have inspired. These are the ones I walk hand in hand with to the brink of the abyss.... Life may strip me of all I have. But it won’t turn me into a miserable wretch.”

He paced aimlessly about the room. The sad scene, his bad leg, his shabby clothes all added to his weary, fragile appear­ance.

“That’s why I remain in this house,” he went on. “The ghosts of my lost books roam within its walls.” He stopped in front of the fireplace and looked at the pile of logs in the hearth. “Sometimes I feel they come back to demand that I make amends. So, to placate them, I take up the violin that you see there and I play for hours, wandering through the house in darkness, like one of the damned....” He turned to look at Corso, was silhouetted against the dirty window. “The wander­ing book collector.” He walked slowly to the table and laid a hand on each book, as if he had delayed making his decision until that moment. Now he smiled inquiringly.

“Which one would you choose, if you were in my place?” Corso fidgeted, uneasy. “Please, leave me out of this. I’m lucky enough not to be in your place.”

“That’s right. Very lucky. How clever of you to realize. A stupid man would envy me, I suppose. All this treasure in my house ... But you haven’t told me which one to sell. Which son to sacrifice.” His face suddenly became distorted with anguish, as if the pain were in his body too. “May his blood taint me and mine,” he added in a very low, intense voice, “unto the seventh generation.”

He returned the Agricola to its place on the rug and stroked the parchment of the Virgil, muttering, “His blood.” His eyes were moist and his hands shook uncontrollably. “I think I’ll sell this one,” he said.

Fargas might not be out of his mind yet, but he soon would be. Corso looked at the bare walls, the marks left by pictures on the stained wallpaper. The highly unlikely seventh gener­ation didn’t give a damn about any of this. Like Lucas Corso’s own, the Fargas line would end here. And find peace at last. Corso’s cigarette smoke rose up to the decrepit painting on the ceiling, straight up, like the smoke from a sacrifice in the calm of dawn. He looked out the window, at the garden overrun with weeds, searching for a way out, like the lamb tangled in the brambles. But there was nothing but books. The angel let go of the hand that held up the knife and went away, weeping. And left Abraham alone, the poor fool.

Corso finished his cigarette and threw it into the fireplace. He was tired and cold. He had heard too many words within these bare walls. He was glad there were no mirrors for him to see the expression on his face. He looked at his watch with­out noticing the time. With a fortune sitting there on the old rugs and carpets, Victor Fargas had more than paid their price in suffering. For Corso it was now time to talk business. “What about The Nine Doors?” “What about it?”

“That’s what brought me here. I assume you got my letter.” “Your letter? Yes, of course. I remember. It’s just that with all of this ... Forgive me. The Nine Doors. Of course.”