Half an hour later, Juliette and Leonidas—that really was his name, which made her think, irresistibly, of a mountain of Belgian chocolates—shared an almond croissant that was left over from breakfast and an instant coffee, because Juliette refused to touch the complicated machine invented by Soliman to make the black nectar of which he drank at least twelve cups a day. Looking at the green hat sitting atop a dozen English novels, the coat hanging from a stand wedged—it was missing a leg—between the despised works of a bestselling American novelist, the curls of smoke from the pipe which wreathed the ceiling in a blueish canopy, one might have thought that the visitor was the real occupant of the place, and Juliette a nervous trainee over-anxious to do well.
“I must organize all this,” she explained. “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. The passeurs turn up, I give them a bag of random books grabbed haphazardly … wherever I can’t move any more, in fact. I feel as if I’m doing everything all wrong. I … I don’t know how Soliman worked. I mean, how he chose the books.”
Leonidas didn’t answer this implicit question; he was deep in thought, his brow knitted, drawing on his pipe and puffing out denser and denser clouds of smoke.
“The problem, my dear child, is not so much to know how he chose them, but how he arranged them. And how the books themselves choose to leave.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the office and the big room next door, where Juliette had not yet dared to venture. It was a room with bare walls lit by two skylights just beneath the ceiling, wider than they were tall, which could be partially opened by pulling on a little chain. But the panes were so filthy that the light they let in was only just sufficient to stop Juliette and Leonidas from bumping into each other.
No shelving here, not even those crude bookcases made out of fruit crates that Soliman seemed so fond of. Just books. Books stacked against the walls, two, three, sometimes four rows deep. The center of the room was empty.
“Well,” said Leonidas with satisfaction, “it looks as though Soliman had begun the task that you find insurmountable. We’ll find a clue here, a guiding principle, so to speak. Most definitely.”
And he nodded twice, puffing out a huge smoke ring as he did so. Juliette ran to pull the nearest window chain to let in a little air.
“A guiding principle.”
She tried for once not to give her voice that questioning lilt that would categorize her once and for all as an airhead in the eyes of this rare book connoisseur.
“You see,” said Leonidas, “the classification of books has a history that is at least as interesting as that of the books themselves. I once knew a man…”
Changing his mind, he went on: “Perhaps I didn’t really know him. Let’s say I read a book in which he was the main character—but that’s a good way of getting to know people, isn’t it? Perhaps the best. Well, this man avoided putting on the same shelf two books whose authors didn’t get on, even after their deaths … Did you know that for having criticized Cicero, Erasmus was sentenced by a Verona judge to pay one hundred crowns to the poor? Shakespeare and Marlowe both accused the other of plagiarism; Louis-Ferdinand Céline called Sartre a ‘little shit-crammed piece of filth’; Jules Vallès considered Baudelaire a blusterer. As for Flaubert, he was a master of damning with faint praise: ‘What a man Balzac would have been, had he known how to write!’ Writing has never prevented people from being jealous, petty, or bitchy. Excuse me; I’m not usually so crude, but there’s no other word for it.”
Juliette shot him a sidelong glance and began to laugh. This man made her feel better. A benevolent scholar, a sort of uncle like you find in old novels, the kind who sit you on their knee and let you play with the charms on their watch chain when you’re little and later give you an alibi when you stay out all night. She wished she could have met him sooner.
He talked about books as if they were living creatures—old friends, occasionally fearsome adversaries, some resembling bolshie adolescents and others elderly ladies working at their needlepoint by the fireside. According to him, bookcases housed grouchy scholars and lovelorn women, wild furies, would-be killers, skinny boys made of paper holding out their hands to delicate girls whose beauty disintegrated as the words to describe it changed. Some books were frisky horses, not yet broken in, that whisked you off on a mad gallop, breathless, clinging to their manes. Others, boats drifting peacefully on a lake under a full moon. Others still, prisons.
He spoke to her of his favorite authors, of Schiller who never wrote without having put rotten apples in his desk drawer to force himself to work faster, and plunged his feet into a basin of iced water to keep himself awake at night; of Marcel Pagnol, so passionate about mechanics that he patented a nut and bolt that couldn’t be undone; of Gabriel García Márquez who, to survive while he was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, sold his car, his heater, his blender, and his hair dryer; grammatical errors in Apollinaire, Balzac, Zola, and Rimbaud, errors which he happily forgave them and even noted with a certain relish.
“I love your stories,” said Juliette at length. It had been dark for some time; Zaide must be hungry and she herself felt gnawing pangs in her stomach. “But I can’t see anything you might call a guiding principle here. I still don’t know where to start. With the writers who make grammatical mistakes? With those who have a hobby, a predisposition to madness? With those who traveled, were sedentary, were reclusive?”
Leonidas chewed on the stem of his pipe, and shook his head with a sigh.
“Me neither, to be honest. But it doesn’t matter. Go and get some sleep, dear. Tomorrow you may see things in a completely different light.” He pondered for a few moments. “Or not.”
“That’s not very encouraging…”
“Nothing is, in life. It’s up to us to find encouragement wherever our eye, or our enthusiasm, our passion, our … whatever you call it, is able to find it.” He patted her cheek indulgently. “And you’re capable of doing that. I’m certain.”