When Arzaky arrived I told him about the ballerina’s visit.
“So you’ve met the Mermaid. Paris’s finest. What did you think of her?”
“She told me about the ballet.”
“She always has some crazy new thing going on. You should see her, sunk deep into the ice. I don’t know where they get those blocks from. Sometimes they even have frozen fish inside them. She’s the kind of woman who drives men crazy.”
“Does she drive you crazy too?”
“Me? No. I’m like the lake of ice she plunges into. What did you find in Darbon’s papers?”
I told him about Grialet, Isel, and Bradelli.
“Darbon always loved false leads. He searched where it was easiest to search, where there was nothing hidden. Do you know the joke about the drunk who came home late? He drank so much that he couldn’t get the key into the lock, and eventually he dropped it. About ten feet away there’s a streetlight, and the drunk starts looking there. His wife hears him and sticks her head out of the window, saying, ‘Did you drop your key again?’ ‘Yes,’ says the drunk. ‘Well, why are you looking for it by the streetlight instead of by the door?’ And the drunk replies, ‘Because there’s more light here.’ That joke is Darbon’s professional biography: he’s always right by the streetlights. Electric light would have made his job even easier.”
I insisted, and Arzaky finally agreed to visit Isel.
“All right, let’s go, if it’ll make you happy. We’re going to wind up switching roles; in the end I’ll be your faithful acolyte. The devotion that Tanner had for every last one of my opinions! He thought I was infallible, and he liked to make mistakes just so I could correct him.”
“Mistakes lead to the truth.”
“Mistakes only lead to mistakes, and skill leads to the truth.”
A carriage took us to Isel’s house. It was a gloomy castle on the outskirts of the city. It had two or three incongruent architectural blocks, which looked as if they had been built in different periods, or in one very fickle period. They were a series of failed attempts to give the building a medieval air.
“You knock on the door. Convince me that there’s something of interest within these walls.”
A servant let us in. He was tall and bald, with oriental features. He moved with his eyes closed, like a sleepwalker. We entered a vast monastic room, where everything appeared to be missing. There were marks where paintings had hung, where rugs no longer covered the floor, where furniture had been taken elsewhere. The statues had gone, but the pedestals remained. We sat in hard chairs, like the kind you find in a church.
“They’re dismantling everything,” I said. “Do you think Isel’s dead? No, the servant would have told us.”
“Servants are no longer allowed to give such news. If the master has died and someone comes to visit him, they leave the person waiting in the living room, with some information left where they can find it—a newspaper, or a death notice—that fills them in on what happened. If the visitor doesn’t think to have a look at those papers, the waiting continues indefinitely. I remember a certain count who was so offended at being made to wait that he challenged the deceased to a duel. Of course, the duel couldn’t be fought.”
Someone coughed a few steps away.
“That’s not the case, gentlemen. This mausoleum houses a living man.”
Isel appeared before us in a tattered yellow robe. He wore round eyeglasses and a gray beard covered his face. From his neck hung an exaggeratedly large gold crucifix.
“Have a seat, please. I’ll sit as well.”
For a few seconds the three of us were silent. Since the chairs were next to one another, and all faced the same direction, the situation was a bit ridiculous. We looked like passengers waiting for a train. Was the silence deliberate? Was it part of Arzaky’s strategy, or was he shy, or distracted? I coughed, and realized that I was the only one made uncomfortable by the silence. For different reasons, they were each used to provoking unease.
Arzaky finally explained what we had come for, and then he asked if Isel had known the man who fell from the tower’s heights.
“Yes, Darbon had been here. He began by asking me about my youthful exploits. It is true that we founded groups and sects, and we ordered books from abroad and each had a library filled with banned volumes. But now I use those books to keep me warm in the winter. Although they’re not even entirely good for that, since the leather covers smell terribly when they’re burned.”
“Who else was a part of your group?”
“Their names aren’t important. Pseudonyms abounded. Names with alchemical or Egyptian echoes were the most common. There were many, they came, they left, they founded new churches…For most of them I was depravity incarnate. They blamed the devil for my sins. If there were a copyright office for vices, I would have registered mine there so that no one could attribute my inventions to the devil.”
Isel stood up and pointed to the mark a large painting had left on the wall.
“You see this painting? These are my parents. I inherited a fortune from them and never worked a day in my life. I spent my time studying and collecting. I had exotic birds brought from abroad, which I often either freed or killed, depending on my mood. I had a large music box built, and I hired a blind girl to dance for me, repeating the same mechanical movements over and over. She danced naked, and never knew how many eyes were upon her. I would invite my friends to the meetings, some of which were held in the dark, and make them smell perfumes, sip drinks, and taste food without knowing what they were. When the lights came on, the real surprises were waiting for them. I was sick, I couldn’t handle real life. I searched for corners where life still held an air of strangeness and artifice. Now I’ve stopped all that, now I devote all my energy to the Church of Truth.”
“What brought about your change?” asked Arzaky.
“Three years ago, a young man who called himself Sinbad joined my domestic staff.” He pointed to another mark on the wall that had been left by a small painting. “I painted his portrait myself. He had Arab features and called himself Sinbad for a circus act he had once performed. I let him keep it; it didn’t bother me. He was dark, reserved, he cheated at every game, and I became interested in him. I had the strange idea of making him into a gentleman, because I sensed that, beneath his wild exterior, there was a hidden god. The statue within the marble block. I hired a tutor to acquaint him with math, Latin, and the French classics, particularly the funereal orations of Bossuet. He learned to fence, and I took him to museums and cathedrals. Meanwhile he helped me to maintain order in this castle where I keep, all muddled together, marvels and misfortunes. I had trouble getting him to enter my natural sciences room, where I kept stuffed birds, some turtles, and several tanks with fish brought from Brazil. Those fish devour anything that’s put before them, and he trembled at the sight of them just cutting through the water with their fins.
“I don’t know what happened to him. Perhaps my efforts weren’t enough, or he missed his old life, because one day he fled. I was undone; I felt that my masterpiece had been completely ruined. My good servant Joseph, whom you saw, was glad that the young man had disappeared. I thought of tracking him down and killing him; I thought of killing myself; I thought about burning the house down. Fortunately I’m not a man of action—except for the act of collecting—so I returned to my studies, my dusky evenings, and my disappointments.
“One day I heard a rumor that a two-headed lamb had arrived in the market; I set out immediately to buy it. But something distracted me on the way: among the crowd I saw Sinbad, juggling for pocket change. He juggled the monkey skulls he had stolen from my collection. I hid my rage, which was also joy, and I embraced him without a second thought. I convinced him to come back with extravagant promises, which I didn’t make to him so much as to myself. Once he was back at the house, it only took me a few minutes to notice how his French had been corrupted, how his manners had changed, how his gaze had become sidelong and given to surreptitiousness and betrayal. I could see it in his eyes: I was just an old eccentric he could get enough money from to run away again. It terrified me to think of him disappearing and I made Joseph lock him in the natural sciences room. With no windows and only one door, there was no way he could possibly escape. Sinbad begged me on bended knee not to lock him up, but he used such common words that I was reminded of how his foolish flight had nearly ruined my work.
“I never knew if he slipped or if he threw himself into the water of his own volition. I heard a terrible scream in the middle of the night, the truest sound I have ever heard in my life. The words we use are nothing more than disguises to cover that scream, which is the essential expression of our soul. In the red water there was incessant motion, boiling. Incapable of moving, I stood staring at the depravity of nature, which was symmetrical to my own illness. When the movement stopped, I was empty, hollow. The great experience that life had in store for me was over. I didn’t leave my room for ten days. I smashed the perfume bottles, I drank all the cocktails I had brought for him, I used up my supply of hashish. I destroyed that abominable tank. Then I pulled out all my collections, every little pleasure meticulously catalogued, and I buried it in the basement of this house. The emperor’s cabinet of wonders would envy what I have stored here! I had nearly reached the most perfect of all experiences; it no longer made sense to continue. Now I devote myself to a different kind of pleasure.”
“Crime?”
“No. Louis Darbon had nothing against me. He considered me an enemy of the tower. Why would I care about something whose existence I don’t even recognize? Could that tower compare with the bloody visions I see in my dreams? Darbon didn’t understand. We are not men of action. We are a school of contemplators. We are the immobile, the useless, those who read books about men of action. I wish there were a true criminal among us. It’s better if Grialet explains it to you. Grialet, now he has a golden tongue. But, of course, Arzaky, you know that full well.”
I had mentioned Grialet when I told Arzaky what I had read in Darbon’s papers, but he never told me he knew him.
“I haven’t seen him in some time. Where is Grialet these days?”
“I don’t know where he lives, but I doubt he’s stopped going to Dorignac’s bookstore. That is the port through which all banned books arrive. Paris is filled with sects that are out to kill each other, but Dorignac’s bookstore is a sort of common ground, a neutral zone where enemies observe each other from a distance. I miss Grialet. I used to take nighttime walks with him. He took me to see the many perversions the city has to offer and I paid the price. Now I prefer other sights. Once in a while I travel to see far-off oddities; in Naples I saw a church made entirely of human skulls. I go to see local miracles: in one chapel there’s an intact cadaver, as fresh as if he’d died just moments before; in another, farther away, I watch a corpse decompose in seconds, right before my eyes. These are the only wonders that fill my free time these days. I’m consumed with death, because after Sinbad, I don’t deserve any new pleasures. I’ve renounced everything.”
Arzaky didn’t seem to take Isel’s confessions very seriously, because he asked him, “And don’t you want to renounce your servant as well, to make your contrition complete?”
“Get rid of Joseph? Oh, please, no. I might be crazy, Mr. Arzaky, but not so crazy as to think one can get by without servants. What’s more, he keeps me alive. On my nights of insomnia he tells me, in infinite detail, of Sinbad’s spasmodic movements as he fell into the water, he describes how his face lit up with terror. He fills my sleepless hours with those few dreadful seconds. How could I go on living without that bedtime story?”