THE REDNESS THAT LIT up Signorina Bergesio’s face, at any of my hinting toward the Library, was a giveaway sign of a very common discomfort among people who live in the city whenever that special topic is broached. There’s nobody anxious to remember the Library, except perhaps its creators—who nonetheless have managed to cover their tracks so carefully that interviewing them is close to impossible. But if you hope to paint an image of what Turin was like at the time of the Twenty Days, you cannot leave out the Library. How many regular clients did it see? Three hundred? Four hundred? Five hundred? Or even more than that? It’s useless searching for the figures: all the statistical data concerning that establishment has been destroyed, along with most of the materials it held. How fast, almost explosive, its growth was! And they dismantled it just as quickly, at the order of the local authorities, ten years ago in September. No official reason was given. They proceeded to seize the Library’s contents. This material was eventually thrown into the incinerators, and, as far as I know, nothing survived except for a few notebooks in a house basement next to the Town Hall.
Still fortified by the encouragement Segre had given me, I decided to take the thrill of approaching some people old enough to have frequented the Library. I mixed in with a crowd at a market and, nearing the stall of a cheesemonger, I waited for the chance to strike up a conversation with someone. At random, I picked a woman who stood behind me with a huge shopping bag.
“Sorry, madam! Were you in line before me?” I asked her.
“Perhaps? I don’t know. I wasn’t watching,” she replied, visibly moved by my courtesy.
“I think you were,” I added. “But that’s no worry. You can go ahead.” She let out a sigh of thanks, and in all the time it took to place her order she never stopped making crafty glances in my direction, full of gratitude.
“Haven’t we met somewhere before?” I said suddenly with a roguish drawl, while the merchant was weighing a piece of Fontina for her.
“We have?” she replied, startled.
“Yes, don’t you remember? Quite a while ago!”
She tweaked her chin with two fingers and frowned.
“Well . . . maybe,” she said. “I’ve always lived around here.”
“No, no, not around here. We’ve met somewhere else. I remember you very well, madam . . . I’d see you almost all the time, on Sunday mornings . . .”
Her expression began to darken.
“You mean, of course . . . at Sunday Mass?” she stammered.
“At Mass, but not just there . . . You didn’t by any chance visit the Library often?”
It was like I’d elbowed her in the gut. For a moment she looked at me, breathless, then promptly settled the bill and crammed the cheese in her bag, sidling away without even a ciao. Her reaction surprised me; it far outdid the blushing of Signorina Bergesio. Shooting in the dark, I must have hit one of her most nervous secrets. Other shoppers around us pretended they hadn’t heard, though we’d spoken loudly enough. They gazed out at thin air, and I was certain that even if I wrangled with the cheesemonger for a quarter of an hour, none of them would ask me to speed things up. I saw some people creeping out of the queue. In a hurry, I bought two pieces of Paglierina. I wasn’t going to increase the awkwardness.
This, and other, similar experiences, convinced me that up-front queries weren’t the best way to approach my topic of interest. To make progress I needed a go-between, and so I was grateful when a friend spoke on my behalf to the current mayor. Thanks to his efforts, I had permission to go and rummage through the Library’s remains. After that, I planned on questioning people who weren’t as heavily involved with the institution, in order to expand my inquiry.
To reach the basement, with its stack of manuscripts that have survived incineration, one first has to clear the obstacle of two very suspicious watchmen who can hardly believe anyone would want to study such decrepit material. I don’t know who put them there or the reason why: whether their job is only to guard the vestiges of the Library, or if they’re charged with minding other things as well. I do know that when I rang the buzzer on the door, the figure who came to greet me seemed to rise from an ocean of torpor. The other watchman was glued to his chair, as if he and it were one substance. But as soon as they knew the purpose of my visit, oh, my! It was like an electric current had crossed them! Suddenly the unforeseen demand on their public function ignited them with a bureaucratic frenzy rarely found in those who fill such positions. They passed my permit around to each other at least five times, examined it against the light, split hairs over my documentation. (And why did I wish to go down to the storeroom? And what was I hoping to find? But this was the mayor’s real signature? Did I know that I was the first to have made this kind of request?)
“Well, go through! Go through!” they jabbered, after assigning me a large rusty key that had been hanging on a nail. I took it, a bit overwhelmed by their sudden change of attitude.
“Come along! What are you waiting for? It’s the first door downstairs . . .” With their thumbs they pointed to a spiral staircase not far from their desk. Then they fell back into their chairs and didn’t say another word.
I’d had the foresight to bring along two old gloves. I’d also taken a pair of scissors and a flashlight, imagining plenty of strings to cut and lots of darkness. I didn’t encounter any darkness—the cellar was lit by neon—but the rest outdid my worst expectations. There was an unbearable stench of mildew and decay. The reference material was gathered in a single stack that occupied almost the entire room: it made me shudder to think this mass of wastepaper made up only the slightest portion of what the Library had once been. I recalled the library of Alexandria, whose conflagration had spared absolutely nothing. Here, fate had proven to be milder: But in the name of what? It was hard to tell where to start searching. There was also the danger that the whole lot would fall on me like an avalanche. I plunged a hand randomly into the mound and, trusting my left forearm to secure the treacherous, shaky side of that structure, pulled hard enough to dislodge a few odds and ends. It was a manuscript held together with string, plus a couple of notebooks. I beat them against my knees, drawing out a dust cloud that left me sneezing. I’d taken some occasions to visit the Library and nose around the year it had appeared, so I knew the spirit of these documents, but it pleased me just as well to refresh my memory. The manuscript was made up of hundreds of rolled foolscap sheets that I immediately unfastened with my scissors. The two notebooks were bound, one in green and one in black. Each still had the reference number attached, but the names and surnames of the authors were missing. Those were the rules of the game back then. Readers who wanted to know a diarist’s identity could request it after making a payment to the Library staff. Everyone’s name and address was carefully catalogued. The writer of the foolscap sheets asked to be called “Evelina” and insisted that she was still an attractive woman, even in her forties. Menopause had struck her too soon, she lamented. It had wreaked havoc on certain “bodily drives.” She was seeking an understanding individual who could assist her, since her husband didn’t want any part in satisfying her “new demands.” He’d fallen to chasing younger girls. Now what Evelina yearned for was a young man who could spare his hands to help her defecate . . .
“I’ve become very constipated,” she wrote. “There are days when my belly seems close to rupturing and I cry because I remember how I suffered during my pregnancy: I felt as heavy as a cannonball! Then one day a man in white appeared with rubber gloves and helped me unburden myself and I was so thankful, even if the kid was stillborn. Well, if someone came to my rescue now there are lots of ways I could show my gratitude. I’d pay them in kisses and hard cash. I won big at the football pools a few months ago and there’s plenty of cheddar in the bank just springing to be taken out. I’m ready to give and give and give . . .” Page after page told of her torments and her need for liberation. One whole chapter was devoted to her bathroom reading: a hefty list of novels, newspapers and glossy magazines. Her appetites weren’t choosy. Certain titles, though, were underlined in red. Next to a pulp romance by Liala, I found a treatise on semiotics. And another chapter followed, filled with descriptions of cutlery and silverware . . .
“If you really want to know,” she wrote, addressing her imaginary reader, “I’m not the materialist you think I am. Deep inside me there’s also a second desire, but it’s so sublime I wouldn’t be able to explain it unless we’re speaking face to face. You would be proud of me if you knew it: it’s the very purest of desires which shines like a soft light at the nethermost part of my being. Come and make it shine! You can do it!”
Toward the end of the manuscript, which I read skimming here and there, Evelina spoke about the feelings that came after the writing was over: the totality of the confessions she’d poured out of herself had given her a feeling of being drained, empty, voided, like there was nothing more to scrape from the bottom of her barrel—like her riverbed had all dried out. Now she was thirsty—and really wanted to get some sleep: “But thirsty for what? And what dreams could I nod off to?”
I remembered Bergesio’s sister and what she told me about her brother’s “dry lake,” about those bas-reliefs. I wondered if this woman had ended up smashed to death along some city avenue. This was a purely academic question: “Evelina,” for sure, was a nom de plume and the personal details in the Library’s register no longer existed. It was fair to assume that, venturing from her house one night due to insomnia, perhaps half naked, she too heard footsteps behind her, and turned without wonder to see who was approaching her. Perhaps she gave a faintly curious, “Oh!”—one last automatic spark of vitality before even that ember was extinguished. Then two hands grabbed her by her lower limbs, swung her through the air and slammed her over the asphalt, or a tree trunk, or the body of a parked car. Whether or not she was among the first to die, used like a truncheon, against . . .
The revelations contained in the other two notebooks were more cautious. They spoke about satisfying some kind of poetic desire. This was a more elaborate language, trying dearly to package personal issues in metaphor. One work ended with a tirade against the despotism of the publishing industry; it seemed to have taken Vittorio Alfieri as its literary model. There were no references to parched lakes. Just a few allusions to the poverty of the human imagination and lack of initiative that was then plaguing the city. And on that point, the author wasn’t wrong. I can remember quite well the “stifling atmosphere” that held sway over Turin at that time. The collapse of its industries. The exodus of immigrants back to their native provinces, which were at least safe from the severe drought that struck the entire Alpine arch. The overcrowded trains that left Porta Nuova station direct for Southern Italy, only to return half empty. New loads, new departures . . . The situation of finding ourselves thrust back almost at once to our indigenous wholesomeness—an event many “purebred Turinese” had even longed for with a sour regionalism—had ended up producing a general sense of loss. “Ah! Look who’s returned! Now we’re all in this together again, fingers crossed!” Among those who arrived to that fanfare, it would’ve been hard to find anyone ready to share in its joy. More often, they looked shrunken, secretive, ashamed. As it happens when you bump into a friend you haven’t visited in decades, dressed by time in wrinkles and gray hair. Although the immigrants had left us holding on to their communal loose ends, so to speak, there weren’t nearly enough battalions of pickpockets, pimps and hardened criminals to fill the vacancies that had formed.
The city authorities, at least some of them, had an accurate sense of what was coming. But how could the goodwill of a few handle a phenomenon which couldn’t necessarily be fixed with superficial measures? It was vital (they said) to establish “community centers” at once! We had to stop new forms of “psychological alienation” from supplanting the old ones! The preventative action was extended to the whole district: It was urgent! It was essential! It was a must-do! How many papers were drafted, full of high-minded cultural intentions! How many mimeographed sheets were distributed among neighborhood committees! Yet the only “places of assembly” that were in any way functional were certain clubs mostly frequented by the elderly—ancient institutions like the Journalists’ Circle, the Artists’ Club, the Famiglia Torinese. Anyone who went inside, to view this anomaly in person, won’t easily forget the haze of smoke through which you could hardly see the pool tables, the bridge players sitting like statues at their benches, the huge chandeliers of crystal that had turned opaque and—hanging over everything—that indescribable, unutterable, tomblike quiet! By chance, one bridge player broke hours of silence by accusing his partner of taking so long he was fossilizing.
“Fossilizing—me?” he answered.
“Yes, fossilizing! You, my dear boy, are a fossil!”
“So I’m a fossil now? Is that right?”
“Well, yes!” a third player butted in. “Everyone’s always known the two of you were a couple of fossils!”
“You’re gonna have it now—mark my word! Calling us fossils, indeed!”
And then there was silence again. Only the sounds of coughing and clearing of throats seemed to have the right to free expression.
Small wonder, then, that an institution like the Library found space to take root. It was presented as a good cause, created in the hope of encouraging people to be more open with one another. Its creators were little more than boys: perky, smiling youngsters, well groomed and well dressed, without a trace of facial hair. They looked designed to win people’s trust. And who wouldn’t trust a cheerful, articulate young man who came calling at your door, inviting you to chat with him about this and that, about the meaning of life, about all the hunger and suffering in the world? It’s true; it was whispered that dark forces acted behind them, national and international groups hungry for vengeance after certain recent defeats. But who could believe such things in front of polite young lads who always looked you in the eye and shook your hand?
Their friendly chats ended with a humble invitation to collaborate in the establishment of a “library.” It would be based in a hospital ward at the St. Cottolengo Little House of Divine Providence, a space large enough to hold shelves and a comfortable reading room.
“And what could I do to contribute to this?” their hosts would ask without hiding their astonishment at the proposal.
“Well, you, buddy”—the you-buddys flowed naturally from their mouths—“you could contribute by coming over to read, or bringing your own manuscripts, which will be archived and numbered and go towards forming the reading material. We’re not interested in printed paper or books. There’s too much artifice in literature, even when it’s said to be spontaneous. We’re looking for true, authentic documents reflecting the real spirit of the people, the kinds of things we could rightly call popular subjects . . . Is it possible that you’ve never written a diary, a memoir, a confession of some problem that really worries you?”
“Yes, now that I think about it, I could write something . . .”
“Very well, why don’t you bring it along? There’s definitely someone who’ll read it and take an interest in your problems. We’ll make sure to put them in touch with you and you’ll become friends; you’ll both feel liberated. It’s an important thing we do, considering how hard it’s gotten for people to communicate these days.”
The monetary charges for “collaboration” weren’t enough to deter eager patrons: three hundred lire for a chance to read, six hundred to know an author’s name, three thousand for the acceptance of a manuscript. All proceeds went to the sole and exclusive benefit of patients at the Little House of Divine Providence. “As you see, this is also a work of charity. We need funds to improve care for patients, many of whom have . . . special needs beyond society’s understanding . . . and rely on the hospital’s free and confidential services. Divine Providence isn’t an airy-fairy thing as we’re commonly led to believe. Why, without practical assistance, who knows how many earthquake victims would still be living in tents . . . ?”
The optimism radiating from those youngsters, their wholesome energy which ran against the historical mood, was the factor that went straight to people’s hearts. “So when can things get started?” people asked them. “For the time being, we’re open only on Sundays, but as soon as the initiative gets rolling, we hope to stay open every day.” It’s easy to imagine what happened in those households where the young men’s proposal had been favorably received: whole families (each member often oblivious to the doings of the others) went rummaging in search of scrapbooks that might’ve been forsaken in a soggy cellar. An old notepad full of yellowed pages and frayed memories, suddenly rediscovered and held up briefly to the light, regained a life that no one could ever have questioned. It was read again frantically by those who had written it. They’d notice the amount of things that had happened since the last entry—and hence the need to update it, to buy fresh notebooks for adding new experiences. If the Library needed “true documents,” it hardly mattered much to dwell on the structure. The pen could scribble freely whatever the spirit dictated. And once it started, it was hard to stop! The prospect of “being read” quivered in the distance like an enchanting mirage—a mirage as real, nonetheless, as the “realities” that were written down. I will give myself to you, you will give yourself to me: on these very human foundations, the future exchange would happen. Anyone hesitant to write could always save that privilege for later, after reading in the Library what their neighbors had confided. If the weight of loneliness became unbearable, the way out was well indicated: “Whose name matches reference number [XY]?” The young man working tirelessly in the Library could reveal it, and the chance of establishing a correspondence was open at last.
I stayed up into the evening to trawl through those manuscripts. Upstairs, the watchmen were beginning to yawn and give signs of agitation. One came down to ask if I’d be at it much longer. In my hands, I had a dossier where a seventy-year-old, concluding a long diary, confided his desire to possess an eighteen-year-old virgin the same age as his granddaughter. I read through some ardent passages: “My dear, my delectable little girl, I’m still keen and equipped, don’t you know? Every night at six, I go to Leopardi Park and sit myself on the bench that’s near the myrtle hedges. I know that sooner or later you’re going to read what I’ve written and accept my invitation. You’ll know me by the book I’m reading: The Heart of a Boy by Edmondo de Amicis. My little heart is all for you! Come hither, little girl . . .” I heard the laughter of the watchman and threw the confession back into the pile.
The nature of the place where the Library was founded—a sanatorium rumored to harbor the pitiably deformed—had proven a lure to people with no desire at all for “regular human communication.” I remember the case of a man who was normal in every respect, in words, in reasoning, in the practice of his profession, but strayed from this “normalcy” in only one way: his inexplicable need to fill thousands of sheets of foolscap paper with seemingly meaningless words, phonemes close to wailing sounds, cries of fury and pain in relentless successions, fragments of sentences and pleas addressed to God-knows-whom. All of this was so well organized in his memory that nobody he lived with could move one sheet from the piles that were growing day by day. The absence of a single page (felt immediately by his ultra-sensitive antennae) was enough to send him into a frenzy. The Library might’ve seemed like a refuge for a man like that . . . Everything could be deposited into the Library: works that were slender or unnaturally bulky, sometimes with a disarming naïveté in a world of slyness. Masterpieces could appear by accident, but they were about as easy to track down as a particle of gold in a heap of gravel. There were manuscripts whose first hundred pages didn’t reveal any oddity, which then crumbled little by little into the depths of bottomless madness; or works that seemed normal at the beginning and end, but were pitted with fearful abysses further inward. Others, meanwhile, were conceived in a spirit of pure malice: pages and pages just to indicate, to a poor elderly woman without children or a husband, that her skin was the color of a lemon and her spine was warping—things she already knew well enough. The range was infinite: it had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.
When I came up from the storehouse I felt my stomach roiling. I returned the key to the watchmen and walked away with my head lowered, forgetting even to leave a tip. I slammed the door behind me. My research had barely begun and my ideas were still very muddled . . . Who knew if one day I could have returned to Segre the attorney and shown him those “interesting findings” that he would have been glad to hear about . . .