If on a winter's night a traveler (12 page)

The speaker is a little man, shrunken and bent, who seems to shrink and bend more and more every time anyone calls him, tugs at his sleeve, presents a problem to him, empties a pile of proofs into his arms. "Mr. Cave-dagna!" "Look, Mr. Cavedagna!" "We'll ask Mr. Cave-dagna!" And every time, he concentrates on the query of the latest interlocutor, his eyes staring, his chin quivering, his neck twisting in the effort to keep pending and in plain view all the other unresolved queries, with the mournful patience of overnervous people and the ultrasonic nervousness of overpatient people.

When you came into the main office of the publishing firm and explained to the doormen the problem of the wrongly bound books you would like to exchange, first they told you to go to Administration; then, when you added that it wasn't only the exchange of books that interested you but also an explanation of what had hap-

pened, they sent you to Production; and when you made it clear that what mattered to you was the continuation of the story of the interrupted novels, "Then you'd better speak with our Mr. Cavedagna," they concluded. "Have a seat in the waiting room; some others are already in there; your turn will come."

And so, making your way among the other visitors, you heard Mr. Cavedagna begin several times the story of the manuscript that couldn't be found, each time addressing different people, yourself included, and each time being interrupted before realizing his mistake, by visitors or by other editors and employees. You realize at once that Mr. Cavedagna is that person indispensable to every firm's staff, on whose shoulders his colleagues tend instinctively to unload all the most complex and tricky jobs. Just as you are about to speak to him, someone arrives bearing a production schedule for the next five years to be brought up to date, or an index of names in which all the page numbers must be changed, or an edition of Dostoyevsky that has to be reset from beginning to end because every time it reads Maria now it should read Mar'ja and every time it says Pyotr it has to be corrected to Pëtr. He listens to everybody, though always tormented by the thought of having broken off the conversation with a previous postulant, and as soon as he can he tries to appease the more impatient, assuring them he hasn't forgotten them, he is keeping their problem in mind. "We much admired the atmosphere of fantasy...." ("What?" says a historian of Trotskyite splinter groups in New Zealand, with a jolt.) "Perhaps you should tone down some of the scatological images...." ("What are you talking about?" protests a specialist in the macroeconomy of the oligopolises. )

Suddenly Mr. Cavedagna disappears. The corridors of the publishing house are full of snares: drama cooperatives from psychiatric hospitals roam through them, groups devoted to group analysis, feminist commandos.

Mr. Cavedagna, at every step, risks being captured, besieged, swamped.

You have turned up here at a time when those hanging around publishing houses are no longer aspiring poets or novelists, as in the past, would-be poetesses or lady writers; this is the moment (in the history of Western culture ) when self-realization on paper is sought not so much by isolated individuals as by collectives: study seminars, working parties, research teams, as if intellectual labor were too dismaying to be faced alone. The figure of the author has become plural and moves always in a group, because nobody can be delegated to represent anybody: four ex-convicts of whom one is an escapee, three former patients with their male nurse and the male nurse's manuscript. Or else there are pairs, not necessarily but tendentially husband and wife, as if the shared life of a couple had no greater consolation than the production of manuscripts.

Each of these characters has asked to speak with the person in charge of a certain department or the expert in a certain area, but they all end up being shown in to Mr. Cavedagna. Waves of talk from which surface the vocabularies of the most specialized and most exclusive disciplines and schools are poured over this elderly editor, whom at first glance you defined as "a little man, shrunken and bent," not because he is more of a little man, more shrunken, more bent than so many others, or because the words "little man, shrunken and bent" are part of his way of expressing himself, but because he seems to have come from a world where they still—no: he seems to have emerged from a book where you still encounter—you've got it: he seems to have come from a world in which they still read books where you encounter "little men, shrunken and bent."

Without allowing himself to be distracted, he lets the arrays of problems flow over his bald pate, he shakes his

head, and he tries to confine the question to its more practical aspects: "But couldn't you, forgive me for asking, include the footnotes in the body of the text, and perhaps condense the text a bit, and even—the decision is yours— turn it into a footnote?"

"I'm a reader, only a reader, not an author," you hasten to declare, like a man rushing to the aid of somebody about to make a misstep.

"Oh, really? Good, good! I'm delighted!" And the glance he gives you really is a look of "friendliness and gratitude. "I'm so pleased. I come across fewer and fewer readers...."

He is overcome by a confidential urge: he lets himself be carried away; he forgets his other tasks; he takes you aside. "I've been working for years and years for this publisher ... so many books pass through my hands... but can I say that I read? This isn't what I call reading.... In my village there were few books, but I used to read, yes, in those days I did read.... I keep thinking that when I retire I'll go back to my village and take up reading again, as before. Every now and then I set a book aside, I'll read this when I retire, I tell myself, but then I think that it won't be the same thing any more.... Last night I had a dream, I was in my village, in the chicken coop of our house, I was looking, looking for something in the chicken coop, in the basket where the hens lay their eggs, and what did I find? A book, one of the books I read when I was a boy, a cheap edition, the pages tattered, the black-and-white engravings all colored, by me, with crayons... You know? As a boy, in order to read, I would hide in the chicken coop...."

You start to explain to him the reason for your visit. He understands at once, and doesn't even let you continue: "You, too! The mixed-up signatures, we know all about it, the books that begin and don't continue, the entire recent

production of the firm is in turmoil, you've no idea. We can't make head or tail of it any more, my dear sir."

In his arms he has a pile of galleys; he sets them down gently, as if the slightest jolt could upset the order of the printed letters. "A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir," he says. "If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spreads, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won't you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo." And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm.

"Come, come, Mr. Cavedagna, don't take it like this." Now it's your job to console him. "It was just a reader's simple curiosity, my question.... But if there's nothing you can tell me..."

"What I know, I'll tell you gladly," the editor says. "Listen. It all began when a young man turned up in the office, claiming to be a translator from the whatsitsname, from the youknowwhat...."

"Polish?"

"No, no, Polish indeed! A difficult language, one not many people know ..."

"Cimmerian?"

"Not Cimmerian. Farther on. What do you call it? This person passed himself off as an extraordinary polyglot, there was no language he didn't know, even whatchama-callit, Cimbrian, yes, Cimbrian. He brings us a book written in that language, a great big novel, very thick, whatsitsname, the
Traveler,
no, the
Traveler
is by the other one,
Outside the town ..."

"By Tazio Bazakbal?"

"No, not Bazakbal, this was the
Steep slope,
by whosit..."

"Ahti?"

"Bravo, the very one. Ukko Ahti."

"But ... I beg your pardon: isn't Ukko Ahti a Cimmerian author?"

"Well, to be sure, he was Cimmerian before, Ahti was; but you know what happened, during the war, after the war, the boundary adjustments, the Iron Curtain, the fact is that now there is Cimbria where Cimmeria used to be, and Cimmeria has shifted farther on. And so Cimmerian literature was also taken over by the Cimbrians, as part of their war reparations...."

"This is the thesis of Professor Galligani, which Professor Uzzi-Tuzii rejects...."

"Oh, you can imagine the rivalry at the university between departments, two competing chairs, two professors who can't stand the sight of each other, imagine Uzzi-Tuzii admitting that the masterpiece of his language has to be read in the language of his colleague...."

"The fact remains," you insist, "that
Leaning from the steep slope
is an unfinished novel, or, rather, barely begun.... I saw the original...."

"Leaning...
Now, don't get me mixed up, it's a title that sounds similar but isn't the same, it's something with
Vertigo,
yes, it's the
Vertigo
of Viljandi."

"Without fear of wind or vertigo?
Tell me: has it been translated? Have you published it?"

"Wait. The translator, a certain Ermes Marana, seemed a young man with all the proper credentials: he hands in a sample of the translation, we schedule the title, he is punctual in delivering the pages of the translation, a hundred at a time, he pockets the payments, we begin to pass the translation on to the printer, to have it set, in order to save time.... And then, in correcting the proofs, we notice some misconstructions, some oddities.. .. We send for Marana, we ask him some questions, he becomes confused, contradicts himself.... We press him, we open the original text in front of him and request him to translate a bit orally.... He confesses he doesn't know a single word of Cimbrian!"

"And what about the translation he turned in to you?"

"He had put the proper names in Cimbrian, no, in

Cimmerian, I can't remember, but the text he had translated was from another novel...."

"What novel?"

"What novel? we ask him. And he says: A Polish novel (there's your Polish!) by Tazio Bazakbal..."

"Outside the town of Malbork..."

"Exactly. But wait a minute. That's what he said, and for the moment we believed him; the book was already on the presses. We stop everything, change the title page, the cover. It was a big setback for us, but in any case, with one title or another, by one author or the other, the novel was there, translated, set, printed.... We calculated that all this to-ing and fro-ing with the print shop, the bindery, the replacement of all the first signatures with the wrong title page—in other words, it created a confusion that spread to all the new books we had in stock, whole runs had to be scrapped, volumes already distributed had to be recalled from the booksellers...."

"There's one thing I don't understand: what novel are you talking about now? The one with the station or the one with the boy leaving the farm? Or—?"

"Bear with me. What I've told you is only the beginning. Because by now, as is only natural, we no longer trust this gentleman, and we want to see the picture clearly, compare the translation with the original. And what do we discover next? It wasn't the Bazakbal, either, it was a novel translated from the French, a book by an almost unknown Belgian author, Bertrand Vandervelde, entitled... Wait: I'll show you."

Cavedagna goes out, and when he reappears he hands you a little bundle of photocopies. "Here, it's called
Looks down in the gathering shadow.
We have here the French text of the first pages. You can see with your own eyes, judge for yourself what a swindle! Ermes Marana translated this trashy novel, word by word, and passed it off to us as Cimmerian, Cimbrian, Polish...."

You leaf through the photocopies and from the first glance you realize that this
Regarde en bas dans l'épaisseur des ombres
by Bertrand Vandervelde has nothing in common with any of the four novels you have had to give up reading. You would like to inform Cavedagna at once, but he is producing a paper attached to the file, which he insists on showing you: "You want to see what Marana had the nerve to reply when we charged him with this fraud? This is his letter..." And he points out a paragraph for you to read.

"What does the name of an author on the jacket matter? Let us move forward in thought to three thousand years from now. Who knows which books from our period will be saved, and who knows which authors' names will be remembered? Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; other authors' names will still be well known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer."

"Did you ever hear such reasoning?" Cavedagna exclaims; then he adds, "And he might even be right, that's the rub..."

He shakes his head, as if seized by a private thought; he chuckles slightly, and sighs slightly. This thought of his, you, Reader, can perhaps read on his brow. For many years Cavedagna has followed books as they are made, bit by bit, he sees books be born and die every day, and yet the true books for him remain others, those of the time when for him they were like messages from other worlds. And so it is with authors: he deals with them every day, he knows their fixations, indecisions, susceptibilities, ego-centricities, and yet the true authors remain those who for him were only a name on a jacket, a word that was part of the title, authors who had the same reality as their characters, as the places mentioned in the books, who existed

and didn't exist at the same time, like those characters and those countries. The author was an invisible point from which the books came, a void traveled by ghosts, an underground tunnel that put other worlds in communication with the chicken coop of his boyhood....

Somebody calls him. He hesitates a moment, undecided whether to take back the photocopies or to leave them with you. "Mind you, this is an important document; it can't leave these offices, it's the corpus delicti, there could be a trial for plagiarism. If you want to examine it, sit down here at this desk, and remember to give it back to me, even if I forget it, it would be a disaster if it were lost...."