The Club Dumas

“Sometimes I don’t even touch them or open them.” He stopped and leaned over to straighten a book in its row, on the old rug. “All I do is dust them and stare at them for hours. I know what lies inside each binding, down to the last detail. Look at this one: De revolutionis celestium, Nicholas Copernicus. Second edition, Basle, 1566. A mere trifle, don’t you think? Like the Vulgata Clementina to your right, between the six volumes of the Polyglot by your compatriot Cisneros, and the Nuremberg Cronicarwn. And look at the strange folio over there: Praxis criminis persequendi by Simon de Colines, 1541. Or that monastic binding with four raised bands and bosses that you see there. Do you know what’s inside? The Golden Legend by Jacobo de la Voragine, Basle, 1493, printed by Nicolas Kesler.”

Corso leafed through The Golden Legend, It was a magnif­icent edition, also with very wide margins. He put it back care­fully. Then he stood up, wiping his glasses with his handker­chief. It would have made the coolest of men break out in a sweat.

“You must be crazy. If you sold all this, you wouldn’t have any money problems.”

“I know.” Fargas was leaning over to adjust the position of the book imperceptibly. “But if I sold them all, I’d have no reason to go on living. So I wouldn’t care if I had money prob­lems or not.”

Corso pointed at a row of books in very bad condition. There were several incunabula and manuscripts. Judging from the bindings, none dated from later than the seventeenth century. “You have a great many old editions of chivalric novels.” “Yes. Inherited from my father. His obsession was acquiring the ninety-five books of Don Quixote’s collection, in particular those mentioned in the priest’s expurgation. He also left me that strange Quixote that you see there, next to the first edition of Os Lusiadas. It’s a 1789 Ibarra in four volumes. In addition to the corresponding illustrations, it is enriched with others printed in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, six wash drawings and a facsimile of Cervantes’s birth certif­icate printed on vellum. To each his own obsessions. In the case of my father, a diplomat who lived for many years in Spain, it was Cervantes. In some people it’s a mania. They won’t accept restoration work, even if it’s invisible, or they won’t buy a book numbered over fifty.... My passion, as you must have noticed, was uncut books. I scoured auctions and bookshops, ruler in hand, and I went weak in the knees if I found one that was intact, that hadn’t been plowed. Have you read Nodier’s bur­lesque tale about the book collector? The same happened to me. I’d have happily shot any bookbinder who’d been too free with the guillotine. I was in ecstasy if I discovered an edition with margins two millimeters wider than those described in the ca­nonical bibliographies.” “I would be too.”

“Congratulations, then. Welcome to the brotherhood.” “Not so fast. My interest is financial rather than aesthetic in nature.”

“Never mind. I like you. I believe that when it comes to books, conventional morality doesn’t exist.” He was at the other end of the room but bent his head toward Corso confidingly. “Do you know something? You Spaniards have a story about a bookseller in Barcelona who committed murder. Well, I too would be capable of killing for a book.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it. That’s how it starts. Murder doesn’t seem like a big deal, but then you end up lying, voting in elections, things like that.”

“Even selling your own books.”

“Even that.”

Fargas shook his head sadly. He stood still a moment, frown­ing. Then he studied Corso closely for some time.

“Which brings us,” he said at last, “to the business I was engaged in when you rang at the door.... Every time I have to address the problem, I feel like a priest renouncing his faith. Are you surprised that I should think of this as a sacrilege?”

“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.