A Reading Diary Read Free Page B

Angel
, after Heinrich Mann met her in Florence in 1905.
TUESDAY
    I’m in my library, surrounded by empty shelves and growing columns of books. It occurs to me that I can trace allmy memories through these piling-up volumes. Then suddenly everything seems redundant, all this accumulation of printed paper. Unless it is my own experience that isn’t necessary. It is like the double reality that the narrator experiences when he quotes Cicero: “The two suns that, as I heard from my father, were seen during the Consulate of Tuditanus and Aquilius.” Impossibly, the narrator finds in the house an identical copy of the pamphlet he is carrying in his pocket: not two copies of the same pamphlet but twice the same copy. Double reality obliterates itself; that is why meeting our doppelgänger means that we must die.
    Title for an essay: “The Library as Doppelgänger.”
    The room in which my library is to be lodged seems to me huge, and as the books begin to fill it, even more so. I pick up a collection by the Iraqi poet Bakr Al-Sayyab and read:
    My new room
Is vast, vaster indeed
Than my tomb shall be
.
    For years, for lack of space, I kept most of my books in storage. I used to think I could hear them call out to me at night. Now I stand for a long time among them all, flooded with images, bits of remembered text, quotations in randomorder, titles and names. I find my early copy of
The Invention of Morel:
the second edition, published by
Sur
in 1948, the year I was born.
FRIDAY
    Several days of unpacking, and many weeks more to come. Memories and false memories. I think I remember something in a certain way, distinctly. A note on the endpaper pages of a book I open by chance tells me I’m wrong; the event happened somewhere else, with someone else, at a different time. Bioy’s narrator: “Our habits suppose a certain way in which things take place, a vague coherence of the world. Now reality appears to me changed, unreal.”
    Papers that have fluttered out of my books as I dust: a Buenos Aires tramway ticket (trams stopped running in the late sixties); a phone number and a name I can’t place; a line,
“laudant illa sed ista legunt”;
a bookmark from the now defunct Librairie Maspéro in Paris; a ticket stub for
Grease;
a stub for an Athens-Toronto flight; a bill for books from Thorpe’s in Guildford, still in shillings and pence; a sticker from Mitchell’s Bookstore in Buenos Aires; a drawing of two ducks or two doves done in red crayon; a Spanish playing card, the ten of clubs; the address of Estela Ocampo in Barcelona; a receipt from a store in Milan for a hat I don’t remember ever owning; a passport photo ofSevero Sarduy; a brochure from the Huntington Library in Pasadena; an envelope addressed to me on George Street in Toronto.
    We don’t choose what remains. In the past moments captured by Morel in his ghostly projections persist two abominable pieces of music: “Valencia” and “Tea for Two.” My mother had an LP with Sara Montiel singing “Valencia.”
SATURDAY
    The fantastic must survive a series of logical or absurd explanations. (Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”) Bioy’s narrator proposes five hypotheses for the strange things he sees: that he is sick with the plague; that he has become invisible through bad air and lack of food; that the people he sees are creatures from another planet, incapable of hearing; that he has gone mad; that the phantoms are his dead friends and the island is a form of purgatory or heaven. The true solution is presumed to be “scientific.”
    Bioy (Bioy’s own sarcastic voice) intrudes into the narrative: “The possibility of several heavens has been stated; if there were only one and all were forced to go there and a charming couple awaited us with all their literaryWednesdays, many of us would have stopped dying long ago.” Also this: “Man and mating can’t bear long and intense