The Dumas Club

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Fargas held up the empty glass as if it were a symbol. “For some time now I’ve had to resort to selling my books again. Not that I need very much. Once a week someone comes in to clean, and I get my food brought from the village. Almost all the money goes to pay the state taxes for the house.”

  He pronounced state as if he’d said vermin. Corso looked sympathetic, glancing again at the bare walls. “You could sell it.”

  “Yes,” Fargas agreed indifferently. “There are things you can’t understand.”

  Corso bent to pick up a folio bound in parchment and leafed through it with interest. De Symmetria by Dtirer, Paris 1557, reprinting of the first Nuremberg edition in Latin. In good condition, with wide margins. Flavio La Ponte would have gone wild over it. Anybody would have gone wild over it. “How often do you have to sell books?” “Two or three a year is enough. After going over and over them, I choose one book to sell. That’s the ceremony I was referring to when I answered the door. I have a buyer, a compatriot of yours. He comes here a couple of times a year.” “Do I know him?” asked Corso.

  “I have no idea,” answered Fargas, not supplying a name. “In fact I’m expecting him any day now. When you arrived, I was getting ready to choose a victim....” He made a guillotine movement with one of his slender hands, still smiling wearily. “The one that must die in order for the others to stay together.”

  Corso looked up at the ceiling, drawing the inevitable parallel. Abraham, a deep crack across his face, was making visible efforts to free the hand in which he held the knife. The angel was holding on to it firmly with one hand and severely reprimanding the patriarch with the other. Beneath the blade, his head resting on a stone, Isaac waited, resigned to his fate. He was blond with pink cheeks, like an ancient Greek youth who never said no. Beyond him a sheep was tangled up in brambles, and Corso mentally voted for the sheep to be spared.

  “I suppose you have no other choice,” he said, looking at Fargas.

  “If there was one, I would have found it.” Fargas smiled bitterly. “But the lion demands his share, and the sharks smell the bait. Unfortunately there aren’t any people left like the Comte d’Artois, who was king of France. Do you know the story? The old Marquis de Paulmy, who owned sixty thousand books, went bankrupt. To escape his creditors he sold his collection to the Comte d’Artois. But the Count stipulated that the old man should keep them until his death. In that way Paulmy used the money to buy more books and extend the collection, even though it was no longer his....”

  He had put his hands in his pockets and was limping up and down along the books, examining each one, like a shabby, gaunt Montgomery inspecting his troops at El Alamein.

  “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.

  “That’s how I feel now,” he said. “I get up because I can’t sleep. I stand here, resolved to commit another desecration.” He moved so close to Corso as he spoke that Corso wanted to take a step back. “To sin against myself and against them ... I touch one book, then change my mind, choose another one but end up putting it back in its place.... I must sacrifice one so that the others can live, snap off a branch so that the tree...” He held up his right hand. “I would rather cut off one of my fingers.”

  As he made the gesture, his hand trembled. Corso nodded. He knew how to listen. It was
part of the job. He could even understand. But he wasn’t prepared to join in. This didn’t concern him. As Varo Borja would have said, he was a mercenary, and he was paying a visit. What Fargas needed was a confessor, or a psychiatrist.

  “Nobody would pay a penny for an old book collector’s finger,” Corso said lightly.

  The joke was lost in the immense void that filled Fargas’s eyes. He was looking through Corso. In his dilated pupils and absent gaze there were only books.

  “So which should I choose?” Fargas went on. Corso took a cigarette from his coat pocket and offered it to the old man, but Fargas didn’t notice. Absorbed, obsessed, he was listening only to himself, was aware of nothing but his tortured mind. “After much thought I have chosen two candidates.” He took two books from the floor and put them on the table. “Tell me what you think.”

  Corso bent over the books. He opened one of them at a page with an engraving, a woodcut of three men and a woman working in a mine. It was a second edition of De re metallica by Georgius Agricola, in Latin, printed by Froben and Episcopius in Basle only five years after its first edition in 1556. He gave a grunt of approval as he lit his cigarette.

  “As you can see, making a choice isn’t easy.” Fargas was following Corso’s movements intently. Anxiously he watched him turn the pages, barely brushing them with his fingertips. “I sell one book each time. And not just any one. The sacrifice has to ensure that the rest are safe for another six months. It’s my tribute to the Minotaur.” He tapped his temple. “We all have one at the center of the labyrinth.... Our reason creates him, and he imposes his own horror.”

  “Why don’t you sell several less valuable books at one time? Then you’d raise the money you need and still keep the rarer ones. Or your favorites.”

  “Place some over others?” Fargas shuddered. “I simply couldn’t do it. They all have the same immortal soul. To me they all have the same rights. I have my favorites, of course. How could I not? But I never make distinctions by a gesture, a word that might raise them above their less favored companions. Rather the opposite. Remember that God chose his own son to be sacrificed. For the redemption of mankind. And Abraham...” He seemed to be referring to the painting on the ceiling, because he looked up and smiled sadly at the empty space, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  Corso opened the secpnd book, a folio with an Italian parchment binding from the 1700s. Inside was a magnificent Virgil. Giunta’s Venetian edition, printed in 1544. This revived Fargas. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He stepped in front of Corso and snatched it from him impatiently. “Look at the title page, at the architectural border. One hundred and thirteen woodcuts, all perfect except for page 345, which has a small, ancient restoration, almost imperceptible, in one of the bottom corners. As it happens, this is my favorite. Look: Aeneas in hell, next to the Sibyl. Have you ever seen anything like it? Look at these flames behind the triple wall, the cauldron of the damned, the bird devouring their entrails....” The old book collector’s pulse was almost visible, throbbing in his wrists and temples. His voice became deeper as he held the book up to his eyes so he could read more clearly. His expression was radiant. “Moenia amnlata videt, triplici circundata muro, quae rapidus flamnis ambit torrentibus amnis.” He paused, ecstatic. “The engraver had a beautiful, violent, medieval view of Virgil’s Hades.”

  “A magnificent book,” confirmed Corso, dragging on his cigarette.

  “It’s more than that. Feel the paper. ‘Esemplare buono e genuine con le figure assai ben impresse,’ assure the old catalogues.” After this feverish outburst, Fargas once more stared into empty space, absorbed, engrossed in the dark corners of his nightmare. “I think I’ll sell this one.”

  Corso exhaled impatiently. “I don’t understand. This is obviously one of your favorites. So is the Agricola. Your hands tremble as you touch them.”

  “My hands? What you mean is that my soul burns in the torments of hell. I thought I’d explained. The book to be sacrificed can never be one to which I am indifferent. What meaning would this painful act have otherwise? A sordid transaction determined by market forces, several cheap books instead of a single expensive one ...” Scornful, he shook his head violently. He looked around grimly, searching for someone on whom to vent his anger. “These are the ones I love best. They shine above the rest for their beauty, for the love they have inspired. These are the ones I walk hand in hand with to the brink of the abyss.... Life may strip me of all I have. But it won’t turn me into a miserable wretch.”

  He paced aimlessly about the room. The sad scene, his bad leg, his shabby clothes all added to his weary, fragile appearance.

  “That’s why I remain in this house,” he went on. “The ghosts of my lost books roam within its walls.” He stopped in front of the fireplace and looked at the pile of logs in the hearth. “Sometimes I feel they come back to demand that I make amends. So, to placate them, I take up the violin that you see there and I play for hours, wandering through the house in darkness, like one of the damned....” He turned to look at Corso, was silhouetted against the dirty window. “The wandering book collector.” He walked slowly to the table and laid a hand on each book, as if he had delayed making his decision until that moment. Now he smiled inquiringly.

  “Which one would you choose, if you were in my place?” Corso fidgeted, uneasy. “Please, leave me out of this. I’m lucky enough not to be in your place.”

  “That’s right. Very lucky. How clever of you to realize. A stupid man would envy me, I suppose. All this treasure in my house ... But you haven’t told me which one to sell. Which son to sacrifice.” His face suddenly became distorted with anguish, as if the pain were in his body too. “May his blood taint me and mine,” he added in a very low, intense voice, “unto the seventh generation.”

  He returned the Agricola to its place on the rug and stroked the parchment of the Virgil, muttering, “His blood.” His eyes were moist and his hands shook uncontrollably. “I think I’ll sell this one,” he said.

  Fargas might not be out of his mind yet, but he soon would be. Corso looked at the bare walls, the marks left by pictures on the stained wallpaper. The highly unlikely seventh generation didn’t give a damn about any of this. Like Lucas Corso’s own, the Fargas line would end here. And find peace at last. Corso’s cigarette smoke rose up to the decrepit painting on the ceiling, straight up, like the smoke from a sacrifice in the calm of dawn. He looked out the window, at the garden overrun with weeds, searching for a way out, like the lamb tangled in the brambles. But there was nothing but books. The angel let go of the hand that held up the knife and went away, weeping. And left Abraham alone, the poor fool.

  Corso finished his cigarette and threw it into the fireplace. He was tired and cold. He had heard too many words within these bare walls. He was glad there were no mirrors for him to see the expression on his face. He looked at his watch without noticing the time. With a fortune sitting there on the old rugs and carpets, Victor Fargas had more than paid their price in suffering. For Corso it was now time to talk business. “What about The Nine Doors?” “What about it?”

  “That’s what brought me here. I assume you got my letter.” “Your letter? Yes, of course. I remember. It’s just that with all of this ... Forgive me. The Nine Doors. Of course.”

  He looked around, bewildered, like a sleepwalker who has just been jolted awake. He suddenly seemed infinitely tired, after a long ordeal. He lifted a finger, requesting a minute to think, then limped over to a corner of the room. Some fifty books were lined up there on a faded French rug. Corso could just make out that the rug depicted Alexander’s victory over Darius.

  “Did you know,” asked Fargas, pointing at the scene on the Gobelin, “that Alexander used his rival’s treasure chest to store Homer’s books?” He nodded, pleased, looking at the Macedonian’s threadbare profile. “He was a fellow book collector. A good man.”

  Corso didn’t give a damn about Alexander the Great’s literary tastes. He knelt and read the titles p
rinted on some of the spines and front edges. They were all ancient treatises on magic, alchemy, and demonology. Les trois livres de I’Art, Destructor omnium rerum, Disertazioni sopra le apparizioni de’ spiriti e diavoli, De origine, moribus et rebus gestis Satanae...

  “What do you think?” asked Fargas.

  “Not bad.”

  The book collector laughed wearily. He got down on the rug beside Corso and went over the books mechanically, making sure that none of them had moved by a millimeter since he last checked them.

  “Not bad at all. You’re right. At least ten of them are extremely rare. I inherited all this part of the collection from my grandfather. He was a devotee of the hermetic arts and astrology, and he was a Mason. Look. This is a classic, the Infernal Dictionary by Collin de Plancy, a first edition dating from 1842. And this is the 1571 printing of the Compendi del secreti, by Leonardo Fioravanti.... That strange duodecimo there is the second edition of the Book of Wonders.” He opened another book and showed Corso an engraving. “Look at Isis.... And do you know what this is?”

  “Yes, of course. The Oedipus Aegiptiacus by Atanasius Kircher.”

  “Correct. The 1652 Borne edition.” Fargas put the book back and picked up another one. Corso recognized the Venetian binding: the black leather with five raised bands and a pentacle but no title on the cover. “Here’s the one you’re looking for, De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis. The nine doors of the kingdom of shadows.” x

  Corso shivered in spite of himself. On the outside at least the book was identical to the one he had in his canvas bag. Fargas handed him the book, and Corso stood up as he leafed through it. They looked identical, or almost. The leather on the back of Fargas’s copy was slightly worn, and there was an old mark left by a label that had been added and then removed. The rest was in the same immaculate condition as Varo Borja’s copy, even engraving number VIIII, which was intact.

  “It’s complete and in good condition,” said Fargas, correctly interpreting the look on Corso’s face. “It’s been out in the world for three and a half centuries, but when you open it, it looks as fresh as the day it came off the press. As if the printer made a pact with the devil.”