A few pages further on, a sentence in my copy is highlighted in green. Bioy is asked about his first literary efforts, which he didn’t like. “What I did like was literature,” says Bioy. “I felt that it was my homeland and I wanted to participate in its world.”
I came up out of the basement of the Lerner (the daylight stung my eyes) and thought that was how it was: that literature was my homeland and I wanted to participate in that world.
II
Only one Bogotá bookshop competed in those Bildungsroman days with the loyalty I had to the Lerner. Seventy-six streets to the north, the Central bookshop was its opposite in every way. On the one hand, it was in a quiet, middle-class neighbourhood, not in the busy city centre, and, although it wasn’t small, the whole place would have fitted in the basement of the Lerner. On the other hand, it hadn’t been my personal discovery, the way the Lerner had, but a sort of paternal inheritance: my father knew the owners from way back, and for years had been such a faithful customer that he could take books home on credit and pay for them at the end of the month. I inherited that privilege: I don’t remember how or when, but one day I began to buy books with nothing but my signature on a sheet of lined paper, and more than once I’ve had to leave my whole month’s earnings in that till having signed for so many books over the course of the month without thinking of the accumulating bill.
The owners of the Central were a Jewish couple from Austria, Hans and Lilly Ungar, who had arrived in Colombia in the inter-war years. In 1947, young Hans frequented a bookshop on the now disappeared Pasaje Santa Fe, a stone’s throw from my university. When the owner died, his widow suggested that Hans take over the bookshop, and to achieve this he had to work there and pay off the costs with his modest salary. Several years and locations later, the Central became such an important place for me that it ended up appearing in my novel The Informers. The narrator had published a book about the life of Germans—Nazi sympathizers or Jewish refugees—in Colombia at the time of the Second World War. His main source for the book, a woman called Sara Guterman, had just died when we read:
Once the book was published, when I found a message on my answering machine in which Lilly invited me in a formal and rather peremptory tone to come to the bookshop, I thought the invitation was in some way related to Sara Guterman, or, at least, to that never-delivered lecture on the hidden anti-Semitism of Colombian politicians, for Hans Ungar (everyone knew this) was one of the most direct victims of the prohibitions López de Mesa used to minimize the number of Jews arriving in Colombia, and he often said in interviews, but also in casual conversations, that his parents had died in German concentration camps largely due to the impossibility of obtaining a Colombian visa for them such as the one he’d obtained and with which he’d entered the country, from his native Austria, in 1938. So anyway, when I arrived at the appointment I found them both, Hans and Lilly, sitting beside the solid, grey table that functioned as the meeting place for the Germans of Bogotá and from which, with the help of a dial telephone and an old typewriter—a Remington Rand, tall and heavy like a scale model of a coliseum—they ran the bookshop. In the main display cabinet there were three copies of my book. Lilly was wearing a burgundy-coloured turtleneck sweater; Hans was wearing a tie and between his suit jacket and tie he had put on an argyle sweater.
I must have written this at the beginning of 2003. By that time I’d been living outside Colombia for seven years and it would be another nine before I went back, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t visit my country on holidays; more than once, during those short visits, I went to the Central to make sure things were as I remembered them and as I’d described them. They were—with one exception. The solid grey table remained, as did the typewriter and the telephone from which I had made several urgent calls in the days before cell phones. But in 2004, when I went to the bookshop for the first time since the publication of my novel, Lilly Ungar complained to me of something that her affection did not manage to attenuate. Hans, she told me, had voiced the opinions I used about the anti-Semitism of the Colombian authorities in several interviews in the 1940s, but his opinion had changed over the years, or he’d no longer felt it right to express it in those terms, and I’d been wrong to use a real person in my fiction without asking his permission or giving him the opportunity to control the words I put in his mouth. Lilly was angry, and I was very sorry about that. The conversation ended with a novelist’s reprimand:
“And also,” she told me, “Hans never wore argyle sweaters.”
A lot of time has gone by since that conversation, and the frequency of my visits to the Central has diminished. But I still recall fondly those days of taking books home without paying for them, which gave the purchase a certain feeling of impunity. Thus, one day I took home Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s Complete Short Stories; I took Las poéticas de Joyce (The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce), an academic book by Umberto Eco I read several times, and Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, an academic book by Deleuze and Guattari that I never read. There, in the Central, I bought Los días enmascarados, early short stories by Carlos Fuentes (3.100 pesos), and also Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, by Werner Jaeger (18.800 pesos). The prices are written in my copies, by hand and in pencil, but I’m not sure in whose hand. Maybe it was the hand of Estela, the woman who awaited me beside the till, either to ask for my signature on the chits of my cashless purchases or to write down my whimsical special orders. These days of online shopping have robbed us of this as well: the peculiar pleasure of not finding the book, having to request it and wait for days or weeks or even months for it arrive. The immediate satisfaction of online buying is no fun for me. Visiting several stores in search of a book, tracking it down and hunting for it like a difficult prey, continues to be one of the pleasures that is turning me, bit by bit, into an anachronistic bibliophile.
In my novel, the narrator sits down in front of a grey table and begins to sign a pile of copies of his own recently published book. I’ve never done that at the Central, but I still give myself the secret satisfaction of occasionally returning to the bookshop and confirming my books are there, between Vargas Llosa and Vázquez Montalbán, and I still enjoy knowing the layout of the shelves and location of the books that interest me, and I still regret not being able to speak German so as to read the books Hans displayed on a special table, at the back and to the right, like the unclaimed letters of a lost country. And I remain full of admiration for this place, between the walls of which I’ve found so much happiness in print, and grateful that it is still alive and still in the hands of the Ungar family, seventy years on, instead of having sunk under the competition from the internet, which treats books as if they were hairdryers, or from so many contemporary readers, traffickers of electronic files for whom literature is so important, but so important that it doesn’t seem fair to them to pay for it.
III
My favourite bookshops have changed with the years and my travels and needs. But these two, the Lerner and the Central, remain alongside the new ones that keep opening in Bogotá: the Madriguera del Conejo (the Rabbit’s Warren), for example, or Wilborada. What I look for in them is always the same. The best bookshops are meeting places, spaces for cultural exchanges and for belonging to that mysterious world Bioy Casares had in mind when he said that literature was his homeland; and nevertheless, a bookshop is (as well, at least for me) a place where I can be alone in a solitude I can’t find anywhere else. I go to my favourite bookshops—from the Strand in New York to El Virrey in Lima, by way of Daunt Books in London—to while away time in solitude and, in that lost time, to find something. A good bookshop is a place we go into looking for a book and come out of with one we didn’t know existed. That’s how the literary conversation gets widened and that’s how we push the frontiers of our experience, rebelling against its limits. This is something else online commerce deprives us of: on a website we cannot discover anything, we can’t bump into the unexpected book, because an algorithm pr
edicts what we’re looking for and leads us—yes, mathematically—only to places we already know.
So, you see, bookshops have been an inextricable part of my life as a novelist. Not just because I discovered my masters there, but because my life as a novelist could be portrayed in a series of bookshop tableaux. I can think, for example, of the day in 1997 when I arrived at the Librería Española in Paris, a legendary place on the rue de Seine, with seven copies of my first and forgotten novel. I left them there on consignment; I returned a month later to find they’d all been sold. (La Librería Española, founded by Republican exiles, outlived Franco by several years, but did not survive the internet.) I can also think of the bookshop in Hay-on-Wye where I found a volume, gathering dust, that contained letters written from Colombia by an American Peace Corps volunteer. That book—published privately and discovered on the unpredictable shelves of a second-hand bookshop—turned out to be a key document for me when I was writing The Sound of Things Falling. The best bookshops are places where the principle of serendipity, which in broad strokes consists of finding the book you need when you don’t yet know you need it, presents itself in all its splendour. A reader’s life is, among other things, this tissue of opportune coincidences.
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Leitner and I
SAŠA STANIŠIĆ
Hello, my name is Saša, and I’d like to tell you about Leitner.
Hello, Saša.
I was new to the city, and distrustful; I thought I might easily come up against a know-it-all in that environment, or a show-off, or even worse, someone whose stuff just wasn’t to my taste. But I had to find someone I could trust in future, because who likes changing his dealer?
No one.
Exactly.
In our line of business, you need trust more than mutual liking. One of you has the goods, the other wants a supply of them. Things get critical only if your wishes aren’t clear—if you don’t know just what you need—and that’s the case with me most of the time. I may know the kind of effect that I want, but not the actual name of the substance.
And I also felt ashamed, even after moving to the new city, of confessing yet again to myself and a stranger that yes, I did have supplies of my own at home, I even have my own laboratory where I make such things myself, but still it isn’t enough, I need new stuff too. Or very old stuff; my preferences vary.
Most of all I was afraid of being asked whether I had tried a shot of this or that classic fix, because I very seldom had. That’s bad. And I also had to convey my dislike of being in shops. I’d agreed with Leitner’s predecessor that I could visit his place before and after opening times. Proximity to other users intimidated me. I wanted to be alone in making my choice; there’s hardly anything more intimate.
I can understand that.
Thanks, Jürgen.
On the other hand, wouldn’t Leitner, intent on acquiring me as a regular customer, also have to show his best side? After all, as everyone knows, his profession is a risky one.
That’s terrible!
Yes.
More and more people are clean these days, or they get what they need in other ways. I must admit that, in the transitional phase of my move to a new city, I’d tried getting a quick fix straight from the manufacturer. Once I even resorted to the major distribution channel so much feared by independent middlemen. It sold me good stuff, no question, but I can’t deny that I was uneasy about it.
I know the feeling.
I felt I was letting someone down, but at that time I didn’t yet know the someone concerned—Leitner.
It was he who made contact with me in the end. He said he would like to organize a little sales event for me, so that I could introduce my own substances to his customers. Generous of him, don’t you think?
Wow.
You see, I’ve tried my hand at manufacturing substances, and there are three of mine on the market. Some people like them, others don’t. That’s life.
I like the first one. It goes down really well.
Thanks, Johanna.
Really well.
Thanks.
Selling them myself, though—that was beyond me. I didn’t feel at ease pushing them on the market. So many novelties, year after year, and in among them all: me, wandering around like a taxi driver in a big city who knows his way up and down only three streets.
Leitner invited me to introduce my own stuff in his shop. It was the end of the month, my finances were running low, I had to be glad of any takers, so I accepted the invitation.
His handshake was perfect. Not too firm, not too limp. It was obvious that I’d have to watch out. You don’t play games with people who have a perfect handshake. They’ve shaken countless hands to achieve that perfection.
I arrived a little late, and we went straight to a juice bar next door, where we each had a juice made from fruits with unpronounceable names. Leitner conspicuously avoided all subjects that could lead to the discussion of substances. He doesn’t want to pester me, I thought. I’d have been glad if things were the other way around and he’d wanted favours from me. Maybe he distrusted me himself. Maybe he wanted to hear how I talked about my own stuff before showing me what he had to offer.
I decided to get through my presentation and then disappear quickly. I didn’t want anything to do with a man who had a handshake like that and acted as if the business didn’t interest him.
His shop was well filled. There were friends there, regular customers, and the passing trade too. I offered a few samples of my own production, and was rewarded with polite appreciation. We ended the evening with a glass of wine.
Leitner is a clean-shaven man, only a few years older than me, always moving around in front of his shelves in jeans and shirt, and not even proud, it seemed, of owning so much of the stuff. Rather shy and withdrawn, even in conversation.
I surreptitiously looked round. He was openly offering hundreds of substances for sale. As well as the hard stuff that can set off the most complex reactions in the user, there were items like Faust that have been compulsorily handed out to schoolchildren for decades now.
The best-known Austrian manufacturer, Bernhard, had a whole shelf to himself. His substances didn’t go down well with everyone, being rather hard to digest and liable to set off a distaste for your own country as a side-effect, especially if that country was Austria.
Some substances were exhibited in full view in the middle of the shop. Most of the manufacturers were unknown to me. Fashionable phenomena, I assumed, bestsellers that created a great stir on the market and then soon disappeared. I was a little disappointed. As I saw it, a good dealer didn’t need to sell modish junk.
A second glance told me that I’d been ignorant, and confirmed that I didn’t know anything about selling. These were indeed little-known substances from little-known manufacturers, but hardly any of them were new to the market. This was where Leitner and his pushers displayed their own favourites, each accompanied by an additional note listing its effects and side-effects, thus making it easier for clueless users like me to choose.
I suddenly felt the dealer’s hand on my arm. I’d had the feeling anyway that he was watching me, as if waiting for his moment to act. Now he struck, directing my attention to a substance promising “a new kind of experience of the animal kingdom”. He tapped it and said, “Suits your character.”
The substance was called Esel (which means “Donkeys”).
I was baffled. I did like donkeys, but they’re not exactly famous for their positive characteristics. All the same, I was impressed that a man whom I’d known only for an evening would be so forthcoming with me.
I said I’d buy the substance. He waved to a young woman who led me to an old-fashioned till at the back of the shop. I hesitated, making out that I’d changed my mind. When I came to the front of the shop again, Leitner wasn’t there.
The next day there was a paper bag containing some old gear outside my door. Shakespeare. Nothing unusu
al about that, and no risk; I had several Shakespeares in stock, but I had never entirely developed a taste for it. I preferred substances that took effect quickly. With Shakespeare I couldn’t shake off an impression of convoluted feelings going in all sorts of different directions, unnecessarily entangled and hazy.
On closer examination, it turned out to be a rare variant made in Germany, a 1923 version of Romeo and Juliet. In spite of its age, it was in good condition. In the U-Bahn I allowed myself to sample a couple of lines. They were excellent, and the outward appearance of my fix also pleasantly distinguished it from the e-substances being taken by my fellow travellers.
A business card told me that the gift had come from Leitner. Beside his email address, he had written: If there’s anything else you need…
This was the meeting I was afraid of. The one that would take place after I first called Leitner because I needed something. He hadn’t suggested his shop as the meeting place. The stuff he offered for sale there was certainly good, and some of it unusual. But with the perfect Shakespeare that I enjoyed line by line in the course of the week, he had shown me what was really possible. Furthermore, his shop was at the other end of town.
A week later the effect of Romeo and Juliet had worn off, and I took a quick fix of Kehlmann, a substance mysteriously entitled F that turned me, while the effect lasted, into a deceiver, a swindler, an illusionist.
But I wanted pure emotions. I remembered the strong feelings of shame, hatred and happiness that the cocktail of substances entitled Dating Miss Universe had aroused in me a few years ago. “Leg” had been the name of one of the ingredients. I wanted to taste the rest of the cocktail. But online research showed that the substance was prohibitively expensive in its hard form, and the soft variant was difficult to find. The name of the manufacturer was Steven Polansky.
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