I rose above the insult to ask a few more questions. Among them was why he wanted to be paid for his work for Crotch when he couldn’t use the money except of course to pay for the cables?
“I import something decent to drink when I can afford it. The local schnapps is horsepiss.”
“One more thing. Everybody here speaks English as a matter of course, but the self-characterized Liberation Front spokesman who phoned me a bomb warning in New York had a heavy accent that sounded Slavic. The stewardess on the plane this morning spoke English like a German. Is there a Sebastiani language?”
“How do I know?” McCoy growled impatiently.
“You’ve been here since World War Two and you can’t answer that question?”
“I’d only ask it if I didn’t know what they were saying,” he told me, and staggered out the door.
What an intellectual loss he was. Unless of course that was part of his cover, which he maintained even when closeted with me. I decided to go out in search of more information about the country, but first I must spruce up my person.
In the valise that had been provided for me I searched without success for a bathrobe, then looked in the tall, dark armoire against the wall opposite the bed, which held what was presumably McCoy’s wardrobe but could easily have been mistaken for a week’s collection made by Goodwill Industries. I could find no robe here, either, but my colleague did possess (no doubt a souvenir of earlier, more ambitious days as a journalist) an ancient, stained trench coat. I stripped to the buff and donned this garment. My next search was for slippers or clogs or scuffs, something with which to protect my feet on the hike to the bathroom, but could find nothing suitable. McCoy owned several pairs of runover shoes, all wing-tipped and in a color that might be called pus-yellow, but they were too small for me. Finally I put on a pair of galoshes, which, large enough to go over shoes, could more than accommodate my feet.
Behind the catercornered screen that concealed the bidet and washstand I came upon the only towel on hand and a sliver of hard gray soap. So attired and accoutered, I went along the hall in the other direction from that which would take me to the elevator. My galoshes were buckled, and taking a leaf from the book of the old movie heroes, I had tied together the ends of the trench-coat belt.
The bathroom was at the farthest termination of the corridor, and so to speak camouflaged behind a closet full of mops and pails. From behind its locked door issued an extraordinary voice lifted in song. My initial annoyance at having to wait, in dirty trench coat and loose galoshes, while someone else soaked his hide for God knows how long, was soon assuaged by successive renditions of every familiar aria in the literature of the Italian grand-opera tenor: “Celeste Aïda,” “La donna è mobile,” “Vesti la giubba,” and so on, in a Mediterranean extravaganza that went on, I should say, for the better part of an hour as I leaned against the slanted mops and brooms and listened to the golden sound. But at such times one does not tick off the minutes.
The bathroom door at last opened and, swathed in a crimson dressing gown made from sufficient cloth for Ringling’s big top, an enormous man emerged. There was not enough room for the both of us in the mop-thronged anteroom, and I was forced to step backwards into the corridor. But I had been so enchanted by his magnificent voice that I did not resent this enforced courtesy.
I bowed as I backstepped. “Sir,” I said, “that was the most extraordinary sound these ears have heard. Surely you cannot be a mere bathtub performer.”
He shrugged in the classic Italianate manner. A thick white towel was around his neck, and he carried a striped sponge bag. His hair was covered with a bathing cap of pink rubber. The lower half of his face was all black mustache and beard.
His silence suggested he had no English. I therefore found employment for the most useful of terms in my limited Italian vocabulary (one can go far on just these two): “Maestro, complimenti!”
Now he smiled radiantly and tossed his fat hand at a jaunty angle. He swept out and rolled down the hallway as if on parade-float wheels.
I entered a bathroom redolent of the subtle aroma of steam and the bolder scents of soap and cologne. The tub, mounted on high, gilded legs, was of heroic proportions—as it had had to be to hold its most recent occupant. Having taken off the trench coat, I sought a hook on which to hang it, but rare indeed is the sanitary facility, in America or Europe, which meets every simple need: so saith Wren’s Law. Eventually I folded the garment into a parcel and placed it on the marble-topped dressing table, and there noticed, as I had not previously, that the other object thereupon was a tape recorder. The cassette inside it was labeled: “All-Time Greatest Hits of Enrico Caruso.”
When I got back to the room after my bath, I found a rusty razor, a mangy brush, and a mug containing a cake of brothel-scented shaving soap, and I brought this ancient equipment into play, with ice water, to clean away a day’s whiskers at the wash-stand behind the screen. I combed my damp-blackened hair (normally it is light brown) and donned a keen combo of synthetics: lime-green shirt; lavender trousers supported by a white plastic belt joined by an outsized brass buckle bearing the logo of Coors beer; the madras jacket, the fabric of which had the texture of crepe paper; and loafers made of cordovan-colored imitation leather.
I went down the hall and rang for the elevator. When the car finally arrived, however, it was filled to capacity by the enormous man who listened to Caruso while bathing. We now exchanged helpless but amiable shrugs, and I used the stairway.
I didn’t know which of the twin concierges was at the desk, and decided I didn’t care.
But he told me. “Mr. Wren, sir! I am now rehabilitated.”
“It wasn’t my idea that you be put in the pillory.”
“It did me a world of good,” said he. “And the institution also serves to meet the needs of youngsters, who, without the occasional malefactor to taunt and deride as he sits helplessly restrained, might torture animals or mutilate one another. As it is, we have little juvenile delinquency in Saint Sebastian.”
“Indeed yours is a remarkable country,” said I. “I wanted to ask you where I might go to find out more about it, whom I might interview—?”
He closed the lid of one eye, leaned across the desk, and spoke in a hoarse whisper. “The public library.”
At this point the elevator finally reached the ground floor: unreasonably, it traveled more slowly with a heavier load than with a light one. The large man deboarded. I failed to mention earlier that he wore tennis clothes: V-necked white sweater, white linen shorts, white knee socks, and sparkling white sneakers. Again we exchanged gestures: this time a slight bow on my part and an inclination of the head, with a horizontaled forearm, on his.
I turned back to the concierge. “The public library?”
He put a fat finger to his lips, and virtually shouted in the direction of the large man, who was moving out the street door, a can of tennis balls in a rear pocket and dwarfed by the massive ham underneath, “A male brothel? But of course, my dear sir!”
“What are you doing?” I cried.
The door closed behind the vast figure of Caruso’s fan. The concierge returned to his stertorous whisper. “We must be discreet.”
“About the public library?”
He gave me a long stare, then threw up his fat hands. “Well, sir, if you are not concerned for your own reputation, then who I am to be worried?”
“Let me get this straight: there is something wrong with going to the library?”
He rolled the vein-webbed whites of his eyes. “Far be it from me to reflect on your tastes, sir, but you are an unrepresentative tourist. You have no apparent interest in sex, you are never drunk, loud, or abusive, and you’ve had only that one slight brush with the law, which I hasten to say was entirely the result of a misapprehension of mine.”
“You mean that most visitors to your country act badly?”
He made his oiliest smile. “And why not? It’s what we’re here for.”
&nbs
p; I frowned. “Be that as it may, tell me how to get to the public library.”
“Number Four, the Street of Words. The boy outside knows the way.”
Though I didn’t understand whom he meant, I went to the street. At the curb was a kind of rickshaw with a husky fair-haired young chap between the traces. He wore running shorts and a singlet in gold-trimmed blue.
“Please to tal me how to go, sair,” said he.
I gave him the address and asked whether he had a sister.
“Many and brothers as well.” His ingenuous broad face shone with good feeling. “You require dem for sex?”
“No thank you. Is one of the sisters named Olga?”
“Sure.”
“Would she work for the Sebastiani airline?”
“Sure.”
Wondering whether he might simply agree with anything asked of him, I climbed into the rickshaw’s seat. He picked up the twin shafts and, swinging the vehicle around, headed uphill at a smart pace. Soon this became a trot: he was stronger than the engine of the ancient Minx I had driven when I was an impoverished young English instructor at State. Having reached the summit, we began to roll downhill at a greater rate of speed than the superannuated Beetle, for which I traded the Minx, could have attained under similar conditions. Such was our progress up and down several steep elevations.
Finally the young man, who was not even breathing heavily from his labor, turned into a little street narrow as an alley, lined with quaint little houses, some leaning at an angle, all decorated in Central European gingerbread, with miniature, one-man balconies attached here and there to the upper stories, and tiny shuttered windows like those in cuckoo clocks. He pulled me in front of the fourth house and lowered the traces, putting my seat at a downward angle from which it was simple to slide out. Despite the downhill speeds, I had felt secure in his hands, and the vehicle did offer a comfortable ride. At such a moment Saint Sebastian had much to recommend to a veteran of the choice of transportation evils available in New York City.
I walked to the somewhat undersized front door of the house and knocked thereupon. In a moment it was opened by a slight, short man with very dark, intense, yet benign eyes.
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” I said, “but can this possibly be the public library?”
“Indeed.” He bowed and beckoned me to come in.
It was a strange library, however, judging from the entrance hall and then the front parlor of the house, which was furnished in a slightly shabby, old-fashioned bourgeois style, fringes on the lamps, tables with curved legs, and antimacassars on the ponderous overstuffed chairs. The only books in view occupied the four shelves of a relatively narrow cabinet with glass doors.
The volumes in this cabinet were of a uniform binding in dark green. I bent and read the dim gold lettering on the spine of the first: “Encyclopaedia Sebastiana, Volume I, A—Austria.”
I asked the librarian, “May I?”
“Certainly.”
I opened the uppermost of the glass doors and removed Volume I, opened it at random, saw the heading “Airplane,” and began to read.
AIRPLANE. The swiftest means of covering great distances in the shortest time. Its advantages over the bus, the train, and the various private vehicles are, in addition to speed, cleanliness, availability of toilets, and, strange as it might seem, according to statistics, safety; but it should be remembered that the normal passenger on an airplane never feels really secure. Most of us have our hearts in our mouths from the moment we take off until the landing is made, for though accidents might be rare statistically speaking, when one does happen, it’s terrible, often resulting in hundreds of deaths...
I turned to the librarian. “Would you know who wrote the entries in this work?”
“Yes indeed. The original edition was a product of a committee of Sebastiani scholars at the turn of the century, but the Encyclopaedia is ever in the process of being revised.”
“By contemporary scholars?”
The man’s smile became smug. “The finest. Perhaps you would like to observe them at work? They are just upstairs.”
With a certain eagerness I said I would, and he led me up a narrow staircase to the next floor. I had expected here at least to see a collection of shelved volumes that might reasonably be called a library, but I encountered none in the room to which my guide conducted me.
This chamber, which fronted on the street, was furnished with a large table around which sat a dozen or so men, each of whom was reading in a green-bound volume of the sort that was in the bookcase downstairs. “Our visitor would like to learn how the Encyclopaedia is edited.”
The nearest scholar smiled at me. “Quite simply, really. Every morning each of us picks out one of the books and reads in it until he comes to a passage with which he does not agree, and then, using a red pen, he rewrites that portion between the lines or in the margins, then tears the pages out and sends them upstairs to the typists, who prepare clean manuscripts for the printer.”
“May I assume,” I asked, “that in such cases you have come upon some information that is outmoded? Which must happen all the time with scientific subjects. For example, the entries on the exploration of space.”
Another of the scholars chuckled. His fringe of hair was sandy in hue, and his spectacles were pince-nez from which dangled a grosgrain ribbon. “As it happens, we have no entry whatever on that subject, not having been able as yet to find anyone amongst us who knows anything about it.”
A whitehaired man spoke up from farther along the table. “Perhaps you would like to do it.”
“Me?”
“Or you might choose any other subject, if you don’t want to do one from scratch, which can be quite taxing. I tried my hand at that as a young fellow, but soon gave it up. There was virtually nothing that interested me sufficiently to warrant the effort of writing an original article upon it. But revising what’s there can often be very entertaining.”
“Yes,” I murmured. “You have interesting and, so far as I know, unique criteria for this enterprise. In the outside world, if I may use that term, scholarship is expected to be, anyway to have a go at being, objective. Yours would seem greatly conditioned by the personality, the character, of him who does it. Am I putting that fairly?”
“Yes, you are,” said the whitehaired man. “But why are you concerned with being fair?”
I chuckled. “That’s true. Why, indeed? I don’t know any of you, and you all look utterly incapable of doing me either good or ill.”
They all joined in good-natured laughter, and one of them said, “Be assured that we are absolutely inconsequential and that what we do has no value whatever. Only two copies of each volume are printed: one goes in the bookcase downstairs and the other is used up here. Furthermore, no one ever consults the downstairs set.”
“No?”
“Well, if you think about it, why would they? The Encyclopaedia contains simply the arbitrary opinions of a number of individuals: anyone else’s would be as good on any subject.”
“Then of course,” I said, “the question is obvious: why have such an encyclopedia?”
“The answer,” the whitehaired man said genially, “is that we are the scholars of Saint Sebastian. What else could we do?”
I shook my head. “That’s not as good an answer as you apparently believe it, sir. You might seriously pursue the facts, the truth, in the various areas of human enterprise, and record them, it, as carefully, as objectively, as possible.”
“That sounds like more work than we have stomach for,” said the sandy-haired man.
A watery-eyed scholar at the far end of the table cried, “It’s great fun to be totally irresponsible, whereas being careful about truth is a dreary way to live.” He bent over the book in front of him. “This is lively writing, much better than if lots of facts were given.” He began to read aloud, “ ‘The tallest building in the world is a Woolworth five-and-ten in New York City. It’s really tall, a whole lot bigger than
any structure in Saint Sebastian. Big buildings are all right if you like to be way up high, but you might not care to live next door to one and have it block the sun from your roof all winter. But summer, now, that’s another matter entirely. The shade provided by the skyscraper might be darned welcome.’ ”
I shook my head. “For at least half a century the Woolworth Building hasn’t been the tallest, and it never was a five-and-dime. The person who wrote this entry apparently wasn’t even aware of the Empire State Building, let alone the World Trade Center, not to mention a structure in Chicago that is taller yet. The other remarks, while perhaps true enough, are pretty obvious and banal, are they not? Are they really worth giving space to in the national encyclopedia?”
The whitehaired man looked at me in gentle reproach. “You do have strong opinions, sir. And forgive me if I say that you yourself are not without bias, are you? if you cannot name the tallest building because it’s in Chicago and not New York. But I take it that your point remains that our encyclopedia might be inadequate?”
“With all respect, sir.”
“And do you have a suggestion as to how we might remove that inadequacy?”
I sighed. They would have a massive job. “You might take a look at the Britannica or the Larousse, the Brockhaus, and so on. I don’t think the Great Soviet Encyclopedia would be, all in all, much of an improvement on your own, but most of the major cultures have pretty good ones.”
“These are already in existence?”
“Of course.”
“Then why should we seek to duplicate what’s there?” he asked.
I thought about this for a moment and had to admit to myself that I could find no reason, after all. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I suppose what you do does serve the only need you have—and anything that does that, anywhere in the universe, can be said to be successful.... In fact, if I might accept your flattering invitation to contribute to your invaluable work of reference....”