Library at Night

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Rudyard Kipling in his study at his house in Vermont, the Naulakha.

library in Neuchatel has a simple bookshelf of neat modern bindings wrapping itself around the room, like one of the circular labyrinths he crafted in his novels; Victor Hugo's cloth-lined and soft-carpeted mansion on the Place des Vosges in Paris seems haunted by manuscripts of his melodramatic stories and sketches of his ghostly landscapes; Arno Schmidt's small, ugly rooms in Bargfeld bei Celle, in Lower Saxony, are lined with ramshackle shelves that held inglorious English titles (such as the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose texts Schmidt re-created in better German versions), and small boxes with snippets handwritten on bits of cardboard—miniature archives kept by Schmidt in thematic order, which he used to compose his masterpieces; thousands more studios and libraries around the world are preserved as memorials to their phantom owners, who might at any moment once again run an absent-minded hand over a familiar piece, sit in the customary chair, pick out a much-leafed book from among its fellows or open a volume to a certain page with cherished words. Deserted libraries hold the shades of the writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

In Valladolid, readers of Don Quixote can stroll through the house occupied by Miguel de Cervantes from 1602 to 1605, the year in which the first part of the novel was published, and experience a voyeuristic thrill. The house has melodramatic associations: on the night of 27 June 1605, a certain Gaspar de Ezpeleta was walking home when, just outside this house, he was assaulted by a masked man and mortally wounded. Ezpeleta managed to cry out, bringing to his assistance a neighbour who in turn summoned Cervantes, and the two carried the dying man to the address of a well-known lady. The mayor of Valladolid, suspecting Cervantes (or one of his relatives) of being responsible for the attack, ordered that the writer and his family be imprisoned. They were released a few days later, after proving their innocence, but historians have long debated the question of Cervantes's involvement in the murder. The house, though carefully restored, has necessarily been furnished with bits and pieces that never were in Cervantes's possession. Only the study, on the second floor, contains a few objects that almost certainly belonged to him: not the "ebony and ivory" desk described in the will of his daughter, Isabel de Cervantes, but another, also mentioned in the document, "made of walnut, the largest one I possess," two paintings, one of Saint John and the other of the Virgin, a copper brazier, a chest for keeping papers and a single bookshelf holding some of the titles mentioned in his work. In this room he wrote several stories for his Exemplary Novels, and here he must have discussed with his friends the conception of his singular Quixote.¹⁹⁶

In one of the first chapters of Don Quixote, when the barber and the priest have decided to purge the knight's library of the books that seem to have brought on his madness, the housekeeper insists that the room must first be sprinkled with holy water, "for there might be here one of those many wizards who inhabit these books, and he might cast a spell on us, to punish us for wanting to expel them from the world."¹⁹⁷ Like so many people who do not read, the housekeeper fears the power of the books she refuses to open. The same superstition holds true for most readers; the books we keep closest to hand are possessed by magic. The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections, of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.

Sometimes the shade of the writer and that of his library mingle long before his death. For many years, until he left to die in Geneva in 1986, Borges lived in Buenos Aires among books he could no longer see, since blindness had overtaken him in his early fifties. His small apartment was on the sixth floor of an unobtrusive building in the centre of town, around the corner from the Plaza San Martin. The door was always opened by Fani, the maid, who would lead his frequent visitors into a small entrance hall where, in the gloom, stood Borges's several walking sticks and canes, "patiently waiting," as he liked to say, "to be taken out for a stroll." Then, through a curtained doorway, one entered the living room, where the master would greet his guests with a weak, shy handshake. To the right, a table covered with a lace cloth and four straight-backed chairs furnished the dining room; to the left, under a window, stood a well- worn couch and two or three armchairs. Borges would sit on the couch and the visitor would be asked to take one of the armchairs facing him. His blind eyes would stare into a point in space as he spoke, his asthmatic voice echoing through the room full of the familiar things of his daily life: a small table on which he kept a silver mug and a mate that had belonged to his grandfather, a miniature writing desk dating from his mother's first communion, two white bookshelves set in the wall holding encyclopedias, and two low bookcases of dark wood. On the wall hung a painting by his sister, Norah Borges, depicting the Annunciation, and an engraving by Piranesi showing mysterious circular ruins. A short corridor to the far left led to the bedrooms: his mother's, full of old photographs, and his own, simple as a monk's cell, with an iron bedstead, two bookcases and a single chair. On the wall of his bedroom hung a wooden plate with the coats of arms of the various cantons of Switzerland, and a copy of Durer's engraving Knight, Death and the Devil, which Borges had celebrated in two exquisite sonnets.

Considering that Borges called the universe a book, and said that he imagined paradise "in the shape of a library,"¹⁹⁸ his visitors expected a place copiously lined with books, shelves bursting at the seams, piles of print blocking the doorways and protruding from every crevice—a jungle of ink and paper. Instead, they'd discover this modest apartment where books occupied a discreet, orderly place. When the young Mario Vargas Llosa visited Borges sometime in the mid-fifties, he remarked on the spartan surroundings and asked why the master didn't live in a more bookish, more luxurious home. Borges took great offence at this remark. "Maybe that's how they do things in Lima," he said to the indiscreet Peruvian, "but here in Buenos Aires we don't like to show off."

These few bookcases, however, were Borges's pride. "I'll tell you a secret," he once explained. "I like to pretend I'm not blind, and I covet books like a man who can see. I even covet new encyclopedias, and imagine I can follow the course of rivers in their maps and find wonderful things in the various entries." He liked to tell how, as a child, he used to accompany his father to the National Library and, too timid to ask for a book, simply take one of the volumes of the Britannica from the open shelves and read whatever article opened itself to his eyes. Sometimes he would be lucky, as when he chose volume De—Dr and learned about the Druids, the Druzes and Dryden.¹⁹⁹ He never abandoned this custom of trusting himself to the ordered chance of encyclopedias, and he spent many hours leafing through (and having read to him) the volumes of the Garzanti, the Brockhaus, the Britannica or the Espasa-Calpe. Then, if there was a particularly appealing tidbit of information, he would ask his reader to record it, with the page number, at the back of the revelatory volume.

The two low bookcases in his living room held works by Stevenson, Chesterton, Henry James and Kipling, as well as J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time, several scientific romances by H.G. Wells, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, various novels by Ega de Queiroz in yellowing cardboard bindings, books by nineteenth-century Argentine writers. Here too were Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; Vies Imaginaires, by Marcel Schwob; detective novels by John Dickson Carr, Milward Kennedy and Richard Hull; Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Arnold Bennett's Buried Alive; a small paperback edition of David Garnett's Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo, with delicate woodblock illustrations; Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes; the several tomes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall; various books on mathematics and philosophy, including titles by Sweden- borg and Schopenhauer; and his beloved Worterbuch der Philosophie, by Fritz Mauthner. Some of these books had accompanied Borges since his adolescent days; others, mostly the ones in English and German, carried labels from the Buenos Aires bookstores where they had been bought, all now vanished: Mitchell's, Rodriguez, Pygmalion.