The Letter Killers Club Read online

  “Yes, I felt that both I and my literature had been trampled and made meaningless; if not for ill health, a sound solution would scarcely have been found. Sudden and difficult, my illness disconnected me for a long time from writing: my unconscious was able to rest, to gain time and gather meanings. I remember that when I, still physically weak and only half connected to the world, finally opened the door of this black room, made my way to this very armchair, and once more surveyed the bookless emptiness, it began to speak—softly and indistinctly, but still, still—it agreed to speak to me again, as in those days I had thought gone forever! You realize that for me this was such a—”

  His hand touched my shoulder—and jerked back.

  “However, we’ve no time for lyrical effusions. They’ll be here soon. So, back to the facts. I now knew that my conceptions needed love and silence. Once profligate with my phantasms, I began hoarding them and hiding them from inquisitive eyes. I kept them all here under lock and key, and my invisible library reappeared: phantasm next to phantasm, opus next to opus, edition next to edition—they began to fill these shelves. Look here a minute—no, to the right, on the middle shelf—you don’t see anything, do you? Whereas I…”

  I moved mechanically aside: a hard, concentrated joy trembled in my host’s sharp pupils.

  “Yes, and then I made up my mind: to shut the inkwell lid and return to the kingdom of free, pure, and unsubstantiated conceptions. Sometimes, out of long habit, I was drawn to paper, and a few words would steal out from under my pencil: but I killed those freaks and dealt ruthlessly with my old writerly ways. Have you ever heard of the giardinetti di San Francesco—the gardens of Saint Francis?* In Italy I often visited them: the tiny flower gardens of one or two beds, three feet square, inside high solid walls, in almost all Franciscan monasteries. Now, in exchange for silver soldi and in violation of the tradition of Saint Francis, one may view them, if only through a grille, from without. In the past, even that was forbidden: flowers grew there—as Saint Francis had willed—not for others, but for themselves: they could not be picked or replanted outside the enclosure; those who had not taken vows could not set foot in the gardens, or even look at the flowers: immune from people’s touch, protected from eyes and scissors, they could bloom and be fragrant for themselves.

  “Well, I decided—I hope you won’t find this strange—to plant a garden immured in silence and secrecy in which all my conceptions, all my most exquisite phantasms and monstrous inventions might, far from people’s eyes, grow and bloom for themselves. I hate the coarse rinds of heavily pendant fruits that torment and wither branches; I wanted my tiny garden to contain an eternal, non-deciduous and non-bearing composite of meanings and forms! Don’t think I am an egoist who cannot step out of his ‘I,’ a misanthrope who hates thoughts not his own. No: in the world only one thing is truly hateful to me: letters. Anyone who can and will pass through this secrecy to live and work here, by the beds of pure conceptions, I welcome as a brother.”

  For a minute he fell silent and eyed the oak backs of the armchairs which, ranged around him, appeared to be listening with great attention.

  “Little by little, chosen ones from the world of writers and readers began gathering here, in letterlessness. My garden of conceptions is not for everyone. We are few and shall be fewer still. Because the burden of empty shelves is onerous. And yet—”

  I tried to object: “You’re confiscating letters, as you put it, not only from yourself, but from others. I would remind you of the outstretched palms.”

  “Well, that … You know, Goethe once described Shakespeare (to Eckermann*) as a wildly overgrown tree that—for two hundred years straight—had stifled the growth of all English literature; thirty years later, Börne* called Goethe: ‘A monstrous cancer spreading through the body of German literature.’ Both men were right: if our letterizations stifle one another, if writers prevent each other from writing, they don’t allow readers even to form an idea. The reader hasn’t the chance to have ideas, the right to them has been usurped by word professionals who are stronger and more experienced in this matter: libraries have crushed the reader’s imagination, the professional writings of a small coterie of scribblers have crammed shelves and heads to bursting. Lettered excesses must be destroyed: on shelves and in heads. One must clear at least a little space of other people’s conceptions to make room for one’s own: everyone has the right to a conception—both the professional and the dilettante. I’ll bring you the eighth armchair.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he flashed from the room.

  Left alone, I again surveyed the black step- and word-muffling sanctum with its shelves encasing emptiness. A feeling of wary bewilderment was increasing in me with every second: so an animal must feel under vivisection. “What am I to him or them? What do their conceptions need from me?” I resolved to find out. But when the door opened, it admitted two men: my host and a bespectacled, moonfaced person with cropped red hair: leaning his limp, seemingly boneless body on a walking stick, he scrutinized me from the threshold through his round lenses.

  “Das,” our host introduced him.

  I said my name.

  After Das, a third person appeared: a wiry little man the muscles of whose clenched jaws twitched under needlelike eyes, with a thin crack for a mouth. Our host turned to face him.

  “Ah, Tyd.”

  “Yes, Zez.”

  Noticing the puzzled look in my eyes, the one called Zez burst out laughing.

  “After our conversation, you’ll understand that writers’ names have no place here.” He stressed the last word. “Let them remain on title pages: instead every member of the brotherhood is given a ‘nonsense syllable.’ A certain learned professor Ebbinghaus,* while researching the laws of memory, relied on what he called ‘nonsense syllables’: he took any vowel and placed a consonant either side; from the series of syllables created in this way, he discarded those with even a hint of meaning: the rest he used to study the memorization process, we use them more for … Well, I needn’t go into it. But where are the other conceivers? It’s time.”

  As if in reply, there was a knock at the door. Two men entered: Hig and Mov. After a bit, one more appeared, wheezing asthmatically and wiping away sweat: his sobriquet was Fev. Only one armchair remained empty. Finally, the last man entered: he had a softly delineated profile with a steep brow.

  “You’re late, Rar,” the president greeted him. Rar raised his eyes, their look was remote and faraway.

  2

  FOR A MINUTE there was silence. Everyone watched as Mov, squatting down, made a fire in the grate. Following his movements, the slowness of which recalled the performance of a ritual, I was able to study him: he was considerably younger than the rest; the glints soon dancing on his face picked out the capricious line of a striking mouth and keenly quivering nostrils. When the crackling wood had begun to hiss, the president picked up the cast-iron tongs and banged them against the logs. “Attention. The seventy-third Saturday of the Letter Killers Club is now open.” Then, prolonging the ritual, he walked slowly to the door: click-click. The key’s steel bit gleamed in Zez’s outstretched hand. “Rar: the key and the floor.”

  After a pause Rar said, “My conception is in four acts. Title: Actus Morbi[1].”

  The president craned forward.

  “Beg pardon. Is it a play?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew it. You always go against Club tradition. I think you do it on purpose. To dramatize is to vulgarize. A conception intended for the stage is pale and insufficiently … fertilized. You always try to slip out through the keyhole—and away: from the embers in the grate to the footlights across a stage. Beware the footlights! Then again, we are your listeners.”

  The face of the man who had begun his story showed no emotion. Interrupted, he calmly heard the tirade out and went on: “Shakespeare’s famous character who asks if his soul is easier to be played on than a pipe* later flings the pipe away, but leaves his soul. For me. Still,
there is a certain similarity here: to make a recorder sound its lowest note, one must stop all its vents, all its windows on the world; to pluck out the depths of a soul, one must also close all its windows, all its outlets to the world. This, my play attempts to do; I should tell you that my Actus Morbi is not in so many acts, but (in the spirit of the language favored by Hamlet) in so many ‘positions.’

  “Now, about the molding of my characters. In Hamlet there is a double character that has long intrigued me, one reminiscent of an organic cell that has split into two not entirely separate daughter cells, as biologists call them. I mean Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, beings impossible to imagine apart, one without the other, who are—in essence—one role copied into two notebooks. The splitting process begun three hundred years ago, I attempt to push farther. Imitating the provincial tragedian who—for effect—breaks Hamlet’s pipe in half,* I take, say, Guildenstern and break that half-being again in half: Guilden and Stern—two characters. The name Ophelia and its combined meaning I take now in the sense of tragedy, Phelia, now in the comedic sense, Phelya. For even putting now a garland of bitter rue, now curlpapers in one’s hair, even that may be divided in two.

  “So then, to start the game. In the first position, four pieces are in play: moving them about an imaginary stage, like a chess player who plays without looking at the board, I arrive at the following—”

  For a moment Rar broke off. His long, white, nearly translucent fingers fumbled something in the air, as if testing the malleability of his material.

  “As they say: ‘The scene is set in …’ Well, in a word …”

  STERN, a young actor, has locked himself away with his role. The role can be divined even without the soliloquies: a black cloak hangs over the back of an armchair; on the desk—among piles of books and portraits of the Elsinore prince—lies a black beret with a broken feather. Also a doublet and braces.

  STERN (unshaven, his faced lined with sleeplessness, flicks at the half-closed window curtain with the tip of his rapier): A rat.

  A knock at the door. Still with his eye on the rapier-fretted curtain, STERN unbolts the door with his left hand. Enter PHELYA.

  “We see her: a lovely face with dimpled cheeks, a being who in plays is always loved by two men, but whose psychology demands one thing: that she choose one of the two.”

  STERN (doesn’t see her come in): A rat!

  PHELYA hitches up her skirt in fright. Dialogue.

  STERN (without turning round at PHELYA’s cry):

  Leave wringing of your hands. Peace, sit you down

  And let me wring your heart, for so I shall.

  He twitches back the curtain. On the windowsill, instead of Polonius, are two empty bottles and a Primus.*

  A king of shreds and patches,

  Who was in life a foolish prating knave.

  Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.

  In the doorway he collides with PHELYA.

  PHELYA: Where are you going like that? Without a jacket. Wake up!

  STERN: Is that you? Oh, Phelya, I … If only you knew …

  PHELYA: I know my role by heart. Whereas you—you silly bungler. Stop speaking in verse—we’re not onstage.

  STERN: Are you sure?

  PHELYA: Now please, don’t try to persuade me otherwise. If there were an audience, I wouldn’t do this (stands up on tiptoe and kisses him). Well, did that wake you up?

  STERN: Darling.

  PHELYA: Finally: a word not from the role.

  “Here I must interrupt love’s weary round: you need to know that at this point Phelia is closer to Stern than Guilden, his rival and stand-in. She wants Stern to win the role. In any case, I can assert that as the dialogue unfolds, it brings chess piece closer to chess piece, Stern closer to Phelya. Hence the stage direction: open parentheses, kiss, close parentheses, period. This time for Stern too, the kiss is not through the role but in reality. Take a good look. Now shift your gaze slightly to the left.”

  The door, which has been left ajar, swings open to admit GUILDEN.

  GUILDEN (smiling a little wickedly): Spectators are not welcome. I’ll go.

  The LOVERS, of course, detain GUILDEN. A minute of embarrassed silence.

  GUILDEN (looks through the books scattered about): The role, I see, is not as compliant as … (glances at PHELIA). Shakespeare. Hmm. On Shakespeare. Again Shakespeare. Incidentally, on the tram just now some simpleton noticed the script poking out of my pocket and, wanting to be nice, remarked: “They say Shakespeare never existed, yet look how many plays he left; now if Shakespeare had existed, then chances are the number of plays …” And he looked at me with such idiotic curiosity.

  PHELYA laughs. STERN remains serious.

  STERN: A simpleton he may have been, but … What did you say to him?

  GUILDEN: Nothing. The tram stopped. I had to get off.

  STERN: You know, Guilden, not so long ago your nonsense would have struck me as just silly. But now that I’ve spent nearly three weeks struggling to exist in nonexistence, to—how shall I put it—to inhabit a role which you will say has no life of its own, now I’m very careful with all those “to be’s” and “not to be’s.” Between them, you see, is only an “or.” Everyone is given to choose. Certain people have already chosen: some have chosen the struggle for existence; others, the struggle for nonexistence. Crossing the line of footlights is like passing through customs: for the right to sojourn on the far side of the lights, one must pay certain duties.

  GUILDEN: I don’t understand.

  STERN: Ah, but understanding isn’t everything. You must also make up your mind.

  PHELIA: Have you made up yours?

  STERN: Yes.

  GUILDEN: You’re an odd duck. If we told Timer, he’d have a good laugh. Although our patron has been rather dour lately. Yesterday, when you skipped rehearsal again, he flew into a terrible rage. That’s why I’ve come, to warn you that if you mean “not to exist” at rehearsal again today, then Timer has threatened—

  STERN: I know. Let him. I have nothing, you understand, nothing, or rather, no one to bring to your rehearsal. Until the role comes to me, until I see it right here, as I see you now, I have no business at your gatherings.

  PHELIA looks pleadingly at STERN, but he has disappeared inside himself, he neither sees nor hears.

  GUILDEN: But there ought to be an outside pair of eyes: first the director’s, then the spectator’s—

  STERN: Rubbish. Spectators: if you took their coats off the hooks in the cloakroom and seated them in the theater, and hung those spectators on the cloakroom hooks instead, art would not suffer. As for the director—his eyes, as you put it: I would gouge them out—out of the theater. To hell with them! An actor needs his character’s eyes. Only. If Hamlet were to walk in here, search out my pupils with his own, and say to me—You know what, my friends, don’t be angry, but I must work. Sooner or later I shall summon him, and then … Away, I say.

  GUILDEN: Phelya, did you hear that? He spoke to us just now like a real prince. We’d better go. Rehearsal starts in fifteen minutes.

  PHELIA: Stern, darling, come with us.

  STERN: Leave me. I beg you. For me as well, it is about … to start.

  “Left alone, Stern sits very still for some time, like this. Then”—Rar reached abruptly for the shadowy emptiness of the bookshelves: his listeners followed with their eyes—“ … Then … he takes a book—the first to hand. I’ll summarize his monologue.”

  STERN: Now then, let’s see. Act II, Scene 2: “I’ll speak to him again.” (To me:) “What do you read, my lord?” “Words, words, words.” Oh, if only I could know: the words that were in that book. If only I could know: that knot of meanings. “What is the matter, my lord?”—“Between who?”

  From out of the room’s gathering darkness, the ROLE appears soundlessly in the doorway. Through the murk, like the reflection in a cheap looking glass, it mimes the actor’s every gesture. STERN, sitting with his back to the door, doesn’t no
tice the ROLE until, gliding up from behind, it touches his shoulder.

  ROLE: Listen, would you like to know the words in that book I’ve been in the habit of perusing in the second scene of the second act for the last 320 years straight? I suppose I could lend them to you-of course, not gratis.

  The black phantom has already subsided into the empty armchair opposite the actor: for a minute STERN and the ROLE peer intently at each other.

  STERN: No. You won’t do. I imagine my Hamlet differently. Forgive me, but you are wan and faded. That’s not what I want.

  ROLE (phlegmatically): Nevertheless, you will play me exactly as I am.

  STERN (taking painful stock of his double): But don’t you understand? I don’t want to be like you.

  ROLE: Perhaps I don’t want—to be like you. Indeed, I am only being polite: when called, I come. On my way here, I wondered: why?

  Rar’s fingers patted the air, as though an acting cue were whirling about unseen; they clutched at something then suddenly let go; Rar watched the word flutter away.

  “Now this is where, dear conceivers, I will try to close the recorder’s first vent. Stern needs to bang into that why. As an actor, a professional speaker of other people’s words, he may not be able to find his own words to explain himself—his reflected self—to his reflection.

  “I think this is all fairly simple: every three-dimensional being doubles himself twice—reflecting himself outwardly and inwardly. Both reflections are untrue: the cold, flat likeness returned by the looking glass is untrue because it is less than three-dimensional; the face’s other reflection, cast inward, flowing along nerves to the brain and composed of a complex set of sensations, is also untrue because it is more than three-dimensional.

  “Poor Stern wants to objectify that inner likeness of himself, to raise it from the bottom of his soul, to lure it out with his acting and press it on the role; but the other reflection responds to his call—the dead, glassy one hidden under surfaces and reflected outwardly. He doesn’t want it; he rejects the presumptuous phantom, and so creates for it an objective existence outside itself. This also happens outside plays; it has before and will again. Take, for instance, Ernesto Rossi* : in his memoirs he describes a visit to the ruins of Elsinore. Roughly thus: at some distance from the castle Rossi stopped the carriage and proceeded on foot. In the deepening dusk he walked on with steady step. The eternal story of the Danish prince now took hold of him. Striding toward the black silhouette of the bridge, he began reciting (at first to himself, then more and more loudly) Hamlet’s appeal to his father’s ghost. And when, gradually drawn into the familiar role, he reached the Ghost’s cue and raised his head in the familiar way, he saw it: the Ghost emerging from the gates and gliding noiselessly toward the bridge across the moat: right on cue. Rossi tells us only that he hared back to the carriage, found the coachman, and ordered him to drive the horses with all his might. So the actor fled—in this case from the role come to him. But he might have stayed put, by the bridge leading from one world to the other. Indeed Stern will have to stay put—this takes no talent: will is enough. But let’s go back to the play. Our character has been waiting for us: I have made his pause too long. So then …”