The Letter Killers Club Read online

  Having adjusted the flame, the old man turned to go. Pressing her lips to his bony knuckles, Françoise said, “Then I must keep silent?”

  “Yes, my child. For how can one reveal the Secret of the Ass to … asses?”

  Smiling as he had the day of the third publication, Father Paulin walked out, closing the door tightly behind him.

  Tyd fell silent and, tapping the steel key against the arm of his chair, sat with his face turned to the door.

  “Well, all right”—Zez cut short the pause—“the masonry of your conception in some dozen bricks. We’re used to doing without cement. Therefore, since we still have time, perhaps you would agree to reassemble the elements of your novella in a different order? As for the first brick—the period—let it lie where it lay; at the center of the action, put not the woman, but the priest; and give him significance owing to the significances of the Feast of the Ass. Separate it from the roots, so to speak, take only the tops, and then—”

  “And then,” the corpulent Fev interposed with a derisive wink, “end everything not in life, but in death.”

  “I would also ask you to revise the title,” Hig snickered from the corner.

  The muscles under the ruddy blotches blooming all over Tyd’s face twitched and tensed; he leaned forward as though preparing to jump; his entire shape—short and wiry, agile and precise—recalled the brevity, dynamism, and clarity of the novellas among which he evidently lived. He sprang to his feet and strode past the black shelves, then spun abruptly round on his heels to face the circle of six.

  Fine. I’ll begin. Title: The Goliard’s Sack. This alone will allow me to remain in the same period. Goliards,* or “merry clerics” as they were called, were—as I think you all know—wandering priests who had lost their way, so to speak, between the church and the show booth. The reasons for the emergence of this strange jester-chaplain hybrid remain unexplored and unexplained: most likely they were priests from impoverished parishes; since their cassock did not feed them or fed them only by half, they took to earning money from whatever they could—mainly farcical acting, a trade that did not require guild membership. The hero of my story, Father François (I’ll transpose the names, if I may, along with everything else), was one such goliard. In high boots of tanned leather, a stout staff in hand, he tramped the dusty bends of country roads, from cottage to cottage, changing psalms into songs, Gallic sayings into scholarly Latin, and the ringing of the Angelus bell* into the tinkle of jingles on a foolscap. In his sack, a string-tied bundle on his back, lay side by side, like man and wife, neatly folded and pressed against each other, a harlequin’s cloak of colored scraps trimmed with trinkets and a black soutane* well worn at the seams. A flask of wine bobbed about his belt; black rosary beads wound around his right hand. Father François was a man of merry disposition; in rain and heat he walked now through ripening fields, now along snow-covered roads, whistling simple ditties and bending over his flask the better to kiss her—as he liked to say—on her glass lips; no one ever saw Father François kiss anyone else.

  My wandering goliard was a man of no small use: if a ceremony had to be performed, he would untie his sack, button himself into his narrow dark soutane, unwind his rosary, fish out his cross, and, knitting stern brows, join or absolve; if a holiday entertainment were called for (interludes or a devil’s role too difficult for the amateurs from some guild), the jester’s cloak, from out of that same sack, all bells and spangles, would wrap itself around his broad shoulders: it would have been hard to find a slyboots better able to provoke tears of laughter and invent witty sayings than the goliard François.

  No one knew if he were young or old: his clean-shaven face was always bronzed by the sun, while the bare skin on his crown could have been a bald spot or a tonsure. The girls who had laughed till they cried at the interludes or cried till they smiled at Mass sometimes gazed at François in a certain way, but the goliard was a wanderer: having performed the Mass and acted the interlude, he would stow his black cassock and jingling cloak, knot his knapsack, and be gone; his hands clasped only his staff, his lips touched only glass lips. True, striding through the fields he liked to whistle to the birds passing overhead, but birds are wanderers too, and to talk to people they would need only one phrase: “Skip it.” Here too, in the fields, the goliard sometimes liked to converse with his knapsack: he would untie its string-bitted mouth, pull out the black and the harlequin, and babble, for example, this:

  “Suum cuique, amici mei[1]: remember that, my black grouse and my harlequin duck. If on earth there were harlequin masses and black laughter, you, my friends, would have to change places. But for now, you must smell the incense, and you must array yourself in wine stains.”

  Having beaten the dust out of the black and the harlequin, the goliard would replace them in his knapsack, get to his feet, and set off down the undulating roads, whistling to the quails.

  One day toward evening, dusty and tired, Father François was nearing the lights of a small village. It was a settlement of forty or fifty hearths, with a church in the middle, surrounded by green squares of vineyards. At the village gate he met a man with whom he traded questions: who-whence-why-whither? Father François had barely sat down in the Ace Trumps All when he was called away to a dying man. Knocking back a hasty tumbler or two, he thrust his arms into the sleeves of his cassock and, fastening the hooks as he went, betook himself to the soul awaiting his prayers.

  Having given the soul absolution, he returned to the tavern. By then news of the stranger had visited all forty hearths, and several old peasants, who had been waiting at the Ace Trumps All, asked him to come on the morrow—the day of their fair—and entertain the folk with something especially merry and cunning. Tumblers clinked—and the goliard said, “Very well.”

  Late that night, while looking for lodging, he chanced upon a young man carrying a lantern: its yellow eye slid over his face; in the dazzling light, the goliard saw first strong broad fingers gripping the lantern’s handle, then gleaming teeth and a broad smile.

  “Have you seen Father François?” the young man asked. “I’m looking for him.”

  “Well then, let’s look together. Have you a looking glass about you?”

  “Why a looking glass?”

  “Come now: without a looking glass I haven’t a prayer of seeing Father François. What is your name?”

  “Pierre.”

  “And your bride’s?”

  “Pauline. How is it you know I have a bride?”

  “Very well. Tomorrow before the Angelus. If you must cling together and become one flesh, you will find no better glue than what I have in my sack. Good night.”

  Blowing out the baffled lad’s lantern, the goliard left him enveloped in darkness and surprise.

  Next morning Father François set earnestly to work: first he sprinkled sickly infants with holy water and muttered purifying prayers over a woman brought to bed, and then, having donned his jester’s patchwork, he packed his traveling and priestly clothes neatly in his knapsack, left it with the tavern’s serving boy, a lanky large-mouthed youth, and went off to the market square to regale the fair-goers. Song followed song, witty saying topped witty saying; time passed, the peasants could not laugh their fill and would not let the jester go. Suddenly from the belfry the Angelus rang out; the peasants took off their caps, while Father François hitched up his jingling cloak and practically ran back to the tavern in his hurry to change clothes and not miss the wedding.

  At the door of the Ace he met the serving boy looking bewildered: in the boy’s hands the goliard saw his knapsack, now strangely gaunt, its sides sunken.

  “Sir,” the lanky boy mumbled, his silly mouth agape, “I wanted to hear you too; but whiles I was gone your sack was cleaned out. Who’d have thought it?”

  The goliard thrust a hand into the sack.

  “Empty, empty!” he cried in despair. “Empty, like your head, you gaping fool. Now how am I to perform a wedding when all I have is my Latin?”
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  The serving boy’s simple face looked blank. Tucking his sack under one arm, Father François raced off to the church as he was, jingles tinkling. On the way he again searched the emptiness in his sack: at the bottom his fingers found his cross, left there by the thief: he quickly slipped it on over his clown costume and unwound the rosary on his wrist, then dashed into the church and began.

  “In nomine …”

  “Cum spiritu tuo,” a lay brother made to join in when suddenly his eyes goggled in fright at the sight of the jester mounting the altar steps. A commotion ensued: the groomsmen backed away to the doors; an old peasant woman dropped her lighted candle; the bride covered her face and wept for shame and fear, while the strapping groom and two or three others dragged the interloper out of the church, thrashed him, and threw him not far from the porch.

  The cool night air revived the goliard. Pulling himself up off the ground, he probed first his scratches and bruises, then once more his sack, which had been thrown next to him; there was nothing in it, save emptiness; even so, he carefully knotted it twice, tossed it over his shoulder, and, having found his staff in the grass, left the sleeping village. He walked through the night, copper jingles tinkling. Toward morning he met some people in a field; on seeing his jester’s garb, they turned away in fright, amazed at this harlequin ghost who belonged not on a field’s black furrows but on a creaking show-booth stage. Nearing the next village, the goliard decided to go around it: creeping past backyards and kitchen gardens, he tried to step quietly so as not to draw anyone’s eyes with his tinkling jingles. But a mangy cur caught sight of the moving patchwork and leapt up, barking wildly; the barking brought people, and soon the jester was being followed through the fields by a gaggle of little boys, whistling and whooping in his wake.

  A peasant busy mending a fence did not reply to the greeting of the show-booth ghost; women shouldering jugs of water did not smile at his merry grimace and, lowering their eyes, passed by: today was a workday—busy and sober people had no time or reason to laugh; they had done making jokes, stashed their Sunday best at the bottom of trunks, donned their work clothes, and begun a long, hard series of six monotonous, gray-faced days. The mysterious stranger was a holiday lost among weekdays, an absurd mistake confounding their simple calendar: eyes jerked away from the goliard, he saw only scornful smiles or indifferent backs. Now he understood the loneliness and homelessness of laughter, seraphically pure, sewn from dazzling scraps with fine threads and sharp needles. He might have soared up to the sun, but flew no higher than the roosts: the soul of an eagle on the wings of a clucking farm hen; all smiles had been counted and locked up in the holiday, as in a cage. No, no. Away! Quickening his step, the goliard now trod the path that goes over the earth away from the earth; but the earth, dark and viscous, clung to his soles, grasses and twigs caught at the hem of his cloak, while the wind, sweaty and stinking of manure, jangled with all its might the jingles and trinkets on his dusk-faded cloak. The road ran down to a river. The goliard took his sack from his shoulder, untied the bundle and spoke to it for the last time. “Blessed Jerome* wrote that our body too is only raiment. If that be so, we shall have it washed.”

  The canvas sack listened with its mouth agape like the fool from the Ace Trumps All. Hanging over the steep riverbank, the merry cleric felt about with his staff for the bottom. Without success. Not far off, pressed into the ground, lay a heavy, moss-covered stone. François prized the stone loose and thrust it in his sack—along with his head. Then he tied the strings tight around his neck. The riverbank was one step away. I dare say that that step was the father’s last.

  Tyd had finished. He stood with his back pressed against the door: it seemed that its black panels—like those of some German mechanical toy with the spring sprung—might suddenly fly open, swallow Tyd’s tiny toy figure, and snap automatically shut over him and his novellas.

  The president did not allow the silence to last. “You were swept away by the current. That happens.”

  “If that were true, I wouldn’t have moored my story as instructed: ending it in death,” Tyd parried.

  “Fev is not objecting: the end is settled. But in the middle you mixed up the cubes: not, I suspect, for want of skill. Isn’t that so? I’ll take your smile for an answer. In view of this, you must tell us a penalty story. Clearer and shorter. A break, I think, is unnecessary. We’re waiting.”

  Tyd’s shoulders flinched with annoyance. You could see he was tired: detaching himself from the doorway, he returned to his seat by the fire and for a moment poked about with his pupils in the litter of sparks and the dance of dove-colored flames.

  Well then. Since it’s hard to improvise with people because they are alive (even the invented ones) and sometimes act outside the authorial design, if not contrary to it, I must fall back on enduring heroes: in short, I shall tell you about two books and one man; only one: that I can do.

  We’ll think of a title together at the end. As for the title pages of my book-characters, they are: Notker the Stammerer and The Four Gospels. My third character, the human one, belongs not to people-plots, but to people-themes: people-plots are very troublesome for a writer—their lives contain so many acts, encounters, and coincidences; put them in a story and they expand it to a novella, or even a novel; people-themes exist immanently, their plotless lives are off the main roads, they are part of an idea, reticent and passive; one of these is my hero. His whole existence was flattened between the two books I shall now tell you about.

  Even when his parents were alive, this man (his name is not material) had the air of an orphan and passed for an eccentric. From an early age he devoted himself to the keys of a piano and whole days to hunting for new sound combinations and rhythm sequences. But one heard him, if at all, only through a wall and locked door. A music publisher was extremely surprised one day when a skinny youth appeared in his office and, without looking at him, produced a notebook entitled: Commentary on Silence. The publisher thrust his bitten nails into the notebook, leafed through it, sighed, glanced again at the title, and returned the manuscript.

  Soon after that the youth locked away his keyboard and tried trading musical notes for letters; but he came up against an even greater obstacle; for he was—I repeat—a person-theme, while our entire literature is based on plot constructions; he was unable to fragment himself and ramify ideas; he strove, as befits a person-theme, not from the one to the many, but from the many to the one. Sometimes a box of pens will contain an unsplit pen: it is just like the others, and no less sharp—but it cannot write.

  Nevertheless, my youth, by now a young man of twenty-five, resolved with the stubbornness of a solid, unsplit nature to master that multitude; he called all this by other names, but a true instinct sent him on a journey, that method of absorbing many people so as to mottle and multiply one’s own relatively uniform and seamless experience. By now he had received an inheritance, and trains took him from station to station around the polyglot patchwork world. The notebooks of this aspiring writer were fat with jottings and outlines, but a work, a real one, a work driven to the end into letters, eluded him. Inside all the plots after which his pencil chased, he felt as one does in a hotel room where everything is foreign and indifferent: to you, and to others.

  Finally—after long months of wandering—they met: the man and the theme. The meeting took place in the library at the Abbey of St. Gall,* in Switzerland. It was, I believe, a rainy day; boredom had led my hero to the shelves of that rarely visited library, and there, amid the whorls of book dust, he found Notker the Stammerer:* although Notker was no one’s invention and had finished existing exactly one thousand years before; besides his name, which caught the immediate interest of our collector of plots, little of him remained; only a few semi-apocryphal bits had stood the test of the millennium; this then meant that one might remake him, might turn what had moldered into something radiant. Our hitherto luckless writer set about re-creating Notker. Abbey books and manuscripts told him of an an
cient, half-forgotten school of St. Gall musicians. Long before the contrapuntists of the Netherlands,* the monks in lonely, mountain-immured St. Gall were performing mysterious polyphonic experiments; one of those monks was Notker the Stammerer. Legend says that one day, while walking along a precipice, he heard the whine of a saw, the tap of a hammer, and the voices of men; turning toward the sound, he reached a crook in the path and saw workers shoring up the beams of a future bridge to be built across the chasm; without going closer and without being seen, he watched and listened as these men, suspended over the abyss, tapped with their hammers and sang merrily, and then—when he returned to his cell—he sat down to compose a chorale: Media vita in morte sumus[2]. Our hero rummaged through the library’s yellowed music books in search of the square neumes* that told of death wedged into life; but the chorale was nowhere to be found. With the abbot’s permission he took a whole pile of moldering music back to his hotel room where, having locked the door, he spent the whole night with the celeste pedal* depressed, pounding out the ancient canticles of the St. Gall monks. When he had played all the sheets through, he strained his imagination in an effort to hear the unfound chorale. That night it came to him in a dream—lofty and mournful, slowly marching in the mixolydian mode.* Next morning, while sitting at the piano trying to re-create the dreamed chorale, he noticed a surprising resemblance between Notker’s Media vita and his own Commentary on Silence. Continuing to ransack the St. Gall library, our sleuth learned that the old composer of music with the odd sobriquet of Stammerer (or Balbulus) had been a lifelong collector of words and syllables to fit music; it was curious that, while venerating sound combinations, he had utter contempt for articulate human speech. In one of his authentic writings, he said: “At times I have quietly considered how to secure my combinations of sounds so that they, even at the cost of words, might escape oblivion.” Words for him were so many motley signals, mnemonic symbols, for memorizing musical sequences; when he tired of choosing words and syllables, he would pause at an Alleluia and lead it through dozens of intervals,* nonsensing the syllables for the sake of other abstruse meanings; these exercises in atekstalis* were of particular interest to our sleuth. The hunt for the Great Stammerer’s neumes led him first to the library at the British Museum, then to the Library of St. Ambrose in Milan.* Here occurred the second meeting, a meeting of two books not content to have their fate,* as the saying goes, but desirous of becoming fate itself. In his tireless search for material on the St. Gall monk, my hero called on a dealer in old books. Nothing of interest, junk, but, wishing to repay the Milanese shopkeeper for the good hour spent bustling about, he pointed to a random spine: that one. Then he slipped the chance purchase into his briefcase with his work, loose longhand sheets slowly coalescing into a book. There, in that sealed sack, they lay together like man and wife, pages in pages, Notker the Stammerer and The Four Gospels (the text bought blind turned out to be the old story, clad in ancient Latin characters, of the four Evangelists). At his leisure one day, having abstractedly perused the volume, my student of atekstalis was about to put it aside when his attention was caught by a note penned in the margin, in a seventeenth-century hand: S-um.