If you are a reader, and a voracious reader, you will probably never know how many books you have hoarded in your house over the decades, until the time comes to redecorate your house. Alas, that that time cannot permanently be deferred. I certainly forget just how many books I have all the time and it never fails to amaze me. Books of all kinds, most of them long forgotten, start to appear and I am suddenly reminded that behind the first row of volumes lined upright in the pigeonholes, there is another row, a second “line of defense” like the trenches in WWI.
I often happen to buy a book out of an irresistible impulse, because its cover, title, or blurb arouses in me the need to read it absolutely immediately, but I am already reading another book that I cannot put aside, and other books, much more urgent, are stacked on my desk and on my bedside table. Therefore, more often than not, that “indispensable” new volume ends up confused among the others on the bookshelves. It does not take much before the constant flow of books that I keep buying, and books sent by friends from the four corners of the world, pushes it into the back row, where it remains sitting until I chance to see it again, usually while looking for something else. In addition to this, I must confess that my daughter worked for ten years in a major bookshop, which meant books galore at a fraction of the retail price.
“More than a reader, you’re a book accumulator,” she often sighs, shaking her head disconsolately, “and an accumulator of knick-knacks for that matter.”
Last week, early in the morning, not even giving myself time to digest breakfast, I started removing rows of books from the shelves, and I needed to hurry, since my wife was impatiently waiting, the brushes and tins of paint already deployed in the middle of the room that I pompously call my study. My attention was suddenly absorbed by a forgotten treasure that slipped out of the block of twenty volumes I was holding in my arms. I picked it up, clutching it the way a shepherd might hold a precious lamb. I could not resist having a flip through the pages and in no time at all I was perusing it, oblivious of the world. Until my wife appeared at my back and her voice startled me, “Gosh, you’re reading! We have to move tons of things!”
I rushed back to transfer the remaining books into the living room.
How did all this begin? When did this unquenchable hunger for the printed pages first start to devour me and my savings?
I remember the first books I read as a child and as young boy. They were classics of children’s literature, often abridged. In a few years, they were followed by some of the detective stories to which my father was an addict. It is not surprising that the first book I bought with my pocket money was “The Greene Murder Case” by S.S. Van Dine (of course, in Italian translation, “La fine dei Greene”). It was at a sort of book fair that my school had organized to encourage reading among younger students. I was thirteen and into the second step of the three-year course of Scuola Media (Junior High) in Gallipoli, a seaside town in southern Salento (my school, in the old town, faced the Ionian and the island of Sant’Andrea at a distance).
At the time, I did not know that “The Greene Murder Case” was already deemed among the classics of crime fiction. I was fascinated by the web of mystery that surrounded the Greenes and the house they were forced to live in together for 25 years, under pain of losing their rich inheritance. A few months later, walking to the bus stop after school, I called on a newsstand and found another book by the same author, “The Bishop Murder Case,” in which a series of murders are perpetrated by a mysterious killer who leaves behind notes with quotations from nursery rhymes.
Later, during my high school and university years, beside my lifelong passion for R.L. Stevenson, came the discovery of the great novelists of the twentieth century, both Italian and foreign, especially English, American, and French (and a few Spanish writers), which I started to read in their original languages. Novels and collections of poems in four tongues soon started to colonize the shelves of my room.
I was attending the third year of teacher’s college when I met Anna, the girl I would marry ten years later. We were classmates. We soon became desk mates. She was a keen reader too, and we started exchanging books. We were both lovers of French literature. At that time, we, the boomers, were discovering the existentialists, Raymond Queneau, Albert Camus, Simone De Beauvoir, J.P. Sartre and all that. We even dressed like them, dark jackets, scarves, turtle-necked sweaters and, if you were lucky enough to be shortsighted, black frame eyeglasses. Anna had a keen interest in psychology, essential for a future teacher. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and I too became interested. In the course of our life together, until Anna’s premature and sudden death, to satisfy our mutual passion for books, we put together thousands of volumes of all kinds, many of them now in the keeping of our daughter.
Over the last twenty-two years, after I moved in with Pina, my present wife, also a former teacher, I built up another collection of books – much to her desperation. I am filling every possible corner with “indispensable” volumes. And half a dozen dictionaries are always at hand to quench the translator’s hunger for words. Though she also loves reading, she thinks that a book, once read, should disappear, as if by magic, maybe given away or resold, so that others may enjoy it. “More than a reader, you’re a book accumulator,” she often sighs, shaking her head disconsolately, “and an accumulator of knick-knacks for that matter.”
From the study, Pina’s voice recalled me to stark reality, while I was wondering why on earth (and when?) I bought the slim essay on quantum mathematics.
Actually, it is not only books that are to be found on the shelves, especially in the back rows. All sorts of things seem to assemble there. Postcards, photographs, boxes of slides that I took long ago with my Miranda MS-3 camera. They all materialize as by a charm, followed by old press clippings, a couple of pipes, an old tobacco metal box, small hand-painted clay statuettes of Carabinieri standing at attention, audio cassettes of unknown content, recorded in Italy and in England. And VHS videotapes whose content I refuse to investigate, since you never know what might pop out of them. Ghosts from the distant past may be lurking in the spools of those magnetic tapes.
I know Pina is absolutely right, but I cannot imagine what my life would have been without books (and without music!). Reading and compulsive buying books and classical music LPs and CDs (my beloved Mahler), were my bulwarks against desperation, in those darkest moments that life has in store for nearly all of us. I was not spared my share.
“Are we waiting for something?” From the study, Pina’s voice recalled me to stark reality, while I was wondering why on earth (and when?) I bought the slim essay on quantum mathematics I had extracted from the last armload of volumes that I had just laid down on an armchair.
“No, darling. Nothing. I am coming.” Yet, I did buy that booklet!
