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Mircea Cartarescu
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hall next to the door and
I would go in the shade of
the room full of books. The
librarian was a discreet
man, as insignificant looking
in reality, as concrete and
present in countless dreams
of later. The books, aligned
in alphabetical order, were
for me like those boards
with postal boxes that
occupy an entire wall at the
ground floor of apartment
buildings. How many times
I had wished, when I was a
child, to have the keys to all
those boxes! I would have
spent my mornings reading
letters and thus getting into
the intricate and sad lives
of all people. I sometimes
managed to take one out
through the thin gap with
great difficulty, using a
little stick and inserting my
fingers as deep as I could
into the dark space, terribly
frightened of being caught.
I would then read about
diseases
and
funerals,
requests for loans, indecent
proposals and divisions of
land plots. And I finally had
all the keys now! Each book
was a gap through which I
looked within the skull of a
person. There were as many
skulls with the boxes of
intelligence, courage, pride,
melancholy,
shrewdness
separated and numbered
in indelible pencil. I was
opening each book like a
surgeon who was to operate
on a skull, but in addition
I had the amazement of
a doctor who would find
something different than
the usual circumvolutions
and the usual grey-brown
substance irrigated by trees
of blood vessels in each dura