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By Root 859 0

nephew. Well, when they saw me bawling over my dream trumpet, they said they would fix everything: tomorrow we would go to the department store where there was a whole counter of toys-wonder of wonders—and I’d have the trumpet I wanted. I didn’t sleep all night, and I couldn’t sit still all the next morning. In the afternoon we went to the store, and they had at least three kinds of trumpets there. Little tin things, probably, but to me they were magnificent brass worthy of die Philharmonic. There was an army bugle, a slide trombone, and a trumpet of gold with a real trumpet mouthpiece but the keys of a saxophone. I couldn’t decide, and maybe I took too long. Wanting them all, I must have given the impression that I didn’t want any of them. Meanwhile, I believe my uncle and aunt looked at the price tags. My uncle and aunt weren’t stingy; on the other hand, a Bakelite clarinet with silver keys was much cheaper. ‘Wouldn’t you like this better?’ they asked. I tried it, produced a reasonable honk, and told myself that it was beautiful, but actually I was rationalizing. I knew they wanted me to take the clarinet because the trumpet cost a fortune. I couldn’t demand such a sacrifice from my relatives, having been taught that if a person offers you something you like, you must say, ‘No, thank you,’ and not just once, not ‘No, thank you,’ with your hand out, but ‘No, thank you’ until the giver insists, until he says, ‘Please, take it.’ A well-bred child doesn’t accept until that point. So I said maybe I didn’t care about the trumpet, maybe the clarinet was all right, if that’s what they wanted. And I looked up at them, hoping they would insist. They didn’t, God bless them, they were delighted to buy me the clarinet, since—they said—that was what I wanted. It was too late to backtrack. I got the clarinet.”

Belbo looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. “You want to know if I dreamed about the trumpet again?’’

“I want to know,” I said, “what the Object of Desire was.”

“Ah,” he said, turning back to his manuscript. “You see? You’re obsessed by the Object of Desire, too. But it’s not all that simple...Suppose I had taken the trumpet. Would I have been truly happy then? What do you think, Casaubon?”

“I think you would have dreamed about the clarinet.”

“I got the clarinet,” he concluded sharply, “but I never played it.”

“Never played it? Or never dreamed it?”

“Played it,” he said, underlining his words, and for some reason I felt like a fool.

10

And finally nothing is cabalistically inferred from vinum save VIS NUMerorum, upon which numbers this Magia depends.

—Cesare della Riviera, Il Mondo Magico degli Eroi, Mantua, Osanna, 1603, pp. 65-66

But I was talking about my first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, had exchanged a few words at Pilade’s, but I didn’t know much about him, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but serious publisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at the university.

“And what do you do?” he asked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far end of the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He used the formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by the familiar tu, even students and professors, even the clientele at Pilade’s. “Tu—buy me a drink,” a student wearing a parka would say to the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was like Moscow in the days of young Shklovski. We were all Mayakovskis, not one Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but he used it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he was responding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyss between acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu with real affection only a few times, only to a few people: Dio-tallevi, one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people he respected but hadn’t known long. He addressed me formally the whole time we worked together, and I valued that.

“And what do you do?” he asked, with what I now know was friendliness.

“In real life or in this theater?” I said, nodding at