• • •
There are only two ways he could have obtained a single plate from a manuscript this old. He cut it out of the book himself, I bet. No stranger Arthur Petrook to this and other profitable mutilations.
• • •
How can I say such things? What do I know about it? It’s not like he’s got the knife in his hand right now.
It’s something else, that sharp glint, something else altogether.
• • •
Anyway, that’s no business of mine. Look away, look away.
• • •
And find, in the corner, behind a narrow door surrounded by stacks of crates, the stairway leading up to my grandfather’s lodgings.
Like the shop itself, this stairway, dim and airless, is choked with objects—papers, books, boxes, terra-cotta heads, grimy textiles—that almost completely occlude the passage up. It is very like a burrow, dug with tooth and claw by some eager, gnawing mammal. At the top is a landing piled with carpet samples, and a door with a card upon it that reads: PROF. F. GIRARD. Behind the door: a dim, low-ceilinged room, antechamber to the warren, carpets rolled and leaning against the wall, large packing crates, some with the lids pried off, from which protrude rocks and bones partially wrapped in old newspapers. In one corner hangs the skeleton, strung together with wires, of some kind of ape, orang-utan, perhaps, how should I know, this is not my area of specialty; in another corner, a stuffed vulture, the feathers grown patchy with mange—El Galliñazo this is, wattled, beloved companion of my mother’s childhood. The collection continues into the adjoining corridor; here are shelves crowded with seashells and birds’ eggs and butterflies of great beauty, side by side with glass jars containing dark things pickled in brine, all kinds of things: fish, insects, tree tumors, parasitical worms; here again a box in which somebody has mounted, perfectly, an exquisite set of colorful dried beetles with enormous mandibles, like something from a dream; there, anemones and hydras in fluid, indifferently prepared, poorly preserved, hardly worth keeping, but kept nonetheless. Stinking, in the heat.
• • •
My grandmother, Marie-Louise Girard, has already left my grandfather by now. By ’41 she’s returned to her father’s house in Paris. Very soon she will remarry. This, perhaps, explains the state of my grandfather’s lodgings. Or does the state of his lodgings explain her departure? And anyway, the house doesn’t belong to my grandfather; it belongs to the one downstairs, him with the cutting eye and edge, Petrook. My grandfather is a kind of employee, a procurer, who, by supplying Petrook with antiquities and curiosities from foreign lands, obtains a favorable deal on the rent.
• • •
I imagine the two of them, Petrook and my grandfather, as two vultures sitting side by side on a single branch, each guarding his pile of decaying treasure, pecking and squabbling, biting and squawking, eating, shitting, shedding, scratching, as vultures will do.
Really, though, it’s more complicated than that. The households Girard and Petrook are intimately entwined in a cheerless roundelay all their own, one that will prove unfortunate for my grandfather (and my mother) in the long run.
Little wonder my grandmother left this place. Who could blame her?
• • •
To think I’ve put my father in here.
• • •
It’s all right. I’ll let him out soon. And anyway, he feels at home. He’s in the study, safe and warm. Like part of the collection.
It’s hard to see him really, it’s so dark, the room so crowded, with books (both on shelves and in stacks, rising up like stalagmites from the floor and from the surfaces, nearly submerged, of a drowning desk and a few weary armchairs, paddling for their lives among the debris), as well as with rolled-up carpets smelling of incense and cloves, with grimacing carved stone heads of Central American origin, and with the ubiquitous specimens, swimming in their bottles of murk.