Library of Unrequited Love (4 page)

But I know lots of things, I could tell them how to do
their
jobs. One day, for instance, I allowed myself to make a little remark. Since I love Maupassant, I pointed out that the only books of his in the Literature section were his bestsellers:
Boule de Suif, Bel-Ami, Le Horla
. But all his other short stories and books,
Strong as Death, Mont-Oriol
, you can't find them at all, impossible. Same thing for Simone de Beauvoir. Everyone thinks she just wrote
The Second Sex
. Well, she wrote some other great books, excellent novels, but you won't find them up there. So I pointed out to the woman in charge of the ground floor that it was pointless buying bad translations of novels from Uzbekistan that nobody borrows unless you had bought up all the books and novels by Beauvoir and Maupassant, and you know what? She just laughed in my face. Yes, she laughed in my face. A crime against culture, that's what it was. Took me weeks to get over that. Especially since, you may not realize this, it took a really, really big effort to pluck up the courage to go and make that comment. Because I absolutely hate drawing attention to myself, I'm not a natural rebel. But when, for once, I
just took a small liberty, if you'd seen how she reacted, oh, it was a crime. I need to sit down, here, in Martin's armchair. Forgive me. I always sit here when I come over funny. It makes me feel better. I like this chair, it's comfy. No it's not his special place, it's just the one I'd
like
him to sit in, if he wanted to. But he always sits on his upright chair. Nothing distracts him from his studies. He's a serious student, and that's fine. So I sit down here, on my own, on these big fat cushions. When there' s nobody in here, I can even read a book. One of my favourite authors, you've already gathered that, is Guy de Maupassant. Now there's a man for you. Just imagine, he wrote two hundred and ninety short stories and seven novels in ten years. And then on Sundays, he went rowing on the Seine. A real force of nature, eh? He must have had terrific biceps and been fantastically intelligent. What a man, Maupassant, and he was a poet too. He started off by writing verse. I love his style. I have to admit, he was helped a lot by Flaubert in his youth, Flaubert was like a father to him. In Maupassant's stories you often find the expression
engourdissement
–
“numbness”. Not a word you see often today. But it's a good word to describe the exalted state of the soul, “numbness”. This armchair's so comfy, I could almost go to sleep here, this is where you should have been sleeping last night. Personally, I prefer early Maupassant to late Maupassant. Because his later novels are a touch sentimental, I have to say. He'd left the Naval Ministry where he was a civil servant and he'd started to be a successful writer. But going round salons and society hostesses, not all of them very reputable, prancing about, making money, that spoiled him. With his royalties, he bought a sailing boat, a Mediterranean yacht. Big mistake. The beginning of the end. Sailing's no good to anyone, whereas rowing is excellent for keeping fit. He started to fall ill, and he died at forty-three. And here, in this library, we don't even have his complete works. How shaming is that? Whereas Balzac, who was a mass-production writer, someone who pissed out prose, of course they've got the whole lot.
The Human Comedy
, oh, come on, the biggest confidence trick of the century. Balzac wrote to pay off his debts, everyone knows that.
Sometimes he put together some unpublished texts, changed the title, added a couple of chapters, and Bob's your uncle, off to the printers. I can't stand that sort of thing. And because I made that humble little remark, they'll never let me run the History section or even Literature, I'm sure of it. But they're wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, O.K., it's not as bad as all that. I'd rather be down here peacefully than have to spend my whole time working alongside the snobs upstairs. When I see the kind of books they have to put on display every day. The books that get published these days, well there's a bit of everything, but generally they're not worth reading. And if you spend your time with bad books, it doesn't improve your intelligence. So no surprises there. Have you never thought about it? What kind of literature is going to be produced in a society where there are no wars or epidemics or revolutions? I'll tell you what: badly written novels about nice girls and boys falling in love, who make each other suffer without meaning to, and spend all their time crying and saying they're sorry. Ridiculous. You should never say you're sorry. By the
way, I like you, because just now, when you were lying there fast asleep between the bookcases 930 and 940, although it's absolutely against the rules, I didn't have to listen to a lot of apologies from you. On the contrary, you started shouting at me, Very healthy. People apologize too much, everyone's afraid of giving offence and it leads to literature being written for babies. Lowbrow rubbish. That's not the way to become an adult. In September, when the autumn books come out, I see all these stupid titles invading the bookshops, and a few months later they're on the scrap heap. All the hundreds of books pouring off the presses, ninety-nine per cent of them they'd do better to use the paper for wrapping takeaways. And for libraries, it's a disaster. The worst ones are the books on instant history, current affairs: no sooner commissioned than written, printed, televised, bought, remaindered, then taken off the shelves and pulped. The publishers ought to put a sell-by date on them, because they're just consumer goods. No really, the annual crop of autumn books is not my cup of tea. But every September I have to go upstairs to help the
duchesses out. I obey. I can't let them down, after all. The readers besiege us every day for the latest books they've heard about the night before on the radio. They want them to be on the shelves right away. You have to resist, play for time. From all the just-published autumn books you have to select the handful worthy of gracing our shelves. It's a Herculean task. And harassing. And it doesn't really get done nowadays, no. Because I'm one of those people – although this attitude of mine has been sacrificed on the altar of cultural democratization – I'm one of those who think that it ought to be a sign of recognition for a book to be bought by a library. A distinction. An honour. And that it's up to the librarian to contribute something to the reader's culture by making a selection from the floods of new books. You have to defend yourself. These soppy sentimental novels ought to be cut out, that's what I say to Monsieur Pratier, cut right into the fat. I get on fine with Monsieur Pratier, he's my butcher, Gustave Pratier. No snobbery about him, no faffing about. The same way a butcher carves up a carcass to bring out the best cuts of meat, you have to
be prepared to get rid of the surplus. No more fat. No pity for bad books. When in doubt, chuck it out. That's my motto. But that kind of attitude is finished, over, I'm from the old school now. When you come into this library, what's the first thing you see? Kids wet behind the ears in front of the comic book shelves. And alongside them, Music. Just behind that, D.V.D.s, that's where cultural democracy has got us. It's not a library anymore, with silence reigning over shelves full of intelligence, it's a leisure centre where people come to amuse themselves. At the Ministry of Culture they lap it up, and on high the Head Librarian is perfectly happy. But you know what, Monsieur le Ministre, I've heard all your arguments: make the
médiathèque
a place of pleasure and conviviality in the very heart of the town. Make it less intimidating to go into a library. Blend culture and pleasure so that culture becomes pleasurable – and so on and so on. But it's phoney, all that, it's a lie, it's manipulation. Because culture
isn't
the same thing as pleasure. Culture calls for a permanent effort by the individual to escape the vile condition of an under-civilized primate. Look
what they do, they just borrow D.V.D.s, nothing but D.V.D.s. Do they even want to learn a little bit of truth about the world? No, they want to be entertained and distracted, and the zombies don't even remove their earphones. They hold out their reader's card at the lending desk just like they'd hold out a bank card to the cashier at the supermarket. If by any chance you suggest something to read, they look down at you as if they're from some superior planet. And these are the people we have to make the effort for? They just want to borrow D.V.D.s. Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against the cinema, I like going to the cinema on a date, not that it happens very often these days, but I appreciate it, especially if the date is well turned out and has sideburns. Arthur had sideburns, that's what undid me, but that's nothing to do with culture. In the evening they watch their D.V.D.s and I sit alone in front of the T.V., it's enough to make you weep … The fact is, Monsieur le Ministre, that you keep them entertained because you're afraid of them. Noise, noise, noise, never the silence of the book. We ought to react, do something, the minister
is deceiving you, you young folk, he knows perfectly well that people don't begin to foster thoughts of revolution when their ears are bombarded by noise, but in the murmuring silence of reading to oneself. But it's too late now. Our shelves are already retreating under their battering rams. Before long they'll create an even deeper level for me, a cellar, and on the ground floor they'll open a café. And on this level, why not a night club while they're at it? That would really bring in the crowds, Monsieur le Ministre. Just one more step to take: develop the hi-tech, expand the
videothèque
, and soon the
médiathèque
will be a
discothèque
, it's bound to happen! Ah, no, what am I saying, it's impossible, I'll never let it come to that. Forgive me if I'm getting worked up, but it's tough being in the minority. I feel like the Maginot Line of public reading. I feel so lonely sometimes, I don't know whether you understand what I'm saying. I doubt it. I'd really like to share all this with Martin. I don't know what his political opinions are. I know so little about him. The only time we had a more personal exchange, what you might call a conversation, was one Tuesday
in winter. I was at my desk. He was sitting at a table, where he'd been working for about half an hour. It was quiet. The sky was grey. I didn't have any coffee left. Then suddenly Martin put the cap back on his pen, closed his book, stood up and walked over to me, with his calm movements and his long legs. I saw him coming, I looked up at him (not too fast, not to let him think I had been waiting for him), he stopped at my desk, leaned forward slightly (I wonder why, perhaps he thinks I'm deaf), I could see his shirt close up, light-blue stripes, I even picked up a hint of aftershave, a very subtle one, he was right there and he asked, oh nothing much, but so politely put, and anyway it was
me
he asked, even though that morning my history colleague was there, in his soft voice he said: “Excuse me, Madame, but would it be possible to have a little more light?” I had the chance. There he was, standing at my desk. I needed to say something to make him register my existence, to find out something about him, to tell him something about me, and hear him speak again, since for once he was looking at me. So I said: “I can put the overhead
strip lighting on, but it makes a buzz.” I threw out this remark to test his taste a bit, to start a conversation – agreed it wasn't very brilliant, but he should have guessed I was flustered. But he just answered: “Oh that doesn't matter, but please, I would prefer more light.” And he went back to his seat. I was a bit disappointed. I've often thought about it since. I replay the scene in my head. I ask myself what I should have replied, what he would have said in return, and so on. Don't take this the wrong way, but it's a pity it was you and not Martin that got locked in my basement. If it had been Martin, we could have had highly intellectual conversations, lasting hours and hours, even if it meant ending up exhausted, drained, worn out … We would have had a really intelligent exchange. Well, that's not how it worked out. Since that brief conversation, on a December morning, I like winter better. Before, I used to dread it. Winter, you know, is always a bit special. During the really cold months, the library fills up with a lot of desperate people: the homeless, families with young children, dropouts with their plastic bags, it's a real refugee centre. You
see them feeling awkward, because they don't really know what to do in the reading room, but at home it's miserable and freezing cold. So our big attraction, on cold days, isn't our incunabula, or our evening lecture programme, nooooo … it's our central heating. Nice, reliable, comfortable central heating, November to April. It's our gas supply that draws in these wretched masses. They're not really readers. They wander about. To the magazine corner, then to Literature. They come down here so as not to be noticed. They pretend to read. They don't make a noise, they just look for some little spot and hope everyone will forget about them. Sometimes, if they land in an armchair, they drop off to sleep, poor things. I do feel a lot of sympathy for them. I call them the “central heating refugees”. Sometimes, like with you, I offer them some coffee. Only if they look clean. There are limits. My little refugees all disappear in the spring. Their places are taken by students stressed out about their exams. Not the same atmosphere. Much noisier. They come with their pals to revise their lecture notes and commandeer my tables. I have to keep a close eye on
them and often ask them to be quiet. Not speaking when you're in a group is unnatural, but it's part of learning to be civilized. Except for me. For me, not speaking comes naturally. Well, O.K., today it's different, because you're here, but otherwise, as a rule, I keep my mouth shut. Apart from the students, spring is usually a pretty quiet season. I get bored here with all my shelfmarks in the same place. It gets to me in the end. Sometimes the readers think we're being grumpy towards them. You have to understand us: who'd choose to come and shut themselves up under these neon lights and inside these plasterboard walls when the sun's just starting to send out the first timid rays of warmth and the grass is greening under the wind at lambing time, eh? I ask you. Only damned souls like us, the captives of culture, locked in our silo, who else would let themselves be locked in like this? You can't think how boring it can get. You fill out order slips, the students are revising, I peer up at the blue sky through the windows and think of Martin. In spring, I see much less of him. Not that I'm jealous, that's not the way I am, but something tells me he's