As I had an obliging assistant at my disposal, I instructed her to find copies of catechisms and schoolbooks currently used for religious instruction and to write me a summary of each one. Isabella did not dispute my orders, but she frowned when I gave them.
“I want to know, in numbing detail, how children are taught the whole business, from Noah’s Ark to the Feeding of the Five Thousand,” I explained.
“Why?”
“Because that’s the way I am. I have a wide range of interests.”
“Are you doing research for a new version of ‘Away in a Manger’?”
“No. I’m planning a novel about the adventures of a second lieutenant nun. Just do as I say and don’t question me or I’ll send you back to your parents’ shop to sell quince jelly galore.”
“You’re a despot.”
“I’m glad to see we’re getting to know each other.”
“Does this have anything to do with the book you’re writing for that publisher, Corelli?”
“It might.”
“Well, I get the feeling it’s not a book that will have much commercial appeal.”
“And what would you know?”
“More than you think. And there’s no need to get so worked up, either. I’m only trying to help you. Or have you decided to stop being a professional writer and change into an elegant amateur?”
“For the moment I’m too busy being a nanny.”
“I wouldn’t bring up the question of who is the nanny here, because I’d win that debate hands down.”
“So what debate does Your Excellency fancy?”
“Commercial art versus stupid moral idiocies.”
“Dear Isabella, my little Vesuvia, in commercial art—and all art that is worthy of the name is commercial sooner or later—stupidity is almost always in the eye of the beholder.”
“Are you calling me stupid?”
“I’m calling you to order. Do as I say. And shush.”
I pointed to the door and Isabella rolled her eyes, mumbling some insult or other that I didn’t quite hear as she walked off down the passageway.
…
While Isabella went around schools and bookshops in search of textbooks and catechisms to summarize for me, I went back to the library in Calle del Carmen to further my theological education, an endeavor I undertook fueled by strong doses of coffee and stoicism. The first seven days of that strange creative process enlightened me only with more doubts. One of the few truths I discovered was that, although the vast majority of authors who felt a calling to write about the divine, the human, and the sacred must have been exceedingly learned and pious, as writers they were dreadful. For the long-suffering reader forced to skim their pages it was a real struggle not to fall into a coma induced by boredom with each new paragraph.
After surviving thousands of pages, I was beginning to get the impression that the hundreds of religious beliefs cataloged throughout the history of the printed letter were extraordinarily similar. I attributed this first impression to my ignorance or to a lack of adequate information, but I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that I’d been going through the story lines of dozens of crime novels in which the murderer turned out to be either one person or another but the mechanics of the plot were, in essence, always the same. Myths and legends, either about divinities or about the origins and history of peoples and races, began to look like the images of a jigsaw puzzle, slightly different from one another but always constructed with the same pieces, though not in identical configurations.
After two days I had already become friends with Eulalia, the head librarian, who picked out texts and volumes from the ocean of paper in her care and from time to time came to see me at my table in the corner to ask whether I needed anything else. She must have been around my age and had wit to spare, generally expressed as sharp, somewhat poisonous jibes.
“You’re reading a lot of hagiography, sir. Have you decided to become an altar boy now, at the threshold of maturity?”
“It’s only research.”
“Ah, that’s what they all say.”
The librarian’s clever jokes provided an invaluable balm that enabled me to survive those texts that seemed to be carved in stone and to press on with my pilgrimage. Whenever Eulalia had a free moment she would come over to my table and help me classify all that bilge—pages abounding with stories of fathers and sons, of pure, saintly mothers, betrayals and conversions, prophets and martyrs, envoys from heaven, babies born to save the universe, evil creatures horrifying to look at and usually taking the form of animals, ethereal beings with racially acceptable features who acted as agents of good, and heroes subjected to terrible tests to prove their destiny. Earthly existence was always perceived as a temporary rite of passage that urged one to a docile acceptance of one’s lot and the rules of the tribe, because the reward was always in the hereafter, a paradise brimming with all the things one had lacked in corporeal life.
On Thursday at midday, Eulalia came over to my table during one of her breaks and asked me whether, besides reading missals, I ate every now and then. So I asked her to lunch at nearby Casa Leopoldo, which had just opened to the public. While we enjoyed a delicious oxtail stew, she told me she’d been in the job for over two years and had spent two more years working on a novel that was proving difficult to finish. It was set in the library on Calle del Carmen and the plot was based on a series of mysterious crimes that took place there.