[ F I C T I O N ]

As the Waters Fail from the Sea

There is no great difficulty in keeping books free from dust. My father knows this better than I do. You just need a brush and some patience. But you would not suspect it by looking at his bookstore; you would imagine that there must exist an abstruse method available exclusively to the rare book and manuscript libraries of the world.
We’ve discussed the matter, and he obstinately clings to an eccentric aesthetic theory (one of many), in which the categories of beauty and ugliness are substituted with those of old and new. Even if I believe it to be destitute of weight, similar to untold other caprices born from the minds of cranks, it has its charm. The exposition came when I first began helping him out.
“Why do you let so much dust gather?”
“It becomes books.”
“What?”
“It is their baptism. A memento of their endurance and hope. They are no longer an idea, an idle lightning, but the solid incursion of soul.”
“That seems quite the high-flown rationalization of laziness.”
“Let me use your irony to exemplify a larger meaning. Irony is the province of youth—of the new; sincerity, the province of age—of the old. One cannot bother finding its way out of self-imposed urbanity; the other moves and takes pride in its vigor. One corrodes; the other galvanizes. And so it is with all: polish and dust, reason and emotion, thought and action.”
While the theory itself lacks consistency, it is not so with my father’s devotion to it. He is scrupulous. All the bookshelves are made of English oak, and most are Victorian—a pattern that reigns over the rest of the furniture. Perhaps half of his earnings have gone into the practice of his theory. A small space, therefore, is natural. Yet I am sometimes impressed by my father’s craft. When you enter the bookstore, you are reminded of Rembrandt’s sparse luxuriance. And within you can almost feel a glimmer of reverence. Obstinacy is old, he would say.
Used books are a declining commodity. Hence, the customers are easily typecast. The great majority arises from the ashes of would-be sellers, people who believe buying a book beforehand might help their case. But it is habitually a lost one: here they come, with a truck full of inherited encyclopedias, assuming that even if they find them useless, there must be others who will rejoice. “A man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” A tacit adage that, as all the rest, does not quite fit reality. It is my duty to disappoint them. I had a hard time before I settled into my father’s curt words. I would try consolation, advice, small talk. It meant little. “No one is buying; better to donate.” The only sellers we are really interested in are the deserters, people who once thought philosophy or literature would make their lives soar into the metaphysical realm, failing to understand it was all a teenage romance.
My father has bought from them first-rate volumes: Traill’s The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Waller & Glover’s The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon. Though he says they will do the store good, I glean from the assigned prices there is no real interest in parting with them. Moreover, he reserves for them a neoclassical glass-door bookcase. I have long thought of it as his canon. How could it not be? It permeates his whole life: his manners, his diction, his motions, his temperament. You can see Carlyle and Hazlitt in his incoherent passion, Johnson and Tolstoy in his zealous earnestness, Emerson and Melville in his prolix mysticism, James and Hume in his pluralistic view of the universe, de Bury in his handling of books. We also have the vagrant parents, who notice a bookshelf and presume its contents the Library of Babel. They can be insistent but lose heart with ease whenever you explain the nature of the finite. A radical departure from those who come looking for popular books. The most stubborn of all, they must be treated furtively, since my father makes it a duty to heap scorn on them. Once more, the consistency in act is praiseworthy, though I cringe at his self-righteous harangues.
Accordingly, as the years go by, fewer and fewer casual readers dare tread this inauspicious corner. The privilege, if you feel in the elitist mood, goes to the great minority, comprised of people as sour and idiosyncratic as my father. They roam the bookstore for hours, turn the dust into creases, and absent-mindedly listen to him, who becomes expansive in their vicinity. Indeed, there is something cheerless about the affair: this reserved old man, elsewhen tight-lipped, judges these instants adequate to bare his soul. The one reason I have refrained from intervening is that he somehow ascends then. With the scraps he receives as answers he constructs evanescent cenotaphs to his heroes. He seems awake.
Thus it is that in a very real sense my father is alone. He has driven my mother away through his unremitting criticisms, which suggest he hoped for a sparring partner. He has driven me away through his sealed deportment, which suggests he hoped for a locum tenens. I have dreamt that the bookstore burns and he escapes, suddenly in the clutches of an epiphany: it all builds up to a barrier, nothing else. He knows where I stand—I will not carry the torch. Nor do I believe others will. He knows this. And a decision seems to have been reached.
Opening the front door has grown difficult. A pile of books that months ago made no difference now accounts for the blockage. My father, characteristically, has little to say. “Leave them alone.” It may be an aesthetic choice, another brush-stroke that adds a strange distinction, akin to the sky’s borders in Rembrandt’s Mill. It may be a form of study that facilitates his wild flights. Or perhaps it is an inconvenience born from necessity. Or even a promise of change. I am inclined to maintain a bracing tide of speculations, but I must resist, for the truth is there, pristine and unapologetic: the door will cease to open; the tomb is finished.

Israel A. Bonilla lives in Guadalajara, Jalisco. His work has appeared in Able Muse, Firmament, Exacting Clam, New World Writing, En Bloc, BULL, Hawk & Whippoorwill, King Ludd's Rag, Damnation, and elsewhere. His debut micro-chapbook, Landscapes, is part of Ghost City Press’s 2021 Summer Series.

Israel A. BonillaFebruary 11, 2022