Love in a Bottle by Antal Szerb Page B

their divine smell of dust and their shamefaced air of not having been read for centuries. One or two of them had, to my precise knowledge, last been handled by thepoet laureate Southey in about 1830, the thought of which moved me deeply. Then the young man who sat beside me every day turned up. I was rather fond of this fellow. He seemed to me to be truly part of the atmosphere of the place, along with the great dome above our heads, the rings of shelves with their endless rows of books, and the silence, deeper and more intense than in a temple, in which the only sound was the constant rustling of paper. I settled myself down and began to read.
    Later I found myself browsing through the catalogues and wondering whether I might make Cynthia a gift of them too, or perhaps bestow them on Eileen, keeping only the letter ‘T’, to which I was so devoted, when I became aware of the same young man standing beside me and wanting a word. I had long intended doing the same myself, and had he been a woman I would surely have already done so, but I had been unable to overcome my shyness with other men. But I now saw that the great moment had come when a new friendship, one determined in some cloudy pre-existence, was about to be born.
    “Yes?” I said, and smiled obligingly.
    “Oh, sorry,” he said, and stammered a bit, in his confusion deploying one or two phrasal verbs incorrectly, but very politely for all that. “You’ve been using that book by Henry Thomas on the novels of Amadis de Gaula for two weeks now, and I need it rather urgently. Would it be a very great nuisance if you could let me have it for a couple of days?”
    “Not at all. But… you’re also working on Amadis?”
    “Oh, yes,” he replied, with that warm, deeply confiding and slightly myopic smile that only philologists can produce when talking about their subject. A tingle of comfortable recognition shot through my heart. I knew that this was the heaven-sent person I so much needed. Not because of Amadis de Gaula. What was Amadis to me, and what was I to him? But I was gazing at the one man to whom in 1930 Amadis still had something to say: a man over whose head the centuries of cold reason had passed without trace; a man who still had a feeling for the charming, ever surprising and truly heroic folly that had once been Europe.
    Meanwhile teatime had come round again, as it always does, and we went out, so rapt in our great discovery of each other that we cast not a glance at the old woman who fed the pigeons every morning in the gardens outside the Museum with a strange, erotic joy written all over her face. We made our way straight to the Bury Street tearoom and, as if by unspoken agreement, both ordered buttered crumpets with our tea, and gazed at one another in wonder and expectation.
    Amadis, the unparalleled knight, must have been turning in his grave. Whole decades, perhaps I should say centuries, must have passed since anyone had spoken about him at such length as we did that day. For a full three hundred years ungarlanded oblivion had squatted on his once-great novels. Now we summoned to memory that Spanish nobleman who called on a friend one day to find the whole family in mourning. “Amadis is no more,” declared his grieving host, and pointed to an open book, that great and challengingfolio whose disturbing sentences captured the dream of the centuries—the dream that has since been lost. We spoke of the wonderful names he gave his characters—Oriana, and Urganda la Discognue, and Galaor—and his countless fantastical islands set in the mystical Mediterranean Sea.
    I deeply regretted that I hadn’t had a chance to ask the young man’s name and nationality. I could tell that he wasn’t English, but his accent reminded me of no country I was familiar with. I was even sorrier that it was Friday, and that that afternoon I was going off with Cynthia for the weekend.
    In my transcendent mood I had nothing more for lunch than a couple of