Of course, I too had a first book—one I read with difficulty and with sweat on my brow. It happened long ago, in a time when I begged everyone around me to read to me. I wasn’t in school yet, and my family was made up of people fond of hurried reading. They especially liked to rattle off, at high speed, a sentence from whatever book they were reading, and none of them ever sat still. They always did something else at the same time, so I had to follow them through the whole house.
My grandmother read enormous books, from which a strip of red silk always hung. She was the one who fidgeted the most, and I could tell where she was by the fluttering ribbon that slipped out from between the pages. If she left her book on the balcony, it meant she had watered the flowers there and taken a reading break on the green sofa. And if I happened to find a small volume sprawled on the edge of a chair, usually with an ashtray beside it, I knew for sure my father was nearby.
Although it was difficult to convince them to read to me, they were very keen on storytelling. And that was rather annoying, because no one ever told a story the way it was written in the book. Each of them had ideas, embellishments, additions that tore my heart apart. Their lack of respect for the written word outraged me so much that I decided to learn to read.
At that time I had found a cardboard book with illustrations. The main character was Helga, whom I could see in flesh and bone, running through our living room or skipping rope on the path in front of the house. On each page there was a short text, with black letters like flickering eyes, giving me the impression they might change position at any moment.
Someone had read me that book—I think it was my father—but in great haste, barely glancing at the letters. This too felt insulting: from grandparents to parents, aunts, or passing relatives, all—without exception—lifted their eyes from the book while reading and looked at me, as if they were tricking me. I was absolutely convinced they weren’t telling everything, that they were skipping around, leaving out the very best parts.
So I began searching for the meaning of the written letters.
The page looked like a lemon custard.
I remember sitting on the couch with a pile of colored pencils beside me. I had pulled a book at random from the library. At the time, I detested writing in notebooks because most of them had lines, which made me feel like a dog on a leash. So I wrote in books, actually scribbled on the printed pages, as if the print were nothing more than a harmless background, a meaningless décor.
Shades of purple and lilac were my favorites. Whenever I received a box of colored pencils, I would immediately grab the purple one and sharpen it with passion.
So I chose a book from the library—a book I considered entirely insignificant, with pale blue covers—and on its cheap pages I drew firmly, with the soft tip of my lilac pencil, the imposing outline of the letter H.
It was the first letter, and the first mystery I ever solved.
With that sign, like a gate, began the book about Helga, whose name had entered my soul long before. I struggled endlessly to write it, and I still remember the uneven letters and the numerous attempts to fit the whole name on a single page. Naturally, on a page of that book I had chosen for my purple experiments. I was living the essential adventure of my life as a reader—through a labor so complicated that I can still feel its weight today.
I deciphered the entire story of Helga letter by letter. I traced the silhouette of each character over the grayish text of that sacrificial book, then drew next to it an object, or more often a person whose name began with that letter. And it wasn’t easy at all. Whenever I caught someone, I would interrogate them about the name of a letter and then check if I had already written it, flipping through the pages of the book, which by then had become a true masterpiece. Thickened letters, heads with bulging eyes and arched eyebrows, or cats made of two ovals reigned on every tiny page of the nameless book.
Over a long time—long as a dream—I managed to learn the names of all the signs in Helga’s book. And one winter afternoon, with sickly windows, I finally read it from beginning to end. It had four pages.
And when I closed it, a great sadness came over me—not because a mystery long warmed inside my mind had been consumed, but because I realized that I simply couldn’t enjoy the reading of my first book without bragging about it to the others, the very family whose negligence had pushed me to learn to read.
The following year I went to school, but only a year later did I begin to read books without pictures. By the end of third grade, I was already bored with so-called “immortal stories,” but I didn’t move on to other books until a June day forever fixed in my mind.
Vacation had begun a few days earlier, and I was rummaging through the peripheral rooms of the house when I came across an old desk. The room had two windows almost smothered by the crown of a linden tree, and whenever I entered it, I felt soft eyelids fluttering above me—those of some benevolent giants. The desk was pressed against the sill of one of the windows.
In a narrow compartment with a fragile little door, I found several coverless, tattered books, abandoned one atop the other. In our house, finished things were rarely thrown away, so there were many corners where battered hats, mismatched teacups, chests without hinges and other forgotten objects lay sleeping. Even the radio from the Second World War still sprawled on the console guarding the kitchen door.
As I crouched beside the old desk, with shimmering leaves at the window, I came across a thin, stained, coverless book that plunged straight into the story. On the first surviving page, someone recounted how, after putting on his best clothes, he boarded a ship. But hardly had they set sail when the sailors—who were in fact scoundrels—took his fine clothes, dressed him in rags, and tied him up, planning to sell him at the next port. Taking advantage of a good moment, the narrator—who was already becoming dear to me—undid his ropes and slipped into the sea. The shore wasn’t far, so he swam toward it and hid in an oak forest. But the sailors weren’t complete fools. As soon as they saw him climbing out of the water, they set out after him.
I was both curious and terribly afraid they might catch him. It was clear he would escape, since he lived to tell the tale, but the price of salvation varies. Who can rejoice for a victorious hero if he has endured so much misery that nothing remains of him but a rag fit for scrubbing pots? But precisely here—when the pursuers were closing in—there was a blot of black ink under which no words could be seen.
I turned the book around, and on its surviving spine I first noticed the number 118 and, above it, two black stars and a name I would never forget: Homer.
I looked again at the other books in the old desk. Another identical spine was visible, and after a while I realized it was the first volume of the same book. This one had survived intact. It was an edition from the “School Library” collection, and the title appeared clearly—a word that seemed to disperse over the forested shores where my narrator still hid. And the sound of that title still echoes in my mind exactly as it did on that June day when I encountered Homer’s Odyssey, in the prose translation by Eugen Lovinescu.
At the time, however, it was nothing more than a pale blue book in two pitiful volumes.
In the window, the linden leaves moved slowly, and from the dry floorboards arose a faint smell of roasted almonds. I opened the first volume and froze. On the cheap paper, above the tiny rows of words, coiled the purple lines of old letters and sprightly faces—the very first gateways through which I had entered the heart of a story. Even the H, which I had once considered a boundary, appeared there, strengthened by many lilac strokes, and beyond it pulsed, carefree, the Homeric Odyssey. Turning page after page, I remembered not only Helga’s story but the smaller tales that once formed the pedestal of each letter.
And from the high ceiling—and from beyond it, from the clear June sky—descended into my mind the gray dust of a boundless regret.
The thought that someone else might see the bulbous cats and deformed letters seemed criminal. I imagined myself setting fire to that innocent book just to erase the trace of my purple adventure.
But I did not get up, nor did I close the book. Beneath the old scribbles, the story of the fugitive beat on, from its beginnings, and my eyes could no longer part from the smoky letters and their seductively intertwined threads, leading into seas I had never yet imagined.
I remained beside the old desk, forgetting entirely about family and time. I had opened the purple gate, swept along into the adventure of a hero who felt like a brother. I was no longer competing with anyone, nor did I have anything to prove. In the immensity of the world, there was only him and me. Not even my mother’s voice calling me through the house, nor the sudden opening of the door, could make me lift my eyes from the page where, at last, the letters had shed their identity.
