The Conversion Read Online Free PDF Page B

dark splendor in which I am on my way to collect Ed’s ashes from acrematorium. And as I try to find my way through a warren of streets, I’m carrying a burden of depression, the yoke of a man who has always been single and solitary,
célibataire
, as the French say. In these dreams I feel so dejected by the death of my friend that I thrash and flail and often wake up with my head at the foot of my bed.
    Now it’s late at night and a throaty chanteuse is singing American hit songs from the seventies and eighties: “You are the sunshine of my life”; “I want to make it with you.” I smell attar of roses and deep spice. Once again, there seem to be intruders in my room, and I cry out.
    “
Ma è una camera privata
(But this is a bedroom),” a woman exclaims to her companion, who says, “
Ah, scusi, Signore. Non lo sapevamo
(We didn’t know).”
    “Didn’t you see the do-not-disturb sign on my bedroom door?” I shout at them.
    “We were looking for a place to make love,” the man admits candidly.
    These straggling guests have ventured where they don’t belong. On the way here from France, Marina explained that although there were many grander villas in Tuscany, Villa Guidi’s common rooms are extraordinarily large, which makes it prized for weddings and corporate functions. She rents it out and conducts a bustling business. During my stay there already have been two large and raucous affairs. Lying there, listening to the din of voices and the cover tunes, the revelry in full swing, I somehow manage to fall asleep again.
    And awaken, but now to the sounds of a chain saw. I’ve cycled back into daylight, but it’s hard to know precisely what time it is. The villa is hunkered down for siesta, and my wooden shutters, opened by the housekeeper very early in the morning, are closed once again around noon to ward off the late-summer heat. I’ve been staring up at the high coffered ceiling of carved circles and hexagons and now get out of bed and throw open the shuttered window. The sky is an untarnished azure, the lawns stretching toward the tall stone walls surrounding the property are freshly mown, and Marina’s young, angelic-looking Polish groundskeeper is hacking away at the limbs of a fallen tree. There is a smell of freshly sawed wood and burning fires. Intent on staying awake, I keep the shutters open and instinctively move to the densely packed bookshelves lining an entire wall. I find literature in five languages including poetry, biographies and political texts. I notice the short novels of Mario Soldati and my favoriteItalian novel of all time,
La Coscienza di Zeno
, by Italo Svevo. Then I discover an entire shelf filled with editions of the
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade
.
    Pléiade books are printed by the great French publisher, Gallimard, leather-bound volumes decorated with gold leaf, onion-thin pages that I consider to be the most beautiful mass-produced books in the world. The volumes are dedicated to the “stars” of world literature, showcasing in the splendor of high production values a renowned author’s greatest works. Owning a library full of Pléiade editions is something that I’ve always dreamed of, despite the fact that my French still lags substantially behind my Italian. Michel had quite the collection.
    I tentatively approach the sacred volumes. I crack a few, setting off flares of dust and a delicious crunching of leather spines and parchment: a sort of literary chiropractic. Here are some of my favorite authors: Musil, Voltaire, Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Rousseau, Sartre, Proust, and even Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis. The Pléiade is proof, I tell myself, that when the author dies, his words continue a life of their own. I used to dream of literary life after death for myself until I learned that it was possible that one’s work could be completely ignored; then I began to say to myself, “What does it matter, anyway?”
    But of course things mattered greatly when it came to