Invisible Traces · A Horror Story No. 15
Living Archive
Alex Moonn
For anyone who has ever felt a library look back.
Rio de Janeiro, November 1991. Paleographer Henrique Fausto Brandão walks down a staircase that appears on none of the National Library's floor plans, to Room 00-C, uncataloged holdings. What he wrote over the next two days ends up in Vienna, in the hands of the curator of his estate. It takes her six months to obtain the notebook and two more years to open it. She transcribes it without changing a single comma.
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It took me six months to obtain the notebook. Another two years to open it. In between, it waited in a drawer in the manuscripts section. I passed that drawer every day, and every day I put it off. I told myself this was scholarly caution. It was fear. The difference, I found, is only the name we give the same thing, depending on who is listening.
What follows is what he wrote across those two days. I have changed nothing. Not so much as a comma. He was explicit about that on the one page of the letter where the handwriting was still wholly his own, and at the time I took it for the raving of a finished man. Now I leave every mark where it lies, for the same reason I do not switch on the corridor light when I cross the archive before dawn. Not because I believe. Because I am no longer sure that disbelief will protect me.
English edition, available on Amazon.
