But when the door opened, it admitted two men: my host and a bespectacled, moonfaced person with cropped red hair: leaning his limp, seemingly boneless body on a walking stick, he scrutinized me from the threshold through his round lenses.

“Das,” our host introduced him.

I said my name.

After Das, a third person appeared: a wiry little man the muscles of whose clenched jaws twitched under needlelike eyes, with a thin crack for a mouth. Our host turned to face him.

“Ah, Tyd.”

“Yes, Zez.”

Noticing the puzzled look in my eyes, the one called Zez burst out laughing.

“After our conversation, you’ll understand that writers’ names have no place here.” He stressed the last word. “Let them remain on title pages: instead every member of the brotherhood is given a ‘nonsense syllable.’ A certain learned professor Ebbinghaus,* while researching the laws of memory, relied on what he called ‘nonsense syllables’: he took any vowel and placed a consonant either side; from the series of syllables created in this way, he discarded those with even a hint of meaning: the rest he used to study the memorization process, we use them more for … Well, I needn’t go into it. But where are the other conceivers? It’s time.”

As if in reply, there was a knock at the door. Two men entered: Hig and Mov. After a bit, one more appeared, wheezing asthmatically and wiping away sweat: his sobriquet was Fev. Only one armchair remained empty. Finally, the last man entered: he had a softly delineated profile with a steep brow.

“You’re late, Rar,” the president greeted him. Rar raised his eyes, their look was remote and faraway.

2

FOR A MINUTE there was silence. Everyone watched as Mov, squatting down, made a fire in the grate. Following his movements, the slowness of which recalled the performance of a ritual, I was able to study him: he was considerably younger than the rest; the glints soon dancing on his face picked out the capricious line of a striking mouth and keenly quivering nostrils. When the crackling wood had begun to hiss, the president picked up the cast-iron tongs and banged them against the logs. “Attention. The seventy-third Saturday of the Letter Killers Club is now open.” Then, prolonging the ritual, he walked slowly to the door: click-click. The key’s steel bit gleamed in Zez’s outstretched hand. “Rar: the key and the floor.”

After a pause Rar said, “My conception is in four acts. Title: Actus Morbi[1].”

The president craned forward.

“Beg pardon. Is it a play?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. You always go against Club tradition. I think you do it on purpose. To dramatize is to vulgarize. A conception intended for the stage is pale and insufficiently … fertilized. You always try to slip out through the keyhole—and away: from the embers in the grate to the footlights across a stage. Beware the footlights! Then again, we are your listeners.”

The face of the man who had begun his story showed no emotion. Interrupted, he calmly heard the tirade out and went on: “Shakespeare’s famous character who asks if his soul is easier to be played on than a pipe* later flings the pipe away, but leaves his soul. For me. Still, there is a certain similarity here: to make a recorder sound its lowest note, one must stop all its vents, all its windows on the world; to pluck out the depths of a soul, one must also close all its windows, all its outlets to the world. This, my play attempts to do; I should tell you that my Actus Morbi is not in so many acts, but (in the spirit of the language favored by Hamlet) in so many ‘positions.’

“Now, about the molding of my characters. In Hamlet there is a double character that has long intrigued me, one reminiscent of an organic cell that has split into two not entirely separate daughter cells, as biologists call them. I mean Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, beings impossible to imagine apart, one without the other, who are—in essence—one role copied into two notebooks.