Free A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel

of ice-cream and red-fruit compote
(Rote Grütze)
. The waitress, an East German woman in an embroidered white apron, trips against a chair and the cup falls on the stones. Catching the supervisor’s eye, she apologizes in a panic and goes down on all fours to clean up the red mess.
    In Münster Cathedral, bombed by the Allies, a stone from Coventry Cathedral, “destroyed 4 Nov. 1940,” and the notice “Forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.” I find in this an almost malicious irony, with a feeling of boasting on either side.
    George Meredith in
Modern Love:
    ’Tis morning: but no morning can restore
What we have forfeited. I see no sin:
The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within
.
SUNDAY
    Last Thursday, in Munich, at the Literaturhaus, I saw an exhibition of photographs of actors taken from many different performances; the ensemble of faces creates a new performance. The different arrangement of facts forms a new pattern, a new story, a new theory (if this were a detective story) of what really happened.
    In a detective story, often the assumption is that anyone can be the murderer.
    This morning, crossing the country by train: the wonderful German forests, so like the pictures in my fairy-tale books. Then the thought: through these forests, hunted prisoners ran.
AFTERNOON
    Berlin. Most German cities have an asepticized look that other cities (London, for instance) never have. This is, nodoubt, due to the eye of the outsider, who, like Watson, never sees beyond appearances. This week, everywhere I go, I see a series of posters announcing a new campaign against drugs, and even the addicts depicted on the posters look scrubbed and neat.
    In my late teens and early twenties I believed that, at any moment, someone would see through my appearance and discover all my secrets. I was afraid that, under the right scrutiny, even my thoughts would not remain hidden for long, and that the keen observer, like a shrewd detective, would know that I was guilty of all sorts of forbidden things.
    The first time I took LSD was in a cheap London hotel with three other people, one of them our high-school monitor from Buenos Aires. This was 1969 or 1970; I was twenty-one or twenty-two, and I had no definable expectations about the experience to come. I had read Huxley and Castañeda, but (as so often in those days) found it impossible to imagine that the literary experience of others might convincingly match my own. What took place on the page unfolded in a separate time, to which, yes, I had access, but as to a parallel universe, truer and more lasting than the one ruled by concerns of money, food, health, sex and the heart. So when the monitor suggested we all take the tiny blue pills he had with him, I said yes, of course, without anyinclination to compare what was to come with what I had read a long time ago.
    But if the obvious books were not on my mind at the time, others fell open unbidden. Perhaps the distribution of comfit-like pills, the round Dodo eyes of my monitor, the street-name of the hotel (Lewis), the contradictory sensation of falling and floating, made me think of another fall and of other adventures, and I started scribbling in a large blue onion-paper notepad thoughts about
Alice in Wonderland
that appeared momentous then, and now read as banal, when not incomprehensible. On the seventh page, after noting something illegible about ceilings and the rhythm of my lungs, I wrote, as a sudden illumination with no reference to Alice,
THE SIGN OF 4!!!
in large block letters.
    I first read the Sherlock Holmes stories in a rented summer house in Mar del Plata, on the Atlantic coast south of Buenos Aires, one book after another, unable to stop. I’m not certain what charmed me then; not the plots, since El Séptimo Círculo, the detective series edited by Borges and Bioy, offered far more intriguing puzzles and original solutions;