More by accident than by design, I took my twelve-year-old son to the Library of Inescapable Cacophony, which some call the Library of Babble (as a wry, off-key tribute to the late literary blind man). But our field trip proved helpful–yes, instructive–to us both, though I could not have imagined such an outcome upon our first stepping over its threshold.

My wife Libretta and I had named our son Palabro to heighten whatever verbal skills our DNA had provided him, but the boy had just shamed himself during a music program at his school. Although ostensibly only the narrator, at one sensitive point he pulled a yam-shaped ocarina from his jacket and blew three notes so piercing that the lenses of Head Mistress Adoba’s bifocals shattered and two members of the chorus suffered burst eardrums. Earlier that week, these same female students had spurned Palabro’s efforts to enlist them in an ocarina trio, so I secretly admired the skill with which he had directed his retributive notes.

No one, a friend of Palabro’s later testified, had ever before heard an ocarina attain such knifelike piquancy. Sadly, though, Señora Adoba summoned me from my editorial work at the Institute of Document Purification to take Palabro home and discipline him. She was too distraught to do it herself, and Libretta could not undertake this task because she had flown to the capitol to work on an epic opera about the life of the supreme maestra of Enigma del Sur, Angelina Otálora, who grew to adulthood here in Adivinanza, second largest city in our pocket homeland.

My punishment of the boy, I confess, consisted of haranguing him about the importance of the editorial work from which his misdeed had stolen me, and of taking him to La Casa Rosita for a lunch of yam fritters and marmalade-basted flounder.

(That would teach him.)

After our meal, we strolled to the greensward on which the Library of Inescapable Cacophony arises, a swatch of land where, only a year ago, skinny prisoners of war from Guacamayo tried out radical soccer strategies under the eyes of our Olympic coach, Robert Hansen, an ex-patriot Swede. This Library, which Señora Otálora meant as a rebuke to those institutions whose inhibiting SILENCIO signs had plagued her girlhood, startles me every time I see it–as would any structure whose design suggests a fusion of the Sydney Opera House and the copper-colored bells of three enormous Sousaphones. The fame of this facility has spread from little Enigma del Sur throughout Latin America (and beyond), but no one in our culture-loving family, despite Palabro’s many pleas to take him, had yet visited it. Libretta’s work keeps her away from Adivinanza months on end, and, frankly, I feared what I would find there.

What I feared, I feared with reason.

The Library of Babble immediately validates the aptness of its name, with flashing signs demanding NOISE–the colored bulbs around these signs sound tart xylophonic notes in dissonant runs–and with exuberant human noisemakers who stand astride pedestals, pose in galleries, or hold forth on stair landings. These folks include clamorous woodblock ensembles, dueling typists, and masked persons in tinfoil suits running about with petrol-powered leaf blowers.

This never-ending uproar occludes thought. It invades the aural cavities, flushing from them all reservoirs of coherency or peacefulness. One’s blood pressure soars. Migraines and a menacing sense of intellectual bankruptcy flood one’s being. The impulse to flee from such orchestrated cacophony–to press one’s skull between one’s palms and to scream like the anguished figure in the famous painting by Edvard Munch–assumes the weight of obligation and does not depart.

–Palabro, I tell my son. –We must go.

–No, Papá, no, he cries, grasping my elbow.

In rapid succession, he points out a tuba player turning a passage from Don Quixote into flatulent oom-pah-pahs; a woman in a blue silk bikini using a jackhammer on the fifth-floor gallery and dislodging an undulant talc-like mist of marble dust; a Masai warrior, with a ventriloquist figure very like an infant baboon, crooning a “duet” of “Bésame Mucho” in two distinct voices; a mixed foursome of New York gang-bangers tap-dancing on the garbage cans they wear as shoes; and a piglet, which a matron with a conflagration of red hair holds like a bagpipe, squealing “Amazing Grace” to the prompts of her expertly timed squeezes. That I can hear these disparately rackety phenomena at all derives, no doubt, from that focus I have learned as an editor at the Institute of Document Purification.

–How marvelous, Palabro shouts. –Why, Papá, have you never brought me here before?

Why, I ask myself, have I brought you today?

We head off into the stacks–at my instigation, for I hope that the banks upon banks of shelves, and their books and periodicals, will act as baffles and save me from a debilitating, if not wholly premature, deafness. It takes only moments to discover, though, that every book in this Library talks–indeed, babbles–and that I really cannot escape amid the stacks…or anywhere else, for that matter.

Palabro, bless him, expects fresh wonders in the stacks: self-propelled, whistling stools; shelves that rearrange themselves at a button push; wandering librarians who yodel, belch, or crepitate. (Of course, the boy now believes that he should get in trouble more often.)

The stacks have an annoying volubility that enchants him. He pulls out a book, cracks its open, and averts his face as a cardboard bandstand pops out and Slavic voices braying the lyrics of two-hundred-year-old polkas vie with the bleats, moos, and neighs issuing from a nearby wrongly shelved tome on animal husbandry.

Proctors in caps and bells sidle past prattling a gibberish in which they encourage us–as we deduce from their gestures–to contribute to the sonic pandemonium. They pantomime “gargling air.” They make crude noises by cramping their hands in their armpits. They whistle the themes of such classic Westerns as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And of course they vociferously rebuke silent patrons.

The most intransigent patrons, before ejection, receive noisemakers: juice harps, tissue paper and combs, maracas, castanets, and inflatable paper tongues that, when blown, unroll like miniature royal carpets.

–This is super! Palabro yells. –This is banshee-licious!

This is hell on Earth, I think.

My head is the size of a weather balloon. Stray phonemes ricochet inside my skull like accelerated particles of sleet or cholesterol. So far beneath the innate dignity of my age and station has all the perfidious ambient noise driven me that soon I will drop gibbering to my knees, like a teenybopper at a concert of iconic rock holograms.

–Palabro! I bark. –Enough! I can’t take any more!

At which point the hands of a ghostly marble Angel grasp my shoulders and a glassy dome or bell descends over my torso, seals itself about my waist, and hovers in the aisle for a timeless moment that leaves Palabro frozen before me like his own picture-perfect effigy.

Inside this dome with me, the Angel says:

–Fulgencio, the Library of Babble has a purpose other than to enmadden you. Do you believe this?

–Sí, I say.

–No, I correct myself.

–Ai, ai, ai, I wail in indescribable pain: a scarab in a bell jar dense with chloroform and hundreds of jangly echoes.

–The world teems, the Angel tells me. –It bulges not only with objects, but also with the noises they make. The Library of Babble, like every other, is a training ground. Do you understand?

–I understand, I lie.

The Angel–the image of Angelina Otálora–vanishes. The dome ascends. And Palabro awakens into his resilient self, shaking the maracas of his fists like a self-absorbed pop star.

I understand nada, or maybe a little more than nada: that the Library of Maestra Otálora is something smaller than a long-deferred payback but larger than an angry little girl’s joke.

Palabro–heedless, happily delirious–drags me from the stacks to the Library’s meeting rooms in a separate wing.

We visit a Poetry Slam, where people with mynah-bird puppets convert their personal muteness to a Joyful Noise. They rhyme in Finnish or Swahili or Esperanto or Penguin. They chant in Tagalog or Basque or Tamil or Lakota or Mongolian or in Bushman clicks reminiscent of the sounds of all the typing-pool fools on the stairwells and balconies.

We visit a Mock Oratory where people mock-pray and a Mock Parliament where people mock-debate, all at intolerable volume levels and ecstatic cross purposes.

In a Music Room we practice every kind of drum and every manner of electrified bagpipe, trumpet, trombone, flugelhorn, flute, dulcimer, guitar, sitar, banjo, and nail gun.

Meanwhile, my hearing deteriorates. Now, every noise tracks over me like hurricane surf or the interleaving brush fires of holocaust. Even Palabro will not escape our outing unscathed. A boy’s ears want tender treatment, for nothing larger than an elbow, or a jillion decibels, should ever cave-crawl their soft canals.

At length, I point to my ears and, by miming a five-seconds-into-the- future flop to the ground, show him that I can take no more. My body will buzz with fuzzy internal hums for weeks.

He not only sees what I have mimed, he empathizes. Indeed, he puts his arm through mine, leads me to the entrance of the Library of Babble, and guides me slowly down the Maya-temple-like grade of its endless front steps.

–Gracias, hijo mío, I tell him. –Muchísimas gracias.

–De nada, he replies.

I forgive him for shattering Señora Adoba’s bifocals and discomfiting the eardrums of the two haughty but otherwise innocent girls who refused to join his ocarina trio.

(Libretta will scold him more severely later.)

Exiting the Library, I understand that not much of the noise inside the extraordinary structure seeps out into the plaza. Granted, a low persistent drone hovers about it: a sound more like that of an air-conditioner in a tiny room than a ceaseless clatter of pots, pans, and colanders.

This discovery greatly heartens me.

–I know a secret, Palabro says, squeezing my hand.

–No fair to say so and then not to tell.

–The Library of Babble isn’t equal to the universe, Papá.

–I don’t believe I ever thought it was.

He ignores my demurral. –All the Libraries of Inescapable Cacophony in Enigma del Sur, taken together, don’t equal our universe. Nor, Papá, do they correspond to any universe on a slant to it.

–Ah.

–So we may visit the Library of Adivinanza with no fear of entering an inescapable labyrinth.

–How has one trip to this Racket Pit taught you so much?

Palabro grins. Rather than answer, he tugs me toward a pond far enough from the plaza that Silence fills the afternoon like fragile unscored music.

We sit on an iron bench beside the pond. In it lolls a ten-foot alligator of bronze and leather. In it, also, stands a red-winged heron on one filamentous leg. A stir of midges hovers over the shallows, and the insurgent Silence of this spot recharges my heart.

–Bless you, I tell my son.

Palabro produces his ocarina.

I recoil at the sight, but he puts it to his lips and coaxes from the yam-like toy a melody so fair–a medieval plainsong? a folk ballad of Enigma del Sur? an air from the mildest recesses of his soul?–that it tastes as sweet as late-spring oranges and soothes as would a soundless breeze.

Indeed, through his ocarina come Palabro’s vivid breaths and the notes of God’s harmonium.

How long my young son plays I cannot tell you. But not even Pan himself could pipe more hauntingly.

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Tomorrow morning, when I report for work, before any other I will purify this document.

–for our son Jamie, on whose notes this story is based