“Well, because he’s a typical Mexican intellectual, his main concern is getting by,” said Amalfitano.

“Isn’t that the main concern of all Latin American intellectuals?” asked Pelletier.

“I wouldn’t say that. Some of them are more interested in writing, for example,” said Amalfitano.

“Tell us what you mean,” said Espinoza.

“I don’t really know how to explain it,” said Amalfitano. “It’s an old story, the relationship of Mexican intellectuals with power. I’m not saying they’re all the same. There are some notable exceptions. Nor am I saying that those who surrender do so in bad faith. Or even that they surrender completely. You could say it’s just a job. But they’re working for the state. In Europe, intellectuals work for publishing houses or for the papers or their wives support them or their parents are well-off and give them a monthly allowance or they’re laborers or criminals and they make an honest living from their jobs. In Mexico, and this might be true across Latin America, except in Argentina, intellectuals work for the state. It was like that under the PRI and it’ll be the same under the PAN. The intellectual himself may be a passionate defender of the state or a critic of the state. The state doesn’t care. The state feeds him and watches over him in silence. And it puts this giant cohort of essentially useless writers to use. How? It exorcises demons, it alters the national climate or at least tries to sway it. It adds layers of lime to a pit that may or may not exist, no one knows for sure. Not that it’s always this way, of course. An intellectual can work at the university, or, better, go to work for an American university, where the literature departments are just as bad as in Mexico, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get a late-night call from someone speaking in the name of the state, someone who offers them a better job, better pay, something the intellectual thinks he deserves, and intellectuals always think they deserve better. This mechanism somehow crops the ears off Mexican writers. It drives them insane. Some, for example, will set out to translate Japanese poetry without knowing Japanese and others just spend their time drinking. Take Almendro—as far as I know he does both. Literature in Mexico is like a nursery school, a kindergarten, a playground, a kiddie club, if you follow me. The weather is good, it’s sunny, you can go out and sit in the park and open a book by Valéry, possibly the writer most read by Mexican writers, and then you go over to a friend’s house and talk. And yet your shadow isn’t following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don’t notice, but you have, you’re missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent, wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily, forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it. The stage is really a proscenium and upstage there’s an enormous tube, something like a mine shaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let’s call it a cave. But a mine works, too. From the opening of the mine come unintelligible noises. Onomatopoeic noises, syllables of rage or of seduction or of seductive rage or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one sees, really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of light and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it’s the shape of something. The other spectators can’t see anything beyond the proscenium, and it’s fair to say they’d rather not. Meanwhile, the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads, they can’t see anything. They only hear the sounds that come from deep in the mine. And they translate or reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they sense a hurricane, they try to be eloquent where they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there’s only a deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they’re incapable of imagining an animal of colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal. Meanwhile, the stage on which they work is very pretty, very well designed, very charming, but it grows smaller and smaller with the passage of time. This shrinking of the stage doesn’t spoil it in any way. It simply gets smaller and smaller and the hall gets smaller too, and naturally there are fewer and fewer people watching. Next to this stage there are others, of course. New stages that have sprung up over time. There’s the painting stage, which is enormous, and the audience is tiny, though all elegant, for lack of a better word. There’s the film stage and the television stage. Here the capacity is huge, the hall is always full, and year after year the proscenium grows by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the performers from the stage where the intellectuals give their talks are invited to perform on the television stage. On this stage the opening of the mine is the same, the perspective slightly altered, although maybe the camouflage is denser and, paradoxically, bespeaks a mysterious sense of humor, but it still stinks. This humorous camouflage, naturally, lends itself to many interpretations, which are finally reduced to two for the public’s convenience or for the convenience of the public’s collective eye. Sometimes intellectuals take up permanent residence on the television proscenium. The roars keep coming from the opening of the mine and the intellectuals keep misinterpreting them. In fact, they, in theory the masters of language, can’t even enrich it themselves. Their best words are borrowings that they hear spoken by the spectators in the front row. These spectators are called flagellants. They’re sick, and from time to time they invent hideous words and there’s a spike in their mortality rate. When the workday ends the theaters are closed and they cover the openings of the mines with big sheets of steel. The intellectuals retire for the night. The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible. Songs can be heard in some bars, the notes reaching the street. Sometimes an intellectual wanders off course and goes into one of these places and drinks mezcal. Then he thinks what would happen if one day he. But no. He doesn’t think anything. He just drinks and sings. Sometimes he thinks he sees a legendary German writer. But all he’s really seen is a shadow, sometimes all he’s seen is his own shadow, which comes home every night so that the intellectual won’t burst or hang himself from the lintel. But he swears he’s seen a German writer and his own happiness, his sense of order, his bustle, his spirit of revelry rest on that conviction. The next morning it’s nice out. The sun shoots sparks but doesn’t burn. A person can go out reasonably relaxed, with his shadow on his heels, and stop in a park and read a few pages of Valéry. And so on until the end.”

“I don’t understand a word you’ve said,” said Norton.

“Really I’ve just been talking nonsense,” said Amalfitano. (2666)

“Statistically speaking, there isn’t a single German born in 1920 who hasn’t changed addresses at least once in his life,” said Pelletier. (2666)

When the critics, much more kindly disposed toward him now, asked what he was doing in Argentina in 1974, Amalfitano looked at them and then at his margarita and said, as if he had repeated it many times, that in 1974 he was in Argentina because of the coup in Chile, which had obliged him to choose the path of exile. And then he apologized for expressing himself so grandiloquently. Everything becomes a habit, he said, but none of the critics paid much attention to this last remark.

“Exile must be a terrible thing,” said Norton sympathetically.

“Actually,” said Amalfitano, “now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate.”

“But exile,” said Pelletier, “is full of inconveniences, of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and interfere with anything you try to do that’s important.”

“That’s just what I mean by abolishing fate,” said Amalfitano. “But again, I beg your pardon.” (2666)

That night the three critics went to bed on the early side. Pelletier dreamed of his toilet. A muffled noise woke him and he got up naked and saw from under the door that someone had turned on the bathroom light. At first he thought it was Norton, even Espinoza, but as he came closer he knew it couldn’t be either of them. When he opened the door the bathroom was empty. On the floor he saw big smears of blood. The bathtub and the shower curtain were crusted with a substance that wasn’t entirely dry yet and that Pelletier at first thought was mud or vomit, but which he soon discovered was shit. He was much more revolted by the shit than frightened by the blood. As he began to retch he woke up.

Espinoza dreamed about the painting of the desert. In the dream Espinoza sat up in bed, and from there, as if watching TV on a screen more than five feet square, he could see the still, bright desert, such a solar yellow it hurt his eyes, and the figures on horseback, whose movements—the movements of horses and riders—were barely perceptible, as if they were living in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched the painting from losing his mind. And then there were the voices. Espinoza listened to them. Barely audible voices, at first only syllables, brief moans shooting like meteorites over the desert and the framed space of the hotel room and the dream. He recognized a few stray words. Quickness, urgency, speed, agility. The words tunneled through the rarefied air of the room like virulent roots through dead flesh. Our culture, said a voice. Our freedom. The word freedom sounded to Espinoza like the crack of a whip in an empty classroom. He woke up in a sweat.

In Norton’s dream she saw herself reflected in both mirrors. From the front in one and from the back in the other. Her body was slightly aslant. It was impossible to say for sure whether she was about to move forward or backward. The light in the room was dim and uncertain, like the light of an English dusk. No lamp was lit. Her image in the mirrors was dressed to go out, in a tailored gray suit and, oddly, since Norton hardly ever wore such things, a little gray hat that brought to mind the fashion pages of the fifties. She was probably wearing black pumps, although they weren’t visible. The stillness of her body, something reminiscent of inertia and also of defenselessness, made her wonder, nevertheless, what she was waiting for to leave, what signal she was waiting for before she stepped out of the field between the watching mirrors and opened the door and disappeared. Had she heard a noise in the hall? Had someone passing by tried to open her door? A confused hotel guest? A worker, someone sent up by reception, a chambermaid? And yet the silence was total, and there was a certain calm about it, the calm of long early-evening silences. All at once Norton realized that the woman reflected in the mirror wasn’t her. She felt afraid and curious, and she didn’t move, watching the figure in the mirror even more carefully, if possible. Objectively, she said to herself, she looks just like me and there’s no reason why I should think otherwise. She’s me. But then she looked at the woman’s neck: a vein, swollen as if to bursting, ran down from her ear and vanished at the shoulder blade. A vein that didn’t seem real, that seemed drawn on. Then Norton thought: I have to get out of here. And she scanned the room, trying to pinpoint the exact spot where the woman was, but it was impossible to see her. In order for her to be reflected in both mirrors, she said to herself, she must be just between the little entryway and the room. But she couldn’t see her. When she watched her in the mirrors she noticed a change. The woman’s head was turning almost imperceptibly. I’m being reflected in the mirrors too, Norton said to herself. And if she keeps moving, in the end we’ll see each other. Each of us will see the other’s face. Norton clenched her fists and waited. The woman in the mirror clenched her fists too, as if she were making a superhuman effort. The light coming into the room was ashen. Norton had the impression that outside, in the streets, a fire was raging. She began to sweat. She lowered her head and closed her eyes. When she looked in the mirrors again, the woman’s swollen vein had grown and her profile was beginning to appear. I have to escape, she thought. She also thought: where are Jean-Claude and Manuel? She thought about Morini. All she saw was an empty wheelchair and behind it an enormous, impenetrable forest, so dark green it was almost black, which it took her a while to recognize as Hyde Park. When she opened her eyes, the gaze of the woman in the mirror and her own gaze intersected at some indeterminate point in the room. The woman’s eyes were just like her eyes. The cheekbones, the lips, the forehead, the nose. Norton started to cry in sorrow or fear, or thought she was crying. She’s just like me, she said to herself, but she’s dead. The woman smiled tentatively and then, almost without transition, a grimace of fear twisted her face. Startled, Norton looked behind her, but there was no one there, just the wall. The woman smiled at her again. This time the smile grew not out of a grimace but out of a look of despair. And then the woman smiled at her again and her face became anxious, then blank, then nervous, then resigned, and then all the expressions of madness passed over it and after each she always smiled. Meanwhile, Norton, regaining her composure, had taken out a small notebook and was rapidly taking notes about everything as it happened, as if her fate or her share of happiness on earth depended on it, and this went on until she woke up. (2666)

The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border. Espinoza and Pelletier saw him as a failed man, failed above all because he had lived and taught in Europe, who tried to protect himself with a veneer of toughness but whose innate gentleness gave him away in the act. But Norton’s impression was of a sad man whose life was ebbing swiftly away and who would rather do anything than serve them as guide to Santa Teresa. (2666)

As they made their way from the rector’s office to the parking lot they saw a group of students of both sexes walking across a lawn just as the sprinklers came on. The students screamed and scattered. (2666)

Norton felt somehow insulted by Morini’s decision not to go with them. They didn’t call each other again. Morini might have called Norton, but before his friends set off on their search for Archimboldi, he, in his own way, like Schwob in Samoa, had already begun a voyage, a voyage that would end not at the grave of a brave man but in a kind of resignation, what might be called a new experience, since this wasn’t resignation in any ordinary sense of the word, or even patience or conformity, but rather a state of meekness, a refined and incomprehensible humility that made him cry for no reason and in which his own image, what Morini saw as Morini, gradually and helplessly dissolved, like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, not knowing that it’s burning. (2666)

So the days in Salzburg were generally pleasant, and although Archimboldi didn’t receive the Nobel Prize that year, life for our four friends proceeded smoothly, flowing along on the placid river of European university German departments, not without racking up one upset or another that in the end simply added a dash of pepper, a dash of mustard, a drizzle of vinegar to orderly lives, or lives that looked orderly from without, although each of the four had his or her own cross to bear, like anyone, a strange cross in Norton’s case, ghostly and phosphorescent, for Norton made frequent and rather tasteless references to her ex-husband as a lurking threat, ascribed to him the vices and defects of a monster, a horribly violent monster but one who never materialized, a monster all evocation and no action, although with her words Norton managed to give substance to a being whom neither Espinoza nor Pelletier had ever seen, as if her ex existed only in their dreams, until Pelletier, sharper than Espinoza, understood that Norton’s unthinking diatribe, that endless list of grievances, was more than anything a punishment inflicted on herself, perhaps for the shame of having fallen in love with such a cretin and married him. Pelletier, of course, was wrong. (2666)

Near the end of 1996, Morini had a nightmare. He dreamed that Norton was diving into a pool as he, Pelletier, and Espinoza played cards around a stone table. Espinoza and Pelletier had their backs to the pool, which seemed at first glance to be an ordinary hotel pool. As they played, Morini watched the other tables, the parasols, the deck chairs lined up along both sides of the pool. In the distance there was a park with deep green hedges, shining as if with fresh rain. Little by little people began to leave, vanishing through the different doors connecting the outdoor space, the bar, and the building’s rooms or little suites, suites that Morini imagined consisted of a double room with kitchenette and bathroom. Soon there was no one left outside, not even the bored waiters he’d seen earlier bustling around. Pelletier and Espinoza were still absorbed in the game. Next to Pelletier he saw a pile of poker chips, as well as coins from various countries, so he guessed Pelletier was winning. And yet Espinoza didn’t look ready to give up. Just then, Morini glanced at his cards and saw he had nothing to play. He discarded and asked for four cards, which he left facedown on the stone table, without looking at them, and with some difficulty he set his wheelchair in motion. Pelletier and Espinoza didn’t even ask where he was going. He rolled the wheelchair to the edge of the pool. Only then did he realize how enormous it was. It must have been at least a thousand feet wide and more than two miles long, calculated Morini. The water was dark and in some places there were oily patches, the kind you see in harbors. There was no trace of Norton. Morini shouted.

“Liz.”

He thought he saw a shadow at the other end of the pool, and he moved his wheelchair in that direction. It was a long way. The one time he looked back, Pelletier and Espinoza had vanished from sight. A fog had settled over that part of the terrace. He went on. The water in the pool seemed to scale the edges, as if somewhere a squall were brewing or worse, although where Morini was heading everything was calm and silent, and there was no sign of a storm. Soon the fog settled over Morini. At first he tried to keep going, but then he realized that he was in danger of tipping his wheelchair into the pool, and he decided not to risk it. When his eyes had adjusted, he saw a rock jutting from the pool, like a dark and iridescent reef. This didn’t seem strange to him. He went over to the edge and shouted Liz’s name once more, afraid now that he would never see her again. A half turn of the wheels was all it would take to topple him in. Then he saw that the pool had emptied and was enormously deep, as if a gulf of moldy black tiles were opening at his feet. At the bottom he seemed to make out the figure of a woman (though it was impossible to be sure) heading toward the slope of rock. Morini was about to shout again and wave when he sensed someone at his back. Two things were instantly certain: the thing was evil and it wanted Morini to turn around and see its face. Carefully, he backed away and continued around the pool, trying not to look at whoever was following him, searching for the ladder that might take him down to the bottom. But of course the ladder, which should logically be in a corner, never appeared, and after he had rolled a few feet Morini stopped and turned and looked into the stranger’s face, controlling his fear, a fear all the worse for his dawning certainty that he knew the person following him, who gave off a stench of evil that Morini could hardly bear. In the fog, Liz Norton’s face appeared. A younger Norton—twenty, if that—staring so seriously and intently that Morini had to look away. Who was the person at the bottom of the pool? Morini could still see him or her, a tiny speck trying to climb the rock that had now become a mountain, and the sight of this person, so far away, filled his eyes with tears and made him deeply and inconsolably sad, as if he were seeing his first love wandering in a labyrinth. Or himself, with legs that still worked, lost on a hopeless climb. Also, and he couldn’t help it, and it was good that he didn’t, he thought it looked like a painting by Gustave Moreau or Odilon Redon. Then he swung around to face Norton and she said:

“There’s no turning back.”

He heard the sentence not with his ears but in his head. Norton has acquired telepathic powers, Morini thought. She isn’t bad, she’s good. It isn’t evil that I sensed, it’s telepathy, he told himself to alter the course of a dream that in his heart of hearts he knew was fixed and inevitable. Then Norton repeated, in German, there’s no turning back. And, paradoxically, she turned and walked off away from the pool and was lost in a forest that could barely be seen through the fog, a forest that gave off a red glow, and it was into this red glow that Norton disappeared. (2666)

Old and alone, thought Pelletier. Just one of thousands of old men on their own. Like the machine célibataire. Like the bachelor who suddenly grows old, or like the bachelor who, when he returns from a trip at light speed, finds the other bachelors grown old or turned into pillars of salt. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of machines célibataires crossing an amniotic sea each day, on Alitalia, eating spaghetti al pomodoro and drinking Chianti or grappa, their eyes half closed, positive that the paradise of retirees isn’t in Italy (or, therefore, anywhere in Europe), bachelors flying to the hectic airports of Africa or America, burial ground of elephants. The great cemeteries at light speed. I don’t know why I’m thinking this, thought Pelletier. Spots on the wall and spots on the skin, thought Pelletier, looking at his hands. (2666)

So Pelletier and Espinoza, who drifted through Bologna like two ghosts, asked Norton on their next visit to London, almost panting, as if they’d been running or jogging (without pause, in dreams or in reality), whether she, their beloved Liz who hadn’t been able to go to Bologna, loved or lusted after Pritchard.

And Norton told them no. And then she said maybe she did, it was hard to give a conclusive answer in that regard. And Pelletier and Espinoza said they needed to know, that is, they needed definitive confirmation. And Norton asked them why now, precisely, they were so interested in Pritchard.

And Pelletier and Espinoza said, almost on the verge of tears, if not now, when?

And Norton asked whether they were jealous. And they said that was simply too much, jealousy had nothing to do with it, it was almost an insult to accuse them of being jealous considering the nature of their friendship.

And Norton said it was only a question. And Pelletier and Espinoza said they weren’t prepared to answer such a hurtful or captious or ill-intentioned question. And then they went out to dinner and the three of them drank too much, happy as children, talking about jealousy and its disastrous consequences. And they also talked about the inevitability of jealousy. And about the need for jealousy, as if jealousy were a middle-of-the-night urge. Not to mention the sweetness and the open, in some cases, to some people, delectable wounds. And on the way out they got in a cab and the discourse went on.

And for the first few minutes, the driver, a Pakistani, watched them in his rearview mirror, in silence, as if he couldn’t believe what his ears were hearing, and then he said something in his language and the cab passed Harmsworth Park and the Imperial War Musuem, heading along Brook Drive and then Austral Street and then Geraldine Street, driving around the park, an unnecessary maneuver no matter how you looked at it. And when Norton told him he was lost and said which streets he should take to find his way, the driver fell silent again, with no more murmurings in his incomprehensible tongue, until he confessed that London was such a labyrinth, he really had lost his bearings.

Which led Espinoza to remark that he’d be damned if the cabbie hadn’t just quoted Borges, who once said London was like a labyrinth—unintentionally, of course. To which Norton replied that Dickens and Stevenson had used the same trope long before Borges in their descriptions of London. This seemed to set the driver off, for he burst out that as a Pakistani he might not know this Borges, and he might not have read the famous Dickens and Stevenson either, and he might not even know London and its streets as well as he should, that’s why he’d said they were like a labyrinth, but he knew very well what decency and dignity were, and by what he had heard, the woman here present, in other words Norton, was lacking in decency and dignity, and in his country there was a word for what she was, the same word they had for it in London as it happened, and the word was bitch or slut or pig, and the gentlemen here present, gentlemen who, to judge by their accents, weren’t English, also had a name in his country and that name was pimp or hustler or whoremonger.

This speech, it may be said without exaggeration, took the Archimboldians by surprise, and they were slow to respond. If they were on Geraldine Street when the driver let them have it, they didn’t manage to speak till they came to Saint George’s Road. And then all they managed to say was: stop the cab right here, we’re getting out. Or rather: stop this filthy car, we’re not going any farther. Which the Pakistani promptly did, punching the meter as he pulled up to the curb and announcing to his passengers what they owed him, a fait accompli or final scene or parting token that seemed more or less normal to Norton and Pelletier, no doubt still reeling from the ugly surprise, but which was absolutely the last straw for Espinoza, who stepped down and opened the driver’s door and jerked the driver out, the latter not expecting anything of the sort from such a well-dressed gentleman. Much less did he expect the hail of Iberian kicks that proceeded to rain down on him, kicks delivered at first by Espinoza alone, but then by Pelletier, too, when Espinoza flagged, despite Norton’s shouts at them to stop, despite Norton’s objecting that violence didn’t solve anything, that in fact after this beating the Pakistani would hate the English even more, something that apparently mattered little to Pelletier, who wasn’t English, and even less to Espinoza, both of whom nevertheless insulted the Pakistani in English as they kicked him, without caring in the least that he was down, curled into a ball on the ground, as they delivered kick after kick, shove Islam up your ass, which is where it belongs, this one is for Salman Rushdie (an author neither of them happened to think was much good but whose mention seemed pertinent), this one is for the feminists of Paris (will you fucking stop, Norton was shouting), this one is for the feminists of New York (you’re going to kill him, shouted Norton), this one is for the ghost of Valerie Solanas, you son of a bitch, and on and on, until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orifice in the head, except the eyes. (2666)

In Pelletier’s bathroom the toilet bowl was missing a chunk. It wasn’t visible at first glance, but when the toilet seat was lifted, the missing piece suddenly leaped into sight, almost like a bark. How the hell did no one notice this? wondered Pelletier. Norton had never seen a toilet in such bad shape. Some eight inches were missing. Under the white porcelain was a red substance, like brick wafers spread with plaster. The missing piece was in the shape of a half-moon. It looked as if someone had ripped it off with a hammer. Or as if someone had picked up another person who was already on the floor and smashed that person’s head against the toilet, thought Norton. (2666)

When one of the drunks recognized the song, he gave a shout and rose to his feet. Espinoza, Pelletier, and Norton thought he was about to start dancing, but instead he went over to the terrace railing and looked up and down the street, craning his neck, then went calmly back to sit with his wife and friends. These people are crazy, said Espinoza and Pelletier. But Norton thought something strange was going on, on the street, on the terrace, in the hotel rooms, even in Mexico City with those unreal taxi drivers and doormen, unreal or at least logically ungraspable, and even in Europe something strange had been happening, something she didn’t understand, at the Paris airport where the three of them had met, and maybe before, with Morini and his refusal to accompany them, with that slightly repulsive young man they had met in Toulouse, with Dieter Hellfeld and his sudden news about Archimboldi. And something strange was going on even with Archimboldi and everything Archimboldi had written about, and with Norton, unrecognizable to herself, if only intermittently, who read and made notes on and interpreted Archimboldi’s books. (2666)

Five months later, back in England again, Liz Norton received a gift in the mail from her German friend. As one might guess, it was another novel by Archimboldi. She read it, liked it, went to her college library to look for more books by the German with the Italian name, and found two: one was the book she had already read in Berlin, and the other was Bitzius. Reading the latter really did make her go running out. It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.

But the truth is that she had only had tea to drink and she felt overwhelmed, as if a voice were repeating a terrible prayer in her ear, the words of which blurred as she walked away from the college, and the rain wetted her gray skirt and bony knees and pretty ankles and little else, because before Liz Norton went running through the park, she hadn’t forgotten to pick up her umbrella. (2666)

That night, while Liz Norton was sleeping, Pelletier remembered a long-ago afternoon when he and Espinoza had watched a horror film in a room at a German hotel.

The film was Japanese, and in one of the early scenes there were two teenage girls. One was telling a story. The story was about a boy spending his holidays in Kobe who wanted to go out to play with friends at the same time that his favorite TV show was on. So the boy found a videocassette and set the machine to record the show and went outside. The problem was that the boy was from Tokyo and in Tokyo his show was on Channel 34, whereas in Kobe, Channel 34 is blank, a channel on which all you see is snow.

And after he came back in, when he sat down in front of the TV and started the player, instead of his favorite show he saw a white-faced woman telling him he was going to die.

And that was all.

And then the phone rang and the boy answered and he heard the same woman’s voice asking him did he think it was a joke. A day later they found him in the yard, dead.

And the first girl told the second girl this story, and the whole time she was talking it looked like she was about to crack up. The second girl was obviously scared. But the first girl, the one who was telling the story, looked like she was about to roll on the floor laughing.

And then, remembered Pelletier, Espinoza said the first girl was a two-bit psychopath and the second girl was a silly bitch, and the film could have been good if the second girl, instead of staring openmouthed and looking horrified, had told the first one to shut up. And not gently, not politely, instead she should have told the girl: “Shut up, you cunt, what’s so funny? does it turn you on telling the story of a dead boy? does it make you come telling the story of a dead boy, you imaginary-dick-sucking bitch?”

And so on, in the same vein. And Pelletier remembered that Espinoza spoke so vehemently, he even did the voice the second girl should have used and the way she should have stood, that he thought it best to turn off the TV and take him to the bar for a drink before they went back to their rooms. And he also remembered that he felt tenderness toward Espinoza at that moment, a tenderness that brought back adolescence, adventures fiercely shared, and small-town afternoons. (2666)

In a word, and bluntly: as they walked around Sankt Pauli, it came to Pelletier and Espinoza that the search for Archimboldi could never fill their lives. They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn’t laugh or be sad with him, partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers. In a word: in Sankt Pauli and later at Mrs. Bubis’s house, hung with photographs of the late Mr. Bubis and his writers, Pelletier and Espinoza understood that what they wanted to make was love, not war. (2666)

“The only person at the press who knew Archimboldi’s work to perfection,” said Mrs. Bubis, “was Mr. Bubis, who published all his books.”

But she asked herself (and by extension, the two of them) how well anyone could really know another person’s work.

“For example, I love Grosz’s work,” she said, gesturing toward the Grosz drawings on the wall, “but do I really know it? His stories make me laugh, often I think Grosz drew what he did to make me laugh, sometimes I laugh to the point of hilarity, and hilarity becomes helpless mirth, but once I met an art critic who of course liked Grosz, and who nevertheless got very depressed when he attended a retrospective of his work or had to study some canvas or drawing in a professional capacity. And these bouts of depression or sadness would last for weeks. This art critic was a friend, but we’d never discussed Grosz. Once, however, I mentioned the effect Grosz had on me. At first he refused to believe me. Then he started to shake his head. Then he looked me up and down as if he’d never laid eyes on me before. I thought he’d gone mad. That was the end of our friendship. A while ago I was told that he still says I know nothing about Grosz and I have the aesthetic sense of a cow. Well, as far as I’m concerned he can say whatever he likes. Grosz makes me laugh, Grosz depresses him, but who can say they really know Grosz?

“Let’s suppose,” said Mrs. Bubis, “that at this very moment there’s a knock on the door and my old friend the art critic comes in. He sits here on the sofa beside me, and one of you brings out an unsigned drawing and tells us it’s by Grosz and you want to sell it. I look at the drawing and smile and I take out my checkbook and buy it. The art critic looks at the drawing and isn’t depressed and tries to make me reconsider. He thinks it isn’t a Grosz. I think it is. Which of us is right?

“Or let’s tell the story a different way. You,” said Mrs. Bubis, pointing to Espinoza, “present an unsigned drawing and say it’s by Grosz and try to sell it. I don’t laugh, I look at it coldly, I appreciate the line, the control, the satire, but nothing about it tickles me. The art critic examines it carefully and gets depressed, in his normal way, and then and there he makes an offer, an offer that exceeds his savings, and that if accepted will condemn him to endless afternoons of melancholy. I try to change his mind. I tell him the drawing strikes me as suspicious because it doesn’t make me laugh. The critic says finally I’m looking at Grosz like an adult and gives me his congratulations. Which of the two of us is right?” (2666)

And when the shadowy writer, who was Swabian, began to reminisce during his talk (or discussion) about his stint as a journalist, as an editor of arts pages, as an interviewer of all kinds of writers and artists wary of interviews, and then began to recall the era in which he had served as cultural promoter in towns that were far-flung or simply forgotten but interested in culture, suddenly, out of the blue, Archimboldi’s name cropped up (maybe prompted by the previous talk led by Espinoza and Pelletier), since the Swabian, as it happened, had met Archimboldi while he was cultural promoter for a Frisian town, north of Wilhelmshaven, facing the Black Sea coast and the East Frisian islands, a place where it was cold, very cold, and even wetter than it was cold, with a salty wetness that got into the bones, and there were only two ways of making it through the winter, one, drinking until you got cirrhosis, and two, listening to music (usually amateur string quartets) in the town hall auditorium or talking to writers who came from elsewhere and who were given very little, a room at the only boardinghouse in town and a few marks to cover the return trip by train, those trains so unlike German trains today, but on which the people were perhaps more talkative, more polite, more interested in their neighbors, but anyway, writers who, after being paid and subtracting transportation costs, left these places and went home (which was sometimes just a room in Frankfurt or Cologne) with a little money and possibly a few books sold, in the case of those writers or poets (especially poets) who, after reading a few pages and answering the townspeople’s questions, would set up a table and make a few extra marks, a fairly profitable activity back then, because if the audience liked what the writer had read, or if the reading moved them or entertained them or made them think, then they would buy one of his books, sometimes to keep as a souvenir of a pleasant evening, as the wind whistled along the narrow streets of the Frisian town, cutting into the flesh it was so cold, sometimes to read or reread a poem or story, back at home now, weeks after the event, maybe by the light of an oil lamp because there wasn’t always electricity, of course, since the war had just ended and there were still gaping wounds, social and economic, anyway, more or less the same as a literary reading today, with the exception that the books displayed on the table were self-published and now it’s the publishing houses that set up the table, and one of these writers who came to the town where the Swabian was cultural promoter was Benno von Archimboldi, a writer of the stature of Gustav Heller or Rainer Kuhl or Wilhelm Frayn (writers whom Morini would later look up in his encyclopedia of German authors, without success), and he didn’t bring books, and he read two chapters from a novel in progress, his second novel, the first, remembered the Swabian, had been published in Hamburg that year, although he didn’t read anything from it, but that first novel did exist, said the Swabian, and Archimboldi, as if anticipating doubts, had brought a copy with him, a little novel about one hundred pages long, maybe longer, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and twenty-five pages, and he carried the novel in his jacket pocket, and, strangely, the Swabian remembered Archimboldi’s jacket more clearly than the novel crammed into its pocket, a little novel with a dirty, creased cover that had once been deep ivory or a pale wheat color or gold shading into invisibility, but now was colorless and dull, just the title of the novel and the author’s name and the colophon of the publishing house, whereas the jacket was unforgettable, a black leather jacket with a high collar, providing excellent protection against the snow and rain and cold, loose fitting, so it could be worn over heavy sweaters or two sweaters without anyone noticing, with horizontal pockets on each side, and a row of four buttons, neither very large nor very small, sewn on with something like fishing line, a jacket that brought to mind, why I don’t know, the jackets worn by some Gestapo officers, although back then black leather jackets were in fashion and anyone who had the money to buy one or had inherited one wore it without stopping to think about what it suggested, and the writer who had come to that Frisian town was Benno von Archimboldi, the young Benno von Archimboldi, twenty-nine or thirty years old, and it had been he, the Swabian, who had gone to wait for him at the train station and who had accompanied him to the boardinghouse, talking about the weather, which was bad, and then had brought him to city hall, where Archimboldi hadn’t set up any table and had read two chapters from a novel that wasn’t finished yet, and then the Swabian had gone to dinner with him at the local tavern, along with the teacher and a widow who preferred music or painting to literature, but who, once resigned to not having music or painting, was in no way averse to a literary evening, and it was she who somehow or other kept up the conversation during dinner (sausages and potatoes and beer: neither the times, recalled the Swabian, nor the town’s budget allowed for anything more extravagant), although it might be truer to say that she steered it with a firm hand on the rudder, and the men who were around the table, the mayor’s secretary, a man in the salted fish business, an old schoolteacher who kept falling asleep even with his fork in his hand, and a town employee, a very nice boy named Fritz who was a good friend of the Swabian’s, nodded or were careful not to contradict the redoubtable widow whose knowledge of the arts was much greater than anyone else’s, even the Swabian’s, and who had traveled in Italy and France and had even, on one of her voyages, an unforgettable ocean crossing, gone as far as Buenos Aires, in 1927 or 1928, when the city was a meat emporium and the refrigerator ships left port laden with meat, a sight to see, hundreds of ships arriving empty and leaving laden with tons of meat headed all over the world, and when she, the lady, went out on deck, say at night, half asleep or seasick or ailing, all she had to do was lean on the rail and let her eyes grow accustomed to the dark and then the view of the port was startling and it instantly cleared away any vestiges of sleep or seasickness or other ailments, the nervous system having no choice but to surrender unconditionally to such a picture, the parade of immigrants like ants loading the flesh of thousands of dead cattle into the ships’ holds, the movements of pallets piled with the meat of thousands of sacrificed calves, and the gauzy tint that shaded every corner of the port from dawn until dusk and even during the night shifts, the red of barely cooked steak, of T-bones, of filet, of ribs grilled rare, terrible, thank goodness the lady, who wasn’t a widow at the time, had to see it only the first night, then they disembarked and took rooms at one of the most expensive hotels in Buenos Aires, and they went to the opera and then to a ranch where her husband, an expert horseman, agreed to race with the rancher’s son, who lost, and then with a ranch hand, the son’s right-hand man, a gaucho, who also lost, and then with the gaucho’s son, a little sixteen-year-old gaucho, thin as a reed and with bright eyes, so bright that when the lady looked at him he lowered his head and then lifted it a little and gave her such a wicked look that she was offended, what an insolent urchin, while her husband laughed and said in German: you’ve made quite an impression on the boy, a joke the lady didn’t find the least bit funny, and then the little gaucho mounted his horse and they set off, the boy could really gallop, he clung to the horse so tightly it was as if he were glued to its neck, and he sweated and thrashed it with his whip, but in the end her husband won the race, he hadn’t been captain of a cavalry regiment for nothing, and the rancher and the rancher’s son got up from their seats and clapped, good losers, and the rest of the guests clapped too, excellent rider, this German, extraordinary rider, although when the little gaucho reached the finish line, or in other words the porch, he didn’t look like a good loser, a dark, angry expression on his face, his head down, and while the men, speaking French, scattered along the porch in search of glasses of ice-cold champagne, the lady went up to the little gaucho, who was left standing alone, holding his horse’s reins in his left hand (at the other end of the long yard the little gaucho’s father headed off toward the stables with the horse the German had ridden), and told him, in an incomprehensible language, not to be sad, that he had ridden an excellent race but her husband was good too and more experienced, words that to the little gaucho sounded like the moon, like the passage of clouds across the moon, like a slow storm, and then the little gaucho looked up at the lady with the eyes of a bird of prey, ready to plunge a knife into her at the navel and slice up to the breasts, cutting her wide open, his eyes shining with a strange intensity, like the eyes of a clumsy young butcher, as the lady recalled, which didn’t stop her from following him without protest when he took her by the hand and led her to the other side of the house, to a place where a wrought-iron pergola stood, bordered by flowers and trees that the lady had never seen in her life or which at that moment she thought she had never seen in her life, and she even saw a fountain in the park, a stone fountain, in the center of which, balanced on one little foot, a creole cherub with smiling features danced, part European and part cannibal, perpetually bathed by three jets of water that spouted at its feet, a fountain sculpted from a single piece of black marble, a fountain that the lady and the little gaucho admired at length, until a distant cousin of the rancher appeared (or a mistress whom the rancher had lost in the deep folds of memory), telling her in brusque and serviceable English that her husband had been looking for her for some time, and then the lady walked out of the enchanted park on the distant cousin’s arm, and the little gaucho called to her, or so she thought, and when she turned he spoke a few hissing words, and the lady stroked his head and asked the cousin what the little gaucho had said, her fingers lost in the thick curls of his hair, and the cousin seemed to hesitate for a moment, but the lady, who wouldn’t tolerate lies or half-truths, demanded an immediate, direct translation, and the cousin said: he says … he says the boss … arranged it so your husband would win the last two races, and then the cousin was quiet and the little gaucho went off toward the other end of the park, dragging on his horse’s reins, and the lady rejoined the party but she couldn’t stop thinking about what the little gaucho had confessed at the last moment, the sainted lamb, and no matter how much she thought, his words were still a riddle, a riddle that lasted the rest of the party, and tormented her as she tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep, and made her listless the next day during a long horseback ride and barbecue, and followed her back to Buenos Aires and all through the days she was at the hotel or went out to receptions at the German embassy or the English embassy or the Ecuadorean embassy, and was solved only days after her ship set sail for Europe, one night, at four in the morning, when the lady went out to stroll the deck, not knowing or caring what parallel or longitude they were at, surrounded or partially surrounded by forty-one million square miles of salt water, just then, as the lady lit a cigarette on the first-class passengers’ first deck, with her eyes fixed on the expanse of ocean that she couldn’t see but could hear, the riddle was miraculously solved, and it was then, at that point in the story, said the Swabian, that the lady, the once rich and powerful and intelligent (in her fashion, at least) Frisian lady, fell silent, and a religious, or worse, superstitious hush fell over that sad postwar German tavern, where everyone began to feel more and more uncomfortable and hurried to mop up what was left of their sausage and potatoes and swallow the last drops of beer from their mugs, as if they were afraid that at any moment the lady would begin to howl like a Fury and they judged it wise to prepare themselves to face the cold journey home with full stomachs.

And then the lady spoke. She said:

“Can anyone solve the riddle?”

That’s what she said, but she didn’t look at any of the townspeople or address them directly.

“Does anyone know the answer to the riddle? Does anyone understand it? Is there by chance a man in this town who can tell me the solution, even if he has to whisper it in my ear?”

She said all of this with her eyes on her plate, where her sausage and her serving of potatoes remained almost untouched.

And then Archimboldi, who had kept his head down, eating, as the lady talked, said, without raising his voice, that it had been an act of hospitality, that the rancher and his son were sure the lady’s husband would lose the first race, and they had rigged the second and third races so the former cavalry captain would win. Then the lady looked him in the eye and laughed and asked why her husband had won the first race.

“Why? why?” asked the lady.

“Because the rancher’s son,” said Archimboldi, “who surely rode better and had a better mount than your husband, was overcome at the last minute by selflessness. In other words, he chose extravagance, carried away by the impromptu festivities that he and his father had arranged. Everything had to be squandered, including his victory, and somehow everyone understood it had to be that way, including the woman who came looking for you in the park. Everyone except the little gaucho.”

“Was that all?” asked the lady.

“Not for the little gaucho. If you’d spent any longer with him, I think he would have killed you, which would have been an extravagant gesture in its own right, though certainly not the kind the rancher and his son had in mind.”

Then the lady got up, thanked everyone for a pleasant evening, and left.

“A few minutes later,” said the Swabian, “I walked Archimboldi back to the boardinghouse. The next morning, when I went to get him to take him to the station, he was gone.” (2666)

SOUL, wilt thou toss again? 

By just such a hazard 

Hundreds have lost, indeed, 

But tens have won an all.

Angels’ breathless ballot 

Lingers to record thee; 

Imps in eager caucus 

Raffle for my soul.