1. THE PART ABOUT THE CRITICS

The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. The book in question was D'Arsonval. The young Pelletier didn't realize at the time that the novel was part of a trilogy (made up of the English-themed The Garden and the Polish-themed The Leather Mask, together with the clearly French-themed D'Arsonval), but this ignorance or lapse or bibliographical lacuna, attributable only to his extreme youth, did nothing to diminish the wonder and admiration that the novel stirred in him.

From that day on (or from the early morning hours when he concluded his maiden reading) he became an enthusiastic Archimboldian and set out on a quest to find more works by the author. This was no easy task. Getting hold of books by Benno von Archimboldi in the 1980s, even in Paris, was an effort not lacking in all kinds of difficulties. Almost no reference to Archimboldi could be found in the university's German department. Pelletier's professors had never heard of him. One said he thought he recognized the name. Ten minutes later, to Pelletier's outrage (and horror), he realized that the person his professor had in mind was the Italian painter, regarding whom he soon revealed himself to be equally ignorant.

Pelletier wrote to the Hamburg publishing house that had published D'Arsonval and received no response. He also scoured the few German bookstores he could find in Paris. The name Archimboldi appeared in a dictionary of German literature and in a Belgian magazine devoted- whether as a joke or seriously, he never knew-to the literature of Prussia. In 1981, he made a trip to Bavaria with three friends from the German department, and there, in a little bookstore in Munich, on Voralmstrasse, he found two other books: the slim volume titled Mitzi's Treasure, less than one hundred pages long, and the aforementioned English novel, The Garden.

Reading these two novels only reinforced the opinion he'd already formed of Archimboldi. In 1983, at the age of twenty-two, he undertook the task of translating D'Arsonval. No one asked him to do it. At the time, there was no French publishing house interested in publishing the German author with the funny name. Essentially Pelletier set out to translate the book because he liked it, and because he enjoyed the work, although it also occurred to him that he could submit the translation, prefaced with a study of the Archimboldian oeuvre, as his thesis, and- why not?-as the foundation of his future dissertation.

He completed the final draft of the translation in 1984, and a Paris publishing house, after some inconclusive and contradictory readings, accepted it and published Archimboldi. Though the novel seemed destined from the start not to sell more than a thousand copies, the first printing of three thousand was exhausted after a couple of contradictory, positive, even effusive reviews, opening the door for second, third, and fourth printings.

By then Pelletier had read fifteen books by the German writer, translated two others, and was regarded almost universally as the preeminent authority on Benno von Archimboldi across the length and breadth of France.

Then Pelletier could think back on the day when he first read Archimboldi, and he saw himself, young and poor, living in a chambre de bonne, sharing the sink where he washed his face and brushed his teeth with fifteen other people who lived in the same dark garret, shitting in a horrible and notably unhygienic bathroom that was more like a latrine or cesspit, also shared with the fifteen residents of the garret, some of whom had already returned to the provinces, their respective university degrees in hand, or had moved to slightly more comfortable places in Paris itself, or were still there-just a few of them-vegetating or slowly dying of revulsion.

He saw himself, as we've said, ascetic and hunched over his German dictionaries in the weak light of a single bulb, thin and dogged, as if he were pure will made flesh, bone, and muscle without an ounce of fat, fanatical and bent on success. A rather ordinary picture of a student in the capital, but it worked on him like a drug, a drug that brought him to tears, a drug that (as one sentimental Dutch poet of the nineteenth century had it) opened the floodgates of emotion, as well as the floodgates of something that at first blush resembled self-pity but wasn't (what was it, then? rage? very likely), and made him turn over and over in his mind, not in words but in painful images, the period of his youthful apprenticeship, and after a perhaps pointless long night he was forced to two conclusions: first, that his life as he had lived it so far was over; second, that a brilliant career was opening up before him, and that to maintain its glow he had to persist in his determination, in sole testament to that garret. This seemed easy enough.

Jean-Claude Pelletier was born in 1961 and by 1986 he was already a professor of German in Paris. Piero Morini was born in 1956, in a town near Naples, and although he read Benno von Archimboldi for the first time in 1976, or four years before Pelletier, it wasn't until 1988 that he translated his first novel by the German author, Bifurcaria Bifurcata, which came and went almost unnoticed in Italian bookstores.

Archimboldi's situation in Italy, it must be said, was very different from his situation in France. For one thing, Morini wasn't his first translator. As it happened, the first novel by Archimboldi to fall into Morini's hands was a translation of The Leather Mask done by someone called Colossimo for Einaudi in 1969. In Italy, The Leather Mask was followed by Rivers of Europe in 1971, Inheritance in 1973, and Railroad Perfection in 1975; earlier, in 1964, a publishing house in Rome had put out a collection of mostly war stories, titled The Berlin Underworld. So it could be said that Archimboldi wasn't a complete unknown in Italy, although one could hardly claim that he was successful, or somewhat successful, or even barely successful. In point of fact, he was an utter failure, an author whose books languished on the dustiest shelves in the stores or were remaindered or forgotten in publishers' warehouses before being pulped.

Morini, of course, was undaunted by the scant interest that Archimboldi's work aroused in the Italian public, and after he translated Bifucaria Bifurcata he wrote two studies of Archimboldi for journals in Milan and Palermo, one on the role of fate in Railroad Perfection, and the other on the various guises of conscience and guilt in Lethaea, on the surface an erotic novel, and in Bitzius, a novel less than one hundred pages long, similar in some ways to Mitzi's Treasure, the book that Pelletier had found in an old Munich bookstore, and that told the story of the life of Albert Bitzius, pastor of Lutzelflüh, in the canton of Bern, an author of sermons as well as a writer under the pseudonym Jeremiah Gotthelf. Both pieces were published, and Morini's eloquence or powers of seduction in presenting the figure of Archimboldi overcame all obstacles, and in 1991 a second translation by Piero Morini, this time of Saint Thomas , was published in Italy. By then, Morini was teaching German literature at the University of Turin, the doctors had diagnosed him with multiple sclerosis, and he had suffered the strange and spectacular accident that left him permanently wheelchair-bound.

Manuel Espinoza came to Archimboldi by a different route. Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer. The only German authors he was (barely) familiar with were three greats: Hölderlin, because at sixteen he thought he was fated to be a poet and he devoured every book of poetry he could find; Goethe, because in his final year of secondary school a teacher with a humorous streak recommended that he read The Sorrows of Young Werther, in whose hero he would find a kindred spirit; and Schiller, because he had read one of his plays. Later he would discover the work of a modern author, Jünger, with whom he became acquainted more by osmosis than anything else, since the Madrid writers he admired (and deep down hated bitterly) talked nonstop about Jünger. So it could be said that Espinoza was acquainted with just one German author, and that author was Jünger. At first he thought Jünger's work was magnificent, and since many of the writer's books were translated into Spanish, Espinoza had no trouble finding them and reading them all. He would have preferred it to be less easy. Meanwhile, many of his acquaintances weren't just Jünger devotees; some of them were the author's translators, too, which was something Espinoza cared little about, since the glory he coveted was that of the writer, not the translator.

As the months and years went by, silently and cruelly as is often the case, Espinoza suffered some misfortunes that made him change his thinking. It didn't take him long, for example, to discover that the group of Jungerians wasn't as Jungerian as he had thought, being instead, like all literary groups, in thrall to the changing seasons. In the fall, it's true, they were Jungerians, but in winter they suddenly turned into Barojians and in spring into Orteganites, and in summer they would even leave the bar where they met to go out into the street and intone pastoral verse in honor of Camilo Jose Cela, something that the young Espinoza, who was fundamentally patriotic, would have been prepared to accept unconditionally if such displays had been embarked on in a fun-loving, carnivalesque spirit, but who could in no way take it all seriously, as did the bogus Jungerians.

Worse was discovering what the members of the group thought about his own attempts at fiction. Their opinion was so negative that there were times-some nights, for example, when he couldn't sleep-that he began to wonder in all seriousness whether they were making a veiled attempt to get him to go away, stop bothering them, never show his face again.

And even worse was when Jünger showed up in person in Madrid and the group of Jungerians organized a trip to El Escorial for him (a strange whim of the maestro, visiting El Escorial), and when Espinoza tried to join the excursion, in any capacity whatsoever, he was denied the honor, as if the Jungerians deemed him unworthy of making up part of the German's garde du corps, or as if they feared that he, Espinoza, might embarrass them with some naive, abstruse remark, although the official explanation given (perhaps dictated by some charitable impulse) was that he didn't speak German and everyone else who was going on the picnic with Junger did.

That was the end of Espinoza's dealings with the Jungerians. And it was the beginning of his loneliness and a steady stream (or deluge) of resolutions, often contradictory or impossible to keep. These weren't comfortable nights, much less pleasant ones, but Espinoza discovered two things that helped him mightily in the early days: he would never be a fiction writer, and, in his own way, he was brave.

He also discovered that he was bitter and full of resentment, that he oozed resentment, and that he might easily kill someone, anyone, if it would provide a respite from the loneliness and rain and cold of Madrid, but this was a discovery that he preferred to conceal. Instead he concentrated on his realization that he would never be a writer and on making everything he possibly could out of his newly unearthed bravery.

He continued at the university, studying Spanish literature, but at the same time he enrolled in the German department. He slept four or five hours a night and the rest of the time he spent at his desk. Before he finished his degree in German literature he wrote a twenty-page essay on the relationship between Werther and music, which was published in a Madrid literary magazine and a Gottingen university journal. By the time he was twenty-five he had completed both degrees. In 1990, he received his doctorate in German literature with a dissertation on Benno von Archimboldi. A Barcelona publishing house brought it out one year later. By then, Espinoza was a regular at German literature conferences and roundtables. His command of German was, if not excellent, more than passable. He also spoke English and French. Like Morini and Pelletier, he had a good job and a substantial income, and he was respected (to the extent possible) by his students as well as his colleagues. He never translated Archimboldi or any other German author.

Besides Archimboldi, there was one thing Morini, Pelletier, and Espinoza had in common. All three had iron wills. Actually, they had one other thing in common, but we'll get to that later.

Liz Norton, on the other hand, wasn't what one would ordinarily call a woman of great drive, which is to say that she didn't draw up long- or medium-term plans and throw herself wholeheartedly into their execution. She had none of the attributes of the ambitious. When she suffered, her pain was clearly visible, and when she was happy, the happiness she felt was contagious. She was incapable of setting herself a goal and striving steadily toward it. At least, no goal was appealing or desirable enough for her to pursue it unreservedly. Used in a personal sense, the phrase "achieve an end" seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life, and, on rare occasions, happiness. If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war.

This was something she'd been told once when she was a student, and she loved it, although it didn't make her read William James, then or ever. For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths, as Morini, Espinoza, and Pelletier believed it to be.

Her discovery of Archimboldi was the least traumatic of all, and the least poetic. During the three months that she lived in Berlin in 1988, when she was twenty, a German friend loaned her a novel by an author she had never heard of. The name puzzled her. How was it possible, she asked her friend, that there could be a German writer with an Italian surname, but with a von preceding it, indicating some kind of nobility? Her German friend had no answer. It was probably a pseudonym, he said. And to make things even stranger, he added, masculine proper names ending in vowels were uncommon in Germany. Plenty of feminine proper names ended that way. But certainly not masculine proper names. The novel was The Blind Woman, and she liked it, but not so much that it made her go running out to buy everything else that Benno von Archimboldi had ever written.

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.

The first time Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton saw each other was at a contemporary German literature conference held in Bremen in 1994. Pelletier and Morini had met before, during the German literature colloquiums held in Leipzig in 1989, when the GDR was in its death throes, and then they saw each other again at the German literature symposium held in Mannheim in December of the same year (a disaster, with bad hotels, bad food, and abysmal organizing). At a modern German literature forum in Zurich in 1990, Pelletier and Morini met Espinoza. Espinoza saw Pelletier again at a twentieth-century German literature congress held in Maastricht in 1991 (Pelletier delivered a paper titled "Heine and Archimboldi: Converging Paths"; Espinoza delivered a paper titled "Ernst Jünger and Benno von Archimboldi: Diverging Paths"), and it could more or less safely be said that from that moment on they not only read each other in the scholarly journals, they became friends, or they struck up something like a friendship. In 1992, Pelletier, Espinoza, and Morini ran into each other again at a German literature seminar in Augsburg. Each was presenting a paper on Archimboldi. For a few months it had been rumored that Benno von Archimboldi himself planned to attend this grand event, which would convene not only the usual Germanists but also a sizable group of German writers and poets, and yet at the crucial moment, two days before the gathering, a telegram was received from Archimboldi's Hamburg publishers tendering his apologies. In every other respect, too, the conference was a failure. In Pelletier's opinion, perhaps the only thing of interest was a lecture given by an old professor from Berlin on the work of Arno Schmidt (here we have a German proper name ending in a vowel), a judgment shared by Espinoza and, to a lesser extent, by Morini.

They spent the free time they had, which was ample, strolling the paltry (in Pelletier's opinion) sites of interest in Augsburg, a city that Espinoza also found paltry, and that Morini found only moderately paltry, but still paltry in the final analysis, while Espinoza and Pelletier took turns pushing the Italian's wheelchair since Morini wasn't in the best of health this time, but rather in paltry health, so that his two friends and colleagues considered that a little bit of fresh air would do him no harm, and in fact might do him good.

Only Pelletier and Espinoza attended the next German literature conference, held in Paris in January 1992. Morini, who had been invited too, was in worse health than usual just then, causing his doctor to advise him, among other things, to avoid even short trips. It wasn't a bad conference, and despite their full schedules, Pelletier and Espinoza found time to eat together at a little restaurant on the Rue Galande, near Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where, besides talking about their respective projects and interests, during dessert they speculated about the health (the ill health, the delicate health, the miserable health) of the melancholy Italian, ill health that nevertheless hadn't prevented him from beginning a book on Archimboldi, a book that might be the grand Archimboldian opus, the pilot fish that would swim for a long time beside the great black shark of the German's oeuvre, or so Pelletier explained that Morini had told him on the phone, whether seriously or in jest he wasn't sure. Both Pelletier and Espinoza respected Morini's work, but Pelletier's words (spoken as if from inside an old castle or a dungeon dug under the moat of an old castle) sounded like a threat in the peaceful little restaurant on the Rue Galande and hastened the end of an evening that had begun in an atmosphere of cordiality and contentment.

None of this soured Pelletier's and Espinoza's relations with Morini.

The three met again at a German-language literature colloquium held in Bologna in 1993. And all three contributed to Number 46 of the Berlin journal Literary Studies, a monograph devoted to the work of Archimboldi. It wasn't the first time they'd contributed to the journal. In Number 44, there'd been a piece by Espinoza on the idea of God in the work of Archimboldi and Unamuno. In Number 38, Morini had published an article on the state of German literature instruction in Italy. And in Number 37, Pelletier had presented an overview of the most important German writers of the twentieth century in France and Europe, a text that incidentally sparked more than one protest and even a couple of scoldings.

But it's Number 46 that matters to us, since not only did it mark the formation of two opposing groups of Archimboldians-Pelletier, Morini, and Espinoza versus Schwarz, Borchmeyer, and Pohl-it also contained a piece by Liz Norton, incredibly brilliant, according to Pelletier, well argued, according to Espinoza, interesting, according to Morini, a piece that aligned itself (and not at anyone's bidding) with the theses of the three friends, whom it cited on various occasions, demonstrating a thorough knowledge of their studies and monographs published in specialized journals or issued by small presses.

Pelletier thought about writing her a letter, but in the end he didn't. Espinoza called Pelletier and asked whether it wouldn't be a good idea to get in touch with her. Unsure, they decided to ask Morini. Morini abstained from comment. All they knew about Liz Norton was that she taught German literature at a university in London. And that, unlike them, she wasn't a full professor.

The Bremen German literature conference was highly eventful. Pelletier, backed by Morini and Espinoza, went on the attack like Napoleon at Jena, assaulting the unsuspecting German Archimboldi scholars, and the downed flags of Pohl, Schwarz, and Borchmeyer were soon routed to the cafes and taverns of Bremen. The young German professors participating in the event were bewildered at first and then took the side of Pelletier and his friends, albeit cautiously. The audience, consisting mostly of university students who had traveled from Göttingen by train or in vans, was also won over by Pelletier's fiery and uncompromising interpretations, throwing caution to the winds and enthusiastically yielding to the festive, Dionysian vision of ultimate carnival (or penultimate carnival) exegesis upheld by Pelletier and Espinoza. Two days later, Schwarz and his minions counterattacked. They compared Archimboldi to Heinrich Boll. They spoke of suffering. They compared Archimboldi to Günter Grass. They spoke of civic duty. Borchmeyer even compared Archimboldi to Friedrich Dürrenmatt and spoke of humor, which seemed to Morini the height of gall. Then Liz Norton appeared, heaven sent, and demolished the counterattack like a Desaix, like a Lannes, a blond Amazon who spoke excellent German, if anything too rapidly, and who expounded on Grimmelshausen and Gryphius and many others, including Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus.

That same night they ate together in a long, narrow tavern near the river, on a dark street flanked by old Hanseatic buildings, some of which looked like abandoned Nazi offices, a tavern they reached by going down stairs wet from the drizzle.

The place couldn't have been more awful, thought Liz Norton, but the evening was long and agreeable, and the friendliness of Pelletier, Morini, and Espinoza, who weren't standoffish at all, made her feel at ease. Naturally, she was familiar with most of their work, but what surprised her (pleasantly, of course) was that they were familiar with some of hers, too. The conversation proceeded in four stages: first they laughed about the flaying Norton had given Borchmeyer and about Borchmeyer's growing dismay at Norton's increasingly ruthless attacks, then they talked about future conferences, especially a strange one at the University of Minnesota, supposedly to be attended by five hundred professors, translators, and German literature specialists, though Morini had reason to believe the whole thing was a hoax, then they discussed Benno von Archimboldi and his life, about which so little was known. All of them, from Pelletier to Morini (who was talkative that night, though he was usually the quietest), reviewed anecdotes and gossip, compared old, vague information for the umpteenth time, and speculated about the secret of the great writer's whereabouts and life like people endlessly analyzing a favorite movie, and finally, as they walked the wet, bright streets (bright only intermittently, as if Bremen were a machine jolted every so often by brief, powerful electric charges), they talked about themselves.

All four were single and that struck them as an encouraging sign. All four lived alone, although Liz Norton sometimes shared her London flat with a globe-trotting brother who worked for an NGO and who came back to England only a few times a year. All four were devoted to their careers, although Pelletier, Espinoza, and Morini had doctorates and Pelletier and Espinoza also chaired their respective departments, whereas Norton was just preparing her dissertation and had no expectation of becoming the head of her university's German department.

That night, before he fell asleep, Pelletier didn't think back on the squabbles at the conference. Instead he thought about walking along the streets near the river and about Liz Norton walking beside him as Espinoza pushed Morini's wheelchair and the four of them laughed at the little animals of Bremen, which watched them or watched their shadows on the pavement while mounted harmoniously, innocently, on each other's backs.

From that day on or that night on, not a week went by without the four of them calling back and forth regularly, sometimes at the oddest hours, without a thought for the phone bill.

Sometimes it was Liz Norton who would call Espinoza and ask about Morini, whom she'd talked to the day before and whom she'd thought seemed a little depressed. That same day Espinoza would call Pelletier and inform him that according to Norton, Morini's health had taken a turn for the worse, to which Pelletier would respond by immediately calling Morini, asking him bluntly how he was, laughing with him (because Morini did his best never to talk seriously about his condition), exchanging a few unimportant remarks about work, and later telephoning Norton, maybe at midnight, after putting off the pleasure of the call with a frugal and exquisite dinner, and assuring her that as far as could be hoped, Morini was fine, normal, stable, and what Norton had taken for depression was just the Italian's natural state, sensitive as he was to changes in the weather (maybe the weather had been bad in Turin, maybe Morini had dreamed who knows what kind of horrible dream the night before), thus ending a cycle that would begin again a day later, or two days later, with Morini calling Espinoza for no reason, just to say hello, that was all, to talk for a while, the call invariably taken up with unimportant things, remarks about the weather (as if Morini and even Espinoza were adopting British conversational habits), film recommendations, dispassionate commentary on recent books, in short, a generally soporific or at best listless phone conversation, but one that Espinoza followed with odd enthusiasm, or feigned enthusiasm, or fondness, or at least civilized interest, and that Morini attended to as if his life depended on it, and which was succeeded two days or a few hours later by Espinoza calling Norton and having a conversation along essentially the same lines, and Norton calling Pelletier, and Pelletier calling Morini, with the whole process starting over again days later, the call transmuted into hyperspecialized code, signifier and signified in Archimboldi, text, subtext, and paratext, reconquest of the verbal and physical territoriality in the final pages of Bitzius, which under the circumstances was the same as talking about film or problems in the German department or the clouds that passed incessantly over their respective cities, morning to night.

They met again at the postwar European literature colloquium held in Avignon at the end of 1994. Norton and Morini went as spectators, although their trips were funded by their universities, and Pelletier and Espinoza presented papers on the import of Archimboldi's work. Pelletier's paper focused on insularity, on the rupture that seemed to separate the whole of Archimboldi's oeuvre from the German tradition, though not from a larger European tradition. Espinoza's paper, one of the most engaging he ever wrote, revolved around the mystery veiling the figure of Archimboldi, about whom virtually no one, not even his publisher, knew anything: his books appeared with no author photograph on the flaps or back cover; his biographical data was minimal (German writer born in Prussia in 1920); his place of residence was a mystery, although at some point his publisher let slip in front of a Spiegel reporter that one of his manuscripts had arrived from Sicily; none of his surviving fellow writers had ever seen him; no biography of him existed in German even though sales of his books were rising in Germany as well as in the rest of Europe and even in the United States, which likes vanished writers (vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers, and where his work was beginning to circulate widely, no longer just in German departments but on campus and off campus, in the vast cities with a love for the oral and the visual arts.

At night Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton would have dinner together, sometimes accompanied by one or two German professors whom they’d known for a long time, and who would usually retire early to their hotels or stay until the end of the evening but remain discreetly in the background, as if they understood that the four-cornered figure formed by the Archimboldians was inviolable and also liable to react violently to any outside interference at that hour of the night. By the end it was always just the four of them walking the streets of Avignon, as blithely and happily as they'd walked the grimy, bureaucratic streets of Bremen and as they would walk the many streets awaiting them in the future, Norton pushing Morini with Pelletier to her left and Espinoza to her right, or Pelletier pushing Morini with Espinoza to his left and Norton walking backward ahead of them and laughing with all the might of her twenty-six years, a magnificent laugh that they were quick to imitate although they would surely have preferred not to laugh but just to look at her, or the four of them abreast and halted beside the low wall of a storied river, in other words a river tamed, talking about their German obsession without interrupting one another, testing and savoring one another's intelligence, with long intervals of silence that not even the rain could disturb.

When Pelletier returned from Avignon at the end of 1994, when he opened the door to his apartment in Paris and set his bag on the floor and closed the door, when he poured himself a glass of whiskey and opened the drapes and saw the usual view, a slice of the Place de Breteuil with the UNESCO building in the background, when he took off his jacket and left the whiskey in the kitchen and listened to the messages on the answering machine, when he felt drowsiness, heaviness in his eyelids, but instead of getting into bed and going to sleep he undressed and took a shower, when wrapped in a white bathrobe that reached almost to his ankles he turned on the computer, only then did he realize that he missed Liz Norton and that he would have given anything to be with her at that moment, not just talking to her but in bed with her, telling her that he loved her and hearing from her lips that she loved him too.

Espinoza experienced something similar, though slightly different in two respects. First, the need to be near Liz Norton struck some time before he got back to his apartment in Madrid. By the time he was on the plane he'd realized that she was the perfect woman, the one he'd always hoped to find, and he began to suffer. Second, among the ideal images of Norton that passed at supersonic speed through his head as the plane flew toward Spain at four hundred miles an hour, there were more sex scenes than Pelletier had imagined. Not many more, but more.

Meanwhile, Morini, who traveled by train from Avignon to Turin, spent the trip reading the cultural supplement of II Manifesto, and then he slept until a couple of ticket collectors (who would help him onto the platform in his wheelchair) let him know that they'd arrived.

As for what passed through Liz Norton's head, it's better not to say. Still, the friendship of the four Archimboldians continued in the same fashion as ever, unshakable, shaped by a greater force that the four didn't resist, even though it meant relegating their personal desires to the background.

In 1995 they met at a panel discussion on contemporary German literature held in Amsterdam, a discussion within the framework of larger discussion that was taking place in the same building (although separate lecture halls), encompassing French, English, and Italian literature.

It goes without saying that most of the attendees of these curious discussions gravitated toward the hall where contemporary English literature was being discussed, next door to the German literature hall and separated from it by a wall that was clearly not made of stone, as walls used to be, but of fragile bricks covered with a thin layer of plaster, so that the shouts, howls, and especially the applause sparked by English literature could be heard in the German literature room as if the two talks or dialogues were one, or as if the Germans were being mocked, when not drowned out, by the English, not to mention by the massive audience attending the English (or Anglo-Indian) discussion, notably larger than the sparse and earnest audience attending the German discussion. Which in the final analysis was a good thing, because it's common knowledge that a conversation involving only a few people, with everyone listening to everyone else and taking time to think and not shouting, tends to be more productive or at least more relaxed than a mass conversation, which runs the permanent risk of becoming a rally, or, because of the necessary brevity of the speeches, a series of slogans that fade as soon as they're put into words.

But before coming to the crux of the matter, or of the discussion, a rather petty detail that nonetheless affected the course of events must be noted. On a last-minute whim, the organizers-the same people who'd left out contemporary Spanish and Polish and Swedish literature for lack of time or money-earmarked most of the funds to provide luxurious accommodations for the stars of English literature, and with the money left over they brought in three French novelists, an Italian poet, an Italian short story writer, and three German writers, the first two of them novelists from West and East Berlin, now reunified, both vaguely renowned (and both of whom arrived in Amsterdam by train and made no complaint when they were put up at a three-star hotel), and the third a rather shadowy figure about whom no one knew anything, not even Morini, who, presenter or not, knew quite a bit about contemporary German literature.

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."

Astounding Swabian, said Espinoza. I want him all to myself, said Pelletier. Try not to overwhelm him, try not to seem too interested, said Morini. We have to treat the man with kid gloves, said Norton. Which means we have to be very nice to him.

But the Swabian had already said everything he had to say, and even though they coddled him and took him out to the best restaurant in Amsterdam and complimented him and talked to him about hospitality and extravagance and the fate of cultural promoters trapped in small provincial towns, it was impossible to get anything interesting out of him, although the four were careful to record every word he spoke, as if they'd met their Moses, a detail that didn't go unnoticed by the Swabian and in fact heightened his shyness (which, according to Espinoza and Pelletier, was such an unusual trait in a former cultural promoter that they thought the Swabian must be some kind of impostor), his reserve, his discretion, which verged on the improbable omerta of an old Nazi who smells danger.

Fifteen days later, Espinoza and Pelletier took a few days' leave and went to Hamburg to visit Archimboldi's publisher. They were received by the editor in chief, a thin, upright man in his sixties by the name of Schnell, which means quick, although Schnell was on the slow side. He had sleek dark brown hair, sprinkled with gray at the temples, which only accentuated his youthful appearance. When he got up to shake hands, it occurred to both Espinoza and Pelletier that he must be gay.

"That faggot is the closest thing to an eel I've ever seen," Espinoza said afterward, as they strolled through Hamburg.

Pelletier chided him for his comment, with its markedly homophobic overtones, although deep down he agreed, there was something eellike about Schnell, something of the fish that swims in dark, muddy waters.

Of course, there was little Schnell could tell them that they didn't already know. He had never seen Archimboldi, and the money, of which there was more and more, was deposited in a Swiss bank account. Once every two years, instructions were received from the writer, the letters usually postmarked Italy, although there were also letters in the publisher's files with Greek and Spanish and Moroccan stamps, letters, incidentally, that were addressed to Mrs. Bubis, the owner of the publishing house, and that he, naturally, hadn't read.

"There are only two people left here, besides Mrs. Bubis, of course, who've met Benno von Archimboldi in person," Schnell told them. "The publicity director and the copy chief. By the time I came to work here, Archimboldi had long since vanished."

Pelletier and Espinoza asked to speak to both women. The publicity director's office was full of plants and photographs, not necessarily of the house authors, and the only thing she could tell them about the vanished writer was that he was a good person.

"A tall man, very tall," she said. "When he walked beside the late Mr. Bubis they looked like a ti. Or a li."

Espinoza and Pelletier didn't understand what she meant and the publicity director wrote the letter l and then the letter i on a scrap of paper. Or maybe more like a le. Like this.

And again she wrote something on the scrap of paper.

"The l is Archimboldi, the e is the late Mr. Bubis."

Then the publicity director laughed and watched them for a while, reclining in her swivel chair in silence. Later they talked to the copy chief. She was about the same age as the publicity director but not as cheery.

She said yes, she had met Archimboldi many years ago, but she didn't remember his face anymore, or what he was like, or any story about him that would be worth telling. She couldn't remember the last time he was at the publishing house. She advised them to speak to Mrs. Bubis, and then, without a word, she busied herself editing a galley, answering the other copy editors' questions, talking on the phone to people who might-Espinoza and Pelletier thought with pity-be translators. Before they left, refusing to be discouraged, they returned to Schnell's office and talked to him about Archimboldian conferences and colloquiums planned for the future. Schnell, attentive and cordial, told them they could count on him for whatever they might need.

Since they didn't have anything to do except wait for their flights back to Paris and Madrid, Pelletier and Espinoza went walking around Hamburg. The walk inevitably took them to the district of streetwalkers and peep shows, and then they both lapsed into gloom and began telling each other stories of love and disillusionment. Of course, they didn't give names or dates, they spoke in what might be called abstract terms, but despite the seemingly detached presentation of their misfortunes, the conversation and the walk only sank them deeper into a state of melancholy, to such a degree that after two hours they both felt as if they were suffocating.

They took a taxi back to the hotel in silence.

A surprise awaited them there. At the desk there was a note from Schnell addressed to both of them, in which he explained that after their conversation that morning, he'd decided to talk to Mrs. Bubis and she had agreed to see them. The next morning, Espinoza and Pelletier called at the publisher's apartment, on the third floor of an old building in Hamburg 's upper town. As they waited they looked at the framed photographs on one wall. On the other two walls there were canvases by Soutine and Kandinsky and several drawings by Grosz, Kokoschka, and Ensor. But Espinoza and Pelletier were much more interested in the photographs, which were almost all of writers they disdained or admired, and in any case had read: Thomas Mann with Bubis, Heinrich Mann with Bubis, Klaus Mann with Bubis, Alfred Doblin with Bubis, Hermann Hesse with Bubis, Walter Benjamin with Bubis, Anna Seghers with Bubis, Stefan Zweig with Bubis, Bertolt Brecht with Bubis, Feuchtwanger with Bubis, Johannes Becher with Bubis, Oskar Maria Graf with Bubis, bodies and faces and vague scenery, beautifully framed. With the innocence of the dead, who no longer mind being observed, the people in the photographs gazed out on the professors' barely contained enthusiasm. When Mrs. Bubis appeared, the two of them had their heads together trying to decide whether a man next to Bubis was Fallada or not.

Indeed, it is Fallada, said Mrs. Bubis. When they turned, Pelletier and Espinoza saw an older woman in a white blouse and black skirt, a woman with a figure like Marlene Dietrich, as Pelletier would say much later, a woman who despite her years was still as strong willed as ever, a woman who didn't cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it with curiosity and elegance. A woman who plunged into the abyss sitting down.

"My husband knew all the German writers and the German writers loved and respected my husband, even if a few of them said horrible things about him later that weren't always even accurate," said Mrs. Bubis, with a smile.

They talked about Archimboldi and Mrs. Bubis had tea and cakes brought in, although she drank vodka, which surprised Espinoza and Pelletier, not that she would start to drink so early, but that she wouldn't offer them a drink too, a drink they would in any case have refused.

"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?"

Then they went back to talking about Archimboldi and Mrs. Bubis showed them a very odd review that had appeared in a Berlin newspaper after the publication of Ludicke, Archimboldi's first novel. The review, by someone named Schleiermacher, tried to sum up the novelist's personality in a few words.

Intelligence: average.

Character: epileptic.

Scholarship: sloppy.

Storytelling ability: chaotic.

Prosody: chaotic.

German usage: chaotic.

Average intelligence and sloppy scholarship are easy to understand. What did he mean by epileptic character, though? that Archimboldi had epilepsy? that he wasn't right in the head? that he suffered attacks of a mysterious nature? that he was a compulsive reader of Dostoevsky? There was no physical description of the writer in the piece.

"We never knew who this man Schleiermacher was," said Mrs. Bubis, "and sometimes my late husband would joke that Archimboldi himself had written the review. But he knew as well as I did that it wasn't true."

Near midday, when it was time to leave, Pelletier and Espinoza dared to ask the only question they thought really mattered: could she help them get in touch with Archimboldi? Mrs. Bubis's eyes lit up. As if she were at the scene of a fire, Pelletier told Liz Norton later. Not a raging blaze, but a fire that was about to go out, after burning for months. Her no came as a slight shake of the head that made Pelletier and Espinoza abruptly aware of the futility of their plea.

Still, they stayed a while longer. From somewhere in the house came the muted strains of an Italian popular song. Espinoza asked whether she knew Archimboldi, whether she had ever seen him in person while her husband was alive. Mrs. Bubis said she had and then, under her breath, she sang the song's final chorus. Her Italian, according to the two friends, was very good.

"What is Archimboldi like?" asked Espinoza.

"Very tall," said Mrs. Bubis, "very tall, a man of truly great height. If he'd been born in this day and age he likely would have played basketball."

Although by the way she said it, Archimboldi might as well have been a dwarf. In the taxi back to the hotel the two friends thought about Grosz and about Mrs. Bubis's cruel, crystalline laugh and about the impression left by that house full of photographs, where nevertheless the photograph of the only writer they cared about was missing. And although neither wanted to admit it, both believed (or sensed) that the flash of insight granted to them in the red-light district was more important than any revelation they might have scented as the guests of Mrs. Bubis.

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.

That afternoon, and without indulging in any confidences beyond the strictly necessary-confidences in general, or maybe abstract, terms- they shared another taxi to the airport, and as they waited for their planes they talked about love, about the need for love. Pelletier was the first to go. When Espinoza was left alone (his flight was an hour later), his thoughts turned to Liz Norton and his real chances of wooing her. He imagined her and then he imagined himself, side by side, sharing an apartment in Madrid, going to the supermarket, both of them working in the German department. He imagined his office and her office, separated by a wall, and nights in Madrid next to her, eating with friends at good restaurants, and, back at home, an enormous bathtub, an enormous bed.

But Pelletier got there first. Three days after the meeting with Archimboldi's publisher, he showed up in London unannounced, and after telling Liz Norton the latest news, he invited her to dinner at a restaurant in Hammersmith that a colleague in the Russian department had recommended, where they ate goulash and chickpea puree with beets and fish macerated in lemon with yogurt, a dinner with candles and violins and real Russian waiters and Irish waiters disguised as Russians, all of it excessive from any point of view, and somewhat rustic and dubious from a gastronomic point of view, and they had vodka with their dinner and a bottle of Bordeaux, and the whole meal cost Pelletier an arm and a leg, but it was worth it because then Norton invited him home, officially to discuss Archimboldi and the few things that Mrs. Bubis had revealed, including, of course, the critic Schleiermacher's contemptuous appraisal of Archimboldi's first book, and then both of them started to laugh and Pelletier kissed Norton on the lips, with great tact, and she kissed him back much more ardently, thanks possibly to the dinner and the vodka and the Bordeaux, but Pelletier thought it showed promise, and then they went to bed and screwed for an hour until Norton fell asleep.

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 video-cassette 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.

That week, Liz Norton's home phone rang three or four times every afternoon and her cell phone rang two or three times every morning. The calls were from Pelletier and Espinoza, and although both produced elaborate Archimboldian pretexts, the pretexts were exhausted in a minute and the two professors proceeded to say what was really on their minds.

Pelletier talked about his colleagues in the German department, about a young Swiss poet and professor who was badgering him for a scholarship, about the sky in Paris (shades of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Banville), about the cars at dusk, their lights already on, heading home. Espinoza talked about his library, where he arranged his books in the strictest solitude, about the distant drums that he sometimes heard coming from a neighboring apartment that seemed to be home to a group of African musicians, about the neighborhoods of Madrid, Lavapies, Malasana, and about the area around the Gran Via, where you could go for a walk at any time of night.

During this period, both Espinoza and Pelletier completely forgot about Morini. Only Norton called him now and then, carrying on the same conversations as ever.

In his way, Morini had vanished from sight.

Soon Pelletier got used to traveling to London whenever he wanted, though it must be emphasized that in terms of proximity and ready modes of transportation, he had it easiest.

These visits lasted only a single night. Pelletier would arrive just after nine, meeting Norton at ten at a restaurant where he had made reservations from Paris, and by one they were in bed.

Liz Norton was a passionate lover, although her passion was of limited duration. Not having much imagination of her own, she abandoned herself to any game her lover suggested, without ever taking the initiative, or thinking she ought to. These sessions rarely lasted more than three hours, a fact that occasionally saddened Pelletier, who would gladly have screwed till daybreak.

After the sexual act, and this was what frustrated Pelletier most, Norton preferred to talk about academic matters rather than to look frankly at what was developing between them. To Pelletier, Norton's coldness seemed a particularly feminine mode of self-protection. Hoping to get through to her, one night he decided to tell her the story of his own sentimental adventures. He drew up a long list of women he had known and exposed them to her frosty or indifferent gaze. She seemed unimpressed and showed no desire to repay his confession with one of her own.

In the mornings, after he called a cab, Pelletier slipped soundlessly into his clothes so as not to wake her and headed for the airport. Before he left he would spend a few seconds watching her, sprawled on the sheets, and sometimes he felt so full of love he could have burst into tears.

An hour later Liz Norton's alarm would sound and she'd jump out of bed. She'd take a shower, put water on to boil, drink tea with milk, dry her hair, and launch a thorough inspection of her apartment as if she were afraid that her nocturnal visitor had purloined some object of value. The living room and bedroom were almost always a wreck, and that bothered her. Impatiently, she would gather up the dirty glasses, empty the ashtrays, change the sheets, put back the books that Pelletier had taken down from the shelves and left on the floor, return the bottles to the rack in the kitchen, and then get dressed and go to the university. If she had a meeting with her department colleagues, she would go to the meeting, and if she didn't have a meeting she would shut herself up in the library to work or read until it was time for class.

One Saturday Espinoza told her that she must come to Madrid, she would be his guest, Madrid at this time of year was the most beautiful city in the world, and there was a Bacon retrospective on, too, which wasn't to be missed.

"I'll be there tomorrow," said Norton, which caught Espinoza off guard, since what his invitation had expressed was more a wish than any real hope that she might accept.

The certain knowledge that she would appear at his apartment the next day naturally sent Espinoza into a state of growing excitement and rampant insecurity. And yet they had a wonderful Sunday (Espinoza did everything in his power to assure they would), and that night they went to bed together, listening for the sound of the drums next door but hearing nothing, as if that day the African band had packed up for a tour of other Spanish cities. Espinoza had so many questions to ask that when the time came he didn't ask a single one. He didn't need to. Norton told him that she and Pelletier were lovers, although she put it another way, using some more ambiguous word, friends maybe, or maybe she said they'd been seeing each other, or words to that effect.

Espinoza would have liked to ask how long they'd been lovers, but all that came out was a sigh. Norton said she had many friends, without specifying whether she meant friend-friends or lover-friends, and always had ever since she was sixteen, when she made love for the first time with a thirty-four-year-old, a failed Pottery Lane musician, and this was how she saw things. Espinoza, who had never talked to a woman about love (or sex) in German, the two of them naked in bed, wanted to know how exactly she did see things, because he wasn't quite clear on that, but all he did was nod.

Then came the great surprise. Norton looked him in the eye and asked whether he thought he knew her. Espinoza said he wasn't sure, maybe in some ways he thought he did and in other ways he didn't, but he felt great respect for her and admired her work as a scholar and critic of the Archimboldian oeuvre. That was when Norton told him she'd been married and was now divorced.

"I had no idea," said Espinoza.

"Well, it's true," said Norton. "I'm a divorcee."

When Liz Norton flew back to London, Espinoza was left even more nervous than he'd been during her two days in Madrid. On the one hand, the encounter had been as successful as he could have hoped, of that there was no doubt. In bed, especially, the two of them seemed to understand each other, to be in sync, well matched, as if they'd known each other for a long time, but when the sex was over and Norton was in the mood to talk, everything changed. She entered a hypnotic state, as if she didn't have any woman friend to turn to, thought Espinoza, who in his heart believed that such confessions weren't intended for men's ears but should be heard by other women: Norton talked about menstrual cycles, for example, and the moon and black-and-white movies that turned without warning into horror films, which thoroughly depressed Espinoza, to the extent that when she stopped talking it took a superhuman effort for him to dress and go out for dinner or meet friends, arm in arm with Norton, not to mention the business with Pelletier, which when you really thought about it was chilling, and now who'll tell Pelletier that I'm sleeping with Liz?, all of which unsettled Espinoza and, when he was alone, gave him knots in his stomach and made him want to run to the bathroom, just as Norton had explained happened to her (how could I have let her tell me these things!) when she saw her ex-husband, six foot three and not very stable, a danger to himself and others, somebody who might have been a small-time thug or hooligan, the extent of his cultural education the old songs he sang in the pub with his mates from childhood, a bastard who believed in television and had the shrunken and shriveled soul of a religious fundamentalist. To put it plainly, the worst husband a woman could inflict on herself, no matter how you looked at it.

And even though Espinoza calmed himself with the promise that he wouldn't take things any further, four days later, once he was recovered, he called Norton and said he wanted to see her. Norton asked whether he'd rather meet in London or Madrid. Espinoza said it was up to her. Norton chose Madrid. Espinoza felt like the happiest man in the world. Norton arrived Saturday evening and left Sunday night. Espinoza drove her to El Escorial and then they went to a flamenco show. He thought she seemed happy, and he was glad. Saturday night they made love for three hours, after which Norton, instead of starting to talk as she had before, said that she was exhausted and went to sleep. The next day, after they showered, they made love again and left for El Escorial. On the way back Espinoza asked her whether she'd seen Pelletier. Norton said she had, that Jean-Claude had been in London.

"How is he?" asked Espinoza.

"Fine," said Norton. "I told him about us."

Espinoza got nervous and concentrated on the road.

"So what did he think?" he asked.

"That it's my business," said Norton, "but sooner or later I'll have to choose."

Though he made no comment, Espinoza admired Pelletier's attitude. There's a man who knows how to play fair, he thought. Then Norton asked him how he felt about it.

"More or less the same," lied Espinoza, without taking his eyes off the road.

For a while they were silent and then Norton started to talk about her husband. This time the horror stories she told didn't affect Espinoza in the slightest.

Pelletier called Espinoza that Sunday night, just after Espinoza had dropped Norton off at the airport. He got straight to the point. He said he knew Espinoza knew what was going on. Espinoza said he appreciated the call, and whether Pelletier believed it or not, he'd been planning to call him that very night and the only reason he hadn't was because Pelletier had beaten him to it. Pelletier said he believed him.

"So what do we do now?" asked Espinoza.

"Leave it all in the hands of fate," answered Pelletier.

Then they started to talk-and laughed quite a bit-about a strange conference that had just been held in Salonika, to which only Morini had been invited.

In Salonika, Morini had a mild attack. One morning he woke up in his hotel room and couldn't see anything. He had gone blind. He panicked at first, but after a while he managed to regain control. He lay in bed without moving, trying to go back to sleep. He thought of pleasant things, trying out childhood scenes, a few films, still shots of faces, but nothing worked. He sat up in bed and felt around for his wheelchair. He unfolded it and swung into it with less effort than he had expected. Then, very slowly, he tried to turn himself toward the room's only window, a French door that opened onto a balcony with a view of bare, yellowish-brown hills and an office building topped with a neon sign for a real estate company advertising chalets in an area presumably near Salonika.

The development (which had yet to be built) boasted the name Apollo Residences, and the night before, Morini had been watching the sign from his balcony, a glass of whiskey in his hand, as it blinked on and off. When he reached the window at last and managed to open it, he felt dizzy, as if he were about to faint. First he thought about trying to find the door to the hallway and maybe calling for help or letting himself fall in the middle of the corridor. Then he decided that it would be best to go back to bed. An hour later he was woken by the light coming in the open window and by his own perspiration. He called the reception desk and asked whether there were any messages for him. He was told there were none. He undressed in bed and got back in the wheelchair sitting ready beside him. It took him half an hour to shower and dress himself in clean clothes. Then he closed the window, without looking out, and left the room for the conference.

The four of them met again at the contemporary German literature symposium held in Salzburg in 1996. Espinoza and Pelletier seemed very happy. Norton, on the other hand, was like an ice queen, indifferent to the city's cultural offerings and beauty. Morini showed up loaded with books and papers to grade, as if the Salzburg meeting had caught him at one of his busiest moments.

All four were put up at the same hotel. Morini and Norton were on the third floor, in rooms 305 and 311, respectively. Espinoza was on the fifth floor, in room 509. And Pelletier was on the sixth floor, in room 602. The hotel was literally overrun by a German orchestra and a Russian choir, and there was a constant musical hubbub in the hallways and on the stairs, sometimes louder and sometimes softer, as if the musicians never stopped humming overtures or as if a mental (and musical) static had settled over the hotel. Espinoza and Pelletier weren't bothered in the least by it, and Morini seemed not to notice, but this was just the sort of thing, Norton exclaimed, one of many others she wouldn't mention, that made Salzburg such a shithole.

Naturally, neither Pelletier nor Espinoza visited Norton in her room a single time. Instead, the room that Espinoza visited (once) was Pelletier's, and the room that Pelletier visited (twice) was Espinoza's, the two of them as excited as children at the news spreading like wildfire, like a nuclear conflagration, along the hallways and through the symposium gatherings in petit comité, to wit, that Archimboldi was a candidate for the Nobel that year, not only cause for great joy among Archimboldians everywhere but also a triumph and a vindication, so much so that in Salzburg, at the Red Bull beer hall, on a night of many toasts, peace was declared between the two main factions of Archimboldi scholars, that is, between Pelletier and Espinoza and Borchmeyer, Pohl, and Schwarz, who from then on decided, with respect for each other's differences and methods of interpretation, to pool their efforts and forswear sabotage, which in practical terms meant that Pelletier would no longer veto the publication of Schwarz's essays in the journals where he held sway, and Schwarz would no longer veto the publication of Pelletier's studies in the journals where he, Schwarz, was held in godlike esteem.

Morini, less excited than Pelletier and Espinoza, was the first to point out that until now, at least as far as he knew, Archimboldi had never received an important prize in Germany, no booksellers' award, or critics' award, or readers' award, or publishers' award, assuming there was such a thing, which meant that one might reasonably expect that, knowing Archimboldi was up for the biggest prize in world literature, his fellow Germans, even if only to play it safe, would offer him a national award or a symbolic award or an honorary award or at least an hour-long television interview, none of which happened, incensing the Archimboldians (united this time), who, rather than being disheartened by the poor treatment that Archimboldi continued to receive, redoubled their efforts, galvanized in their frustration and spurred on by the injustice with which a civilized state was treating not only-in their opinion-the best living writer in Germany, but the best living writer in Europe, and this triggered an avalanche of literary and even biographical studies of Archimboldi (about whom so little was known that it might as well be nothing at all), which in turn drew more readers, most captivated not by the German's work but by the life or nonlife of such a singular figure, which in turn translated into a word-of-mouth movement that increased sales considerably in Germany (a phenomenon not unrelated to the presence of Dieter Hellfeld, the latest acquisition of the Schwarz, Borchmeyer, and Pohl group), which in turn gave new impetus to the translations and the reissues of the old translations, none of which made Archimboldi a bestseller but did boost him, for two weeks, to ninth place on the bestseller list in Italy, and to twelfth place in France, also for two weeks, and although it never made the lists in Spain, a publishing house there bought the rights to the few novels that still belonged to other Spanish publishers and the rights to all of the writer's books that had yet to be translated into Spanish, and in this way a kind of Archimboldi Library was begun, which wasn't a bad business.

In the British Isles, it must be said, Archimboldi remained a decidedly marginal writer.

In these heady days, Pelletier happened on a piece written by the Swabian whom they'd had the pleasure of meeting in Amsterdam. In the piece the Swabian basically repeated what he'd already told them about Archimboldi's visit to the Frisian town and the dinner afterward with the lady who had traveled to Buenos Aires. The piece was published in the Reutlingen Morning News and differed from the Swabian's original account in that it reproduced an exchange between the lady and Archimboldi, pitched in a key of sardonic humor. The conversation began with her asking him where he was from. Archimboldi replied that he was Prussian. The lady asked whether his was a noble name, of the Prussian landed gentry. Archimboldi replied that it probably was. Then the lady murmured the name Benno von Archimboldi, as if biting a gold coin to test it. Immediately she said it didn't sound familiar and she mentioned a few other names, to see whether Archimboldi recognized them. He said he didn't, all he'd known of Prussia were its forests.

"And yet your name is of Italian origin," said the lady.

"French," replied Archimboldi. "It's Huguenot."

At this, the lady laughed. She had once been very beautiful, said the Swabian. Even then, in the dim light of the tavern, she looked beautiful, although when she laughed her false teeth slipped and she had to adjust them with her hand. Still, the operation was not ungraceful, as performed by her. The lady was so easy and natural with the fishermen and peasants that she inspired only respect and affection. She had been a widow for a long time. Sometimes she would go out riding on the dunes. Other times she would wander down side roads buffeted by the wind off the North Sea.

When Pelletier discussed the Swabian's article with his three friends one morning as they were having breakfast at the hotel before going out into Salzburg, opinions and interpretations varied considerably.

According to Espinoza and Pelletier, the Swabian had probably been the lady's lover at the time when Archimboldi came to give his reading. According to Norton, the Swabian had a different version of events depending on his mood and his audience, and it was possible that he himself didn't even remember anymore what was really said and what had really happened on that momentous occasion. According to Morini, the Swabian was a grotesque double of Archimboldi, his twin, the negative image of a developed photograph that keeps looming larger, becoming more powerful, more oppressive, without ever losing its link to the negative (which undergoes the reverse process, gradually altered by time and fate), the two images somehow still the same: both young men in the years of terror and barbarism under Hitler, both World War II veterans, both writers, both citizens of a bankrupt nation, both poor bastards adrift at the moment when they meet and (in their grotesque fashion) recognize each other, Archimboldi as a struggling writer, the Swabian as "cultural promoter" in a town where culture was hardly a serious concern.

Was it even conceivable that the miserable and (why not?) contemptible Swabian was really Archimboldi? It wasn't Morini who asked this question, but Norton. And the answer was no, since the Swabian, to begin with, was short and of delicate constitution, which didn't match Archimboldi's physical description at all. Pelletier's and Espinoza's explanation was much more plausible: the Swabian as the noble lady's lover, even though she could have been his grandmother. The Swabian trudging each afternoon to the house of the lady who had traveled to Buenos Aires, to fill his belly with charcuterie and biscuits and cups of tea. The Swabian massaging the back of the former cavalry captain's widow, as the rain lashed the windows, a sad Frisian rain that made one want to weep, and although it didn't make the Swabian weep, it made him pale, and he approached the nearest window, where he stood looking out at what was beyond the curtains of frenzied rain, until the lady called him, peremptorily, and the Swabian turned his back on the window, not knowing why he had gone to it, not knowing what he hoped to see, and just at that moment, when there was no one at the window anymore and only a little lamp of colored glass at the back of the room flickering, it appeared.

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.

Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone.

Pelletier made the first call, which lasted an hour and fifteen minutes. The second was made three days later by Espinoza and lasted two hours and fifteen minutes. After they'd been talking for an hour and a half, Pelletier told Espinoza to hang up, the call would be expensive and he'd call right back, but Espinoza firmly refused.

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid , eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The word euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed. In fact, they both laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid.

The second conversation, radically longer than the first, was a conversation between friends doing their best to clear up any murky points they might have overlooked, a conversation that refused to become technical or logistical and instead touched on subjects connected only tenuously to Norton, subjects that had nothing to do with surges of emotion, subjects easy to broach and then drop when they wished to return to the main subject, Liz Norton, whom, by the time the second call was nearing its close, both had recognized not as the Fury who destroyed their friendship, black clad with bloodstained wings, nor as Hecate, who began as an au pair, caring for children, and ended up learning witchcraft and turning herself into an animal, but as the angel who had fortified their friendship, forcibly shown them what they'd known all along, what they'd assumed all along, which was that they were civilized beings, beings capable of noble sentiments, not two dumb beasts debased by routine and regular sedentary work, no, that night Pelletier and Espinoza discovered that they were generous, so generous that if they'd been together they'd have felt the need to go out and celebrate, dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed), and for lack of celebration or revelry they hailed this virtue with an unspoken promise of eternal friendship, and sealed the vow, after they hung up their respective phones in their respective apartments crammed with books, by sipping whiskey with supreme slowness and watching the night outside their windows, maybe seeking unconsciously what the Swabian had sought outside the widow's window in vain.

Morini was the last to know, as one would expect, although in Morini's case the sentimental mathematics didn't always work out.

Even before Norton first went to bed with Pelletier, Morini had felt it coming. Not because of the way Pelletier behaved around Norton but because of her own detachment, a generalized detachment, Baudelaire would have called it spleen, Nerval melancholy, which left Norton liable to embark on an intimate relationship with anyone who came along.

Espinoza, of course, he hadn't predicted. When Norton called and told him she was involved with the two of them, Morini was surprised (although he wouldn't have been surprised if Norton had said she was involved with Pelletier and a colleague at the University of London or even a student), but he hid it well. Then he tried to think of other things, but he couldn't.

He asked Norton whether she was happy. Norton said she was. He told her he had received an e-mail from Borchmeyer with fresh news. Norton didn't seem very interested. He asked her whether she'd heard from her husband.

"Ex-husband," said Norton.

No, she hadn't heard from him, although an old friend had called to tell her that her ex was living with another old friend. Morini asked whether the woman had been a very close friend. Norton didn't understand the question.

"What close friend?"

"The one who's living with your ex now," said Morini.

"She doesn't live with him, she's supporting him, it's completely different."

"Ah," said Morini, and he tried to change the subject, but he drew a blank.

Maybe I should talk to her about my illness, he thought bitterly. But that he would never do.

Around this time, Morini was the first of the four to read an article about the killings in Sonora, which appeared in II Manifesto and was written by an Italian reporter who had gone to Mexico to cover the Zapatista guerrillas. The news was horrible, he thought. In Italy there were serial killers, too, but they hardly ever killed more than ten people, whereas in Sonora the dead numbered well over one hundred.

Then he thought about the reporter from II Manifesto and it struck him as odd that she had gone to Chiapas, which is at the southern tip of the country, and that she had ended up writing about events in Sonora, which, if he wasn't mistaken, was in the north, the northwest, on the border with the United States. He imagined her traveling by bus, a long way from Mexico City to the desert lands of the north. He imagined her talking to Subcomandante Marcos. He imagined her in the Mexican capital. Someone there must have told her what was happening in Sonora. And instead of getting on the next plane to Italy, she had decided to buy a bus ticket and set off on a long trip to Sonora. For an instant, Morini felt a wild desire to travel with the reporter.

I'd love her until the end of time, he thought. An hour later he'd already forgotten the matter completely.

A little later he got an e-mail from Norton. He thought it was strange that Norton would write and not call. Once he had read the letter, though, he understood that she needed to express her thoughts as precisely as possible and that was why she'd decided to write. In the letter she asked his forgiveness for what she called her egotism, an egotism that expressed itself in the contemplation of her own misfortunes, real or imaginary. She went on to say that she'd finally resolved her lingering quarrel with her ex-husband. The dark clouds had vanished from her life. Now she wanted to be happy and sing [sic]. Until probably the week before, she added, she'd loved him still, and now she could attest that the part of her past that included him was behind her for good. I'm suddenly keen on my work, she said, and on all those little everyday things that make human beings happy. And she also said: I wanted you, my patient Piero, to be the first to know.

Morini read the letter three times. With a heavy heart, he thought now wrong Norton was when she said her love and her ex-husband and everything they'd been through were behind her. Nothing is ever behind us.

Pelletier and Espinoza, meanwhile, received no such confidences. But Pelletier noticed something that Espinoza didn't. The London-Paris trips had become more frequent than the Paris-London trips. And as often as not, Norton would show up with a gift-a collection of essays, an art book, catalogs of exhibitions that Pelletier would never see, even a shirt or a handkerchief-which had never happened before.

Otherwise, everything was the same. They screwed, went out to dinner, discussed the latest news about Archimboldi. They never talked about their future as a couple. Each time Espinoza came up in conversation (which was rare), both adopted a strictly impartial, cautious, and above all friendly tone. Some nights they even fell asleep in each other's arms without making love, something Pelletier was sure didn't happen with Espinoza. But he was wrong, because relations between Norton and Espinoza were often a faithful simulacrum of Norton's relations with Pelletier.

The meals were different, better in Paris; the setting and the scenery were different, more modern in Paris; and the language was different, because with Espinoza Norton spoke mostly German and with Pelletier mostly English, but overall the similarities outweighed the differences. Naturally, with Espinoza there had also been nights without sex.

If Norton's closest friend (she had none) had asked which of the two friends she had a better time with in bed, Norton wouldn't have known what to say.

Sometimes she thought Pelletier was the more skillful lover. Other times, Espinoza. Viewed from outside, say from a rigorously academic standpoint, one could maintain that Pelletier had a longer bibliography than Espinoza, who relied more on instinct than intellect in such matters, and who had the disadvantage of being Spanish, that is, of belonging to a culture that tended to confuse eroticism with scatology and pornography with coprophagy, a confusion evident (because unaddressed) in Espinoza's mental library, for he had only just read the Marquis de Sade in order to check (and refute) an article by Pohl in which the latter drew connections from Justine and Philosophy in the Boudoir to one of Archimboldi's novels of the 1950s.

Pelletier, on the other hand, had read the divine Marquis when he was sixteen and at eighteen had participated in a menage à trois with two female fellow students, and his adolescent predilection for erotic comics had flowered into a reasonable, restrained adult collection of licentious literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In figurative terms: Pelletier was more intimately acquainted than Espinoza with Mnemosyne, mountain goddess and mother of the nine muses. In plain speech: Pelletier could screw for six hours (without coming) thanks to his bibliography, whereas Espinoza could go for the same amount of time (coming twice, sometimes three times, and finishing half dead) sheerly on the basis of strength and force of will.

And speaking of the Greeks, it would be fair to say that Espinoza and Pelletier believed themselves to be (and in their perverse way, were) incarnations of Ulysses, and that both thought of Morini as Eurylochus, the loyal friend about whom two very different stories are told in the Odyssey. The first, in which he escapes being turned into a pig, suggests shrewdness or a solitary and individualistic nature, careful skepticism, the craftiness of an old seaman. The second, however, involves an impious and sacrilegous adventure: the cattle of Zeus or another powerful god are grazing peacefully on the island of the Sun when they wake the powerful appetite of Eurylochus, so that with clever words he cajoles his friends to kill the cattle and prepare a feast, which angers Zeus or whichever god it is no end, who curses Eurylochus for putting on airs and presuming to be enlightened or atheistic or Promethean, since the god in question is more incensed by Eurylochus's attitude, by the dialectic of his hunger, than by the act itself of eating the cattle, and because of this act, or because of the feast, the ship that bears Eurylochus capsizes and all the sailors die, which was what Pelletier and Espinoza believed would happen to Morini, not in a conscious way, of course, but in a kind of disjointed or instinctual way, a dark thought in the form of a microscopic sign throbbing in a dark and microscopic part of the two friends' souls.

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.

A week later, having interpreted the dream in at least four different ways, Morini traveled to London. The decision to make the trip was a complete break from his usual routine, since normally he traveled only to conferences and meetings, his plane ticket and hotel room paid for by the organization in question. This time there was no professional excuse and he paid the hotel and transportation costs out of his own pocket. Nor can it be said that he was answering a call of help from Liz Norton. He had talked to her just four days before and told her he was planning to come to London, a city he hadn't visited in a long time.

Norton was delighted and invited him to stay with her, but Morini lied, saying he'd already made a reservation at a hotel. When he landed at Gatwick, Norton was waiting for him. That day they had breakfast together, in a restaurant near Morini's hotel, and that night they had dinner in Norton's apartment. During dinner, bland but praised politely by Morini, they talked about Archimboldi, about his growing renown and the innumerable gaps in his story that remained to be filled, but later, over dessert, the conversation took a more personal turn, tending more toward reminiscence, and until three in the morning, when they called a cab and Norton helped Morini into her building's old elevator, then down a flight of six steps, everything was, as the Italian reviewed it in his mind, much more pleasant than he'd expected.

Between breakfast and dinner, Morini was alone, hardly daring at first to leave his room, although later, driven by boredom, he decided to go out and went as far as Hyde Park, where he wandered aimlessly, lost in thought, without noticing or seeing anyone. Some people gazed after him in curiosity, because they had never seen a man in a wheelchair moving with such determination and at such a steady pace. When he finally came to a stop he found himself outside the Italian Gardens, or so they were called, although nothing about them struck him as Italian, but who knows, he mused, sometimes people are staggeringly ignorant of what's under their very noses.

He pulled a book out of his jacket pocket and began to read as he regained his strength. Soon he heard a voice saying hello, then the noise a heavy body makes when it drops to a wooden bench. He returned the greeting. The stranger had straw-colored hair, graying and dirty, and must have weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. They sat a moment looking at each other and the stranger asked whether he was a foreigner. Morini said he was Italian. The stranger wanted to know whether he lived in London, and then what the book he was reading was called. Morini answered that he didn't live in London and that the book he was reading was called Il libra di cucina di Juana Ines de la Cruz, by Angelo Morino, and that it was written in Italian, of course, although it was about a Mexican nun. About the nun's life and some of her recipes.

"So this Mexican nun liked to cook?" asked the stranger.

"In a way she did, although she also wrote poems," Morini replied.

"I don't trust nuns," said the stranger.

"Well, this nun was a great poet," said Morini.

"I don't trust people who cook from recipes," said the stranger, as if he hadn't heard him.

"So whom do you trust?" asked Morini.

"People who eat when they're hungry, I guess," said the stranger.

Then he went on to explain that a long time ago he had worked for a company that made mugs, just mugs, the plain kind and the kind decorated with phrases or mottoes or jokes: Sorry, I'm On My Coffee Break! or Daddy Loves Mummy or Last Round Today, Last Round Forever, that sort of thing, mugs with anodyne captions, and one day, surely due to demand, the inscriptions on the mugs changed drastically and they started using pictures, black-and-white at first, but then the venture did so well they switched to pictures in color, some humorous but some dirty, too.

"They even gave me a raise," the stranger said. "Do mugs like that exist in Italy?" he asked then.

"Yes," said Morini, "some with phrases in English and others with phrases in Italian."

"Well, it was everything we could have asked for," said the stranger. "We all worked more happily. The managers worked more happily, too, and the boss looked happy. But after a few months of making those mugs I realized that my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn't really happy. In fact, I felt worse than before they'd given me a raise. I thought I was going through a bad patch and I tried not to think about it, but after three months I couldn't keep pretending nothing was wrong. I was in a terrible mood, I was much more violent than I'd been before, any little thing would make me angry, I started to drink. So I raced up to the problem, and finally I realized that I didn't like to make that particular kind of mug. At night, I swear, I suffered like a dog. I thought I was going crazy, that I didn't know what I was doing or thinking. Some of the thoughts I had back then still scare me. One day I confronted one of the managers. I told him I was sick of making those idiotic mugs. This manager was a good man, his name was Andy, and he always tried to make conversation with the workers. He asked me whether I'd preferred making the mugs we'd made before. That's right, I said. Are you serious, Dick? he asked me. Completely serious, I answered. Are the new mugs more work? Not at all, I said, the work is the same, but the fucking mugs didn't do damage to me this way before. What do you mean? said Andy. That the bloody mugs didn't bother me before and now they're destroying me inside. So what the hell makes them different, aside from being more modern? asked Andy. That's it exactly, I answered, the mugs weren't so modern before, and even if they tried to hurt me, they couldn't, I didn't feel their sting, but now the fucking mugs are like samurais armed with those fucking samurai swords and they're driving me insane. Anyway, it was a long conversation," said the stranger. "The manager listened to me, but he didn't understand a single word I was saying. The next day I asked for the pay I was due and I left the company. I haven't worked since. What do you think of that?"

Morini hesitated before answering.

"I don't know," he said finally.

"That's what everyone says: they don't know," said the stranger.

"What do you do now?" asked Morini.

"Nothing, I don't work anymore, I'm a London bum," the stranger said.

It's as if he's pointing out a tourist attraction, thought Morini, but he was careful not to say this out loud.

"So what do you think of that book?" asked the stranger.

"What book?" asked Morini.

The stranger pointed one of his thick fingers at the book, published by Sellerio, in Palermo, that Morini was holding delicately in one hand.

"Oh, I think it's very good," he said.

"Read me some recipes," said the stranger, in a tone of voice that struck Morini as threatening.

"I don't know whether I have time," he said, "I have to meet a friend."

"What's your friend's name?" asked the stranger in the same tone of voice.

"Liz Norton," said Morini.

"Liz, pretty name," said the stranger. "And what's your name, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Piero Morini," said Morini.

"Odd," said the stranger, "your name is almost the same as the name of the author of the book."

"No," said Morini, "my name is Piero Morini, and his name is Angelo Morino."

"If you wouldn't mind," said the stranger, "at least read me the names of some recipes. I'll close my eyes and imagine them."

"All right," said Morini.

The stranger closed his eyes and Morini began to read some of the names of the recipes attributed to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, slowly and with an actor's intonation.

By the time he got to dolce di mamey, the stranger seemed to have fallen asleep and Morini left the Italian Gardens.

The next day was much like the first. This time Norton came to meet him at the hotel, and as Morini was paying the bill she put his only suitcase in the boot of her car. When they left, she drove the same way he'd taken to Hyde Park the day before.

Morini realized it and watched the streets in silence, and then the appearance of the park, which looked to him like a film of the jungle, the colors wrong, terribly sad, exalted, until the car turned and disappeared down other streets.

They ate together in a neighborhood that Norton had discovered, a neighborhood near the river, where there had once been a few factories and dry docks and where boutiques and food shops and fashionable restaurants had now opened in the renovated buildings. A small boutique occupied the same number of square feet as four workers' houses, calculated Morini. The restaurant, twelve or sixteen. Liz Norton's voice praised the neighborhood and the efforts of the people who were setting it back afloat.

Morini thought that afloat was wrong, despite its maritime ring. In fact, as they ate dessert he felt like weeping, or better yet, fainting, sliding gently out of his chair with his eyes fixed on Norton's face, and never waking up. But now Norton was telling a story about a painter, the first to settle in the neighborhood.

He was a young man, thirty-three or so, known on the scene but not what you'd call famous. The real reason he came was because it was cheaper to rent a studio here than anywhere else. The neighborhood was less lively in those days. There were still old workmen living here on their pensions, but no young people or children. Women were notably absent: they had either died or spent all day inside, never going out. There was just one pub, as tumbledown as the rest of the neighborhood. In short, a lonely, decrepit place. But it seemed this sparked the painter's imagination and inspired him to work. He was a solitary kind of person, too. Or else just comfortable being alone.

So the neighborhood didn't frighten him. He fell in love with it, actually. He liked to come home at night and walk for blocks and blocks without seeing anyone. He liked the color of the streetlamps and the light that spilled over the fronts of the houses. The shadows that moved as he moved. The ashen, sooty dawns. The men of few words who gathered in the pub, where he became a regular. The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.

The point is, he set to work more eagerly than ever. A year later he had a show at the Emma Waterson gallery, an alternative space in Wapping, and it was an enormous success. He ushered in something that would later be known as the new decadence or English animalism. The paintings in the inaugural show of this school were big, ten feet by seven, and they portrayed the remains of the shipwreck of his neighborhood, awash in a mingling of grays. It was as if painter and neighborhood had achieved total symbiosis. As if, in other words, the painter were painting the neighborhood or the neighborhood were painting the painter, in savage, gloomy strokes. The paintings weren't bad. Still, the show wouldn't have been so successful or had such an impact if not for the central painting, much smaller than the rest, the masterpiece that years later led so many British artists down the path of new decadence. This painting, viewed properly (although one could never be sure of viewing it properly), was an ellipsis of self-portraits, sometimes a spiral of self-portraits (depending on the angle from which it was seen), seven feet by three and a half feet, in the center of which hung the painter's mummified right hand.

It happened like this. One morning, after two days of feverish work on the self-portraits, the painter cut off his painting hand. He immediately applied a tourniquet to his arm and took the hand to a taxidermist he knew, who'd already been informed of the nature of the assignment. Then he went to the hospital, where they stanched the bleeding and proceeded to suture his arm. At some point someone asked how the accident had happened. He answered that he had cut off his hand with a machete blow while he was working, by mistake. The doctors asked where the amputated hand was, because there was always the possibility that it might be reattached. He said he'd thrown it in the river on his way to the hospital, out of sheer rage and pain.

Although the prices were astronomical, the show sold out. The masterpiece, it was said, went to an Arab who worked in the City, as did four of the big paintings. Shortly thereafter, the painter went mad and his wife (he was married by then) had no choice but to send him to a convalescent home on the outskirts of Lausanne or Montreux.

He lives there to this day.

Other painters, meanwhile, began to move into the neighborhood. Mostly because it was cheap, but also because they were attracted by the legend of the man who had painted the most radical self-portrait of our time. Then came the architects, then some families who bought houses that had been renovated and remodeled. Then came the boutiques, the black-box theaters, the cutting-edge restaurants, until it was one of the trendiest neighborhoods in London, nowhere near as cheap as it was reputed to be.

"What do you think of that story?"

I don't know what to think," said Morini. The urge to weep-or else, faint-persisted, but he restrained it.

They had tea at Norton's apartment. Only then did she begin to talk about Espinoza and Pelletier, but casually, as if the matter was too familiar to be worthy of interest or discussion with Morini (whom she had noticed was upset, although she was careful not to pry, knowing there was rarely anything soothing about being pestered with questions), and not even something she cared to discuss herself.

It was a very pleasant afternoon. From his armchair, Morini admired Norton's sitting room-her books and her framed prints hanging on white walls, her mysterious photographs and souvenirs, her preferences expressed in things as simple as the choice of furniture, which was tasteful, comfortable, and modest, and even in the sliver of tree-lined street that she surely saw each morning before she left the apartment-and he began to feel good, as if he were swaddled in these various manifestations of his friend, as if they were also an expression of affirmation, the words of which he might not understand but that brought him comfort nevertheless.

Shortly before he left, he asked the name of the painter whose story he'd just heard and whether there'd been a catalog for that terrible show. His name is Edwin Johns, said Norton. Then she got up and searched one of the bookcases. She found a large catalog and handed it to Morini. Before he opened it he asked himself whether it was a good idea to insist on this, precisely now that he was so relaxed. But if I don't do it I'll die, he told himself, and he opened the catalog, which more than a catalog was an art book that covered or tried to cover the trajectory of Johns's career. There was a photograph of Johns on the first page, from before his self-mutilation, which showed a young man of about twenty-five looking straight at the camera and smiling a half smile that might be shy or mocking. His hair was dark and straight.

"It's a gift," he heard Norton say.

"Thank you," he heard himself answer.

An hour later they left together for the airport, and an hour after that Morini was on his way back to Italy.

Around this time, a previously insignificant Serbian critic, a German professor at the University of Belgrade, published a strange article in the journal overseen by Pelletier, an article reminiscent in a certain sense of the minuscule findings on the Marquis de Sade published many years ago by a French critic, which comprised the facsimile reproduction of loose papers testifying vaguely to the Marquis's visit to a laundry, an aide-memoire of his relations with a certain theater impresario, a doctor's bill complete with medicines prescribed, an order for a doublet specifying buttonwork and color, etc., all of it accompanied by lengthy notes from which only a single conclusion could be drawn: Sade had existed, Sade had washed his clothes and bought new clothes and maintained a correspondence with beings now definitively wiped from the slate of time.

The Serb's text was very similar. In this case, the person traced was Archimboldi, not Sade, and the article consisted of a painstaking and often frustrating investigation that began in Germany, continued through France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, returned to Italy, and ended at a travel agency in Palermo, where it seemed Archimboldi had bought a plane ticket to Morocco. An old man, a German, said the Serbian. The words old man and German he waved like magic wands to uncover a secret, and at the same time they supplied the stamp of ultraconcrete critical literature, a nonspeculative literature free of ideas, assertions, denials, doubts, free of any intent to serve as guide, neither pro nor con, just an eye seeking out the tangible elements, not judging them but simply displaying them coldly, archaeology of the facsimile, and, by the same token, of the photocopier.

To Pelletier it seemed an odd text. Before he published it, he sent copies to Espinoza, Morini, and Norton. Espinoza said it could lead somewhere, and even though researching and writing that way might seem like drudge work, like the lowest of menial tasks, he thought, and said, that it was good to have a place in the Archimboldian project for these single-minded fanatics. Norton said she'd always had the feeling (feminine intuition) that sooner or later Archimboldi would show up somewhere in the Maghreb, and that the only part of the Serb's paper that was worth anything was the ticket in the name of Benno von Archimboldi, bought a week before the Italian plane was scheduled to depart ror Rabat. From now on we can imagine him lost in a cave in the Atlas Mountains, she said. Morini held his tongue.

Here we should clarify in the interest of properly (or improperly) understanding the Serb's text. A reservation was indeed made in the name of Benno von Archimboldi. And yet, that reservation was never confirmed and at the departure time no Benno von Archimboldi appeared at the airport. By the Serb's lights, the matter couldn't be clearer. Archimboldi had doubtless made the reservation himself. We can imagine him at his hotel, likely upset about something or other, maybe drunk, perhaps even half asleep, at that abyss like hour (with its ineffably nauseating scent) when momentous decisions are made, speaking to the girl at Alitalia and mistakenly giving her his pen name instead of booking the seat under the name on his passport, an error that later, the next day, he would rectify by going in person to the airline office and buying a ticket in his own name. This explained the absence of an Archimboldi on the flight to Morocco. Of course, there were other possibilities: at the last minute, after having second (or fourth) thoughts, Archimboldi may have decided not to take the trip, or to travel somewhere else instead, say the United States, or maybe it was all simply a joke or misunderstanding.

The Serb's text contained a physical description of Archimboldi. This description was plainly based on the Swabian's account. Of course, in the Swabian's account Archimboldi was a young postwar writer. All the Serbian had done was age him, turning that same young man, who had traveled with his single published book to Friesland in 1949, into an old man, seventy-five or eighty, who now had a substantial oeuvre behind him but the same attributes more or less, as if Archimboldi, unlike most people, hadn't changed and were still the same person. To judge by his work, our writer is unquestionably a stubborn man, said the Serb, he's stubborn as a mule, as a pachyderm, and if during the saddest stretch of a Sicilian afternoon he hatched a plan to travel to Morocco, no matter that he made the reservation under the name Archimboldi by mistake, instead of his legal name, there's no reason to think he might not have changed his mind the very next day and gone personally to the travel agency to buy the ticket, this time under his legal name and with his legal passport, and that he didn't set off, like any of the thousands of old men, German bachelors, who each day cross the skies alone heading for any of the countries of North Africa.

Old and alone, thought Pelletier. Just one of thousands of old men on their own. Like the machine celibataire. 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 celibataires 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. Fuck the Serb.

In the end, after the article came out, Espinoza and Pelletier were forced to recognize flaws in the Serb's approach. There had to be research, literary criticism, interpretive essays, even informational pamphlets if required, but not this hybrid between science fiction and half-finished roman noir, said Espinoza, and Pelletier was in complete agreement.

Around this time, at the beginning of 1997, Norton felt a desire for change. To get away. To visit Ireland or New York. To distance herself abruptly from Espinoza and Pelletier. She summoned them both to London. Pelletier had a feeling that nothing serious would happen, nothing irrevocable at least, and he arrived calm, ready to listen and say little. By contrast, Espinoza feared the worst (that Norton had summoned them to tell them she preferred Pelletier, but also to assure him that they'd still be friends, maybe even to ask if he'd give her away at her approaching wedding).

Pelletier was the first to show up at Norton's apartment. He asked whether anything serious was wrong. Norton said she'd rather discuss it when Espinoza got there, to keep from making the same speech twice. As they had nothing else important to say, they began to talk about the weather. Pelletier soon rebelled and changed the subject. Then Norton started to talk about Archimboldi. This new subject of conversation almost did Pelletier in. He thought again about the Serb, he thought again about that poor writer, old and alone and possibly misanthropic (Archimboldi), he thought again about the lost years of his own life before Norton had appeared.

Espinoza was late. Life is shit, thought Pelletier in astonishment, all shit! – And then: if we hadn't teamed up, she would be mine now. And then: if there hadn't been mutual understanding and friendship and affinity and alliance, she would be mine now. And a little later: if there hadn't been anything, I wouldn't even have met her. And: I might have met her, since each of us has an independent interest in Archimboldi that doesn't spring from our mutual friendship. And: it's possible, too, that she might have hated me, found me pedantic, cold, arrogant, narcissistic, an intellectual elitist. The term intellectual elitist amused him. Espinoza was late. Norton seemed very calm. Actually, Pelletier seemed very calm too, but that was far from how he felt.

Norton said there was nothing strange about Espinoza's lateness. Planes get delayed, she said. Pelletier imagined Espinoza's plane engulfed in flames, crashing onto a runway at the Madrid airport in a screech of twisted steel.

"Maybe we should turn on the television," he said.

Norton looked at him and smiled. I never turn on the television, she said, smiling, surprised that Pelletier didn't already know that. Of course, Pelletier did know it. But he hadn't had the spirit to say: let's watch the news, let's see whether some plane wreck appears on the screen.

"Can I turn it on?" he asked.

"Of course," said Norton, and as Pelletier bent over the knobs of the set, he saw her out of the corner of his eye, luminous, so natural, making a cup of tea or moving from one room to another, putting away a book that she had just shown him, answering the phone and talking to someone who wasn't Espinoza.

He turned on the television. He clicked through different channels. He saw a man with a beard dressed in cheap clothes. He saw a group of blacks walking along a dirt track. He saw two men in suits and ties talking slowly and deliberately, both with their legs crossed, both glancing every so often at a map that appeared and disappeared behind their backs. He saw a chubby woman saying: daughter… factory… meeting… doctors… inevitable, and then smiling a little and lowering her gaze. He saw the face of a Belgian minister. He saw the smoldering remains of a plane next to a runway, surrounded by ambulances and fire trucks. He shouted for Norton. She was still talking on the phone.

Espinoza's plane has crashed, said Pelletier, this time not raising his voice, and Norton, instead of looking at the television screen, looked at him. It took her only a few seconds to realize that the plane in flames wasn't a Spanish plane. In addition to the firemen and rescue teams, passengers could be seen walking away, some limping, others wrapped in blankets, their faces contorted in fear or shock, but apparently unharmed.

Twenty minutes later, Espinoza arrived, and during lunch Norton told him that Pelletier had thought he was in the plane that went down. Espinoza laughed but gave Pelletier a strange look, which Norton didn't notice, but Pelletier caught immediately. It was a sad meal, all things considered, although Norton's behavior was perfectly normal, as if she had run into the two of them by chance and hadn't expressly asked them to come to London. They guessed what she had to tell them before she said anything: Norton wanted to end her romantic involvement with both of them, at least for the time being. The reason she gave was that she needed to think and get her bearings. Then she said she didn't want to stop being friends with either of them. She needed to think, that was all.

Espinoza accepted Norton's explanation without asking a single question. Pelletier would have liked to ask whether her ex-husband had anything to do with her decision, but following Espinoza's example, he kept quiet. After they ate they went out for a drive around London in Norton's car. Pelletier insisted on sitting in back, until he saw a sarcastic flash in Norton's eyes, and then he said he would sit anywhere, which happened to be the backseat.

As she drove along Cromwell Road, Norton said that maybe that night it would make most sense for her to sleep with both of them. Espinoza laughed and said something meant to be funny, a continuation of the joke, but Pelletier wasn't sure Norton was joking and he was even less sure he was ready to participate in a menage à trois. Then they went to watch the sun set near the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens. They sat on a bench by a giant oak tree, Norton's favorite spot, a place she d been drawn to ever since she was a child. At first there were people lying on the grass, but little by little the area began to empty. Couples or elegantly dressed single women passed briskly, toward the Serpentine Gallery or the Albert Memorial, and in the opposite direction men with crumpled newspapers or mothers pushing baby carriages headed toward Bayswater Road.

As dusk fell, they watched a young Spanish-speaking couple approach the Peter Pan statue. The woman had black hair and was very pretty, and she reached out as if to touch Peter Pan's leg. The man beside her was tall and had a beard and mustache and pulled a notepad out of his pocket and jotted something down. Then he said out loud:

" Kensington Gardens."

The woman wasn't looking at the statue anymore but at the lake, or rather at something moving in the grass and weeds that separated the little path from the lake.

"What's she looking at?" asked Norton in German.

"It seems to be a snake," said Espinoza.

"There aren't any snakes here!" said Norton.

Then the woman called to the man: Rodrigo, come see this, she said. The man seemed not to hear. He had put the little notepad away in a pocket of his leather jacket and he was gazing silently at the statue of Peter Pan. The woman bent down and something beneath the leaves slithered toward the lake.

"It does actually seem to be a snake," said Pelletier.

"That's what I thought," said Espinoza.

Norton didn't answer but she stood to get a better look.

That night Pelletier and Espinoza slept for a few hours in Norton's sitting room. Although they had the sofa bed and the rug at their disposal, they had difficulty dozing off. Pelletier tried to talk, explain the plane wreck thing to Espinoza, but Espinoza said there was no need for explanations, he understood everything.

At four in the morning, by common accord, they turned on the light and started to read. Pelletier opened a book on the work of Berthe Morisot, the first woman impressionist, but soon he felt like hurling it against the wall. Espinoza, meanwhile, pulled Archimboldi's latest novel, The Head, out of his bag and started to go over the notes he had written in the margins, notes that were the nucleus of an essay he planned to publish in the journal edited by Borchmeyer.

Espinoza's thesis, also espoused by Pelletier, was that with this novel Archimboldi was drawing his literary adventures to a close. After The Head, said Espinoza, there'll be no new books on the market, an opinion that another illustrious Archimboldian, Dieter Hellfeld, considered too risky, based as it was on no more than the writer's age, and the same thing had been said when Archimboldi came out with Railroad Perfection, a few Berlin professors had even said it when Bitzius was published. At five in the morning Pelletier took a shower, then made coffee. At six Espinoza was asleep again but at six-thirty he woke in a foul mood. At a quarter to seven they called a cab and straightened up the sitting room.

Espinoza wrote a goodbye note. Pelletier glanced at it and after thinking for a few seconds, decided to leave another note himself. Before they left he asked Espinoza whether he didn't want to shower. I'll shower in Madrid, Espinoza answered. The water is better there. True, said Pelletier, although his reply struck him as stupid and appeasing. Then the two of them left without making a sound and had breakfast at the airport, as they'd done so many times before.

On the plane back to Paris, Pelletier began to think, inexplicably, about the Berthe Morisot book he'd wanted to slam against the wall the night before. Why? Pelletier asked himself. Was it that he didn't like Berthe Morisot or something she stood for in some momentary way? Actually, he liked Berthe Morisot. All at once it struck him that Norton hadn't bought the book, that he'd been the one who traveled from Paris to London with the gift-wrapped volume, that the first Berthe Morisot reproductions Norton had ever seen were the ones in that book, with Pelletier next to her, massaging the back of her neck and walking her through each painting. Did he regret having given her the book now? No, of course not. Did the painter have anything to do with their separation? The idea was ridiculous. Then why had he wanted to slam the book against the wall? And more to the point: why was he thinking about Berthe Morisot and the book and Norton's neck and not about the real possibility of a menage à trois that had hovered in Norton's apartment that night like a howling Indian witch doctor without ever materializing?

On the plane back to Madrid, Espinoza, unlike Pelletier, thought about the book he believed to be Archimboldi's last novel, and how-if he was right, which he thought he was-there would be no more novels by Archimboldi, and he thought about all that entailed, and about a plane in flames and Pelletier's hidden desires (the son of a bitch could be oh so modern, but only when it was to his advantage), and every once in a while he looked out the window and glanced at the engines and dearly wished he was back in Madrid.

For a while Pelletier and Espinoza didn't call each other. Pelletier called Norton occasionally, although their conversations were increasingly, how to put it, stilted, as if good manners were the only thing sustaining their relationship, and he called Morini just as frequently as ever, for with him nothing had changed.

It was the same for Espinoza, although it took him a little longer to realize that Norton meant what she said. Naturally, Morini noticed something wrong, but out of discretion or laziness, the awkward and sometimes painful laziness that gripped him now and then, he preferred to behave as if he hadn't noticed, for which Pelletier and Espinoza were grateful.

Even Borchmeyer, who in some ways feared the tandem of Espinoza and Pelletier, noticed something new in the correspondence he maintained with each, veiled insinuations, tiny retractions, the faintest of doubts (all extremely eloquent, naturally, coming from them) about the methodology they had previously shared.

Then came an assembly of Germanists in Berlin, a twentieth-century German literature congress in Stuttgart, a symposium on German literature in Hamburg, and a conference on the future of German literature in Mainz. Norton, Morini, Pelletier, and Espinoza attended the Berlin assembly, but for one reason or another all four of them were able to meet only once, at breakfast, where they were surrounded by other Germanists fighting doggedly over the butter and jam. Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton attended the congress, and just as Pelletier managed to speak to Norton alone (while Espinoza was exchanging views with Schwarz), when it was Espinoza's turn to talk to Norton, Pelletier went off discreetly with Dieter Hellfeld.

This time Norton noticed that her friends were doing their best not to speak to each other, sometimes even avoiding each other's company, which couldn't help affecting her since she felt in some way responsible for the rift between them.

Only Espinoza and Morini attended the symposium, and since they were in Hamburg anyway and killing time they went to visit the Bubis publishing house and paid their compliments to Schnell, but they couldn't see Mrs. Bubis, for whom they'd brought a bouquet of roses, since she was on a trip to Moscow. That woman, Schnell said to them, I don't know where she gets her energy, and then he gave a pleased laugh that Espinoza and Morini thought was a bit much. Before they left the publishing house they gave the roses to Schnell.

Only Pelletier and Espinoza attended the conference, and this time they had no choice but to meet and lay their cards on the table. At first, as was natural, they tried to avoid each other, politely most of the time or brusquely on a few occasions, but in the end there was nothing to do but talk. This event took place at the hotel bar, late at night, when only one waiter was left, the youngest one, a tall, blond, sleepy boy.

Pelletier was sitting at one end of the bar and Espinoza at the other. Then the bar began gradually to empty, and when only the two of them were left Pelletier got up and sat down next to Espinoza. They tried to discuss the conference, but after a few minutes it came to seem ridiculous going on, or pretending to go on, in that vein. Once again it was Pelletier, better versed in the art of conciliation and confidences, who took the first step. He asked how Norton was. Espinoza confessed he didn't know. Then he said that he called her sometimes and it was like talking to a stranger. This last part Pelletier inferred, because Espinoza, who at times expressed himself in unintelligible ellipses, didn't call Norton a stranger but used the word busy, then the word distracted. For a while, the phone in Norton's apartment floated in their conversation. A white telephone in the grasp of a white hand, the white forearm of a stranger. But she wasn't a stranger. Not insofar as both had slept with her. Oh white hind, little hind, white hind, murmured Espinoza. Pelletier assumed he was quoting a classic, but without comment asked him whether they were really going to become enemies. The question seemed to surprise Espinoza, as if the possibility had never occurred to him.

That's absurd, Jean-Claude," he said, although Pelletier noticed he thought for a long time before he answered.

By the end of the night, they were drunk and the young waiter had to help them both out of the bar. What Pelletier remembered best was the strength of the waiter who hauled them, one on each side, to the elevators in the lobby, as if he and Espinoza were adolescents, no older than fifteen, two weedy adolescents clamped in the powerful arms of this young German who had stayed until closing time, when all the veteran waiters had already gone home, a country boy, to judge by his face and build, or a laborer, and he also remembered something like a whisper that he later understood was a kind of laugh, Espinoza's laugh as he was lugged by the peasant waiter, a soft chuckle, a discreet laugh, as if the situation weren't merely ridiculous but also an escape valve for his unspoken sorrows.

One day, when more than three months had gone by since their visit to Norton, one of them called the other and suggested a weekend in London. It's unclear whether Pelletier or Espinoza made the call. In theory, it must have been the one with the strongest sense of loyalty, or of friendship, which amounts to the same thing, but in truth neither Pelletier nor Espinoza had a strong sense of any such virtue. Both of them paid it lip service, of course. But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed in passion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both voted Socialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in the possibility of self-realization.

The salient point is that one called and the other said yes, and one Friday afternoon they met at the London airport and got a cab to a hotel, then another cab, now very close to dinnertime (they had made a reservation for three at Jane & Chloe), to Norton's apartment.

From the sidewalk, after they paid the driver, they looked up at the lighted windows. Then, as the cab drove off, they saw Liz's silhouette, the beloved silhouette, and then, as if a breath of foul air had wafted into a commercial for sanitary pads, the silhouette of a man that made them freeze, Espinoza with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, Pelletier with a Jacob Epstein book wrapped in the finest paper. But the pantomime above didn't end there. In one window, Norton's silhouette gestured, as if trying to explain something that her interlocutor refused to understand. In the other window, the man's silhouette, to the horror of its two gaping spectators, made a kind of hula-hooping motion, or what looked to Pelletier and Espinoza like a hula-hooping motion, first the hips, then the legs, the torso, even the neck! a motion that contained a hint of sarcasm and mockery, unless behind the curtains the man was undressing or melting, which seemed very unlikely; the motion, or the series of motions, expressed not only sarcasm but cruelty and assurance too, the assurance plain, since he was the strongest one in the apartment, the tallest, the most muscular, the hula-hooper.

And yet there was something strange about Liz's silhouette. To the extent that they knew her, and they thought they knew her well, Norton wasn't the sort to stand for slights, especially in her own apartment. So it was possible, they decided, that the man's silhouette wasn't actually hula-hooping or insulting Liz but laughing, and laughing with her, not at her. But Liz's silhouette didn't seem to be laughing. Then the man's silhouette disappeared: maybe he had gone to look at books, maybe to the bathroom or the kitchen. Maybe he had dropped onto the sofa, still laughing. And just then Norton's silhouette drew near the window, seeming to shrink, and then pushed back the curtains and opened the window. Norton's eyes were closed, as if she needed to breathe the night air of London, and then she opened her eyes and looked down, into the abyss, and saw them.

They called hello as if the taxi had just left them there. Espinoza waved his bouquet of flowers in the air and Pelletier his book, and then, without waiting to see Norton's confused face, they headed to the door of the building and waited for Liz to buzz them in.

They were sure all was lost. As they climbed the stairs, without talking, they heard a door being opened, and although they didn't see her, both sensed Norton's luminous presence on the landing. The apartment smelled of Dutch tobacco. Leaning in the doorway, Norton looked at them as if they were two friends who had died long ago, ghosts returning from the sea. The man waiting for them in the sitting room was younger, probably born in the seventies, not the sixties-even the mid-seventies. He was wearing a turtleneck sweater, although the neck seemed to sag, and faded jeans and sneakers. He looked like a student of Norton's or a substitute teacher.

Norton said his name was Alex Pritchard. A friend. Pelletier and Espinoza shook his hand and smiled, knowing their smiles would be pathetic. Pritchard didn't smile. Two minutes later they were all sitting drinking whiskey in silence. Pritchard, who was drinking orange juice, sat next to Norton and slung an arm over her shoulders, a gesture she didn’t seem to mind at first (in fact, Pritchard's long arm was resting on the back of the sofa and only his fingers, long as a spider's or a pianist's, occasionally brushed Norton's blouse), but as the minutes went by Norton became more and more nervous and her trips to the kitchen or bedroom became more frequent.

Pelletier attempted a few subjects of conversation. He tried to talk about film, music, recent theater productions, without getting any help even from Espinoza, who seemed to vie with Pritchard in his muteness, although Pritchard's muteness was at least that of the observer, equal parts distracted and engaged, and Espinoza's muteness was that of the observed, sunk in misery and shame. Suddenly, without anyone being able to say for sure who had started it, they began to talk about Archimboldian studies. It was probably Norton, from the kitchen, who mentioned the work they all did. Pritchard waited for her to come back and then, his arm stretched once again along the back of the sofa and his spider fingers on Norton's shoulder, said he thought German literature was a scam.

Norton laughed, as if someone had told a joke. Pelletier asked him what he, Pritchard, knew about German literature.

"Not much, really," he said.

"Then you're a cretin," said Espinoza.

"Or an ignoramus, at least," said Pelletier.

"In any case, a badulaque," said Espinoza.

Espinoza had said badulaque in Spanish, and Pritchard didn't know what it meant. Norton didn't understand it either and wanted to know what it was.

"A badulaque," said Espinoza, "is someone of no consequence. It's a word that can also be applied to fools, but there are fools of consequence, and badulaque applies only to fools of no consequence."

"Are you insulting me?" Pritchard wanted to know.

"Do you feel insulted?" asked Espinoza, who had begun to sweat profusely.

Pritchard took a swallow of his orange juice and said that he did, he really did feel insulted.

"Then you have a problem, sir," said Espinoza.

"Typical reaction of a badulaque," added Pelletier.

Pritchard got up from the sofa. Espinoza got up from his armchair. Norton said that's enough, you're behaving like stupid children. Pelletier started to laugh. Pritchard went over to Espinoza and tapped him on the chest with his index finger, which was almost as long as his middle finger. He tapped his chest, one, two, three, four times, as he said:

"First: I don't like to be insulted. Second: I don't like to be taken for a fool. Third: I don't like it when some Spanish fucker takes the piss. Fourth: if you have anything else to say to me, let's go outside."

Espinoza looked at Pelletier and asked him, in German, of course, what he should do.

"Don't go outside," said Pelletier.

"Alex, leave now," said Norton.

And since Pritchard didn't really intend to hit anyone, he kissed Norton on the cheek and left without saying goodbye.

That night the three of them ate at Jane & Chloe. At first they were a little subdued, but the dinner and wine cheered them up and in the end they went home laughing. Still, they were reluctant to ask Norton who Pritchard was and she didn't say anything that might cast light on the lanky figure of that disagreeable youth. Instead, toward the end of dinner, they talked about themselves, about how close they'd come to destroying, possibly forever, the friendship they felt for one another.

Sex, they agreed, was too wonderful (although almost immediately they regretted the adjective) to get in the way of a friendship based as much on emotional as intellectual affinities. Pelletier and Espinoza took pains, however, to make it clear there in front of each other that the ideal thing for them, and they imagined for Norton too, was that she ultimately and in a nontraumatic way (try to make it a soft landing, said Pelletier) choose one of them, or neither of them, said Espinoza, either way the decision was in her hands, Norton's hands, and it was a decision she could make whenever she wanted, whenever was most convenient for her, or never make, put off, defer, postpone, draw out, delay, adjourn until her deathbed, they didn't care, because they were as in love with her now, while Liz was keeping them in limbo, as they had been before, when they were her active lovers or colovers, as in love with her as they would be when she chose one of them or the other, or when she (in a possible future that was only slightly more bitter, a future of shared bitterness, of somehow mitigated bitterness), if such was her wish, chose neither of them. To which Norton replied with a question, no doubt partly rhetorical, but a plausible question all the same: what would happen if, while she took her time considering the options, one of them, Pelletier for example, suddenly fell in love with a student who was younger and prettier than she, and richer, too, and more charming? Should she consider the pact broken and automatically give up on Espinoza? Or should she take the Spaniard, since he was the only one left? To which Pelletier and Espinoza responded that the real possibility of such a thing happening was extremely remote, and anyway she could do as she liked, even become a nun if she so desired.

"The only thing either of us wants is to marry you, live with you, have children with you, grow old with you, but at this point in our lives, what matters to us is preserving your friendship."

After that night, the plane trips to London began again. Sometimes it would be Espinoza who came to visit, other times Pelletier, and once in a while both. When this happened they would always stay at the same place, a small, uncomfortable hotel on Foley Street, near the Middlesex Hospital. When they left Norton's apartment, they would often take a walk near the hotel, usually in silence, frustrated, somehow exhausted by the goodwill and cheer they felt required to display during these joint visits. Many times they would just stand there under the streetlight on the corner, watching the ambulances going in and out. The English nurses spoke at the top of their lungs, although from where they stood the sound of the braying voices was muted.

One night, as they were watching the unusually quiet entrance to the hospital, they asked themselves why, when they came to London together, neither of them stayed at Liz's apartment. Out of politeness, probably, they said. But neither one of them believed in that kind of politeness anymore. And they also asked themselves, at first hesitantly and then vehemently, why the three of them didn't sleep together. That night a green, sickly light seeped from under the hospital doors, a transparent green swimming pool light, and an orderly smoked a cigarette, standing on the curb, and among the parked cars there was one with its light on, a yellow light as in a nest, though not just any nest but a post-nuclear nest, a nest with no room for any certainties but cold, despair, and apathy.

One night, while talking to Norton on the phone from Paris or Madrid, one of them brought the subject up. Surprisingly, Norton said she'd been asking herself the same question for a while.

"I don't think we'll ever suggest it," said the person on the phone. "I know," said Norton. "You're afraid to. You're waiting for me to make the first move."

"I don't know," said the person on the phone, "maybe it isn't as simple as that."

They saw Pritchard again a few times. The lanky youth didn't seem as ill-humored as before, although in truth their encounters were fleeting, too brief for rudeness or violence. Espinoza was on his way into Norton's apartment as Pritchard was leaving; Pelletier crossed paths with him once on the stairs. Brief though it was, however, this latter encounter was significant. Pelletier said hello to Pritchard. Pritchard said hello to Pelletier, and after they had passed each other Pritchard turned around and called after Pelletier.

"Do you want some advice?" he asked. Pelletier gazed at him in alarm. "I know you don't, old man, but here it is. Be careful," said Pritchard.

"Careful of what?" Pelletier managed to ask.

"Of the Medusa," said Pritchard. "Beware of the Medusa."

And then, before he continued down the stairs, he added: "When you've got her in your hands she'll blow you to pieces."

For a while Pelletier stood there motionless, listening to Pritchard's footsteps on the stairs, then the noise of the street door opening and closing. Only when the silence became unbearable did he continue upstairs, thoughtful and in the dark.

He said nothing to Norton about the incident with Pritchard, but on his return to Paris he wasted no time calling Espinoza and telling him the story of the enigmatic encounter.

Odd," said the Spaniard. "It sounds like a warning but also a threat."

There's this, too," said Pelletier. "Medusa is one of the three daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, the so-called Gorgons, three sea monsters. According to Hesiod, the other two sisters, Stheno and Euryale, were immortal. But not Medusa."

Have you been reading the Greek myths?" asked Espinoza.

It's the first thing I did when I got home," said Pelletier. "Listen to this: when Perseus cut Medusa's head off, Chrysaor, father of the monster Geryon, emerged, and so did the horse Pegasus."

Pegasus came out of Medusa's body? Fuck," said Espinoza.

"That's right. The winged horse Pegasus, which to me stands for love."

"You think Pegasus stands for love?"

"That's right."

"Strange," said Espinoza.

"It's a lycee thing," said Pelletier.

"And you think Pritchard knows this stuff?"

"Impossible," said Pelletier. "Although who's to say, but no, I doubt it."

"Then what do you think it all means?"

"I'd say Pritchard is alerting me, alerting us, to a danger we can't see. Or rather, he was trying to tell me that only after Norton's death would I, or we, find true love."

"After Norton's death?" said Espinoza.

"Of course, don't you understand? Pritchard sees himself as Perseus, Medusa's assassin."

For a while, Espinoza and Pelletier wandered around as if possessed. Archimboldi, who was again rumored to stand a clear chance for the Nobel, left them cold. They resented their work at the university, their periodic contributions to the journals of German departments around the world, their classes, and even the conferences they attended like sleepwalkers or drugged detectives. They were there but they weren't there. They talked, but their minds were on something else. Only Pritchard held their interest, the ominous presence of Pritchard, Norton's constant companion. A Pritchard who saw Norton as the Medusa, as a Gorgon, a Pritchard about whom, as reticent spectators, they knew almost nothing at all.

To fill in the gaps, they began to question the one person who could give them answers. At first Norton was reluctant to talk. He was a teacher, as they had suspected, though not at the university but at a secondary school. He wasn't from London but a town near Bournemouth. He had studied at Oxford for a year, and then, incomprehensibly to Espinoza and Pelletier, had moved to London and finished his studies there. He was on the Left, the pragmatic Left, and, according to Norton, on occasion he had mentioned plans (which never hardened into action) to become active in the Labour Party. The school where he taught was a council school with a good number of students from immigrant families.

He was headstrong and generous and lacked imagination, something Pelletier and Espinoza had already gathered. But that didn't make them feel any better.

"A bastard may have no imagination and then do one imaginative thing when you least expect it," said Espinoza.

" England is full of swine like him," was Pelletier's opinion.

Talking on the phone one night, they discovered without surprise (without even a shadow of surprise) that both of them hated Pritchard, and that they hated him more each day.

During the next conference they attended ("Reflecting the Twentieth Century: The Work of Benno von Archimboldi," a two-day event in Bologna packed with young Italian Archimboldians and a crop of Archimboldian neostructuralists from all over Europe), they decided to tell Morini everything that had happened to them in the last few months and all the fears they harbored concerning Norton and Pritchard.

Morini, whose health had deteriorated slightly since the last time (although neither Espinoza nor Pelletier knew), listened patiently at the hotel bar and at a trattoria near the conference headquarters and at an extremely expensive restaurant in the old part of the city and also as they strolled aimlessly along the streets of Bologna, Espinoza and Pelletier pushing Morini's wheelchair and talking nonstop. In the end, when they requested his opinion on the romantic imbroglio, real or imaginary, in which they found themselves, Morini only asked if either of them, or both, had asked Norton whether she loved Pritchard or was attracted to him. They had to confess that out of delicacy, tact, and good taste-out of consideration for Norton, essentially-they hadn't asked.

Well, that's where you should have begun," said Morini, who, although he felt ill, and dizzy, too, after taking so many turns, breathed not a sigh of complaint.

(And at this point it must be said that there's truth to the saying make your name, then sleep and reap fame, because Espinoza's and Pelletier's Participation in the conference "Reflecting the Twentieth Century: The Work of Benno von Archimboldi," not to mention their contribution to it, was at best null, at worst catatonic, as if they were suddenly spent or absent, prematurely aged or in a state of shock, a fact that didn't pass unnoticed by the attendees used to Espinoza's and Pelletier's displays of energy [sometimes brazen] at this sort of event, nor did it go unnoticed by the latest litter of Archimboldians, recent graduates, boys and girls, their doctorates tucked still warm under their arms, who planned, by any means necessary, to impose their particular readings of Archimboldi, like missionaries ready to instill faith in God, even if to do so meant signing a pact with the devil, for most were what you might call rationalists, not in the philosophical sense but in the pejorative literal sense, denoting people less interested in literature than in literary criticism, the one field, according to them-some of them, anyway-where revolution was still possible, and in some way they behaved not like youths but like nouveaux youths, in the sense that there are the rich and the nouveaux riches, all of them generally rational thinkers, let us repeat, although often incapable of telling their asses from their elbows, and although they noticed a there and a not-there, an absence-presence in the fleeting passage of Pelletier and Espinoza through Bologna, they were incapable of seeing what was really important: Pelletier's and Espinoza's absolute boredom regarding everything said there about Archimboldi or their negligent disregard for the gaze of others, as if the two were so much cannibal fodder, a disregard lost on the young conferencegoers, those eager and insatiable cannibals, their thirtysomething faces bloated with success, their expressions shifting from boredom to madness, their coded stutterings speaking only two words: love me, or maybe two words and a phrase: love me, let me love you, though obviously no one understood.)

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 who were 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.

When they stopped kicking him they were sunk for a few seconds in the strangest calm of their lives. It was as if they'd finally had the menage a trois they'd so often dreamed of.

Pelletier felt as if he had come. Espinoza felt the same, to a slightly different degree. Norton, who was staring at them without seeing them in the dark, seemed to have experienced multiple orgasms. A few cars were passing by on St. George's Road, but the three of them were invisible to anyone traveling in a vehicle at that hour. There wasn't a single star in the sky. And yet the night was clear: they could see everything in great detail, even the outlines of the smallest things, as if an angel had suddenly clapped night-vision goggles on their eyes. Their skin felt smooth, extremely soft to the touch, although in fact the three of them were sweating. For a moment Espinoza and Pelletier thought they'd killed the Pakistani. A similar idea seemed to be passing through Norton's mind, because she bent over the cabbie and felt for his pulse. To move, to kneel down, hurt her as if the bones of her legs were dislocated.

A group of people came from Garden Row singing a song. They were laughing. Three men and two women. Without moving, Norton, Pelletier, and Espinoza turned their heads toward them and waited. The group began to walk in their direction.

"The cab," said Pelletier, "they want the cab."

Only at that moment did they realize the interior light of the cab was still on.

"Let's go," said Espinoza.

Pelletier took Norton by the shoulders and helped her up. Espinoza had gotten behind the wheel and was urging them to hurry. Pelletier pushed Norton into the backseat and then got in himself. The group from Garden Row headed straight toward the spot where the driver lay.

"He's alive, he's breathing," said Norton.

Espinoza started the car and they drove away. On the other side of the Thames, on a little street near Old Marylebone, they left the cab and walked for a while. They wanted to talk to Norton, explain what had happened, but she wouldn't even let them take her home.

The next day, as they ate a big breakfast at the hotel, they searched the papers for news about the Pakistani cabbie, but he wasn't mentioned anywhere. After breakfast they went out to get the tabloids. They didn't find anything there either.

They called Norton, who didn't seem as angry as she had the night before. They said they had to see her that afternoon. There was something important they needed to tell her. Norton said she had something "important to tell them, too. To kill time they went out for a walk around the neighborhood. For a few minutes they entertained themselves by watching the ambulances coming in and out of Middlesex Hospital, imagining that each sick or hurt person who went in looked like the Pakistani they'd beaten so badly, until they got bored and went for a walk, their minds calmer, along Charing Cross toward the Strand. They confided in each other, as is natural. They shared their innermost feelings. What worried them most was that the police would come after them and catch them in the end.

"Before I got out of the cab," confessed Espinoza, "I wiped my fingerprints away with a handkerchief."

"I know," said Pelletier, "I saw you do it and I did the same. I wiped my fingerprints away, and Liz's, too."

More calmly each time, they went over and over the concatenation of events that had driven them, finally, to give the cabbie a beating. Pritchard, no question about it. And the Gorgon, that innocent and mortal Medusa, set apart from her immortal sisters. And the veiled or not so veiled threat. And nerves. And the rudeness of that ignorant wretch. They wished they had a radio so they could hear the latest news. They talked about what they'd felt as they rained blows on the fallen body. A combination of sleepiness and sexual desire. Desire to fuck the poor bastard? Not at all! More as if they were fucking themselves. As if they were digging into themselves. With long nails and empty hands. Though if your fingernails are long enough your hands are never really empty. But in this dreamlike state, they dug and dug, rending fabric and ripping veins and puncturing vital organs. What were they looking for? They didn't know. Nor, at that stage, did they care.

In the afternoon they saw Norton and they told her everything they knew or feared about Pritchard. The Gorgon, the death of the Gorgon. The exploding woman. She let them talk until they ran out of words. Then she soothed them. Pritchard couldn't hurt a fly, she said. They thought of Anthony Perkins, who claimed he wouldn't hurt a fly and look what happened, but they were content not to argue and they accepted her arguments, unconvinced. Then Norton sat down and said that the thing that couldn't be explained was what had happened the night before.

As if to divert blame, they asked her whether she'd heard anything about the Pakistani. Norton said she had. There'd been something on a local television station. A group of friends, probably the people they saw coming from Garden Row, had found the driver's body and called the police. He had four broken ribs, a concussion, a broken nose, and he'd lost all his top teeth. Now he was in the hospital.

"It was my fault," said Espinoza. "His insults made me lose control."

"It would be best if we didn't see each other for a while," said Norton, "I have to think this over."

Pelletier agreed, but Espinoza kept blaming himself: it seemed fair that Norton should stop seeing him but not that she should stop seeing Pelletier.

"Stop talking nonsense," Pelletier said to him in a low voice, and only then did Espinoza realize that what he was saying was, in fact, stupid.

That night they both flew home.

When he got back to Madrid, Espinoza had a minor breakdown. In the cab home he started to cry, discreetly, covering his eyes with his hand, but the driver saw him crying and asked him if anything was wrong, whether he felt ill.

"I feel all right," said Espinoza, "I'm just a little on edge."

"Are you from here?" asked the driver.

"Yes," said Espinoza, "I was born in Madrid."

For a while neither of them said anything. Then the driver renewed his attack and asked whether he was interested in soccer. Espinoza said no, he'd never been interested in soccer or any other sport. And he added, as if not to put an abrupt end to the conversation, that the night before he had almost killed a man.

"Really," said the driver.

That's right," said Espinoza, "I almost killed him."

"How's that?" asked the driver.

It was in a rage," said Espinoza.

"Abroad?" asked the driver.

Yes," said Espinoza, laughing for the first time, "far from here, and The man had a strange job, too."

Pelletier, meanwhile, neither had a breakdown nor talked to the driver who brought him back to his apartment. When he got home he took a shower and made himself some pasta with olive oil and cheese.

Then he checked his e-mail, answered a few messages, and went to bed with a novel by a young French author, nothing of great significance but amusing, and a journal of literary studies. A little while later he was asleep and he had the following extremely strange dream: he was married to Norton and they lived in a big house, near a cliff from which one could see a beach full of people in bathing suits lying in the sun or swimming, though never getting too far from shore.

The days were short. From his window he watched an almost unending succession of sunrises and sunsets. From time to time Norton would approach the room he was in and say something to him, but she never crossed the threshold. The people on the beach were always there. Sometimes he had the impression that at night they didn't go home, or that they all left together when it was dark, returning in a long procession before the sun came up. Other times, if he closed his eyes, he could soar over the beach like a seagull and see the bathers from up close. They came in every shape and size, although most were adults, in their thirties, forties, fifties, and all gave the impression of being focused on foolish activities, like rubbing oil on themselves, eating sandwiches, listening with more politeness than interest to the conversation of friends, relatives, or towel mates. Sometimes, however, the bathers would get up circumspectly and gaze at the horizon, even if for only a second or two. It was a calm horizon, cloudless, of a transparent blue.

When Pelletier opened his eyes he thought about the bathers' behavior. It was clear they were waiting for something, but you couldn't say if there was anything desperate in their waiting. Every once in a while they'd simply look more alert, their eyes scanning the horizon for a second or two, and then they would once again become part of the flow of time on the beach, fluidly, without a moment of hesitation. Absorbed in watching the bathers, Pelletier forgot about Norton, trusting, perhaps, in her presence in the house, a presence evidenced by the noises that occasionally drifted from within, from the rooms that had no windows or windows that overlooked the fields or the mountains, not the sea or the crowded beach. He slept, or so he discovered deep into the dream, sitting in a chair, near his desk and the window. And he didn't seem to do much sleeping. Even when the sun set he tried to stay awake as long as possible, with his eyes fixed on the beach, now a black canvas or the bottom of a well, watching for any light, the trace of a flashlight, the flickering flame of a bonfire. He lost all notion of time. He vaguely remembered a confusing scene, at once embarrassing and exciting. The papers he had on the table were manuscripts by Archimboldi, or at least that was what he'd been told when he bought them, although when he looked through them he realized that they were written in French, not German. Next to him was a phone that never rang. The days grew hotter and hotter.

One morning, near midday, he saw the bathers halt their activities and turn to watch the horizon, all at once, in the usual way. Nothing happened. But then, for the first time, the bathers turned around and began to leave the beach. Some headed along a dirt road between two hills. Others struck off cross-country, clinging to bushes and stones. A few moved toward the cliff and Pelletier couldn't see them but he knew they were beginning a slow climb. All that was left on the beach was a mass, a dark form projecting from a yellow pit. For an instant Pelletier wondered whether he should go down to the beach and bury the mass at the bottom of the hole, taking all necessary precautions. But just imagining how far he would have to walk to get to the beach made him sweat, and he kept sweating more and more, as if once you turned the spigot you couldn't turn it off.

And then he spied a tremor in the sea, as if the water were sweating too, or as if it were about to boil. A barely perceptible simmer that spilled into ripples, building into waves that came to die on the beach. And then Pelletier felt dizzy and a hum of bees came from outside. And when the hum faded, a silence that was even worse fell over the house and everywhere around. And Pelletier shouted Norton's name and called to her, but no one answered his calls, as if the silence had swallowed up his cries for help. And then Pelletier began to weep and he watched as what was left of a statue emerged from the bottom of the metallic sea. A formless chunk of stone, gigantic, eroded by time and water, though a hand, a wrist, part of a forearm could still be made out with total clarity. And this statue came out of the sea and rose above the beach and it was horrific and at the same time very beautiful.

For a few days, Pelletier and Espinoza were, quite independently, filled with remorse by the business with the Pakistani driver, which circled in their guilty consciences like a ghost or an electric charge.

Espinoza wondered whether his behavior didn't reveal what he truly was, in other words a violent, xenophobic reactionary. Pelletier's guilt, on the other hand, was driven by having kicked the Pakistani when he was already on the ground, which was frankly unsportsmanlike. What need was there for that? he asked himself. The cabbie had already got what he deserved and there was no need to heap violence on violence.

One night the two of them talked on the phone for a long time. They expressed their respective fears. They comforted each other. But after a few minutes they were again lamenting what had happened, even though deep inside they were convinced that it was the Pakistani who was the real reactionary and misogynist, the violent one, the intolerant and offensive one, that the Pakistani had asked for it a thousand times over. The truth is that at moments like these, if the Pakistani had materialized before them, they probably would have killed him.

For a long time they forgot their weekly trips to London. They forgot Pritchard and the Gorgon. They forgot Archimboldi, whose renown continued to grow while their backs were turned. They forgot their papers, which they wrote in a perfunctory and uninspired way and which were really the work of their acolytes or of assistant professors from their respective departments recruited for the Archimboldian cause on the basis of vague promises of tenure-track positions or higher pay.

During a conference, as Pohl was giving a brilliant lecture on Archimboldi and shame in postwar German literature, the two visited a brothel in Berlin, where they slept with two tall and long-legged blondes. Upon leaving, near midnight, they were so happy they began to sing like children in the pouring rain. The experience, something new in their lives, was repeated several times in different European cities and finally ended up becoming part of their daily routine in Paris and Madrid. Others might have slept with students. They, afraid of falling in love, or of falling out of love with Norton, turned to whores.

In Paris, Pelletier went looking for them on the Internet, with excellent results. In Madrid, Espinoza found them by reading the sex ads in El Pais, which provided a much more reliable and practical service than the newspaper's arts pages, where Archimboldi was hardly ever mentioned and Portuguese heroes abounded, just as in the arts pages of ABC.

“You know,” complained Espinoza in his conversations with Pelletier, perhaps seeking some consolation,"we Spaniards have always been provincials.”

"True," replied Pelletier, after considering his answer for exactly two seconds.

Nor did they emerge unscathed from their adventures in prostitution.

Pelletier met a girl called Vanessa. She was married and had a son. Sometimes she would go weeks without seeing her husband and son. According to her, her husband was a saint. He had some flaws-for example he was an Arab, Moroccan to be precise, plus he was lazy-but overall, according to Vanessa, he was a good person, who almost never got angry about anything, and when he did, he wasn't violent or cruel like other men but instead melancholy sad, filled with sorrow in the face of a world that suddenly struck him as overwhelming and incomprehensible. When Pelletier asked whether the Arab knew she worked as a prostitute, Vanessa said he did, that he knew but didn't care, because he believed in the freedom of individuals.

"Then he's your pimp," said Pelletier.

To this Vanessa replied that he might be, that if you thought about it he probably was, but he wasn't like other pimps, who were always demanding too much of their women. The Moroccan made no demands. There were periods, said Vanessa, when she, too, lapsed into a kind of habitual laziness, a persistent languor, and then money was tight. At times like these, the Moroccan contented himself with what there was and tried, without much luck, to find odd jobs so the three of them could scrape by. He was a Muslim, and sometimes he prayed toward Mecca, but clearly he was his own kind of Muslim. According to him, Allah permitted everything, or almost everything. To consciously hurt a child was not allowed. To abuse a child, kill a child, abandon a child to certain death, was forbidden. Everything else was relative and, in the end, permitted.

At some point, Vanessa told Pelletier, they had traveled to Spain. She, her son, and the Moroccan. In Barcelona they met up with the Moroccan's younger brother, who lived with another Frenchwoman, a tall, fat girl. They were musicians, the Moroccan told Vanessa, but really they were beggars. She had never seen the Moroccan so happy. He was constantly laughing and telling stories and he never got tired of walking around Barcelona, all the way to the suburbs or the mountains with views of the whole city and the gleam of the Mediterranean. Never, according to Vanessa, had she seen a man with such energy. Children, yes. A few, not many. But no adults.

When Pelletier asked Vanessa whether her son was the Moroccan's' son too, she answered that he wasn't, and something about the way she said it made it plain that the question struck her as offensive or hurtful, an insult to her son. He was light-skinned, almost blond, she said, and he had turned six by the time she met the Moroccan, if she remembered correctly. A terrible time in my life, she said without going into details. The Moroccan's appearance could hardly be called providential. When she met him, it was a bad time for her, but he was literally starving.

Pelletier liked Vanessa and they saw each other several times. She was a tall girl, with a straight Greek nose and a steely, arrogant gaze. Her disdain for culture, especially book culture, was schoolgirlish somehow, a combination of innocence and elegance so thoroughly immaculate, or so Pelletier believed, that Vanessa could make the most idiotic remarks without provoking the slightest annoyance. One night, after they had made love, Pelletier got up naked and went looking among his books for a novel by Archimboldi. After hesitating for a moment he decided on The Leather Mask, thinking that with some luck Vanessa might read it as a horror novel, might be attracted by the sinister side of the book. She was surprised at first by the gift, then touched, since she was used to her clients giving her clothes or shoes or lingerie. Really, she was very happy with it, especially when Pelletier explained who Archimboldi was and the role the German writer played in his life.

"It's as if you were giving me a part of you," said Vanessa.

This remark left Pelletier a bit confused, since in a way it was perfectly true, Archimboldi was by now a part of him, the author belonged to him insofar as Pelletier had, along with a few others, instituted a new reading of the German, a reading that would endure, a reading as ambitious as Archimboldi's writing, and this reading would keep pace with Archimboldi's writing for a long time, until the reading was exhausted or until Archimboldi's writing-the capacity of the Archimboldian oeuvre to spark emotion and revelations-was exhausted (but he didn't believe that would happen), though in another way it wasn't true, because sometimes, especially since he and Espinoza had given up their trips to London and stopped seeing Norton, Archimboldi's work, his novels and stories, that is, seemed completely foreign, a shapeless and mysterious verbal mass, something that appeared and disappeared capriciously, literally a pretext, a false door, a murderer's alias, a hotel bathtub full of amniotic liquid in which he, Jean-Claude Pelletier, would end up committing suicide for no reason, gratuitously, in bewilderment, just because.

As he expected, Vanessa never told him what she thought of the book. One morning he went home with her. She lived in a working-class neighborhood full of immigrants. When they got there, her son was watching TV and Vanessa scolded him because he hadn't gone to school. The boy said he had a stomachache and Vanessa immediately made him some herbal tea. Pelletier watched her move around the kitchen. The energy Vanessa expended was boundless and ninety percent of it was lost in wasted movement. The house was a complete mess, which he attributed in part to the boy and the Moroccan, though it was essentially her fault.

Soon, drawn by the noise from the kitchen (spoons dropping on the floor, a broken glass, shouts demanding to know of no one in particular where the hell the tea was), the Moroccan appeared. Without anyone introducing them, they shook hands. The Moroccan was small and thin. Soon the boy would be taller and stronger than he was. He had a heavy mustache and he was balding. After greeting Pelletier he sat on the sofa, still half asleep, and began to watch cartoons with the boy. When Vanessa came out of the kitchen, Pelletier told her he had to leave.

"That's fine with me," she said.

He thought there was something belligerent about her reply, but then he remembered Vanessa was like that. The boy took a sip of the tea and said it needed sugar, then he left the steaming glass untouched. A few leaves floated in the liquid, leaves that struck Pelletier as strange and suspicious.

That morning, while he was at the university, he spent his idle moments thinking about Vanessa. When he saw her again they didn't make love, though he paid her as if they had, and they talked for hours. Before he fell asleep, Pelletier had come to some conclusions. Vanessa was perfectly suited to live in the Middle Ages, emotionally as well as physically for her, the concept of "modern life" was meaningless. She had much more faith in what she could see than in the media. She was mistrustful and brave, although paradoxically her bravery made her trust people- waiters, train conductors, friends in trouble, for example-who almost always let her down or betrayed her trust. These betrayals drove her wild and could lead her into unthinkably violent situations. She held grudges, too, and she boasted of saying things to people's faces without beating around the bush. She considered herself a free woman and had an answer for everything. Whatever she didn't understand didn't interest her. She never thought about the future, even her son's future, but only the present, a perpetual present. She was pretty but didn't consider herself pretty. More than half her friends were Moroccan immigrants, but she, who never got around to voting for Le Pen, saw immigration as a danger to France.

"Whores are there to be fucked," Espinoza said the night Pelletier talked to him about Vanessa, "not psychoanalyzed."

Espinoza, unlike his friend, didn't remember any of their names. On one side were the bodies and faces, and on the other side, flowing in a kind of ventilation tube, the Lorenas, the Eolas, the Martas, the Paulas, the Susanas, names without bodies, faces without names.

He never saw the same girl twice. He was with a Dominican, a Brazilian, three Andalusians, a Catalan woman. He learned from the start to be the silent type, the well-dressed man who pays and makes it known what he wants, sometimes with a gesture, and then gets dressed and leaves as if he'd never been there. He met a Chilean who advertised herself as a Chilean and a Colombian who advertised herself as a Colombian, as if the two nationalities held a special fascination. He did it with a Frenchwoman, two Poles, a Russian, a Ukrainian, a German. One night he slept with a Mexican and that was the best.

As always, they went to a hotel, and when he woke up in the morning the Mexican was gone. That day was strange. As if something inside of him had burst. He spent a long time sitting in bed, naked, with his feet resting on the floor, trying to remember something vague. When he got in the shower he realized that he had a mark on his inner thigh. It was as if someone had sucked there or set a leech on his left leg. The bruise was as big as a child's fist. The first thing he thought was that the whore had given him a love bite, and he tried to remember it, but he couldn't, the only images that came were of him on top of her, her legs around his shoulders, and some vague, indecipherable words, whether spoken by him or the Mexican he wasn't sure, probably obscene.

For a few days he thought he'd forgotten her, until one night he found himself searching for her along the streets of Madrid where the whores went or in the Casa de Campo. One night he thought he saw her and he followed her and touched her shoulder. The woman who turned around was Spanish and didn't look like the Mexican whore at all. Another night, in a dream, he thought he remembered what she'd said. He realized that he was dreaming, realized the dream was going to end badly, realized there was a good chance he would forget her words and maybe that was for the best, but he resolved to do everything he could to remember them before he woke up. In the middle of the dream, with the sky spinning in slow motion, he even tried to force himself awake, to turn on the light, to shout so that the sound of his own voice would return him to wakefulness, but the bulbs in the house seemed to have burned out and instead of a shout all he heard was a distant moan, as if of a boy or a girl or maybe an animal sheltering in a faraway room.

When he woke up, of course, he couldn't remember a thing, except that he had dreamed about the Mexican, that she was standing in the middle of a long, dimly lit hallway and he was watching her, unseen. The Mexican seemed to read something written in felt-tip pen on the wall, graffiti or obscene messages that she was spelling out slowly, as if she didn't know how to read. He kept looking for her for a few more days, but then he got tired of it and slept with a Hungarian, two Spanish women, a Gambian, a Senegalese, and an Argentinian. He never dreamed of her again, and finally he managed to forget her.

Time, which heals all wounds, finally erased the sense of guilt that had been instilled in them by the violent episode in London. One day they returned to their respective labors as fresh as daisies. They began writing and attending conferences again with uncommon energy, as if the time or the whores had been a Mediterranean rest cruise. They got back in touch with Morini, whom they'd somehow sidelined at first during their adventures and then forgotten altogether. They found the Italian in slightly worse health than usual, but just as warm, intelligent, and discreet, which meant that he didn't ask a single question, didn't demand a single confidence. One night, to their mutual surprise, Pelletier said to Espinoza that Morini was like a gift. A gift from the gods to the two of 'hern. It was a silly thing to say and to argue it would have been to wade directly into a swamp of sentimentalism, but Espinoza, who felt the same way, even if he'd have put it differently, instantly agreed. Life smiled on them once again. They traveled to conferences here and there. They partook of the pleasures of gastronomy. They read and were lighthearted. Everything around them that had stopped and grown creaky and rusted sprang into motion again. The lives of other people grew visible, to a point. Their remorse vanished like laughter on a spring night. Once more they began to call Norton.

Deeply affected by their reunion, Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton met at a bar, or rather at the tiny cafeteria (truly Lilliputian: two tables and a counter at which no more than four people fit shoulder to shoulder) of an unorthodox gallery only a little bigger than the bar, which exhibited paintings but also sold used books and clothes and shoes, located on Hyde Park Gate, very near the Dutch embassy. The three expressed their admiration for the Netherlands, a thoroughly democratic country.

At this bar, according to Norton, they made the best margaritas in London, a distinction of little interest to Pelletier and Espinoza, although they feigned enthusiasm. They were the only ones there, of course, and despite the time of day, the single employee or owner looked as if he were asleep or had just woken up, in contrast to Pelletier and Espinoza, who, though each had woken at seven and taken a plane, then separately endured the delays of their respective flights, were fresh and full of energy, ready to make the most of their London weekend.

Conversation, it's true, was difficult at first. In the silence, Pelletier and Espinoza watched Norton: she was as pretty and seductive as ever. Sometimes they were distracted by the little ant steps of the gallery owner, who was taking dresses off a rack and carrying them into a back room, returning with identical or very similar dresses, which he left where the others had been hanging.

Though the silence didn't bother Pelletier or Espinoza, Norton found it stifling and felt obliged to tell them, quickly and rather ferociously, about her teaching activities during the time they hadn't seen each other. It was a boring subject, and soon exhausted, so Norton went on to describe everything she had done the day before and the day before that, but once again she was left with nothing to say For a while, smiling like squirrels, the three of them turned to their margaritas, but the quiet became more and more unbearable, as if within it, in the interregnum of silence, cutting words and cutting ideas were slowly being formed, never a performance or dance to be observed with indifference. So Espinoza decided it would be a good idea to describe a trip to Switzerland, a trip that hadn't involved Norton and that might amuse her.

In his telling, Espinoza didn't leave out the tidy cities or the rivers that invited contemplation or the springtime mountainsides clothed in green. And then he spoke of a trip by train, once the work that had brought the three friends together was finished, into the countryside, toward one of the towns halfway between Montreux and the foothills of the Bernese Alps, where they hired a car that took them along a winding but scrupulously paved road toward a rest clinic that bore the name of a late nineteenth-century Swiss politician or financier, the Auguste Demarre Clinic, an unobjectionable name behind which lay concealed a civilized and discreet lunatic asylum.

It hadn't been Pelletier's or Espinoza's idea to visit such a place. It was Morini's idea, because Morini had somehow learned that a man he considered to be one of the most disturbing painters of the twentieth century was living there. Or not. Maybe Morini hadn't said that. Either way, the name of this painter was Edwin Johns and he had cut off his right hand, the hand he painted with, then had it embalmed, and attached it to a kind of multiple self-portrait.

"How is it you never told me this story?" interrupted Norton. Espinoza shrugged his shoulders. "I thought you'd heard it from me," said Pelletier. Although after a few seconds he realized that in fact she hadn't. Norton, to everyone's surprise, burst into inappropriate laughter and ordered another margarita. For a while, as they were waiting for their drinks to be brought by the owner, who was still taking down and hanging up dresses, the three of them sat in silence. Then, at Norton's pleading, Espinoza had to resume his tale. But he didn't want to. You tell it," he said to Pelletier, "you were there, too." Pelletier's story then began with the three Archimboldians contemplating the iron gate that rose in welcome to the Auguste Demarre lunatic asylum, while also blocking the way out (and preventing the entrance of any importunate guests). Or rather, the story begins seconds before, with Espinoza and Morini in his wheelchair surveying the iron gate and the iron railings that vanished to right and left, shaded by a venerable and well-tended grove of trees, as Pelletier, half in and half out of the car, paid the driver and arranged a reasonable time for him to drive up from the town to retrieve them. Then the three turned to face the bulk of the asylum, which could just be seen at the end of the road, like a fifteenth-century fortress, not in its architecture but in the effect of its inertness.

And what was this effect? An odd conviction. The certainty that the American continent, for example, had never been discovered, or in other words had never existed, and that this had in no way impeded the sustained economic growth or normal demographic growth or democratic advancement of the Helvetian republic. Just one of those strange and pointless ideas, said Pelletier, that people exchange on trips, especially if the trip is manifestly pointless, as this one was shaping up to be.

Next they made their way through all the formalities and red tape of a Swiss lunatic asylum. At last, without having seen a single one of the mental patients taking the cure, they were led by a middle-aged nurse with an inscrutable face to a small cottage in the rear grounds of the clinic, huge grounds that enjoyed a splendid view but sloped downward, which Pelletier, who was pushing Morini's wheelchair, thought must not be very calming for the disturbed or the severely disturbed.

To their surprise, the cottage turned out to be a cozy place, surrounded by pine trees, with rosebushes along a low wall, and armchairs within that mimicked the comfort of the English countryside, a fireplace, an oak table, a half-empty bookcase (the titles were almost all in German and French, besides a few in English), a special table with a computer and modem, a Turkish divan that clashed with the rest of the; furnishings, a bathroom containing a toilet, a sink, and even a shower with a sliding plastic door.

"They don't have it too bad," said Espinoza.

Pelletier went over to a window and looked out at the view. At the, foot of the mountains, he thought he saw a city. Maybe it's Montreux, he said to himself. Or maybe it was the town where they'd hired the car. After all, you couldn't see the lake. When Espinoza came over to the window he thought the houses were the town, certainly not Montreux. Morini sat still in his wheelchair, his gaze fixed on the door.

When the door opened, Morini was the first to see him. Edwin Johns had straight hair, starting to thin on top, and pale skin. He wasn't especially tall, but he was still thin. He wore a gray turtleneck sweater and a leather blazer. The first thing he noticed was Morini's wheelchair, which evinced pleasant surprise, as if clearly he hadn't been expecting anything quite so concrete. Morini, meanwhile, couldn't help glancing at Johns's right arm, where the hand was missing, and to his own great surprise, not at all pleasant, he discovered that where there should only have been emptiness, a hand emerged from Johns's jacket cuff, plastic of course, but so well made that only a careful and informed observer could tell it was artificial.

Behind Johns a nurse came in, not the one who had attended them but another one, a little younger and much blonder, who sat in a chair by one of the windows and took out a fat paperback, which she began to read, oblivious to Johns and the visitors. Morini introduced himself as a professor of literature from the University of Turin and an admirer of Johns's work, and then proceeded to introduce his friends. Johns, who had remained standing all this time, offered his hand to Espinoza and Pelletier, who shook it carefully, then sat in a chair at the table and watched Morini, as if they were the only two people in the cottage.

At first Johns made a slight, almost imperceptible effort to start a conversation. He asked whether Morini had bought any of his art. Morini replied in the negative. He said no, then he added that he couldn't afford Johns's work. Espinoza noticed then that the book the nurse was reading so intently was an anthology of twentieth-century German literature. He elbowed Pelletier, and the latter asked the nurse, more to break the ice than because he was curious, whether Benno von Archimboldi was included in the anthology. At that moment they all heard the caw or squawk of a crow. The nurse said yes. Johns began to blink and then he closed his eyes and ran his prosthetic hand over his face.

It's my book," he said, "I loaned it to her."

Unbelievable," said Morini, "what a coincidence."

But of course I haven't read it, I don't speak German." Espinoza asked why he'd bought it, then.

“For the cover," said Johns. "The drawing is by Hans Wette, a fine painter. And as far as coincidence is concerned, it's never a question of believing in it or not. The whole world is a coincidence. I had a friend who told me I was wrong to think that way. My friend said the world isn't a coincidence for someone traveling by rail, even if the train should cross foreign lands, places the traveler will never see again in his life. And it isn't a coincidence for the person who gets up at six in the morning, exhausted, to go to work; for the person who has no choice but to get up and pile more suffering on the suffering he's already accumulated. Suffering is accumulated, said my friend, that's a fact, and the greater the suffering, the smaller the coincidence."

"As if coincidence were a luxury?" asked Morini.

At that moment, Espinoza, who had been following Johns's monologue, noticed Pelletier next to the nurse, one elbow propped on the window ledge as with the other hand, in a polite gesture, he helped her find the page where the story by Archimboldi began. The blond nurse, sitting in the chair with the book on her lap, and Pelletier, standing by her side, in a pose not lacking in gallantry. And the window ledge and the roses outside and beyond them the grass and the trees and the evening advancing across ridges and ravines and lonely crags. The shadows that crept imperceptibly across the inside of the cottage, creating angles where none had existed before, vague sketches that suddenly appeared on the walls, circles that faded like mute explosions.

"Coincidence isn't a luxury, it's the flip side of fate, and something else besides," said Johns.

"What else?" asked Morini.

"Something my friend couldn't grasp, for a reason that's simple and easy to understand. My friend (if I may still call him that) believed in humanity, and so he also believed in order, in the order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with. He believed in redemption. Deep down he may even have believed in progress. Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us."

Then, just then, Espinoza-and Pelletier, too-heard or sensed that Morini was formulating the question he had come to ask, his voice low his torso so far inclined they feared he would tumble out of his wheel-chair.

"Why did you mutilate yourself?"

Morini's face seemed to be pierced by the last lights rolling across the grounds of the asylum. Johns listened impassively. His attitude suggested a presentiment that the man in the wheelchair had come on this visit in search of an answer, like so many others before him. Then Johns smiled and posed a question of his own.

"Are you going to publish this conversation?"

"Certainly not," said Morini.

"Then why ask me a question like that?"

"I want to hear you say it yourself," whispered Morini.

In a movement that to Pelletier seemed slow and rehearsed, Johns lifted his right hand and held it an inch or so from Morini's expectant face.

"Do you think you're like me?" asked Johns.