Roberto Bolaño - 2666 (Excerpts)

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.
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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 G-d 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 . . .
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...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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 G-ddess 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 G-d 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 G-d it is no end, who curses Eurylochus for putting on airs and presuming to be enlightened or atheistic or Promethean, since the G-d 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."
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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.
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"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 *beep* 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 *beep* mugs are like samurais armed with those *beep* 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.
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"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.
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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 G-d at every moment on our planet. A senseless G-d 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.
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"I understand," said Espinoza, gritting his teeth, "but I need to talk to someone in a position of authority."

"Talk to me," said the student.

Espinoza asked whether Dr. Morini had missed any of his classes.

"Let's see, let me think," said the student.

And then Espinoza heard someone, the student himself, whispering Morini . . . Morini . . . Morini, in a voice that didn't sound like his but rather like the voice of a sorcerer, or more specifically, a sorceress, a soothsayer from the times of the Roman Empire, a voice that reached Espinoza like the dripping of a basalt fountain but that soon swelled and overflowed with a deafening roar, with the sound of thousands of voices, the thunder of a great river in flood comprising the shared fate of every voice.

Yesterday he had a class and he wasn't here," said the student after some thought.

Espinoza thanked him and hung up.
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Norton felt somehow insulted by Morini's decision not to go with them. They didn't call each other again. Morini might have called Norton, but before his friends set off on their search for Archimboldi, he, in his own way, like Schwob in Samoa, had already begun a voyage, a voyage that would end not at the grave of a brave man but in a kind of resignation, what might be called a new experience, since this wasn't resignation in any ordinary sense of the word, or even patience or conformity, but rather a state of meekness, a refined and incomprehensible humility that made him cry for no reason and in which his own image, what Morini saw as Morini, gradually and helplessly dissolved, like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, not knowing that it's burning.
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The next morning they flew to Hermosillo and from the airport they called the rector of the University of Santa Teresa, then they rented a car and set off toward the border. As they left the airport, the three of them noticed how bright it was in Sonora. It was as if the light were buried in the Pacific Ocean, producing an enormous curvature of space. It made a person hungry to travel in that light, although also, and maybe more insistently, thought Norton, it made you want to bear your hunger until the end.
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The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border. Espinoza and Pelletier saw him as a failed man, failed above all because he had lived and taught in Europe, who tried to protect himself with a veneer of toughness but whose innate gentleness gave him away in the act. But Norton's impression was of a sad man whose life was ebbing swiftly away and who would rather do anything than serve them as guide to Santa Teresa.
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Espinoza dreamed about the painting of the desert. In the dream Espinoza sat up in bed, and from there, as if watching TV on a screen more than five feet square, he could see the still, bright desert, such a solar yellow it hurt his eyes, and the figures on horseback, whose movements—the movements of horses and riders—were barely perceptible, as if they were living in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched the painting from losing his mind. And then there were the voices. Espinoza listened to them. Barely audible voices, at first only syllables, brief moans shooting like meteorites over the desert and the framed space of the hotel room and the dream. He recognized a few stray words. Quickness, urgency, speed, agility. The words tunneled through the rarefied air of the room like virulent roots through dead flesh. Our culture, said a voice. Our freedom. The word freedom sounded to Espinoza like the crack of a whip in an empty classroom. He woke up in a sweat.

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

As they finished breakfast they speculated again about the motives that might have compelled Archimboldi to travel to Santa Teresa. That was when Amalfitano learned that no one had ever seen Archimboldi in person. The story struck him as amusing, though he couldn't say exactly why, and he asked why they wanted to find him when it was clear Archimboldi didn't want to be seen. Because we're studying his work, said the critics. Because he's dying and it isn't right that the greatest German writer of the twentieth century should die without being offered the chance to speak to the readers who know his novels best. Because, they said, we want to convince him to come back to Europe.

"I thought," said Amalfitano, "that Kafka was the greatest German writer of the twentieth century."

Well, then the greatest postwar German writer or the greatest German writer of the second half of the twentieth century, said the critics.

"Have you read Peter Handke?" Amalfitano asked them. "And what about Thomas Bernhard?"

Ugh, said the critics, and until breakfast was over Amalfitano was attacked until he resembled the bird in Azuela's Mangy Parrot, gutted and plucked to the last feather.
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"Tell us what you mean," said Espinoza.

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

"I don't understand a word you've said," said Norton.

"Really I've just been talking nonsense," said Amalfitano.
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That night, while Norton was checking her e-mail on the hotel computer, she found a message from Morini. In his message Morini talked about the weather, as if he had nothing better to say, about the slanting rain that had begun to fall on Turin at eight and hadn't stopped until one in the morning, and he sincerely wished Norton better weather in the north of Mexico, where he believed it never rained and it was cold only at night, and then only in the desert. That night, too, after replying to some messages (not Morini's), Norton went up to her room, combed her hair, brushed her teeth, put moisturizing cream on her face, sat on the edge of the bed for a while, thinking, and then went out into the hallway and knocked at Pelletier's door and next at Espinoza's door and without a word she led them to her room, where she made love to both of them until five in the morning, at which time the critics, at Norton's request, returned to their rooms, where they soon fell into a deep sleep, a sleep that eluded Norton, who straightened the sheets of her bed a little and turned out the lights but remained wide awake.

She thought about Morini, or rather she saw Morini sitting in his wheel-chair at a window in his apartment in Turin, an apartment she had never been to, looking out at the street and the facades of the surrounding buildings and watching the rain falling incessantly. The buildings across the street were gray. The street was dark and wide, a boulevard, although not a single car went by, with a spindly tree planted every sixty feet, like a bad joke on the part of the mayor or city planner. The sky was a blanket on top of a blanket, with another blanket on top of that, even thicker and wetter. The window Morini looked out was big, almost like a French door, narrower than it was wide but very tall, and so clean that the glass, with the raindrops sliding over it, was like pure crystal. The window frame was wooden, painted white. The lights were on in the room. The parquet shone, the bookshelves looked meticulously organized, and just a few paintings, in impeccable taste, hung on the walls. There were no rugs, and the furniture—a black leather sofa and two white leather armchairs—in no way impeded the passage of the wheelchair. Through double doors, half open, stretched a dark hallway.

And what to say about Morini? His position in the wheelchair expressed a certain degree of surrender, as if watching the night rain and the sleeping neighborhood fulfilled all his expectations. Sometimes he would rest his two arms on the chair, other times he would rest his head in one hand and prop his elbow on the chair's armrest. His useless legs, like the legs of an adolescent near death, were clothed in jeans possibly too big for him. He was wearing a white shirt with the top buttons undone, and on his left wrist his watch strap was too loose, though not so loose that the watch would fall off. He wasn't wearing shoes but rather very old slippers, of a cloth as black and shiny as the night. Everything he had on was comfortable, intended for wearing around the house, and by Morini's attitude it seemed clear that he had no intention of going in to work the next day, or that he planned to go in late.

The rain out the window, as he'd said in his e-mail, was falling obliquely, and there was something of the peasant fatalist in Morini's lassitude, his stillness and surrender, his uncomplaining and total abandonment to insomnia.
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"What were his eyes like?" asked Norton.

"Blue," said El Cerdo.

"No, I already know they're blue, I've read all his books many times and they couldn't not be blue, I mean what were they like, what was your impression of them."

At the other end of the line there was a long silence, as if the question were completely unexpected or as if it were something El Cerdo had asked himself many times, and still couldn't answer.

"That's a hard question," said El Cerdo.

"You're the only person who can answer it. No one has seen him in a long time, and your situation is privileged, if I may say so," said Norton.

"Christ," said El Cerdo.

"What?" said Norton.

"Nothing, nothing, I'm thinking," said El Cerdo.

And after a while he said:

"He had the eyes of a blind man, I don't mean he couldn't see, but his eyes were just like the eyes of the blind, though I could be wrong about that."
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Lola's pretext was a plan to visit her favorite poet, who lived in the insane asylum in Mondragon, near San Sebastian. Amalfitano listened to her explanations for a whole night as she packed her bag and promised she'd come home soon to him and Rosa. Lola, especially toward the end, used to claim that she knew the poet, that she'd met him at a party in Barcelona before Amalfitano became a part of her life. At this party, which Lola described as a wild party, a long overdue party that suddenly sprang to life in the middle of the summer heat and a traffic jam of cars with red lights on, she had slept with him and they'd made love all night, although Amalfitano knew it wasn't true, not just because the poet was gay, but because Lola had first heard of the poet's existence from him, when he'd given her one of his books. Then Lola took it upon herself to buy everything else the poet had written and to choose friends who thought the poet was a genius, an alien, G-d's messenger, friends who had themselves just been released from the Sant Boi asylum or had flipped out after repeated stints in rehab. The truth was, Amalfitano knew that sooner or later she would make her way to San Sebastian, so he chose not to argue but offered her part of his savings, begged her to come back in a few months, and promised to take good care of Rosa. Lola seemed not to hear a thing. When she had finished, she went into the kitchen, made coffee, and sat in silence, waiting for dawn, although Amalfitano tried to come up with subjects of conversation that might interest her or at least help pass the time. At six-thirty the doorbell rang and Lola jumped. They've come for me, she said, and since she didn't move, Amalfitano had to get up and ask over the intercom who it was. He heard a weak voice saying it's me. Who is it? asked Amalfitano. Let me in, it's me, said the voice. Who? asked Amalfitano. The voice, while still barely audible, seemed indignant at the interrogation. Me me me me, it said. Amalfitano closed his eyes and buzzed the door open. He heard the sound of the elevator cables and he went back to the kitchen. Lola was still sitting there, sipping the last of her coffee. I think it's for you, said Amalfitano. Lola gave no sign of having heard him. Are you going to say goodbye to Rosa? asked Amalfitano. Lola looked up and said it was better not to wake her. There were dark circles under her blue eyes. Then the doorbell rang twice and Amalfitano went to open the door.
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Lola was very tired and she went to bed early and in her dreams she heard laughter and loud voices and scolding, almost all Imma's but some her friend's, too. They talked about the old days, about the struggle against Franco, about the women's prison in Zaragoza. They talked about a pit, a very deep hole from which oil or coal could be extracted, about an underground jungle, about a commando team of female suicide bombers. Then Lola's letter took an abrupt turn. I'm not a lesbian, she said, I don't know why I'm telling you this, I don't know why I'm treating you like a child by saying it. Homosexuality is a lie, it's an act of violence committed against us in our adolescence, she said. Imma knows this. She knows it, she knows it, she's too clearsighted not to, but all she can do is help. Imma is a lesbian, every day hundreds of thousands of cows are sacrificed, every day a herd of herbivores or several herds cross the valley, from north to south, so slowly but so fast it makes me sick, right now, now, now, do you understand, Oscar? No, thought Amalfitano, I don't, as he held the letter in his two hands like a life raft of reeds and grasses, and with his foot he steadily rocked his daughter in her seat.
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I hope you won't think I'm indiscreet, said the doctor, but I'm writing a biography of our friend and the more information I can gather on his life, the better, wouldn't you say? Someday he’ll leave here, said Gorka, smoothing his eyebrows, someday the Spanish public will have to recognize him as one of the greats, I don't mean they'll give him a prize, hardly, no Principe de Asturias or Cervantes for him, let alone a seat in the Academy, literary careers in Spain are for social climbers, operators, and ass kissers, if you'll pardon the expression. But someday he'll leave here. There's no question about that. Someday I'll leave, too. And so will my patients and my colleagues 'patients. Someday all of us will finally leave Mondragon, and this noble institution, ecclesiastical in origin, charitable in aim, will stand abandoned. Then my biography will be of interest and I'll be able to publish it, but in the meantime, as you can imagine, it's my duty to collect information, dates, names, confirm stories, some in questionable taste, even damaging, others more picturesque, stories that revolve around a chaotic center of gravity, which is our friend here, or what he's willing to reveal, the ordered self he presents, ordered verbally, I mean, according to a strategy I think I understand, although its purpose is a mystery to me, an order concealing a verbal disorder that would shake us to the core if ever we were to experience it, even as spectators of a staged performance. Doctor, you're a sweetheart, said Lola. Imma ground her teeth. Then Lola began to tell Gorka about her heterosexual experience with the poet, but her friend sidled over and kicked her in the ankle with the pointed toe of her shoe. Just then, the poet, who had begun to blow smoke rings again, remembered the apartment in Barcelona's Ensanche and remembered the philosopher, and although his eyes didn't light up, part of his bone structure did: the jaws, the chin, the hollow cheeks, as if he'd been lost in the Amazon and three Sevillian friars had rescued him, or a monstrous three-headed friar, which held no terror for him either. So, turning to Lola, he asked her about the philosopher, said the philosopher's name, talked about his stay in the philosopher's apartment, the months he'd spent in Barcelona with no job, playing stupid jokes, throwing books that he hadn't bought out the window (as the philosopher ran down the stairs to retrieve them, which wasn't always possible), playing loud music, practically never sleeping and laughing all the time, taking the occasional assignment as a translator or lead reviewer, a liquid star of boiling water.
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Lola thought she heard his laugh. An ironic laugh, as if he were saying: boys, you can't take a joke. But maybe the poet wasn't laughing. Maybe, Lola said in her letter to Amalfitano, it was my madness that was laughing. In any case, whether it was her madness or not, the poet went over to the other two and said something to them. Neither of the lunatics answered. Lola saw them: they were looking down, at the life throbbing at ground level, between the blades of grass and under the loose clumps of dirt. A blind life in which everything had the transparency of water.
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The next and final letter Amalfitano received from his wife wasn't postmarked but the stamps were French. In it Lola recounted a conversation with Larrazabal. Christ, you're lucky, said Larrazabal, my whole life I've wanted to live in a cemetery, and look at you, the minute you get here, you move right in. A good person, Larrazabal. He invited her to stay at his apartment. He offered to drive her each morning to the Mondragon asylum, where Spain's greatest and most self-deluding poet was studying osteology. He offered her money without asking for anything in return. One night he took her to the movies. Another night he went with her to the boardinghouse to ask whether there was any word from Imma. Once, late one Saturday night, after they'd made love for hours, he proposed to her and he didn't feel offended or stupid when Lola reminded him that she was already married. A good person, Larrazabal. He bought her a skirt at a little street fair and he bought her some brand-name jeans at a store in downtown San Sebastian. He talked to her about his mother, whom he'd loved dearly, and about his siblings, to whom he wasn't close. None of this had much of an effect on Lola, or rather it did, but not in the way he had hoped. For her, those days were like a prolonged parachute landing after a long space flight. She went to Mondragon once every three days now, instead of once a day, and she looked through the fence with no hope at all of seeing the poet, seeking at most some sign, a sign that she knew beforehand she would never understand or that she would understand only many years later, when none of it mattered anymore. Sometimes, without calling first or leaving a note, she wouldn't sleep at Larrazabal's apartment and he would go looking for her at the cemetery, the asylum, the old boardinghouse where she'd stayed, the places where the tramps and transients of San Sebastian gathered. Once he found her in the waiting room of the train station. Another time he found her sitting on a seafront bench at La Concha, at an hour when the only people out walking were two opposite types: those running out of time and those with time to burn. In the morning it was Larrazabal who made breakfast. At night, when he came home from work, he was the one who made dinner. During the day Lola drank only water, lots of it, and ate a little piece of bread or a roll small enough to fit in her pocket, which she would buy at the corner bakery before she went roaming. One night, as they were showering, she told Larrazabal that she was planning to leave and asked him for money for the train. I'll give you everything I've got, he answered, but I can't give you money to go away so I never see you again. Lola didn't insist. Somehow, though she didn't tell Amalfitano how she did it, she scraped together just enough money for a ticket, and one day at noon she took the train to France. She was in Bayonne for a while. She left for Landes. She returned to Bayonne.
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She was in Pau and in Lourdes. One morning she saw a train full of sick people, paralyzed people, adolescents with cerebral palsy, farmers with skin cancer, terminally ill Castilian bureaucrats, polite old ladies dressed like Carmelite nuns, people with rashes, blind children, and without knowing how she began to help them, as if she were a nun in jeans stationed there by the church to aid and direct the desperate, who one by one got on buses parked outside the train station or waited in long lines as if each person were a scale on a giant and old and cruel but vigorous snake. Then trains came from Italy and from the north of France, and Lola went back and forth like a sleepwalker, her big blue eyes unblinking, moving slowly, since the weariness of her days was beginning to weigh on her, and she was permitted entry to every part of the station, some rooms converted into first aid posts, others into resuscitation posts, and just one, discreetly located, converted into an improvised morgue for the bodies of those whose strength hadn't been equal to the accelerated wear and tear of the train trip. At night she slept in the most modern building in Lourdes, a functionalist monster of steel and glass that buried its head, bristling with antennas, in the white clouds that floated down from the north, big and sorrowful, or marched from the west like a ragtag army whose only strength was its numbers, or dropped down from the Pyrenees like the ghosts of dead beasts. There she would sleep in the trash compartments, which she entered through a tiny door. Other times she would stay at the station, at the station bar, when the chaos of the trains subsided, and let the old men buy her coffee and talk to her about movies and crops. One afternoon she thought she saw Imma get off the train from Madrid escorted by a troop of cripples. She was the same height as Imma, she was wearing long black skirts like Imma, her doleful Castilian nun's face was just like Imma's face. Lola sat still until she had gone by and didn't call out to her, and five minutes later she elbowed her way out of the Lourdes station and the town of Lourdes and walked to the highway and only then did she try to thumb a ride.
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Five years after she left, Amalfitano heard from Lola again. The letter was short and came from Paris. In it Lola told him that she had a job cleaning big office buildings. It was a night job that started at ten and ended at four or five or six in the morning. Paris was pretty then, like all big cities when everyone is asleep. She would take the metro home. The metro at that hour was the saddest thing in the world. She'd had another child, a son, named Benoit, with whom she lived. She'd also been in the hospital. She didn't say why, or whether she was still sick. She didn't mention any man. She didn't ask about Rosa. For her it's as if Rosa doesn't exist, thought Amalfitano, but then it struck him that this might not be the case at all. He cried for a while with the letter in his hands. It was only as he was drying his eyes that he noticed the letter was typed. He knew, without a doubt, that Lola had written it from one of the offices she said she cleaned. For a second he thought it was all a lie, that Lola was working as an administrative assistant or secretary in some big company. Then he saw it clearly. He saw the vacuum cleaner parked between two rows of desks, saw the floor waxer like a cross between a mastiff and a pig sitting next to a plant, he saw an enormous window through which the lights of Paris blinked, he saw Lola in the cleaning company's smock, a worn blue smock, sitting writing the letter and maybe taking slow drags on a cigarette, he saw Lola's fingers, Lola's wrists, Lola's blank eyes, he saw another Lola reflected in the quicksilver of the window, floating weightless in the skies of Paris, like a trick photograph that isn't a trick, floating, floating pensively in the skies of Paris, weary, sending messages from the coldest, iciest realm of passion.
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On her fifth morning with them, when the medicine she had brought with her from France was about to run out, Lola told them she had to leave. Benoit is little and he needs me, she said. Actually, he doesn't need me, but that doesn't mean he isn't little, she said. I don't know who needs who, she said at last, but the fact is I have to go see how he is.
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One afternoon Amalfitano went into the yard in his shirtsleeves, like a feudal L-rd riding out on horseback to survey his lands. The moment before, he'd been sitting on the floor of his study opening boxes of books with a kitchen knife, and in one of the boxes he'd found a strange book, a book he didn't remember ever buying or receiving as a gift. The book was Rafael Dieste's Testamento geometrico, published by Ediciones del Castro in La Coruna, in 1975, a book evidently about geometry, a subject that meant next to nothing to Amalfitano, divided into three parts, the first an "Introduction to Euclid, Lobachevsky and Riemann," the second concerning "The Geometry of Motion," and the third titled "Three Proofs of the V Postulate." This last was the most enigmatic by far since Amalfitano had no idea what the V Postulate was or what it consisted of, nor did he mean to find out, although this was probably owing not to a lack of curiosity, of which he possessed an ample supply, but to the heat that swept Santa Teresa in the afternoons, the dry, dusty heat of a bitter sun, inescapable unless you lived in a new apartment with air-conditioning, which Amalfitano didn't. The publication of the book had been made possible thanks to the support of some friends of the author, friends who'd been immortalized, in a photograph that looked as if it was taken at the end of a party, on page 4, where the publisher's information usually appears. What it said there was: The present edition is offered as a tribute to Rafael Dieste by: Ramon BALTAR DOMINGUEZ, Isaac DIAZ PARDO, Felipe FERNANDEZ ARMESTO, Francisco FERNANDEZ DEL RIEGO, Alvaro GIL VARELA, Domingo GARCIA-SABELL, Valentin PAZ-ANDRADE and Luis SEOANE LOPEZ. It struck Amalfitano as odd, to say the least, that the friends' last names had been printed in capitals while the name of the man being honored was in small letters. On the front flap, the reader was informed that the Testamento geometrico was really three books, "each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole," and then it said "this work representing the final distillation of Dieste's reflections and research on Space, the notion of which is involved in any methodical discussion of the fundamentals of Geometry." At that moment, Amalfitano thought he remembered that Rafael Dieste was a poet. A Galician poet, of course, or long settled in Galicia. And his friends and patrons were also Galician, naturally, or long settled in Galicia, where Dieste probably gave classes at the University of La Coruna or Santiago de Compostela, or maybe he was a high school teacher, teaching geometry to kids of fifteen or sixteen and looking out the window at the permanently overcast winter sky of Galicia and the pouring rain. And on the back flap there was more about Dieste. It said: "Of the books that make up Dieste's varied but in no way uneven body of work, which always cleaves to the demands of a personal process in which poetic creation and speculative creation are focused on a single object, the closest forerunners of the present book are Nuevo tratado del paralelismo (Buenos Aires, 1958) and more recent works: Variaciones sobre Zenon de Elea and ¿Que es un axioma? this followed by Movilidad y Semejanza together in one volume." So, thought Amalfitano, his face running with sweat to which microscopic particles of dust adhered, Dieste's passion for geometry wasn't something new. And his patrons, in this new light, were no longer friends who got together every night at the club to drink and talk politics or football or mistresses. Instead, in a flash, they became distinguished university colleagues, some doubtless retired but others fully active, and all well-to-do or relatively well-to-do, which of course didn't mean that they didn't meet up every so often like provincial intellectuals, or in other words like deeply self-sufficient men, at the La Coruna club to drink good cognac or whiskey and talk about intrigues and mistresses while their wives, or in the case of the widowers, their housekeepers, were sitting in front of the TV or preparing supper. But the question for Amalfitano was how this book had ended up in one of his boxes. For half an hour he searched his memory, leafing distractedly through Dieste's book. Finally he concluded that for the moment it was a mystery beyond his powers to solve, but he didn't give up. He asked Rosa, who was in the bathroom putting on makeup, if the book was hers. Rosa looked at it and said no. Amalfitano begged her to look again and tell him for sure whether it was hers or not. Rosa asked him if he was feeling all right. I feel fine, said Amalfitano, but this book isn't mine and it showed up in one of the boxes of books I sent from Barcelona. Rosa told him, in Catalan, not to worry, and kept putting on her makeup. How can I not worry, said Amalfitano, also in Catalan, when it feels like I'm losing my memory. Rosa looked at the book again and said: it might be mine. Are you sure? asked Amalfitano. No, it isn't mine, said Rosa, I'm sure it isn't, in fact, I've never seen it before. Amalfitano left his daughter in front of the bathroom mirror and went back out into the desolate yard, where everything was a dusty brown, as if the desert had settled around his new house, with the book dangling from his hand. He thought back on the bookstores where he might have bought it. He looked at the first page and the last page and the back cover for some sign, and on the first page he found a stamp reading Libreria Follas Novas, S.L., Montero Rios 37, phone 981-59-44-06 and 981-59-44-18, Santiago. Clearly it wasn't Santiago de Chile, the only place in the world where Amalfitano could see himself in a state of total catatonia, walking into a bookstore, choosing some book without even looking at the cover, paying for it, and leaving. Obviously, it was Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia. For an instant Amalfitano envisioned a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago. He walked to the back of the yard, where his wooden fence met the cement wall surrounding the house behind his. He had never really looked at it. Glass shards, he thought, the owners' fear of unwanted guests. The edges of the shards were reflecting the afternoon sun when Amalfitano resumed his walk around the desolate yard. The wall of the house next door was also bristling with glass, here mostly green and brown glass from beer and liquor bottles. Never, even in dreams, had he been in Santiago de Compostela, Amalfitano had to acknowledge, halting in the shadow of the left-hand wall. But that hardly mattered. Some of the bookstores he frequented in Barcelona carried stock bought directly from other bookstores in Spain, from bookstores that were selling off their inventories or closing, or, in a few cases, that functioned as both bookstore and distributor. I probably picked it up at Laie, he thought, or maybe at La Central, the time I stopped in to buy some philosophy book and the clerk was excited because Pere Gimferrer, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and Juan Villoro were all there, arguing about whether it was a good idea to fly, and plane accidents, and which was more dangerous, taking off or landing, and she mistakenly put this book in my bag. La Central, that makes sense. But if that was the way it happened I'd have discovered the book when I got home and opened the bag or the package or whatever it was, unless, of course, something terrible or upsetting happened to me on the walk home that eliminated any desire or curiosity I had to examine my new book or books. It's even possible that I might have opened the package like a zombie and left the new book on the night table and Dieste's book on the bookshelf, shaken by something I'd just seen on the street, maybe a car accident, maybe a mugging, maybe a suicide in the subway, although if I had seen something like that, thought Amalfitano, I would surely remember it now or at least retain a vague memory of it. I wouldn't remember the Testamento geometrico, but I would remember whatever had made me forget the Testamento geometrico. And as if this wasn't enough, the biggest problem wasn't really where the book had come from but how it had ended up in Santa Teresa in one of Amalfitano's boxes of books, books he had chosen in Barcelona before he left. At what point of utter obliviousness had he put it there? How could he have packed a book without noticing what he was doing? Had he planned to read it when he got to the north of Mexico? Had he planned to use it as the starting point for a desultory study of geometry? And if that was his plan, why had he forgotten the moment he arrived in this city rising up in the middle of nowhere? Had the book disappeared from his memory while he and his daughter were flying east to west? Or had it disappeared from his memory as he was waiting for his boxes of books to arrive, once he was in Santa Teresa? Had Dieste's book vanished as a side effect of jet lag?

Amalfitano had some rather idiosyncratic ideas about jet lag. They weren't consistent, so it might be an exaggeration to call them ideas. They were feelings. Make-believe ideas. As if he were looking out the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial landscape. He believed (or liked to think he believed) that when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn't exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn't exist or hadn't yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn't traveled. This was something he'd probably read in some science fiction novel or story and that he'd forgotten having read.

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.

And although Amalfitano later found more information on the life and works of Rafael Dieste at the University of Santa Teresa library—information that confirmed what he had already guessed or what Don Domingo Garcia-Sabell had insinuated in his prologue, titled "Enlightened Intuition," which went so far as to quote Heidegger (Es gibt Zeit: there is time)—on the afternoon when he'd ranged over his humble and barren lands like a medieval squire, as his daughter, like a medieval princess, finished applying her makeup in front of the bathroom mirror, he could in no way remember why or where he'd bought the book or how it had ended up packed and sent with other more familiar and cherished volumes to this populous city that stood in defiance of the desert on the border of Sonora and Arizona. And it was then, just then, as if it were the pistol shot inaugurating a series of events that would build upon each other with sometimes happy and sometimes disastrous consequences, Rosa left the house and said she was going to the movies with a friend and asked if he had his keys and Amalfitano said yes and he heard the door bang shut and then he heard his daughter's footsteps along the path of uneven paving stones to the tiny wooden gate that didn't even come up to her waist and then he heard his daughter's footsteps on the sidewalk, heading off toward the bus stop, and then he heard the engine of a car starting. And then Amalfitano walked into his devastated front yard and looked up and down the street, craning his neck, and didn't see any car or Rosa and he gripped Dieste's book tightly, which he was still holding in his left hand. And then he looked up at the sky and saw the moon, too big and too wrinkled, although it wasn't night yet. And then he returned to his ravaged backyard and for a few seconds he stopped, looking left and right, ahead and behind, trying to see his shadow, but although it was still daytime and the sun was still shining in the west, toward Tijuana, he couldn't see it. And then his eyes fell on the four rows of cord, each tied at one end to a kind of miniature soccer goal, two posts perhaps six feet tall planted in the ground, and a third post bolted horizontally across the top, making them sturdier, the cords strung from this top bar to hooks fixed in the side of the house. It was the clothesline, although the only things he saw hanging on it were a shirt of Rosa's, white with ocher embroidery around the neck, and a pair of underpants and two towels, still dripping. In the corner, in a brick hut, was the washing machine. For a while he didn't move, breathing with his mouth open, leaning on the horizontal bar of the clothesline. Then he went into the hut as if he were short of oxygen, and from a plastic bag with the logo of the supermarket where he went with his daughter to do the weekly shopping, he took out three clothespins, which he persisted in calling perritos, as they were called in Chile, and with them he clamped the book and hung it from one of the cords and then he went back into the house, feeling much calmer.

The idea, of course, was Duchamp's.

All that exists, or remains, of Duchamp's stay in Buenos Aires is a ready-made. Though of course his whole life was a readymade, which was his way of appeasing fate and at the same time sending out signals of distress. As Calvin Tomkins writes: As a wedding present for his sister Suzanne and his close friend Jean Crotti, who were married in Paris on April 14, 1919, Duchamp instructed the couple by letter to hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could "go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages." Clearly, then, Duchamp wasn't just playing chess in Buenos Aires. Tompkins continues: This Unhappy Readymade, as he called it, might strike some newlyweds as an oddly cheerless wedding gift, but Suzanne and Jean carried out Duchamp's instructions in good spirit; they took a photograph of the open hook dangling in midair (the only existing record of the work, which did not survive its exposure to the elements), and Suzanne later painted a picture of it called Le Readymade malheureux de Marcel. As Duchamp later told Cabanne, "It amused me to bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then the rain, the wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea." I take it back: all Duchamp did while he was in Buenos Aires was play chess. Yvonne, who was with him, got sick of all his play-science and left for France. According to Tompkins: Duchamp told one interviewer in later years that he had liked disparaging "the seriousness of a book full of principles," and suggested to another that, in its exposure to the weather, "the treatise seriously got the facts of life."

That night, when Rosa got back from the movies, Amalfitano was watching television in the living room and he told her he'd hung Dieste's book on the clothesline. Rosa looked at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about. I mean, said Amalfitano, I didn't hang it out because it got sprayed with the hose or dropped in the water, I hung it there just because, to see how it survives the assault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate. I hope you aren't going crazy, said Rosa. No, don't worry, said Amalfitano, in fact looking quite cheerful. I'm telling you so you don't take it down. Just pretend the book doesn't exist. Fine, Rosa said, and she shut herself in her room.
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In the mornings, before he left for the university, Amalfitano would go out the back door to watch the book while he finished his coffee. No doubt about it: it had been printed on good paper and the binding was stoically withstanding nature's onslaught. Rafael Dieste's old friends had chosen good materials for their tribute, a tribute that amounted to an early farewell from a circle of learned old men (or old men with a patina of learning) to another learned old man. In any case, nature in northwestern Mexico, and particularly in his desolate yard, thought Amalfitano, was in short supply. One morning, as he was waiting for the bus to the university, he made firm plans to plant grass or a lawn, and also to buy a little tree in some store that sold that kind of thing, and plant flowers along the fence. Another morning he thought that any work he did to make the yard nicer would ultimately be pointless, since he didn't plan to stay long in Santa Teresa. I have to go back now, he said to himself, but where? And then he asked himself: what made me come here? Why did I bring my daughter to this cursed city? Because it was one of the few hellholes in the world I hadn't seen yet? Because I really just want to die? And then he looked at Dieste's book, the Testamento geometrico, hanging impassively from the line, held there by two clothespins, and he felt the urge to take it down and wipe off the ocher dust that had begun to cling to it here and there, but he didn't dare.
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In the mornings, when Amalfitano came into the kitchen and left his coffee cup in the sink after his obligatory visit to Dieste's book, Rosa was the first to leave. They didn't usually speak, although sometimes, if Amalfitano came in sooner than usual or put off going into the backyard, he would say goodbye, remind her to take care of herself, or give her a kiss. One morning he managed only to say goodbye, then he sat at the table looking out the window at the clothesline. The Testamento geometrico was moving imperceptibly. Suddenly, it stopped. The birds that had been singing in the neighboring yards were quiet. Everything was plunged into complete silence for an instant. Amalfitano thought he heard the sound of the gate and his daughter's footsteps receding. Then he heard a car start. That night, as Rosa watched a movie she'd rented, Amalfitano called Professor Perez and confessed that he was turning into a nervous wreck. Professor Perez soothed him, told him not to worry so much, all you had to do was be careful, there was no point giving in to paranoia. She reminded him that the victims were usually kidnapped in other parts of the city. Amalfitano listened to her talk and all of a sudden laughed. He told her his nerves were in tatters. Professor Perez didn't get the joke. Nobody gets anything here, thought Amalfitano angrily. Then Professor Perez tried to convince him to come out that weekend, with Rosa and Professor Perez's son. Where to, asked Amalfitano, almost inaudibly. We could go eat at a merendero ten miles out of the city, she said, a very nice place, with a pool for the kids and lots of outdoor tables in the shade with a view of the slopes of a quartz mountain, a silver mountain with black streaks. At the top of the mountain there was a chapel built of black adobe. The inside was dark, except for the light that came in through a kind of skylight, and the walls were covered in ex-votos written by travelers and Indians in the nineteenth century who had risked the pass between Chihuahua and Sonora.
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The voice said: I beg you to forgive me. I beg you to relax. I beg you not to consider this a violation of your freedom. Of my freedom? thought Amalfitano, surprised, as he sprang to the window and opened it and looked out at the side yard and the wall of the house next door, spiky with glass, and the reflection of the streetlights in the shards of broken bottles, very faint green and brown and orange gleams, as if at this time of night the wall stopped being a barricade and became or played at becoming ornamental, a tiny element in a choreography the basic features of which even the ostensible choreographer, the feudal L-rd next door, couldn't have identified, features that affected the stability, color, and offensive or defensive nature of his fortification. Or as if there was a vine growing on the wall, Amalfitano thought before he closed the window.

That night there were no further manifestations of the voice and Amalfitano slept very badly, his sleep plagued by jerks and starts, as if someone was scratching his arms and legs, his body drenched in sweat, although at five in the morning the torment ceased and Lola appeared in his sleep, waving to him from a park behind a tall fence (he was on the other side), along with the faces of two friends he hadn't seen for years (and would probably never see again), and a room full of philosophy books covered in dust but still magnificent. At that same moment the Santa Teresa police found the body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the neighborhoods on the edge of the city, and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano's shirts and pants and slipping into his daughter's underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geometrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind.
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At some point he fell asleep. By the time he woke up, they were there. Professor Perez's hand was on his face, a gesture that might have been a caress or not. Her hand was like a blind woman's hand. Rosa and Rafael were no longer in the car. He saw a parking lot, almost full, the sun glittering on the chrome-plated surfaces, an open terrace on a slightly higher level, a couple with their arms around each other's shoulders looking at something he couldn't see, the blinding sky full of small, low, white clouds, distant music and a voice that sang or muttered at great speed, so that it was impossible to understand the words. An inch away he saw Professor Perez's face. He took her hand and kissed it. His shirt was damp with sweat, but what surprised him most was that the professor was sweating too.

Despite everything, they had a pleasant day. Rosa and Rafael swam in the pool and then joined Amalfitano and Professor Perez, who were watching them from one of the tables. After that they all bought sodas and went out to walk around. In some places the mountain dropped straight down, and in the depths or on the cliff sides there were big gashes with different-colored rock showing through, or rock that looked different colors in the sun as it fled westward, lutites and andesites sandwiched between sandstone formations, vertical outcrops of tuff and great trays of basaltic rock. Here and there, a Sonora cactus dangled from the mountainside. And farther away there were more mountains and then tiny valleys and more mountains, finally giving way to an expanse veiled in haze, in mist, like a cloud cemetery, behind which were Chihuahua and New Mexico and Texas. Sitting on rocks and surveying this view, they ate in silence. Rosa and Rafael spoke only to exchange sandwiches. Professor Perez seemed lost in her own thoughts. And Amalfitano felt tired and overwhelmed by the landscape, a landscape that seemed best suited to the young or the old, imbecilic or insensitive or evil and old who meant to impose impossible tasks on themselves and others until they breathed their last.

That night Amalfitano was up until very late. The first thing he did when he got home was go out into the backyard to see whether Dieste's book was still there. On the ride home Professor Perez had tried to be nice and start a conversation in which all four of them could participate, but her son fell asleep as soon as they began the descent and soon afterward Rosa did, too, with her head against the window. It wasn't long before Amalfitano followed his daughter's example. He dreamed of a woman's voice, not Professor Perez's but a Frenchwoman's, talking to him about signs and numbers and something Amalfitano didn't understand, something the voice in the dream called "history broken down" or "history' taken apart and put back together," although clearly the reassembled history became something else, a scribble in the margin, a clever footnote, a laugh slow to fade that leaped from an andesite rock to a rhyolite and then a tufa, and from that collection of prehistoric rocks there arose a kind of quicksilver, the American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain. And then Amalfitano switched dreams and stopped hearing voices, which must have meant he was sleeping deeply, and he dreamed he was moving toward a woman, a woman who was only a pair of legs at the end of a dark hallway and then he heard someone laugh at his snoring, Professor Perez's son, and he thought: good. As they were driving into Santa Teresa on the westbound highway, crowded at that time of day with dilapidated trucks and small pickups on their way back from the city market or from cities in Arizona, he woke up. Not only had he slept with his mouth open, but he had drooled on the collar of his shirt. Good, he thought, excellent. When he looked in satisfaction at Professor Perez, he detected an air of sadness about her. Out of sight of their respective children, she lightly stroked Amalfitano's leg as he turned his head and looked at a taco stand where a couple of policemen with guns on their hips were drinking beer and talking and watching the red and black dusk, like a thick chili whose last simmer was fading in the west. When they got home it was dark but the shadow of Dieste's book hanging from the clothesline was clearer, steadier, more reasonable, thought Amalfitano, than anything they'd seen on the outskirts of Santa Teresa or in the city itself, images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments.
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There is no friendship, said the voice, there is no love, there is no epic, there is no lyric poetry that isn't the gurgle or chuckle of egoists, the murmur of cheats, the babble of traitors, the burble of social climbers, the warble of *beep* What is it you have against homosexuals? whispered Amalfitano. Nothing, said the voice. I'm speaking figuratively, said the voice. Are we in Santa Teresa? asked the voice. Is this city part of the state of Sonora? A pretty significant part of it, in fact? Yes, said Amalfitano. Well, there you go, said the voice. It's one thing to be a social climber, say, for example, said Amalfitano, tugging at his hair as if in slow motion, and something very different to be a *beep* I'm speaking figuratively, said the voice. I'm talking so you understand me. I'm talking like I'm in the studio of a ho-mo-sex-u-al painter, with you there behind me. I'm talking from a studio where the chaos is just a mask or the faint stink of anesthesia. I'm talking from a studio with the lights out, where the sinew of the will detaches itself from the rest of the body the way the snake tongue detaches itself from the body and slithers away, self-mutilated, amid the rubbish. I'm talking from the perspective of the simple things in life. You teach philosophy? said the voice. You teach Wittgenstein? said the voice. And have you asked yourself whether your hand is a hand? said the voice. I've asked myself, said Amalfitano. But now you have more important things to ask yourself, am I right? said the voice. No, said Amalfitano. For example, why not go to a nursery and buy seeds and plants and maybe even a little tree to plant in the middle of your backyard? said the voice. Yes, said Amalfitano. I've thought about my possible and conceivable yard and the plants and tools I need to buy. And you've also thought about your daughter, said the voice, and about the murders committed daily in this city, and about Baudelaire's *beep* (I'm sorry) clouds, but you haven't thought seriously about whether your hand is really a hand. That isn't true, said Amalfitano, I have thought about it, I have. If you had thought about it, said the voice, you'd be dancing to the tune of a different piper. And Amalfitano was silent and he felt that the silence was a kind of eugenics. He looked at his watch. It was four in the morning. He heard someone starting a car. The engine took a while to turn over. He got up and went over to the window. The cars parked in front of the house were empty. He looked behind him and then put his hand on the doorknob. The voice said: be careful, but it said it as if it were very far away, at the bottom of a ravine revealing glimpses of volcanic rock, rhyolites, andesites, streaks of silver and gold, petrified puddles covered with tiny little eggs, while red-tailed hawks soared above in the sky, which was purple like the skin of an Indian woman beaten to death. Amalfitano went out onto the porch. To the left, some thirty feet from his house, the lights of a black car came on and its engine started. When it passed the yard the driver leaned out and looked at Amalfitano without stopping. He was a fat man with very black hair, dressed in a cheap suit with no tie. When he was gone, Amalfitano came back into the house. I didn't like the looks of him, said the voice the minute Amalfitano was through the door. And then: you'll have to be careful, my friend, things here seem to be coming to a head.
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Then they recognized each other and relaxed and set off together toward the rectangle of light at the end of the hallway, which reminded Marco Antonio of the stories of people who'd been in comas or declared clinically dead and who claimed to have seen a dark tunnel with a white or dazzling brightness at the end, and sometimes these people even testified to the presence of loved ones who had passed away, who took their hands or soothed them or urged them to turn back because the hour or microfraction of a second in which the change took effect hadn't yet arrived. What do you think, Professor? Do people on the verge of death make this *beep* up, or is it real? Is it all just a dream, or is it within the realm of possibility? I don't know, said Amalfitano curtly, since he still hadn't gotten over his fright, and he wasn't in the mood for a repeat of their last meeting. Well, said Marco Antonio Guerra, if you want to know what I think, I don't believe it. People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath. I'm telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest thing there is to a rat.
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He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
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Right, said Fate, and he turned away and stared out the window at the clouds that looked like cathedrals or maybe just little toy churches abandoned in a labyrinthine marble quarry one hundred times bigger than the Grand Canyon.
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The first was that he didn't approve of the way poor people spent their money, especially poor African Americans. It makes my blood boil, he said, when I see a pimp cruising around the neighborhood in a limousine or a Lincoln Continental. I can't stand it. When poor people make money, they should behave with greater dignity, he said. When poor people make money, they should help their neighbors. When poor people make money, they should send their children to college and adopt an orphan, or more than one. When poor people make money, they should admit publicly to having made only half as much. They shouldn't even tell their children how much they really have, because then their children will want the whole inheritance and won't be willing to share it with their adopted siblings. When poor people make money, they should establish secret funds, not just to help the black people rotting in this country's prisons, but to start small businesses like laundries, bars, video stores, the profits to be fully reinvested in the community. Scholarships. Never mind if the scholarship students come to a bad end. Never mind if the scholarship students end up killing themselves because they listened to too much rap, or killing their white teacher and five classmates in a rage. The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new-found riches. We have to give it our all. We have to squeeze water from the rocks, and from the desert too. But we can never forget that money remains a problem to be solved, Seaman said.

FOOD. As you all know, said Seaman, pork chops saved my life. First I was a Panther and I faced down the police in California and then I traveled all over the world and then I lived for years on the tab of the U.S. government. When they let me out I was nobody. The Panthers no longer existed. In the minds of some, we were old terrorists. In the minds of others, we were a vague memory of sixties blackness, we were picturesque. Marius Newell had died in Santa Cruz. Some comrades had died in prison and others had made public apologies and started new lives. Now there weren't just black cops. There were black people in public office, black mayors, black businessmen, famous black lawyers, black TV and movie stars, and the Panthers were a hindrance. So when they let me out there was nothing left, or next to nothing, the smoldering remains of a nightmare we had plunged into as youths and that as grown men we were leaving behind now, practically old men, you could say, with no future ahead of us, because during the long years in prison we'd forgotten what we knew and we'd learned nothing, nothing but cruelty from the guards and sadism from our fellow inmates. That was my situation. So those first months out on parole were sad and gray.
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Sometimes I would sit at the window for hours watching the lights blink on a nameless street, just smoking. I won't lie to you, terrible thoughts crossed my mind more than once. Only one person helped me selflessly: my older sister, G-d rest her soul. She invited me to stay at her house in Detroit, which was small, but for me it was as if a princess in Europe had offered me her castle for a resting place. My days were all alike, but they had something that today, in hindsight, I don't hesitate to call happiness. Back then I saw only two people regularly: my sister, who was the world's most good-hearted human being, and my parole officer, a fat man who used to pour me a shot of whiskey in his office and he'd say: tell me, Barry, how could you be so bad? Sometimes I thought he said it to get me going. Sometimes I thought: this man is on the payroll of the California police and he wants to get me going and then he'll shoot me in the gut. Tell me about your b———, Barry, he would say, referring to my manly attributes, or: tell me about the guys you killed. Talk, Barry. Talk. And he would open his desk drawer, where I knew he kept his gun, and wait. And what could I do? Well, I would say, I didn't meet Chairman Mao, but I did meet Lin Piao, and later on he wanted to kill Chairman Mao and he was killed in a plane crash when he was trying to get away to Russia. A little man, wise as a serpent. Do you remember Lin Piao? And Lou would say he had never heard of Lin Piao in his life. Well, Lou, I would say, he was something like a Chinese cabinet member or like the Chinese secretary of state. And in those days we didn't have a whole lot of Americans in China, I can tell you. You could say we paved the way for Kissinger and Nixon. And Lou and I could go on like that for three hours, him asking me to tell him about the guys I'd shot in the back, and me talking about the politicians I'd met and the countries I'd seen. Until I was finally able to get rid of him, with a little Christian patience, and I've never seen him since. Lou probably died of cirrhosis. And my life went on, with the same uncertainties and the same feeling of impermanence. Then, one day I realized there was one thing I hadn't forgotten. I hadn't forgotten how to cook. I hadn't forgotten my pork chops. With the help of my sister, who was one of G-d's angels and who loved to talk about food, I started writing down all the recipes I remembered, my mother's recipes, the ones I'd made in prison, the ones I'd made on Saturdays at home on the roof for my sister, though she didn't care for meat. And when I'd finished the book I went to New York and took it to some publishers and one of them was interested and you all know the rest. The book put me back in the public eye. I learned to combine cooking with history. I learned to combine cooking with the thankfulness and confusion I felt at the kindness of so many people, from my late sister to countless others. And let me explain something. When I say confusion, I also mean awe. In other words, the sense of wonderment at a marvelous thing, like the lilies that bloom and die in a single day, or azaleas, or forget-me-nots. But I also realized this wasn't enough. I couldn't live forever on my recipes for ribs, my famous recipes. Ribs were not the answer. You have to change. You have to turn yourself around and change. You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for. So those of you who are interested can take out pencil and paper now, because I'm going to read you a new recipe. It's for duck a l'orange. This is not something you want to eat every day, because it isn't cheap and it will take you an hour and a half, maybe more, to make, but every two months or when a birthday comes around, it isn't bad. These are the ingredients, for four: a four-pound duck, two tablespoons of butter, four cloves of garlic, two cups of broth, a few sprigs of herbs, a tablespoon of tomato paste, four oranges, four tablespoons of sugar, three tablespoons of brandy, black pepper, oil, and salt. Then Seaman explained the preparation, step by step, and when he had finished explaining he said that duck made a fine meal, and that was all.
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Useless things are forced upon us, and it isn't because they improve our quality of life but because they're the fashion or markers of class, and fashionable people and high-class people require admiration and worship. Naturally, fashions don't last, one year, four at most, and then they pass through every stage of decay. But markers of class rot only when the corpse that was tagged with them rots. Then he began to talk about useful things the body needs. First, a balanced diet. I see lots of fat people in this church, he said. I suspect few of you eat green vegetables. Maybe now is the time for a recipe. The name of the recipe is: Brussels Sprouts with Lemon. Take note, please. Four servings calls for: two pounds of brussels sprouts, juice and zest of one lemon, one onion, one sprig of parsley, three tablespoons of butter, black pepper, and salt. You make it like so. One: Clean sprouts well and remove outer leaves. Finely chop onion and parsley. Two: In a pot of salted boiling water, cook sprouts for twenty minutes, or until tender. Then drain well and set aside. Three: Melt butter in frying pan and lightly saute onion, add zest and juice of lemon and salt and pepper to taste. Four: Add brussels sprouts, toss with sauce, reheat for a few minutes, sprinkle with parsley, and serve with lemon wedges on the side. So good you'll be licking your fingers, said Seaman. No cholesterol, good for the liver, good for the blood pressure, very healthy. Then he dictated recipes for Endive and Shrimp Salad and Broccoli Salad and then he said that man couldn't live on healthy food alone. You have to read books, he said. Not watch so much TV. The experts say TV doesn't hurt the eyes. I'm not so sure. It won't do your eyes any good, and cell phones are still a mystery. Maybe they cause cancer, as some scientists say. I'm not saying they do or they don't, but there you have it. What I'm saying is, you have to read books. The preacher knows I'm telling you the truth. Read books by black writers. But don't stop there. This is my real contribution tonight. Reading is never a waste of time. I read in jail. That's where I started to read. I read a lot. I went through books like they were barbecue. In prison they turn the lights out early. You get in bed and hear sounds. Footsteps. People yelling. As if instead of being in California, the prison was inside the planet Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. You feel cold and hot at the same time and that's a clear sign you're lonely or sick. You try to think about other things, sure, nice things, but sometimes you just can't do it. Sometimes a guard at the nearest desk turns on a lamp and light from that lamp shines through the bars of your cell. This happened to me any number of times. The light from a lamp set in the wrong place, or from the fluorescent bulbs in the corridor above or the next corridor over. Then I would pick up my book and hold it in the light and get to reading. It wasn't easy, because the letters and the paragraphs seemed frenzied or spooked in that unpredictable, underground world. But I read and read anyway, sometimes so fast that even I was surprised, and sometimes very slowly, as if each sentence or word were something good for my whole body, not just my brain. And I could read like that for hours, not caring whether I was tired and not dwelling on the inarguable fact that I was in prison because I had stood up for my brothers, most of whom couldn't care less whether I rotted or not. I knew I was doing something useful. That was all that counted. I was doing something useful as the guards marched back and forth or greeted each other at the change of shift with friendly words that sounded like obscenities to my ear and that, thinking about it now, might actually have been obscene. I was doing something useful. Something useful no matter how you look at it.
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Then the road sloped down into a kind of valley that at first glimpse struck him as gigantic. In the farthest corner of the valley he thought he saw a glow. But it could have been anything. A convoy of trucks moving very slowly, the first lights of a town. Or maybe just his desire to escape the darkness, which in some way reminded him of his childhood and adolescence. At some point in between childhood and adolescence, he thought, he had dreamed of this landscape or one like it, less dark, less desertlike. He was in a bus with his mother and one of his mother's sisters and they were taking a short trip, from New York to a town near New York. He was next to the window and the view never changed, just buildings and highways, until suddenly they were in the country. At that exact moment, or maybe earlier, the sun had begun to set and he watched the trees, a small wood, though in his eyes it looked bigger. And then he thought he saw a man walking along the edge of the little wood. In great strides, as if he didn't want night to overtake him. He wondered who the man was. The only way he could tell it was a man and not a shadow was because he wore a shirt and swung his arms as he walked. The man's loneliness was so great, Fate remembered, that he wanted to look away and cling to his mother, but instead he kept his eyes open until the bus was out of the woods, and buildings, factories, and warehouses once again lined the sides of the road.
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Fate kept the appointment. Three members of the Brotherhood and a black van were waiting for him. They drove to a basement near Baychester. The fat guy with the shaved head was waiting for them there. He said to call him Khalil. The others didn't give their names. Khalil talked about the Holy War. Explain what the hell you mean by Holy War, said Fate. The Holy War speaks for us when our mouths are parched, said Khalil. The Holy War is the language of the mute, of those who've lost the power of speech, of those who never knew how to speak. Why do you march against Israel? asked Fate. The Jew is keeping us down, said Khalil. You won't see a Jew in the Klan, said Fate. That's what the Jews want us to think. In fact, the Klan is everywhere. In Tel Aviv, in London, in Washington. Many leaders of the Klan are Jews, said Khalil. It's always been that way. Hollywood is full of Klan leaders. Who? asked Fate. Khalil warned him that what he was about to say was off the record. "The Jew tycoons have good Jew lawyers," he said. Who? asked Fate. Khalil named three movie directors and two actors. Then Fate had an inspiration. He asked: is Woody Allen a member of the Klan? He is, said Khalil, look at his movies, have you ever seen a black man in them? Not many, said Fate. Not one, said Khalil. Why were you carrying a poster of bin Laden? asked Fate. Because Osama bin Laden was the first to understand the nature of the fight we face today. Then they talked about bin Laden's innocence and Pearl Harbor and about how convenient the attack on the Twin Towers had been for some people. Stockbrokers, said Khalil, people with incriminating papers hidden in their offices, people who sell arms and needed something like that to happen. According to you, said Fate, Mohamed Atta was an undercover agent for the CIA or the FBI. What happened to Mohamed Atta's body? Khalil asked. Who can be sure Mohamed Atta was on one of those planes? I'll tell you what I think. I think Atta is dead. He died under torture, or he was shot in the back of the head. Then I think they chopped him into little pieces and ground his bones down until they looked like chicken bones. After that they put the little bones and cutlets in a box, filled it with cement, and dropped it in some Florida swamp. And they did the same thing to the men he was with.

So who flew the planes? asked Fate. Klan lunatics, nameless inmates from mental hospitals in the Midwest, volunteers brainwashed to face suicide. Thousands of people disappear in this country every year and nobody tries to find them. Then they talked about the Romans and the Roman circus and the first Christians who were eaten by lions. But the lions will choke on our black flesh, he said.
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His editor told him to forget writing a story about the Brotherhood.

"Those guys, how many of them are there?" he asked.

"Twenty, more or less," said Fate.

"Twenty *beep* said his editor. "At least five of them must be FBI."

"Maybe more," said Fate.

"What makes them interesting to us?" asked his editor.

"Stupidity," said Fate. "The endless variety of ways we destroy ourselves."
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"I have to go visit him in prison," she said. "The chief suspect—your countryman—has been in prison for years."

"So how can he be the chief suspect?" asked Fate. "I thought the crimes were still being committed."

"Mysteries of Mexico," said Guadalupe Roncal.
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Fate walked along the hallway, counting doors. When he got to the third door he heard a noise from the floor above. He paused. The noise stopped. The bathroom was big and looked like something straight out of a design magazine. The walls and floor were white marble. At least four people could fit into the bathtub, which was circular. Next to the bathtub was a big oak box in the shape of a coffin. A coffin from which the head would protrude, and that Fate would have said was a sauna, if the box weren't so narrow. The toilet was black marble. Next to it was a bidet and next to the bidet was a marble protuberance a foot and a half high whose purpose Fate was unable to discern. By a stretch of the imagination, you might say it looked like a chair or a saddle. But he couldn't imagine anyone sitting there, not in a normal position. Maybe it was used to hold towels for the bidet. As he urinated, he gazed at the wooden box and the marble sculpture. For an instant he thought both things were alive. Behind him was a mirror that covered the whole wall and made the bathroom seem bigger than it was. Looking to the left, Fate saw the wooden coffin, and turning his head to the right, he saw the protuberant marble fixture. At one point he looked behind him and saw his own back, standing in front of the toilet, flanked by the coffin and the useless-seeming saddle. The sense of unreality that dogged him that night was heightened.
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Chucho Flores managed to point to a corner of the room that Fate hadn't seen. I've lived this scene before, thought Fate. Rosa was sitting in an armchair, with her legs crossed, snorting cocaine. "Let's go," he said.

He didn't order her or plead with her. He just asked her to come with him, but he put all his soul into the words. Rosa smiled at him sympathetically, but she didn't seem to understand. He heard Chucho Flores say in English: get out of here, amigo, wait for us downstairs. Fate held out his hand to the girl. Rosa got up and took it. Her hand felt warm, its temperature evoking other scenarios but also evoking or encompassing their current sordid circumstances. When he took it he became conscious of the coldness of his own hand. I've been dying all this time, he thought. I'm as cold as ice. If she hadn't taken my hand I would've died right here and they would've had to send my body back to New York.
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When Chucho Flores was about to come, she could tell by the pressure of his hand on her head, forcing her down. Rosa would stop moving her tongue and be still, as if having his whole penis in her mouth had choked her, until she felt the spurt of semen in her throat, and even then she didn't move, although she could hear her lover's moans and his exclamations, often bizarre, because he liked to say crude things and swear as he came, not at her but at unspecified people, ghosts who appeared for just a moment and were as quickly lost in the night.
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"Still, the drunk (by the way, why do you call him a little old drunk and not just a drunk?) was laughing, maybe because he knew he wasn't in jail."

For a few seconds, remembered Rosa, Charly Cruz's gaze altered, as if he were trying to see where her father was going with all this. Charly Cruz, as we've already said, was a relaxed man, and for those few seconds, although his poise and natural calm were unshaken, something did happen behind his face, as if the lens through which he was observing her father, Rosa remembered, had stopped working and he was proceeding, calmly, to change it, an operation that took less than a fraction of a second, but during which his gaze was necessarily left naked or empty, vacant, in any case, since one lens was being removed and another inserted, and both operations couldn't be carried out simultaneously, and for that fraction of a second, which Rosa remembered as if she had invented it herself, Charly Cruz's face was empty or it emptied, and the speed at which this happened was startling, say the speed of light, to put it in exaggerated but nevertheless roughly accurate terms, and the emptying of the face was complete, hair and teeth included, although to say hair and teeth in the presence of that blankness was like saying nothing, all of Charly Cruz's features emptied, his wrinkles, his veins, his pores, everything left defenseless, everything acquiring a dimension to which the only response, remembered Rosa, could be vertigo and nausea, although it wasn't.

"The little old drunk is laughing because he thinks he's free, but he's really in prison," said Oscar Amalfitano, "that's what makes it funny, but in fact the prison is drawn on the other side of the disk, which means one could also say that the little old drunk is laughing because we think he's in prison, not realizing that the prison is on one side and the little old drunk is on the other, and that's reality, no matter how much we spin the disk and it looks to us as if the little old drunk is behind bars. In fact, we could even guess what the little old drunk is laughing about: he's laughing at our credulity, you might even say at our eyes."
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The clerk shrugged and said that all of Mexico was a collage of diverse and wide-ranging homages.

"Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even the things that haven't happened yet," he said.
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You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman's fears. It was something like that, remembered Fate, that his mother or her neighbor, the deceased Miss Holly, used to say when both of them were young and he was a boy. For an instant he imagined a set of scales, like the scales of Blind Justice, except that instead of two platters, there were two bottles, or something like two bottles. The bottle on the left was clear and full of desert sand. There were several holes in it through which the sand escaped. The bottle on the right was full of acid. There were no holes in it, but the acid was eating away at the bottle from the inside. On the way to Tucson, Fate didn't recognize any of the things he'd seen a few days before, when he'd traveled the same road in the opposite direction. What used to be my right is my left, and there are no points of reference. Everything is erased. Toward noon they stopped at a diner on the highway. A group of Mexicans who looked like jobless migrant workers watched them from the counter. They were drinking bottled water and local sodas, the names and logos odd to Fate. New businesses that would soon fail. The food was bad. Rosa was sleepy and when they got back to the car she fell asleep. Fate remembered the words of Guadalupe Roncal. No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.
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Did Guadalupe Roncal say that, or was it Rosa? At moments, the highway was like a river. The suspected killer said it, thought Fate. The giant *beep* albino who appeared along with the black cloud.
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This happened in 1993. January 1993. From then on, the killings of women began to be counted. But it's likely there had been other deaths before. The name of the first victim was Esperanza Gomez Saldana and she was thirteen. Maybe for the sake of convenience, maybe because she was the first to be killed in 1993, she heads the list. Although surely there were other girls and women who died in 1992. Other girls and women who didn't make it onto the list or were never found, who were buried in unmarked graves in the desert or whose ashes were scattered in the middle of the night, when not even the person scattering them knew where he was, what place he had come to.
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That night Epifanio dreamed about the female coyote left by the side of the road. In the dream he was sitting a few yards away, on a chunk of basalt, staring alertly into the dark and listening to the whimpering of the coyote, whose insides were torn up. She probably already knows she lost her pup, thought Epifanio, but instead of getting up and putting a bullet in her brain he sat there and did nothing. Then he saw himself driving Pedro Negrete's car along a long track that came to an end on the slopes of a mountain bristling with sharp rocks. There were no passengers in the car. He couldn't tell whether he had stolen the car or the chief had loaned it to him. The track was straight and he could easily get up to ninety miles an hour, although whenever he hit the accelerator he heard a strange noise from under the chassis, like something jumping. Behind him rose a giant plume of dust, like the tail of a hallucinogenic coyote. But the mountains still looked just as far away, so Epifanio braked and got out to inspect the car. At first glance everything looked all right. The suspension, the engine, the battery, the axles. Suddenly, with the car stopped, he heard the knocks again and turned around. He opened the trunk. There was a body inside. Its hands and feet were tied. A black cloth was wrapped around its head. What the *beep* is this? shouted Epifanio in the dream. When he had checked that the body was still alive (its chest was rising and falling, though perhaps too violently), he closed the trunk without daring to remove the black cloth and see who it was. He got back in the car, which leaped forward at the first thrust. On the horizon the mountains seemed to be burning or crumbling, but he kept driving toward them.
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Before the end of the year, however, another lamentable event occurred that had nothing to do with the killings of women, assuming the killings were related to one another, which had yet to be proved.
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Around this time, too, a seer appeared on Sonora TV. Her name was Florita Almada, but her followers, whose numbers were small, called her La Santa. Florita Almada was seventy and it was only recently, ten years before, that she had been granted the gift of sight. She saw things no one else saw. She heard things no one else heard. And she knew how to find a meaningful explanation for everything that happened to her. Before she became a seer she had been an herbalist, which was her true calling, or so she said, because seer meant someone who sees, and sometimes she didn't see anything, the picture was fuzzy, the sound faulty, as if the antenna that had sprung up in her brain wasn't installed right or had been shot full of holes or was made of aluminum foil and blew every which way in the wind. So even though she called herself a seer or let her followers call her one, she put more faith in herbs and flowers, in healthy eating and prayer. She recommended that people with high blood pressure give up eggs and cheese and white bread, for example, because those were foods high in sodium, and sodium attracts water and causes extra fluid to build up in the body, which raises blood pressure. Plain as day, said Florita Almada. No matter how much you like to eat huevos rancheros or huevos a la mexicana for breakfast, if you have high blood pressure you'd better give up eggs. And if you've given up eggs, you might as well give up meat and fish, too, and eat nothing but rice and fruit. Rice and fruit are very good for you, especially when you're over forty. She also denounced the excessive consumption of fat. Your total intake of fat, she said, should never be more than twenty-five percent of the total energy quotient of the food you eat. Ideally, the consumption of fat should settle at between fifteen and twenty percent. But the employed sometimes consume up to eighty or ninety percent of fat, and if their employment is stable, consumption rises to one hundred percent, which is disgraceful, she said. In contrast, consumption of fat by the unemployed is between thirty and fifty percent, which is an affliction, too, because those poor people aren't just undernourished, they're also malnourished, if you follow me, said Florita Almada, and really, being undernourished is an affliction in itself, and being malnourished doesn't help, maybe I haven't made myself clear, what I'm trying to say is that a tortilla with chile is better for you than pork rinds that are actually dog or cat or rat, she said, sounding apologetic. Then, too, she was against cults and healers and all those despicable people who tried to swindle the poor. She thought botanomancy, or the art of predicting the future through plants, was trickery. Still, she knew how it worked, and once she explained to a third-rate healer the different branches of the divinatory art of botanomancy, namely: floromancy, or the study of the shapes, movements, and reactions of plants, subdivided in turn into cromniomancy and fructomancy, the reading of sprouting onions or fruits, and also dendromancy, the interpretation of trees, and phyllomancy, the study of leaves, and xylomancy, or divination using wood and tree branches, which, she said, is lovely, poetic, but has more to do with laying the past to rest and nurturing and pacifying the present than with predicting the future. Then came cleromantic botanomancy, subdivided into favomancy, practiced with several white beans and a black bean, as well as the disciplines of rhabdomancy and belomancy, in which wooden rods were used. She had nothing against any of these arts and hence nothing to say about them. Then came plant pharmacology, or the use of hallucinogenic and alkaloid plants, which she had nothing against either. Everyone was free to mess with their own heads. It worked well for some people and not for others, especially lazy youths with regrettable habits. She'd rather not rule in favor or against. Then came meteorological botanomancy, which really was interesting but which very few people had mastered, no more than could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and which was based on observation of the reactions of plants. For example: if the poppy lifts its petals, the weather will be fine. For example: if a poplar begins to quiver, something unexpected will happen. For example: if the little flower with white petals and a tiny yellow corolla, called the pijuli, bows its head, it will be hot. For example: if another flower, the kind with yellowish and sometimes pink petals, called camphor in Sonora—why I don't know—and crow's beak in Sinaloa because from a distance it looks like a hummingbird, well, if the little rascal shuts, then rain is coming. And finally we have radiesthesia, a practice that originally required a hazel rod, now replaced by a pendulum, and about which Florita Almada had nothing to say. When you know something, you know it, and when you don't, you'd better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process. Her own life, as she explained, had been a constant apprenticeship. She didn't learn to read or write until she was twenty, more or less. She was born in Nacori Grande and she couldn't go to school like a normal child because her mother was blind and the task of caring for her fell to Florita. About her brothers and sisters, of whom she preserved fond, vague recollections, she knew nothing. The gale forces of life had scattered them to the four corners of Mexico and they might be in their graves by now. Her childhood, despite the hardships and misfortunes typical of a peasant family, was happy. I loved the country, she said, although now it bothers me a little because I've stopped being used to the bugs. Life in Nacori Grande, believe it or not, could sometimes be very involving. Taking care of her blind mother could be fun. Tending the chickens could be fun. Washing the clothes could be fun. Cooking could be fun. The only thing she regretted was not having gone to school. Then they moved, for reasons not worth discussing, to Villa Pesqueira, where her mother died and where she, eight months later, married a man she barely knew, a hardworking and honorable man, who treated everyone with respect, someone quite a bit older than she was, incidentally, thirty-eight to her seventeen the day they stood before the altar, in other words twenty-one years her senior, a livestock dealer who mostly bought and sold goats and sheep, although every once in a while he also dealt in cattle or even pigs, and who was obliged by the circumstances of his work to travel constantly in the area, to towns like San Jose de Batuc, San Pedro de la Cueva, Huepari, Tepache, Lampazos, Divisaderos, Nacori Chico, El Chorro, and Napopa, along dirt roads or animal tracks and on shortcuts that skirted the mazelike mountains. Business wasn't bad. Sometimes she went with him on his trips, not often, because it was considered unseemly for a dealer to travel with a woman, especially his own wife, but she did go occasionally. It was a unique opportunity to see the world. To get a glimpse of other landscapes, which, though they might seem familiar, when you looked carefully were very different from the landscapes of Villa Pesqueira. Every hundred feet the world changes, said Florita Almada. The idea that some places are the same as others is a lie. The world is a kind of tremor. Of course, she would have liked to have children, but nature (nature in general or her husband's nature, she said, laughing) denied her that responsibility. The time she would have devoted to a baby she used to study. Who taught her to read? Children taught me, said Florita Almada, there are no better teachers. Children with their alphabet books, who came to her house for toasted cornmeal. Such is life that just when she thought her chances of taking classes or going back to school (unlikely, since in Villa Pesqueira they thought Night School was the name of a brothel outside San Jose de Pimas) had vanished forever, she learned almost effortlessly to read and write. From that moment on she read everything that fell into her hands. In a notebook, she jotted down thoughts and impressions inspired by her reading. She read old magazines and newspapers, she read political flyers distributed every so often from pickups by young men with mustaches, she read the daily papers, she read the few books she could find and the books her husband got into the habit of bringing back each time he returned from his buying and selling trips to neighboring towns, books he purchased sometimes by the pound. Ten pounds of books. Fifteen pounds of books. Once he came back with twenty-five pounds. And she read every single one, and from each, without exception, she drew some lesson. Sometimes she read magazines from Mexico City, sometimes she read history books, sometimes she read religious books, sometimes she read dirty books that made her blush, sitting alone at the table, the pages lit by an oil lamp's light that seemed to dance and assume demonic shapes, sometimes she read technical books about the cultivation of vineyards or the construction of prefabricated houses, sometimes she read horror stories or ghost stories, any kind of reading that providence placed within her reach, and she learned something each time, sometimes very little, but something was left behind, like a gold nugget in a trash heap, or, to refine the metaphor, said Florita, like a doll lost and found in a heap of somebody else's trash. Anyway, she wasn't an educated person, at least she didn't have what you might call a classical education, for which she apologized, but she wasn't ashamed of being what she was, because what G-d takes away the Virgin restores, and when that's the way it is, it's impossible not to be at peace with the world. And so the years went by. One day, by the miraculous laws of symmetry, her husband went blind. Luckily she was already experienced in the care of the sightless and the livestock dealer's last years were peaceful, because his wife looked after him with skill and tenderness. Then she was alone and by that time she had turned forty-four. She didn't marry again, not for lack of suitors but because she found she liked being alone. What she did was buy herself a .38 revolver, because the shotgun her husband had left her seemed unwieldy, and, for the moment, she took over the business of buying and selling livestock. But the problem, she explained, was that to buy and especially to sell livestock a certain sensibility was required, a certain training, a certain propensity to blindness that she in no way possessed. Traveling with the animals along the mountain trails was lovely; auctioning them at the market or the slaughterhouse was a nightmare. So she soon abandoned the business and kept traveling, with her late husband's dog and her revolver and sometimes her animals, which began to age with her, but this time she went as a healer, one of the many in the blessed state of Sonora, and on her travels she foraged for herbs or recorded her thoughts while the animals grazed, as Benito Juarez had done when he was a shepherd boy, oh, Benito Juarez, what a great man, so honorable, so wise, and what a charming boy, too, little was said about that period of his life, in part because little was known, in part because Mexicans were aware that when they talked about children they tended to speak nonsense. Mind you, she had something to say on the subject. Of the thousands of books she had read, among them books on the history of Mexico, the history of Spain, the history of Colombia, the history of religion, the history of the popes of Rome, the advances of NASA, she had come across only a few pages that depicted with complete faithfulness, utter faithfulness, what the boy Benito Juarez must have felt, more than thought, when he went out to pasture with his flock and was sometimes gone for several days and nights, as is the way of these things. Inside that book with a yellow cover everything was expressed so clearly that sometimes Florita Almada thought the author must have been a friend of Benito Juarez and that Benito Juarez had confided all his childhood experiences in the man's ear. If such a thing were possible. If it were possible to convey what one feels when night falls and the stars come out and one is alone in the vastness, and life's truths (night truths) begin to march past one by one, somehow swooning or as if the person out in the open were swooning or as if a strange sickness were circulating in the blood unnoticed. What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? asks the little shepherd in the poem. What are you doing, tell me, silent moon? Aren't you tired of plying the eternal byways? The shepherd's life is like your life. He rises at first light and moves his flock across the field. Then, weary, he rests at evening and hopes for nothing more. What good is the shepherd's life to him or yours to you? Tell me, the shepherd muses, said Florita Almada in a transported voice, where is it heading, my brief wandering, your immortal journey? Man is born into pain, and being born itself means risking death, said the poem. And also: But why bring to light, why educate someone we'll console for living later? And also: If life is misery, why do we endure it? And also: This, unblemished moon, is the mortal condition. But you're not mortal, and what I say may matter little to you. And also, and on the contrary: You, eternal solitary wanderer, you who are so pensive, it may be you understand this life on earth, what our suffering and sighing is, what this death is, this last paling of the face, and leaving Earth behind, abandoning all familiar, loving company. And also: What does the endless air do, and that deep eternal blue? What does this enormous solitude portend? And what am I? And also: This is what I know and feel: that from the eternal motions, from my fragile being, others may derive some good or happiness. And also: But life for me is wrong. And also: Old, white haired, weak, barefoot, bearing an enormous burden, up mountain and down valley, over sharp rocks, across deep sands and bracken, through wind and storm, when it's hot and later when it freezes, running on, running faster, crossing rivers, swamps, falling and rising and hurrying faster, no rest or relief, battered and bloody, at last coming to where the way and all effort has led: terrible, immense abyss into which, upon falling, all is forgotten. And also: This, O virgin moon, is human life. And also: O resting flock, who don't, I think, know your own misery! How I envy you! Not just because you travel as if trouble free and soon forget each need, each hurt, each deathly fear, but more because you're never bored. And also: When you lie in the shade, on the grass, you're calm and happy, and you spend the great part of the year this way and feel no boredom. And also: I sit on the grass, too, in the shade, but an anxiousness invades my mind as if a thorn is pricking me. And also: Yet I desire nothing, and till now I have no reason for complaint. And at this point, after sighing deeply, Florita Almada would say that several conclusions could be drawn: (1) that the thoughts that seize a shepherd can easily gallop away with him because it's human nature; (2) that facing boredom head-on was an act of bravery and Benito Juarez had done it and she had done it too and both had seen terrible things in the face of boredom, things she would rather not recall; (3) that the poem, now she remembered, was about an Asian shepherd, not a Mexican shepherd, but it made no difference, since shepherds are the same everywhere; (4) that if it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion. And that was what she did, listen and talk, until the day Reinaldo stopped by to consult her about a lost love and left with a diet plan and some calming herbal infusions and other aromatic herbs that he tucked in the corners of his apartment, herbs that made it smell like a church and a spaceship at the same time, as Reinaldo told his friends when they came to visit, a glorious smell, a smell that soothes and gladdens the spirit, it even makes you want to listen to classical music, don't you think?

And Reinaldo's friends began to insist that he introduce them to Florita, ay, Reinaldo, I need Florita Almada, one after the other, like a procession of penitents with their purple or fabulous vermillion or checkered hoods, and Reinaldo weighed the pros and cons, all right, boys, you win, I'm going to introduce you to Florita, and when Florita met them, one Saturday night, at Reinaldo's apartment, so thoroughly decked out for the occasion that there was even a lonely pinata on the terrace, she didn't turn up her nose or look displeased but instead said why, you've gone to so much trouble for me, these amazing treats, who made them, I want to compliment the cook, this delicious cake, I never had anything like it in my life, it's pineapple, no? the fresh-squeezed juices, the perfectly laid table, what charming young men, so thoughtful, look, you brought me presents, and it's not even my birthday, and then she went into Reinaldo's bedroom and the boys trooped in one by one to tell her their woes, and those who went in bowed with care came out full of hope, that woman, Reinaldo, where did you find her? she's a saint, she's a miracle worker, I wept and she wept with me, I couldn't find the words and she guessed what was wrong, she told me to try sulphured glycosides, because they're supposed to stimulate the renal epithelium and they're a diuretic, I was told to try a course of colon hydrotherapy, I saw her sweat blood, I saw her forehead studded with rubies, she rocked me on her breast and sang me a lullaby and when I woke up it was like I'd just gotten out of the sauna, La Santa understands Hermosillo's unfortunates better than anyone, La Santa has a feeling for those who've been hurt, for sensitive and abused children, for those who've been raped and humiliated, for those who are the butt of jokes and laughter, everyone gets a kind word, a bit of practical advice, the freaks feel like divas when she speaks to them, the scatterbrained feel sensible, the fat lose weight, the AIDS patients smile. So it wasn't many years before Florita Almada, beloved of all, made her TV debut. But the first time Reinaldo asked her, she said no, she wasn't interested, she didn't have time, if worse came to worst someone might think to ask her how she made her money, and she wasn't about to pay taxes, absolutely not! better to leave it for another day, she was no one. Rut months later, when Reinaldo had stopped insisting, it was she who called and told him she wanted to come on the show because she had a message she'd like to make public. Reinaldo wanted to know what kind of message and she said something about visions, the moon, pictures in the sand, the reading she did at home, in the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table when her visitors had gone, the newspaper, the newspapers, the things she read, the shadows that watched her through the window, though they weren't shadows, which meant they weren't watching, it was the night, the night that sometimes seemed pixilated. She was going on in such a way that Reinaldo had no idea what she meant, but since he really did love her, he found a spot for her on his next show. The television studios were in Hermosillo and sometimes the signal was strong in Santa Teresa, but other times the broadcast was interrupted by ghostly images and fog and background noise. The first time Florita Almada was on, the reception in Santa Teresa was terrible, and almost no one in the city saw her, although An Hour with Reinaldo was one of Sonora's most popular shows. She was scheduled to speak after a ventriloquist from Guaymas, an autodidact who had made a name for himself in Mexico City, Acapulco, Tijuana, and San Diego, and who thought his dummy was a living creature. He came right out and said so. He's alive, the little bastard. There’ve been times he tried to escape, times he tried to kill me. But his little hands aren't strong enough to hold a gun or a knife, let alone strangle me. When Reinaldo, looking straight into the camera and smiling his trademark wicked smile, said that in films about ventriloquists the same thing always happened, in other words, the dummy rebelled against its master, the ventriloquist from Guaymas, in the broken voice of the infinitely misunderstood, answered that he was well aware of it, he had seen those films, and probably many more of them than Reinaldo or anyone in the live audience had seen, and all he could think was that the reason there were so many films was that the rebellion was much more widespread than he had first believed, so that by now it extended all over the world. Deep inside, all of us ventriloquists, one way or another, know that once the bastards reach a certain level of animation, they come to life. They suck life from the performances. They suck it from the ventriloquist's capillaries. They suck it from the applause. And especially from the gullibility of the audience! Isn't that right, Andresito? Yes, sir. And are you good or are you sometimes an evil little bastard, Andresito? Good, very good, very very good. And you've never tried to kill me, Andresito? Never, never, never! It so happened that Florita Almada was impressed by the wooden dummy's profession of innocence and the story of the ventriloquist, to whom she took an immediate liking, and when it was her turn the first thing she did was offer the man a few words of encouragement, despite surreptitious hints from Reinaldo, who smiled and winked at her as if to say the ventriloquist wasn't quite right in the head and she should ignore him. But Florita didn't ignore him, she asked about his health, asked how many hours a night he slept, how many meals a day he ate and where, and although the ventriloquist's replies were mostly ironic, addressed to the audience in a bid for applause or fleeting sympathy, La Santa got more than enough information to recommend (quite vehemently, too) that he visit an acupuncturist with some knowledge of craniopuncture, an excellent technique for treating neuropathies originating in the central nervous system. Then she glanced at Reinaldo, who was fidgeting in his chair, and began to talk about her latest vision. She said she had seen dead women and dead girls. A desert. An oasis. Like in films about the French Foreign Legion and the Arabs. A city. She said that in this city they killed little girls. As she talked, trying to recall her vision as exactly as possible, she realized she was about to go into a trance and she was mortified, since sometimes, not often, her trances could be violent and end with the medium crawling on the ground, which she didn't want to happen since it was her first time on television. But the trance, the possession, was progressing, she felt it in her chest and in the blood coursing through her, and there was no way to stop it no matter how much she fought and sweated and smiled at Reinaldo, who asked her if she felt all right, Florita, if she wanted the assistants to bring her a glass of water, if the glare and the spotlights and the heat were bothering her. She was afraid to speak, because sometimes the first thing to be seized was her tongue. And even though she wanted to, because it would have been a great relief, she was afraid to close her eyes, since it was precisely when they were closed that she saw what the spirit possessing her saw, so Florita kept her eyes open and her mouth shut (though curved in a pleasant and enigmatic smile), watching the ventriloquist, who looked back and forth between her and his dummy, as if he had no idea what was going on but he could smell danger, the moment of revelation, unsolicited and afterward uncomprehended, the kind of revelation that flashes past and leaves us with only the certainty of a void, a void that very quickly escapes even the word that contains it. And the ventriloquist knew this was dangerous. Dangerous especially for people like him, hypersensitive, of artistic temperament, their wounds still open. And Florita glanced at Reinaldo too when she got tired of looking at the ventriloquist, and he said to her: don't be afraid, Florita, don't be shy, think of this show as your home away from home. And she also glanced, though less often, at the audience, where several friends of hers were seated, waiting to hear what she had to say. Poor things, she thought, they must be feeling so sorry for me. And then she couldn't help it and she went into a trance. She closed her eyes. She opened her mouth. Her tongue began to work. She repeated what she had already said: a big desert, a big city, in the north of the state, girls killed, women killed. What city is it? she asked herself. Come now, what city is it? I must know the name of this infernal city. She concentrated for a few seconds. It's on the tip of my tongue. I don't censor myself, ladies, especially not at times like this. It's Santa Teresa! It's Santa Teresa! I see it clearly now. Women are being killed there. They're killing my daughters. My daughters! My daughters! she screamed as she threw an imaginary shawl over her head and Reinaldo felt a shiver descend his spine like an elevator, or maybe rise, or both at once. The police do nothing, she said after a few seconds, in a different voice, deeper and more masculine, the *beep* police do nothing, they just watch, but what are they watching? what are they watching? At this point Reinaldo tried to call her to order and get her to stop talking, but he couldn't. Away from me, you bootlicker, said Florita. The state governor must be informed, she said in a hoarse voice. This is no joke. Jose Andres Briceno must hear about this, he must know what's being done to the women and girls of beautiful Santa Teresa. Beautiful and hardworking too. The silence must be broken, friends. Jose Andres Briceno is a good man and a wise man and he won't let so many killers go unpunished. Such terrible apathy and such terrible darkness. Then, in a little girl's voice, she said: some are driven away in black cars, but they kill them anywhere. Then she said, in a normal voice: can't they at least leave the virgins in peace? A moment later, she leaped from her chair, perfectly captured by the cameras of Sonora TV's Studio 1, and dropped to the floor as if felled by a bullet. Reinaldo and the ventriloquist hurried to her aid, but when they tried to help her up, each taking an arm, Florita roared (never in his life had Reinaldo seen her like this, a real fury): don't touch me, you cold-hearted wretches! Don't worry about me! Haven't you understood what I've said? Then she got up, turned toward the audience, went to Reinaldo and asked him what had happened, and a moment later she apologized, gazing straight into the camera.
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I'm friends with a crazy bastard everybody calls El Tequila, and one of the Bisontes is El Tequila's brother. But that's all. There's nothing else, I swear, said the voice with the foreign accent. Tell it to your lawyer, said Sergio, I don't write about the killings in Santa Teresa anymore. At the other end of the line Haas laughed. That's what everybody says. Tell this person, tell that person. My lawyer already knows, he said. I can't do anything for you, said Sergio. Well, I'm telling you, I think you can, said Haas. Again Sergio heard the sound of pipes, scratches, a hurricane wind that came in gusts. What would I do if I were locked up? Sergio wondered. Would I hide in a corner, wrapped in my blanket, like a child? Would I shake? Would I beg for help, cry, try to kill myself? They want to destroy me, said Haas. They're postponing the trial. They're afraid of me. They want to destroy me. Then Sergio heard the sound of the desert and something like the tread of an animal. We're all losing our minds, he thought. Haas? Are you still there? No one answered.
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He was a professor at the medical school, and as a medical examiner he unfortunately never lacked for work, so he simply didn't have time for other things, like business, for example. He was an atheist and it had been years since he'd read a book, despite the fact that he had amassed a more than decent library of works in his specialty, as well as volumes of philosophy and Mexican history and a novel or two. Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in G-d, how do you believe in a *beep* book? he asked himself.
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Haas said: I've been investigating. He said: I've gotten tips. He said: nothing's secret in prison. He said: friends of friends are your friends and they tell you things. He said: friends of friends of friends get around and do you favors. No one laughed. Chuy Pimentel kept taking pictures. They show the lawyer, who seems about to shed a few tears. Of rage. The reporters have the gaze of reptiles: they watch Haas, who stares at the gray walls as if his lines are written on the crumbling cement. The name, said one of the reporters, whispering, but loudly enough for everyone to hear. Haas stopped staring at the wall and contemplated the person who had spoken. Instead of answering directly, he explained once more that he was innocent of the murder of Estrella Ruiz Sandoval. I didn't know her, he said. Then he covered his face with his hands. A lovely girl, he said. I wish I had known her. He feels sick. He imagines a street full of people, at sunset, a street that slowly empties until there's no one to be seen, just a car parked on a corner. Then night falls and Haas feels the lawyer's fingers on his hand. Fingers that are too thick, too short. The name, says another reporter, we won't get anywhere without the name.
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In 1920 Hans Reiter was born. He seemed less like a child than like a strand of seaweed. Canetti, and Borges, too, I think—two very different men—said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited. Hans Reiter defied this rule from the moment he was born. He didn't like the earth, much less forests. He didn't like the sea either, or what ordinary mortals call the sea, which is really only the surface of the sea, waves kicked up by the wind that have gradually become the metaphor for defeat and madness. What he liked was the seabed, that other earth, with its plains that weren't plains and valleys that weren't valleys and cliffs that weren't cliffs.

When his one-eyed mother bathed him in a washtub, the child Hans Reiter always slipped from her soapy hands and sank to the bottom, with his eyes open, and if her hands hadn't lifted him back up to the surface he would have stayed there, contemplating the black wood and the black water where little particles of his own filth floated, tiny bits of skin that traveled like submarines toward an inlet the size of an eye, a calm, dark cove, although there was no calm, and all that existed was movement, which is the mask of many things, calm among them.

Once, his one-legged father, who sometimes watched as his one-eyed mother bathed him, told her not to lift him out, to see what he would do. From the bottom of the washtub Hans Reiter's blue eyes gazed up at his mother's blue eye, and then he turned on his side and remained very still, watching the fragments of his body drift away in all directions, like space probes launched at random across the universe. When he ran out of breath he stopped watching the tiny particles as they were lost in the distance and set out after them. He turned red and understood that he was passing through a region very like hell. But he didn't open his mouth or make the slightest attempt to come up, although his head was only four inches below the surface and the seas of oxygen. Finally his mother's arms lifted him out and he began to cry. His father, wrapped in an old military cloak, looked down at the floor and spat into the center of the hearth.
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When he got home, like a night diver, his mother asked him where he'd spent the day and the young Hans Reiter told her the first thing that came to mind, anything but the truth.

Then his mother stared at him with her blue eye and the boy held her gaze with his two blue eyes, and from the corner near the hearth, the one-legged man watched them both with his two blue eyes and for three or four seconds the island of Prussia seemed to rise from the depths.
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But bravery was another thing he held in high esteem, and when he saw that a boy, though at first he mistook him for seaweed, was drowning, he didn't hesitate a second before throwing himself into the sea, which wasn't exactly calm near the rocks just there, to rescue him. One further thing must be noted, which is that Vogel's blunder (mistaking a boy with brown skin and blond hair for a tangle of seaweed) tormented him that night, after it was all over. In bed, in the dark, Vogel relived the day's occurrences just as he always did, that is, with great satisfaction, until suddenly he saw the drowning boy again and himself watching, not sure whether it was a human being or seaweed. Sleep deserted him. How could he have mistaken a boy for seaweed? he asked himself. And then: in what sense can a boy resemble seaweed? And then: can a boy and seaweed have anything in common?

Before he formulated a fourth question, Vogel thought that possibly his doctor in Berlin was right and he was going mad, or perhaps not mad in the usual sense, but he was approaching the path of madness, so to speak, because a boy, he thought, has nothing in common with seaweed, and an observer from the rocks who mistakes a boy for seaweed is a person with a half-loosened screw, not a madman, exactly, with a screw altogether loose, but a man whose screw is loosening, and who, as a result, must tread more carefully in all matters regarding his mental health.
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The second time young Hans Reiter almost drowned was in winter, when he went with some fishermen to cast nets across from the Village of Blue Women. It was getting dark and the fishermen began to talk about the lights that moved at the bottom of the sea. One said it was dead fishermen searching for the way to their villages, their cemeteries on dry land. Another said it was shining lichens, lichens that shone only once a month, as if in a single night they gave off all the light it had taken them thirty days to build up. Another said it was a kind of anemone particular to that coast, and the female anemones lit up to attract the male anemones, although everywhere else in the world anemones were hermaphrodites, neither male nor female, but male and female in a single body, as if the mind lapsed into sleep and when it woke, a part of the anemone had *beep* the other part, as if inside each of us there were a woman and a man, or a *beep* and a man in the cases where the anemone was sterile. Another said it was electric fish, a very strange kind of fish that required great vigilance, because if they landed in your nets they looked no different from any other kind of fish, but when people ate them they fell ill, with terrible electric shocks in the stomach, which at times could even be deadly.

And as the fishermen talked, young Hans Reiter's irrepressible curiosity, or madness, which at times made him do things he shouldn't, led him to drop off the boat with no warning, and he dove down after the lights or light of those singular fish or that singular fish, and at first the fishermen weren't alarmed, nor did they shout or cry out, because they were all aware of young Reiter's peculiarities, and yet, after a few seconds without a sighting of his head, they grew worried, because even though they were uneducated Prussians they were also men of the sea and they knew that no one can hold his breath for more than two minutes (or thereabouts), certainly not a boy, whose lungs—no matter how tall he is—aren't strong enough to survive the strain.

And finally two of them plunged into that dark sea, a sea like a pack of wolves, and they dove around the boat trying to find young Reiter's body, with no success, until they had to come up for air, and before they dove again, they asked the men on the boat whether the brat had surfaced. And then, under the weight of the negative response, they disappeared once more among the dark waves like forest beasts and one of the men who hadn't been in before joined them, and it was he who some fifteen feet down spotted the body of young Reiter floating like uprooted seaweed, upward, a brilliant white in the underwater space, and it was he who grabbed the boy under the arms and brought him up, and also he who made the young Reiter vomit all the water he had swallowed.
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This was the year Hitler seized power. The same year, before Hitler seized power, a propaganda committee passed through Hans Reiter's town. The committee stopped first in the Town of Chattering Girls, where it held a rally at the movie theater, a success, and the next day it moved on to Pig Village and Egg Village and in the afternoon it reached Hans Reiter's town, where the members of the committee drank beer at the tavern with the local farmers and fishermen, bringing glad tidings and explanations of National Socialism, a movement that would raise Germany up from its ashes and Prussia from its ashes, too, the talk open and friendly, until someone who couldn't keep his mouth shut mentioned Hans Reiter's one-legged father, the only townsman who had returned alive from the front, a hero, a seasoned veteran, every inch a Prussian, although perhaps a bit lazy, a countryman who told war stories that gave you goose bumps, stories he had lived himself, the townspeople put special emphasis on this, he had lived them, they were true, and not only were they true but the storyteller had lived them, and then one member of the committee, a man who put on L-rdly airs (this must be stressed, because his companions certainly didn't put on L-rdly airs, they were ordinary men, happy to drink beer and eat fish and sausages and fart and laugh and sing, and they didn't put on airs, which is only fair to say and bears repeating because in fact they were like villagers, salesmen who traveled from village to village and sprang from the common herd and lived as part of the common herd, and who, when they died, would fade from common memory), said that perhaps, just perhaps, it would be interesting to meet this soldier, and then he asked why Reiter wasn't there, at the tavern, conversing with his National Socialist comrades who had only Germany at heart, and one of the townspeople, a man who had a one-eyed horse that he looked after more carefully than Reiter looked after his one-eyed wife, said that the aforementioned wasn't at the tavern because he didn't have the money to buy even a mug of beer, which led the members of the committee to protest that they would buy the soldier a beer, and then the man who put on L-rdly airs singled out one of the townsmen and ordered him to go to Reiter's house and bring the old soldier to the tavern, and the townsman hurried off, but when he returned, fifteen minutes later, he informed those present that Reiter had refused to come, with the excuse that he wasn't dressed properly to be introduced to the distinguished members of the committee, and also that he was alone with his daughter, because his one-eyed wife was still at work, and naturally his daughter couldn't be left alone, an argument that nearly moved the members of the committee (who were swine) to tears, because in addition to being swine they were sentimentalists, and the fate of this veteran and war cripple touched their hearts, but not so the L-rdly man, who got up and, after saying, as evidence of his great learning, that if Mohammed couldn't come to the mountain, the mountain would come to Mohammed, motioned for the townsman to lead him to the soldier's house and forbade any of the other members of the committee to accompany them, and so this National Socialist Party member dirtied his boots in the mud of the town streets and followed the townsman nearly to the edge of the forest, where the Reiter family house stood, which the L-rdly man scanned with a knowing eye for an instant before he went in, as if to weigh the character of the paterfamilias by the harmony or strength of the house's lines, or as if he were tremendously interested in rustic architecture in that part of Prussia, and then they went into the house and there really was a girl of three asleep in a wooden cot and her one-legged father really was dressed in rags, because his military cloak and only pair of decent trousers were in the washtub that day or hanging wet in the yard, which didn't prevent the old soldier from offering his visitor a warm welcome, and surely at first he felt proud, privileged, that a member of the committee had come all the way to his house expressly to meet him, but then things took a wrong turn or seemed to take a wrong turn, because the questions asked by the L-rdly man began gradually to displease the one-legged man, and the L-rdly man's remarks, which were more like prophecies, also began to displease him, and then the one-legged man answered each question with a statement, generally outlandish or outrageous, and countered each of the other man's remarks with a question that somehow discredited the remark itself or cast it in doubt or made it seem puerile, completely lacking in common sense, which in turn began to exasperate the L-rdly man, and in a vain effort to find common ground he told the one-legged man that he had been a pilot during the war and shot down twelve French planes and eight English planes and he knew very well the suffering one experienced at the front, to which the one-legged man replied that his worst suffering hadn't come at the front but at the cursed military hospital near Düren, where his comrades stole not only cigarettes but whatever they could lay their hands on, they even stole men's souls to sell, since there were a disproportionate number of satanists in German military hospitals, which, after all, said the one-legged man, was understandable, because a long stay in a military hospital drove people to become satanists, a claim that exasperated the self-avowed aviator, who had also spent three weeks in a military hospital, in Düren? asked the one-legged man, no, in Belgium, said the L-rdly man, and the treatment he had received not only met but very often exceeded every expectation of sacrifice but also of kindness and understanding, marvelous and manly doctors, skilled and pretty nurses, an atmosphere of solidarity and endurance and courage, even a group of Belgian nuns had shown the highest sense of duty, in short, everyone had done his or her part to make the patient's stay as pleasant as possible, taking into account the circumstances, of course, because naturally a hospital isn't a cabaret or a brothel, and then they moved on to other topics, like the creation of Greater Germany, the construction of a Hinterland, the cleansing of the state institutions, to be followed by the cleansing of the nation, the creation of new jobs, the struggle for modernization, and as the ex-pilot talked Hans Reiter's father grew more and more nervous, as if he were afraid little Lotte would start to cry at any moment, or as if all at once he had realized that he wasn't a worthy interlocutor for this L-rdly man, and that perhaps it would be best to throw himself at the feet of this dreamer, this centurion of the skies, and plead what was already obvious, his ignorance and poverty and the courage he had lost, but he did nothing of the sort, instead he shook his head at each word the other uttered, as if he wasn't convinced (in fact he was terrified), as if it were difficult for him to understand the full scope of the other man's dreams (in fact he didn't understand them at all), until suddenly both of them, the former pilot who put on L-rdly airs and the old soldier, witnessed the arrival of young Hans Reiter, who, without a word, lifted his sister from her cot and carried her into the yard.

"And who is that?" asked the former pilot.

"My son," said the one-legged man.

"He looks like a giraffe fish," said the former pilot, and he laughed.
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Sometimes, however, as they sat on a cafe terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who've just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn't more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then, naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to talking about inventions, women, Finnish philology, the building of highways across the Reich.
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The conductor then wanted to meet them, and the hostess, with great delicacy, beckoned to the surprised trio and led them to a quiet corner of the flat. For a while, as might be expected, they didn't know what to say. Again, because it was his favorite subject at the time, the conductor talked about music or the fourth dimension, it wasn't exactly clear where one ended and the other began, though perhaps, to judge by certain mysterious words of the conductor, the point of union was the conductor himself, in whom mysteries and answers spontaneously coincided. Halder and Nisa nodded agreement at everything. Not so Hans. According to the director, life qua life in the fourth dimension was of an unimaginable richness, etc., etc., but the truly important thing was the distance from which one, immersed in this harmony, could contemplate human affairs, with equanimity, in a word, and free of the artificial travails that oppress the spirit devoted to work and creation, to life's only transcendent truth, the truth that creates more and more life, an inexhaustible torrent of life and happiness and brightness.
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That night, however, Hans asked or wondered aloud (it was the first time he had spoken) what those who inhabited or visited the fifth dimension must think. At first the conductor didn't quite understand him, although Hans's German had improved considerably since he left home to join the road crews and even more since he came to live in Berlin. Then he got the idea and turned from Halder and Nisa to focus his hawk's or eagle's or carrion bird's gaze on the calm blue eyes of the young Prussian, who was already formulating another question: what would those who had ready access to the sixth dimension think of those who were settled in the fifth or fourth dimension? What would those who lived in the tenth dimension, that is, those who perceived ten dimensions, think of music, for example? What would Beethoven mean to them? What would Mozart mean to them? What would Bach mean to them? Probably, the young Reiter answered himself, music would just be noise, noise like crumpled pages, noise like burned books.

At this point the conductor raised a hand and said or rather whispered confidentially:

"Don't speak of burned books, my dear young man."

To which Hans responded:

"Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books."

"What are you talking about?" asked the director.

"I was just stating my opinion," said Hans.

"An opinion like any other," said Halder, doing his best to end the conversation on a humorous note, one that would leave them all on good terms, he and the conductor and Hans and the conductor, "a typically adolescent pronouncement."

"No, no, no," said the conductor, "what do you mean by Westerns?"

"Cowboy novels," said Hans.

This declaration seemed to relieve the director, who, after exchanging a few friendly words with them, soon took his leave. Later, he would tell their hostess that Halder and the Japanese man seemed like decent people, but Halder's young friend was a time bomb, no question about it: an untrained, powerful mind, irrational, illogical, capable of exploding at the moment least expected. Which was untrue.
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During his regiment's stay in Normandy, Reiter often swam, no matter how cold it was, off the rocks of Portbail, near the Ollonde, or off the rocks north of Carteret. His battalion was based in the town of Besneville. In the mornings he went out, with his weapons and a rucksack in which he carried cheese, bread, and half a bottle of wine, and walked to the coast. There he chose a rock well out of sight, and after swimming and diving naked for hours, he would stretch out on his rock and eat and drink and reread his book Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region.

Sometimes he found starfish, which he stared at for as long as his lungs would hold, until finally he made up his mind to touch them just before he returned to the surface. Once he saw a pair of gobies, Gobius paganellus, lost in a jungle of seaweed, and he followed them for a while (the seaweed jungle was like the locks of a dead giant), until he was seized by a strange, powerful despair and had to come up quickly, because if he had stayed down any longer the despair would have dragged him to the bottom.

Sometimes he felt so good, drowsing on his damp slab of rock, that he might have chosen never to rejoin the battalion. And more than once he gave serious thought to deserting, living like a tramp in Normandy, finding a cave, feeding himself on the charitable offerings of peasants or small thefts that no one would report. I would learn to see in the dark, he thought. In time my clothes would fall to rags and finally I would live naked. I would never return to Germany. One day I would drown, radiant with joy.
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As soon as they had settled themselves on the wooden benches in the back of the truck, the soldiers fell asleep again. Reiter couldn't. Sitting next to the back flap, he pushed aside the canvas that served as roof and watched the scenery. His night-vision eyes, permanently reddened despite the drops he used each morning, glimpsed a series of small, dark valleys between two lines of peaks. Every so often the trucks passed huge stands of pine, which crept threateningly toward the road. In the distance, on a smaller mountain, he made out the silhouette of a castle or fort. When the sun rose he realized it was just a forest. He saw hills or rocky outcroppings that looked like ships about to sink, prows lifted, like enraged horses, nearly vertical. He saw dark mountain paths that led nowhere, but above which, at a great height, soared blackbirds that must be carrion fowl.
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First they praised the assortment of little cakes and then, without pause, they began to talk about Count Dracula, as if they had been waiting all night for this moment. It wasn't long before they broke into two factions, those who believed in the count and those who didn't. Among the latter were the general staff officer, General Entrescu, and the Baroness Von Zumpe. Among the former were Popescu, Hoensch, and the SS officer, though Popescu claimed that Dracula, whose real name was Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler, was Romanian, and Hoensch and the SS officer claimed that Dracula was a noble Teuton, who had left Germany accused of an imaginary act of treason or disloyalty and had come to live with some of his loyal retainers in Transylvania a long time before Vlad Tepes was born, and while they didn't deny Tepes a real historical or Transylvanian existence, they believed that his methods, as revealed by his alias or nickname, had little or nothing to do with the methods of Dracula, who was more of a strangler than an impaler, and sometimes a throat slitter, and whose life abroad, so to speak, had been a constant dizzying spin, a constant abysmal penitence.

As far as Popescu was concerned, meanwhile, Dracula was simply a Romanian patriot who had resisted the Turks, a deed for which every European nation should to some degree be grateful. History is cruel, said Popescu, cruel and paradoxical: the man who halts the conquering onslaught of the Turks is transformed, thanks to a second-rate English writer, into a monster, a libertine whose sole interest is human blood, when the truth is that the only blood Tepes cared to spill was Turkish.
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In the grove Reiter spotted a figure in the undergrowth and stopped. It was the statue of a Greek G-ddess, or so he believed. Her hair was gathered up and she was tall, her expression impassive. Bathed in sweat, Reiter began to shake and stretched out his hand. The marble or stone, he couldn't say which, was cold. There was something absurd about where it stood, because that hidden spot in the trees was hardly the place for a statue. For a brief and painful instant, Reiter thought he should ask it something, but no question occurred to him and his face twisted in a grimace of suffering. Then he ran.
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Then the one-eyed man shifted in his chair, pulled a blanket up to his chin, and said: our commander's name was Korolenko and he died the same day. Then, at supersonic speed, Ansky imagined Verbitsky and Korolenko, he saw Korolenko mocking Verbitsky, heard what Korolenko said behind Verbitsky's back, entered into Verbitsky's night thoughts, Korolenko's desires, into each man's vague and shifting dreams, into their convictions and their rides on horseback, the forests they left behind and the flooded lands they crossed, the sounds of night in the open and the unintelligible morning conversations before they mounted again. He saw villages and farmland, he saw churches and hazy clouds of smoke rising on the horizon, until he came to the day when they both died, Verbitsky and Korolenko, a perfectly gray day, utterly gray, as if a thousand-mile-long cloud had passed over the land without stopping, endless.
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He wrote an essay on the future of literature, which began and ended with the word nothing.
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They make their way across a vast snow-covered plain. The horses sink in the snow. The Chinese leader sings. How were the stars created? Who are we in the middle of the boundless universe? What trace of us will remain?

Suddenly the Chinese leader falls off his horse. The young Russian examines him. The Chinese leader is like a burning doll. The young Russian touches the Chinese leader's forehead and then his own forehead and understands that the fever is devouring them both. With no little effort he ties the Chinese leader to his mount and sets off again. The silence of the snow-covered plain is absolute. The night and the passage of stars across the vault of the sky show no signs of ever ending. In the distance an enormous black shadow seems to superimpose itself on the darkness. It's a mountain range. In the young Russian's mind the certainty takes shape that in the coming hours he will die on that snow-covered plain or as he crosses the mountains. A voice inside begs him to close his eyes, because if he closes them he'll see the eyes and then the beloved face of the hypnotist. It tells him that if he closes his eyes he'll see the streets of New York again, he'll walk again toward the hypnotist's house, where she sits waiting for him on a chair in the dark. But the Russian doesn't close his eyes. He rides on.
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It's in Ansky's notebook, long before he sees a painting by the man, that Reiter first reads about the Italian painter Arcimboldo, Giuseppe or Joseph or Josepho or Josephus Arcimboldo or Arcimboldi or Arcimboldus (1527-1593). When I'm sad or bored, writes Ansky, although it's hard to imagine Ansky bored, busy fleeing twenty-four hours a day, I think about Giuseppe Arcimboldo and the sadness and tedium vanish as if on a spring morning, by a swamp, morning's imperceptible advance clearing away the mists that rise from the shores, the reed beds. There are also notes on Courbet, whom Ansky considers the paradigm of the revolutionary artist. He mocks, for example, the Manichaean conception that some Soviet painters have of Courbet. He tries to imagine the Courbet painting The Return from the Conference, which depicts a gathering of drunken priests and ecclesiastical dignitaries and was rejected by the official Salon and the Salon des Refuses, which in Ansky's judgment casts the reject-rejectors into ignominy. The fate of The Return from the Conference strikes him as not only inevitable and poetic but also telling: a rich Catholic buys the painting and no sooner does he get home than he proceeds to burn it.
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When he was near despair, Ansky returned to Arcimboldo. He liked to remember Arcimboldo's paintings, though he knew or pretended to know almost nothing about the painter's life, which wasn't in a state of constant turmoil like Courbet's, true, but in Arcimboldo's canvases Ansky found something that for lack of a better word he called simplicity, a descriptive term that would not have been to the liking of many scholars and exegetes of the Arcimboldian oeuvre.

The Milanese painter's technique struck him as happiness personified. The end of semblance. Arcadia before the coming of man. Not all of the paintings, of course, because The Roast, for example, was like a horror painting, a reversible canvas that, hung one way, looked like a big metal platter of roast meats, including a suckling pig and a rabbit, with a pair of hands, probably a woman's or an adolescent's, trying to cover the meat so it won't get cold, and, hung the other way, showed the bust of a soldier, in helmet and armor, with a bold, satisfied smile missing some teeth, the terrible smile of an old mercenary who looks at you, writes Ansky, and his gaze is even more terrible than his smile, as if he knew things about you that you never even suspected. The Lawyer (a lawyer or high official with his head made of pieces of small game and his body of books) was also like a horror painting. But the paintings of the four seasons were pure bliss. Everything in everything, writes Ansky. As if Arcimboldo had learned a single lesson, but one of vital importance.

And here Ansky belies his lack of interest in the painter's life and writes that when Leonardo da Vinci left Milan in 1516 he bequeathed his notebooks and some drawings to his disciple Bernardino Luini, which in time the young Arcimboldo, friend of Luini's son, might possibly have consulted and studied. When I'm sad or in low spirits, writes Ansky, I close my eyes and think of Arcimboldo's paintings and the sadness and gloom evaporate, as if a strong wind, a mentholated wind, were suddenly blowing along the streets of Moscow.
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You're a giant, said little Lotte. At first Reiter was disconcerted by this. But then he thought that for a child, and a child as sweet and impressionable as Lotte, someone of his height was the closest thing to a giant she had ever seen. Your steps echo in the forest, said Lotte in her letters. The birds of the forest hear the sound of your footsteps and stop singing. The workers in the fields hear you. The people hidden in dark rooms hear you. The Hitler Youth hear you and come out to wait for you on the road into town. Everything is happiness. You're alive. Germany is alive. Et cetera.
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On the walls—and on the ceiling!—of the floor above someone had amused himself by drawing scenes from the daily life of the Germans who had lived in Kostekino. Thus, in a corner was a sketch of the forest and five Germans, recognizable by their caps, gathering wood or hunting birds. In another corner two Germans made love while a third, with both arms bandaged, watched from behind a tree. In another, four Germans lay asleep after dinner and next to them one could make out the bones of a dog. In the last corner was Reiter himself, with a long blond beard, peering out the window of the Anskys' farmhouse at the passing parade of an elephant, a giraffe, a rhinoceros, and a duck. In the middle of the fresco, if it could be called that, was a paved square, an imaginary square that had never existed in Kostekino, crowded with women or the ghosts of women, their hair standing on end, who ran back and forth wailing as two German soldiers oversaw the work of a squad of young Ukrainians raising a stone statue whose shape couldn't yet be made out.

The drawings were crude and childish and the perspective was pre-Renaissance, but the composition revealed glimpses of irony and thus of a secret mastery much greater than was at first apparent to the eye. As he returned to the farmhouse, Reiter reflected that the painter had talent, but that he had gone mad like the rest of the Germans who spent the winter of '42 in Kostekino. He also pondered his own surprise appearance in the mural. The painter clearly believed that it was he who had gone mad, he concluded. The figure of the duck, bringing up the rear of the procession headed by the elephant, suggested as much. He remembered that in those days he hadn't yet recovered his voice. He also remembered that in those days he had ceaselessly read and reread Ansky's notebook, memorizing each word, and feeling something very strange that sometimes seemed like happiness and other times like a guilt as vast as the sky. And he accepted the guilt and happiness and some nights he even weighed them against each other and the net result of his unorthodox reckoning was happiness, but a different kind of happiness, a heartrending happiness that for Reiter wasn't happiness but simply Reiter.

One night, three days after he had come to Kostekino, he dreamed that the Russians had taken the village and to escape them he had plunged into the stream, Sweet Spring, and swum until he came to the Dnieper, and the Dnieper, the banks of the Dnieper, were swarming with Russians, to the left as well as the right, and they all laughed to see him appear in the middle of the river and fired at him, and he dreamed that to escape the bullets he ducked underwater and let himself be carried along by the current, coming up only to breathe and going under again, and in this way he traveled miles and miles of river, sometimes holding his breath for three minutes or four or five, the world record, until the current had carried him away from the Russians, but even then Reiter kept going under, coming up, taking a breath, and going under again, and the bottom of the river was like a gravel road, every so often he saw schools of little white fish and every so often he bumped into a corpse already picked clean, just the bare bones, and these skeletons that dotted the river could be German or Soviet, it was impossible to say, because their clothes had rotted and the current had swept them downriver, and in Reiter's dream the current swept him downriver, too, and sometimes, especially at night, he came up to the surface and did the dead man's float, to rest or perhaps to sleep for five minutes as the river carried him incessantly southward in its embrace, and when the sun came up Reiter went under again and dove down, returned to the gelatinous bottom of the Dnieper, and so the days went by, sometimes he passed a city and saw its lights, or if there were no lights he heard a vague noise, like the clatter of furniture, as if sick people were moving furniture around, and sometimes he passed under military pontoons and he saw the frozen shadows of the soldiers in the night, shadows cast on the choppy surface of the water, and one morning, at last, the Dnieper flowed into the Black Sea, where it ceased to exist or was transformed, and Reiter approached the shore of the river or the sea with shaky steps, as if he were a student, the student he had never been, who flops down on the sand after swimming to the point of exhaustion, dazed, at the zenith of the holidays, only to discover with horror, as he sat on the beach contemplating the immensity of the Black Sea, that Ansky's notebook, which he was carrying under his jacket, had been reduced to a kind of pulp, the ink blurred forever, half of the notebook stuck to his clothes or his skin and the other half reduced to particles washed away by the gentle waves. Then Reiter woke and decided he should leave Kostekino as quickly as possible. He dressed in silence and gathered his few belongings. He didn't light a lamp or stir the fire. He thought about how far he would have to walk that day. Before he left the farmhouse he returned Ansky's notebook carefully to the chimney hiding place. Let someone else find it now, he thought. Then he opened the door, closed it with care, and left the village with great strides.
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Then Ingeborg's health took a turn for the worse and an English doctor told Reiter that the girl, that lovely, delightful girl, probably had no more than two or three months to live and then he just looked at Reiter, who began to weep without a word, but the English doctor wasn't really looking at Reiter, he was staring at his handsome black leather coat, assessing it with the eye of a furrier or a leatherworker, and finally, as Reiter continued to weep, he asked where he'd bought it, where did I buy what? the coat, oh, in Berlin, lied Reiter, before the war, at a shop called Hahn & Forster, he said, and then the doctor said that the furriers Hahn and Forster or their heirs had probably been inspired by the leather coats of Mason & Cooper, the Manchester coat makers, who also had a branch in London, and who in 1938 had made a coat exactly like the one Reiter was wearing, the same sleeves, the same collar, the same number of buttons, to which Reiter responded with a shrug, drying the tears that ran down his cheeks with his coat sleeve, and then the doctor was moved and he stepped forward and put a hand on Reiter's shoulder and said that he too had a leather coat like this, like Reiter's, except that his was from Mason & Cooper and Reiter's was from Hahn & Forster, although by the feel, and Reiter could take his word for it because he was a connoisseur, an aficionado of black leather coats, they were identical, it was as if both had come from the same lot of leather that Mason & Cooper had used in 1938 to make his coat, which was a true work of art, and unreproducible, too, since even though the house of Mason & Cooper was still in business, Mr. Mason, or so he'd heard, had died during the war in a bombing raid, not killed by a bomb, he hastened to explain, but because he had a weak heart, unable to withstand the dash to the shelter or the alarm whistle, the sounds of destruction and the explosions, or perhaps the wail of the sirens, who can say, but whatever the case Mr. Mason was overcome by a heart attack and from that moment on the house of Mason & Cooper experienced a slight drop not just in productivity but in quality too, although perhaps that was an overstatement, since the quality of Mason & Cooper's leather coats was and would continue to be beyond reproach, if not in the detail then in the mood, if one could properly call it that, of the new models, in the intangible something that made a leather coat a work of craftsmanship, a piece of art that kept pace with history but also bucked the tide of history, I don't know whether you follow me, said the doctor, and then Reiter took off the coat and handed it to him, look at it as long as you want, he said as he sat down in one of the two chairs in the office and continued to weep, and the doctor was left with the coat hanging from his hands and only then did he seem to wake from his dream of leather coats and manage to offer a few words of encouragement or words that struggled to form an encouraging sentence, though he knew that nothing could lessen Reiter's pain, and then he draped the coat over Reiter's shoulders and again he thought that this coat, the coat of a doorman at a bar in Cologne's red-light district, was exactly like his, and for a moment he even imagined it was his, just a bit more worn, as if his own coat had flown from its wardrobe on a London street and crossed the Channel and the north of France with the sole intent of seeing him again, he, its owner, an English military doctor who led a licentious life, a doctor who treated the destitute for free, so long as the destitute were his friends, or at least the friends of friends, and for a moment he even thought that the weeping young German had lied to him, that he hadn't bought the coat at Hahn & Forster, that it was an authentic Mason & Cooper, acquired in London, at the house of Mason & Cooper, but ultimately, the doctor said to himself as he helped the tearful Reiter back into his coat (so particular to the touch, so pleasing, so familiar), life is a mystery.
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Finally he found an old man who owned an old French typewriter and wasn't in the habit of renting it but would sometimes make an exception for writers.

The sum the old man requested was high and at first Reiter thought he had better keep looking, but when he saw the typewriter, in perfect condition, not a speck of dust, every letter ready to leave its impression on the paper, he decided he could permit himself the luxury. The old man asked for the money up front, and that same night, at the bar, Reiter requested and obtained several loans from the girls. The next day he returned and showed the old man the money, but then the man took an accounting book out of his desk and wanted to know his name. Reiter said the first thing that came into his head.

"My name is Benno von Archimboldi."

The old man looked him in the eye and said don't play games with me, what's your real name?

"My name is Benno von Archimboldi, sir," said Reiter, "and if you think I'm joking I'd better go."

For a few seconds both were silent. The old man's eyes were dark brown, although in the dim light of his study they looked black. Archimboldi's eyes were blue and to the old man they looked like the eyes of a young poet, tired, strained, reddened, but young and in a certain sense pure, although it had been a long time since the old man stopped believing in purity.

"This country," he said to Reiter, who that afternoon, perhaps, became Archimboldi, "has tried to topple any number of countries into the abyss in the name of purity and will. As far as I'm concerned, you understand, purity and will are utter tripe. Thanks to purity and will we've all, every one of us, hear me you, become cowards and thugs, which in the end are one and the same. Now we sob and moan and say we didn't know! we had no idea! it was the Nazis! we never would have done such a thing! We know how to whimper. We know how to drum up sympathy. We don't care whether we're mocked so long as they pity us and forgive us. There'll be plenty of time for us to embark on a long holiday of forgetting. Do you understand me?"

"I understand," said Archimboldi.
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"In a word: experience is best. I won't say you can't get experience by hanging around libraries, but libraries are second to experience. Experience is the mother of science, it is often said. When I was young and I still thought I would make a career in the world of letters, I met a great writer. A great writer who had probably written a single masterpiece, although in my judgment everything he had written was a masterpiece.

"I won't tell you his name. It'll do you no good to learn it, nor do you need to know it for the purposes of this story. Suffice it to say that he was German and one day he came to Cologne to give a few lectures. Of course, I didn't miss a single one of the three he gave at the university. At the last lecture I got a seat in the front row, and rather than listen (the truth is he repeated things he'd already said in the first and second lectures), I spent the time observing him in detail, his hands, for example, bony and energetic, his old man's neck, like the neck of a turkey or a plucked rooster, his faintly Slavic cheekbones, his lifeless lips, lips that one could slash with a knife and from which one could be sure not a single drop of blood would fall, his gray temples like a stormy sea, and especially his eyes, deep eyes that at the slightest tilt of his head seemed at times like two endless tunnels, two abandoned tunnels on the verge of collapse.

"Of course, once the lecture was over he was mobbed by local worthies and I wasn't even able to shake his hand and tell him how much I admired him. Time went by. The writer died, and, as one might expect, I continued to read and reread him. The day came when I decided to give up literature. I gave it up. This was in no way traumatic but rather liberating. Between you and me, I'll confess that it was like losing my virginity. What a relief to give up literature, to give up writing and simply read!

"But that's another story. We can discuss it when you return my typewriter. And yet I couldn't forget the great writer and his visit. Meanwhile, I began to work at a factory that made optical instruments. I did well for myself. I was a bachelor, I had money, every week I went to the movies, the theater, exhibitions, and I also studied English and French and visited bookshops where I bought whatever books struck my fancy.
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"A comfortable life. But I couldn't shake the memory of the great writer's visit, and what's more, I realized abruptly that I remembered only the third lecture, and my memories were limited to the writer's face, as if it was supposed to tell me something that in the end it didn't. But what? One day, for reasons that are beside the point, I went with a doctor friend of mine to the university morgue. I doubt you've ever been there. The morgue is underground and it's a long room with white-tiled walls and a wooden ceiling. In the middle there's a stage where autopsies, dissections, and other scientific atrocities are performed. Then there are two small offices, one for the dean of forensic studies and the other for another professor. At each end are the refrigerated rooms where the corpses are stored, the bodies of the destitute or people without papers visited by death in cheap hotel rooms.

"In those days I showed a doubtless morbid interest in these facilities and my doctor friend kindly took it upon himself to give me a detailed tour. We even attended the last autopsy of the day. Then my friend went into the dean's office and I was left alone outside in the corridor, waiting for him, as the students left and a kind of crepuscular lethargy crept from under the doors like poison gas. After ten minutes of waiting I was startled by a noise from one of the refrigerated rooms. In those days, I promise you, that was enough to frighten anyone, but I've never been particularly cowardly and I went to see what it was.

"When I opened the door a gust of cold air hit me in the face. At the back of the room, by a stretcher, a man was trying to open one of the lockers to stow away a corpse, but no matter how hard he struggled, the door to the locker or cell wouldn't budge. Without moving from the threshold, I asked whether he needed help. The man straightened up, he was very tall, and gave me what seemed to me a despairing look. Perhaps it was because I sensed despair in his gaze that I was emboldened to approach him. As I did, flanked by corpses, I lit a cigarette to calm my nerves and when I reached him the first thing I did was offer him another cigarette, perhaps forcing a false camaraderie.

"Only then did the morgue worker look at me and it was as if I had gone back in time. His eyes were exactly like the eyes of the great writer whose Cologne lectures I had devoutly attended. I confess that just then, for a few seconds, I even thought I was going mad. It was the morgue worker's voice, nothing like the warm voice of the great writer, that rescued me from my panic. He said: smoking isn't allowed here.

"I didn't know what to answer. He added: smoke is harmful to the dead. I laughed. He supplied an explanatory note: smoke interferes with the process of preservation. I made a noncommittal gesture. He tried a last time: he spoke about filters, he spoke about moisture levels, he uttered the word purity. I offered him a cigarette again and he announced with resignation that he didn't smoke. I asked whether he had worked there for a long time. In an impersonal and somewhat shrill voice, he said he had worked at the university since long before the 1914 war.

'"Always at the morgue?' I asked.

"'Here and nowhere else,' he answered.

"'It's funny,' I said, 'but your face, and especially your eyes, remind me of a great German writer.' At this point I mentioned the writer's name.

'"I've never heard of him,' was his response.
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In his place were three ex-paratroopers and a secretary with silver-colored hair. The paratroopers informed him that Mickey Bittner was in Antwerp just then closing a deal on a shipment of bananas. Then they all started to laugh and it took Archimboldi a moment to understand that they were laughing about the bananas, not at him. Then the paratroopers began to talk about the movies, since they were all avid moviegoers, as was the secretary, and they asked Archimboldi what front he'd been on and in what arm of the service, and Archimboldi said he'd been in the east, always the east, and in the light infantry, although in the last years of the war he hadn't seen a single mule or horse. The paratroopers themselves had always fought in the west, in Italy, France, one of them in Grete, and they had that cosmopolitan air of veterans of the western front, an air of roulette players, late-night revelers, sippers of fine wines, men who visited brothels and greeted the whores by name, an air unlike that of most veterans of the eastern front, who looked more like the living dead, zombies, cemetery dwellers, soldiers without eyes or mouths, but with penises, thought Archimboldi, because the penis, sexual desire, is unfortunately the last thing man loses, when it should be the first, but no, human beings keep *beep* *beep* or *beep* themselves, which amounts to the same thing, until their last breaths, like the soldier who was trapped under a pile of corpses and there, beneath the corpses and the snow, he dug a little cave with his regulation shovel, and to pass the time he jerked off, more boldly each time, because once the fear and surprise of the first few instants had vanished, all that was left was the fear of death and boredom, and to stave off boredom he began to masturbate, first timidly, as if he were seducing a peasant girl or a little shepherdess, then with increasing determination, until he managed to bring himself off to his full satisfaction, and he went on like that for fifteen days, in his little cave of corpses and snow, rationing his food and indulging his urges, which didn't make him weaker but rather seemed to retronourish him, as if he had drunk his own semen or as if after going mad he had found a forgotten way back to a new sanity, until the German troops counterattacked and discovered him, and here was a curious bit of information, thought Archimboldi, one of the soldiers who freed him from the pile of reeking corpses and the heaps of snow said the man smelled strange somehow, in other words not dirty or like *beep* or urine, nor like rot or worm meat, in fact, the survivor smelled good, the smell was strong, perhaps, but good, like cheap perfume, Hungarian perfume or Gypsy perfume, maybe with a faint hint of yogurt, maybe a faint scent of roots, but the predominant smell wasn't of yogurt or roots but of something else, something that surprised all of those present, all the men shoveling out the corpses to send them behind the lines or give them a Christian burial, a smell that parted the waters, as Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea, to let the soldier pass, though he could scarcely stand, and where was he going? who could say, surely away from the fighting, surely to a madhouse back home.
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Then, incomprehensibly, he began to make faces that in some way linked him to the wife of the writer from Mainz, to such a degree that Bubis thought they must be brother and sister and only thus could one fully understand the presence of the writer and his wife at the meal. It was also possible, thought Bubis, that they were lovers, because it was common knowledge that lovers often began to resemble each other, usually in their smiles, their opinions, their points of view, in short, the superficial trappings that all human beings are obliged to bear until their deaths, like the rock of Sisyphus, yes Sisyphus, known as the craftiest of men, son of Aeolus and Enarete, founder of the city of Ephyra, which is the old name for Corinth, a city that the good Sisyphus turned into the staging ground of his happy misdeeds, because with his characteristic nimbleness of body and intellectual inclination to see every turn of fate as a chess problem or a detective story to unravel, and his instinct for laughter and jokes and jests and cracks and quips and gags and pranks and punch lines and spoofs and stories and gibes and taunts and send-ups and satires, he turned to theft, in other words parting all passersby from their belongings, even going so far as to steal from his neighbor Autolycus, also a thief, perhaps with the remote hope that one who steals from a thief is granted one hundred years of forgiveness, and at the same time smitten by his neighbor's daughter, Anticlea, because Anticlea was very beautiful, a treat, but the girl had an official suitor, she was promised to Laertes, of subsequent fame, which didn't daunt Sisyphus, who could count on the complicity of the girl's father, the thief Autolycus, whose admiration for Sisyphus had sprung up like the regard of an objective and honorable artist for another artist of superior gifts, so that even though it could be said that as a man of honor he remained true to his promise to Laertes, he didn't look unkindly upon the romantic attentions Sisyphus lavished on his daughter or treat them as disrespect or mockery of his future son-in-law, and in the end his daughter married Laertes, or so it's said, but only after surrendering to Sisyphus one or two or five or seven times, possibly ten or fifteen times, always with the collusion of Autolycus, who wanted his neighbor to plant the seed of a grandchild as clever as Sisyphus, and on one of these occasions Anticlea was left with child and nine months later, now the wife of Laertes, her son would be born, the son of Sisyphus, called Odysseus or Ulysses, who in fact turned out to be just as clever as his father, though Sisyphus never gave him a thought and continued to live his life, a life of excesses and parties and pleasure, during which he married Merope, the dimmest star in the Pleiades precisely because she married a mortal, a miserable mortal, a miserable thief, a miserable gangster in thrall to his excesses, blinded by his excesses, among which not least was the seduction of Tyro, the daughter of Sisyphus's brother Salmoneus, whom Sisyphus pursued not because he was interested in Tyro, not because Tyro was particularly sexy, but because Sisyphus hated his own brother and wanted to cause him pain, and for this deed, after his death, he was condemned in hell to push a stone to the top of a hill only to watch it roll down to the bottom and then push it back up to the top of the hill and watch it roll again to the bottom, and so on eternally, a bitter punishment out of all proportion to his crimes or sins, the vengeance of Zeus, it's said, because on a certain occasion Zeus passed through Corinth with a nymph he had kidnapped, and Sisyphus, who was smarter than a whip, seized his chance, and when Asopus, the girl's father, came by in desperate search of his daughter, Sisyphus offered to give him the name of his daughter's kidnapper, but only if Asopus made a fountain spring up in the city of Corinth, which shows that Sisyphus wasn't a bad citizen or perhaps he was thirsty, to which Asopus agreed and the fountain of crystalline waters sprang up and Sisyphus betrayed Zeus, who, in a blind rage, sent him ipso facto to Thanatos, or death, but Sisyphus was too much for Thanatos, and in a masterstroke perfectly in keeping with his craftiness and sense of humor he captured Thanatos and threw him in chains, a feat within reach of very few, truly very few, and for a long time he kept Thanatos in chains and during all that time not a single human being died on the face of the earth, a golden age in which men, though still men, lived free of the anxiety of death, in other words, free of the anxiety of time, because now they had more than enough time, which is perhaps what distinguishes a democracy, spare time, surplus time, time to read and time to think, until Zeus had to intervene personally and Thanatos was freed and then Sisyphus died.
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Mr. Bubis didn't like Bifurcaria Bifurcata, to the extent that he didn't even finish reading it, although of course he decided to publish it, thinking maybe that idiot Lothar Junge would like this one.

Before he sent it to the printers, though, he passed it to the baroness and asked for her honest opinion. Two days later the baroness said she had fallen asleep and couldn't get past page four, which didn't discourage Mr. Bubis, who anyway didn't put much stock in the literary judgment of his lovely wife. Soon after he sent the contract for Bifurcaria Bifurcata to Archimboldi, he received a letter from the writer stating in no uncertain terms his dissatisfaction with the advance Mr. Bubis intended to pay him. For an hour, as Mr. Bubis ate alone in a restaurant with views of the estuary, he thought about how to answer Archimboldi's letter. His first reaction upon reading it was indignation. Then the letter made him laugh. Finally, it saddened him, which was in part due to the river, which at that time of day acquired the hue of old gilt, gold leaf, and everything seemed to crumble, the river, the boats, the hills, the little stands of trees, each thing going its own way, toward different times and different spaces.

Nothing lasts, murmured Bubis. Nothing remains with us for very long. In the letter Archimboldi said he expected to receive an advance at least as big as the advance for Rivers of Europe. Really, he's right, thought Mr. Bubis: just because a novel bores me doesn't mean it's bad, it just means I won't be able to sell it and it will take up precious space in my warehouse. The next day he sent Archimboldi a slightly larger sum than the latter had received for Rivers of Europe.
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"They say you pushed her into a ravine," said Ingeborg.

"Which ravine?" asked Leube, who was finding the conversation more and more amusing.

"I don't know," said Ingeborg.

"There are lots of ravines around here, ma'am," said Leube, "there's the Lost Sheep ravine and the Flower ravine, the Shadow ravine (so-called because it's always deep in shadow) and the Children of Kreuze ravine, there's the Devil's ravine and the Virgin's ravine, Saint Bernard's ravine and the Slabs ravine, from here to the border post there are more than one hundred ravines."

"I don't know," said Ingeborg, "any of them."

"No, not just any of them, it has to be one in particular, because if I killed my wife by pushing her into any old ravine it's as if I didn't kill her. It has to be a specific one, not any of them," repeated Leube. "Especially," he said after another long silence, "because there are ravines that turn into riverbeds during the spring thaw and everything that's been tossed there or has fallen or anything one tries to hide washes down to the valley. Dogs gone over the edge, lost calves, scraps of wood," said Leube almost inaudibly. "What else do my neighbors say?" he asked after a while.

"That's all," said Ingeborg, looking him in the eye.

"They're lying," said Leube, "they're lying and holding their tongues, there are many other things they could say, but they're lying and holding their tongues. They're like animals, don't you think?"

"No, I hadn't got that impression," said Ingeborg, who in fact had hardly spoken to the few villagers, all too busy at their tasks to bother with strangers.

"And yet," said Leube, "they've had time to inform you about my life."

"Very superficially," said Ingeborg, and then she gave a loud and bitter laugh that made her cough once more.

As he listened to her cough Leube closed his eyes.

When she took the handkerchief away from her mouth the stain of blood was like a giant rose in full bloom.

That night, after they had made love, Ingeborg left the village and set out along the mountain road. The snow seemed to refract the light of the full moon. There was no wind and the cold was bearable, but Ingeborg wore her heaviest sweater and a jacket and boots and a wool cap. At the first bend the village disappeared from sight and all she could see was a row of pines and the mountains multiplying in the night, all white, like nuns with no worldly ambitions.

Ten minutes later Archimboldi woke with a start and realized that Ingeborg wasn't in bed. He got dressed, looked for her in the bathroom, the kitchen, and the front room, and then went to wake Leube. The man was sleeping like the dead and Archimboldi had to shake him several times, until Leube opened one eye and gave him a terrified look.

"It's me," said Archimboldi, "my wife has disappeared."

"Go find her," said Leube.

The tug Archimboldi gave him almost tore his nightshirt.

"I don't know where to start," said Archimboldi.

Then he went back up to his room and put on his boots and jacket, and when he came downstairs he found Leube, unkempt but dressed to go out. When they reached the center of the village, Leube gave him a flashlight and told him it would be best if they separated. Archimboldi took the mountain road and Leube started down toward the valley.

When he got to the bend in the road Archimboldi thought he heard a shout. He stopped. The shout came again, it seemed to rise from deep in a gorge, but Archimboldi understood that it was Leube, who was shouting Ingeborg's name as he walked toward the valley. I'll never see her again, thought Archimboldi, shivering with cold. In his hurry, he had forgotten to put on gloves and a scarf and as he climbed in the direction of the border post his hands and face froze so stiff he couldn't feel them anymore, and every so often, he stopped and breathed into his hands or rubbed them together, and pinched his face to no avail.

Leube's shouts came at longer and longer intervals until they couldn't be heard anymore. Sometimes Archimboldi got confused and thought he saw Ingeborg sitting by the side of the road, gazing into the chasms that yawned to either side, but when he came closer he discovered that what he had seen was just a rock or a small pine blown down in a gale. Halfway up his flashlight died and he put it in one of his pockets, although he would happily have tossed it onto the snow-covered slopes. Anyway, the road was bathed in moonlight and a flashlight wasn't necessary. Thoughts of suicide and accidents passed through his mind. He stepped off the road and tested the firmness of the snow. In some spots he sank almost up to his knees. In others, closest to the cliffs, he sank nearly to his waist. He imagined Ingeborg walking with a vacant gaze. He imagined her coming close to one of the ravines. Stumbling. Falling. He too went up to the edge of a ravine. But the moonlight illuminated only the road: the bottom of the gorge was still black, a formless black, in which one could glimpse indistinct shapes and outlines.

He returned to the road and kept climbing. At a certain point he realized he was sweating. Perspiration came hot out of his pores and immediately turned into a cold film that in turn was eliminated by more hot perspiration ... In any case he was no longer cold. When he had almost reached the border post he saw Ingeborg, standing by a tree, looking up at the sky. Ingeborg's neck, her chin, her cheeks, shone as if touched by a white madness. He ran up to her and threw his arms around her.

"What are you doing here?" asked Ingeborg.

"I was afraid," said Archimboldi.

Ingeborg's face was as cold as ice. He kissed her cheeks until she slipped from his embrace.

"Look at the stars, Hans," she said.

Archimboldi obeyed. The sky was full of stars, many more than could be seen at night in Kempten, and many, many more than it was possible to see on the clearest night in Cologne. It's a very pretty sky, darling, said Archimboldi, and then he tried to take her hand and drag her back to the village, but Ingeborg clung to a tree branch, as if they were playing, and wouldn't go.

"Do you realize where we are, Hans?" she asked, laughing with a laugh that sounded to Archimboldi like a cascade of ice.

"On the mountain, darling," he said, still grasping her hand and trying vainly to embrace her again.
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"On the mountain," said Ingeborg, "but we're also in a place surrounded by the past. All these stars," she said, "can you possibly not understand, clever as you are?"

"What is there to understand?" asked Archimboldi.

"Look at the stars," said Ingeborg.

He lifted his gaze: it was true, there were many stars, then he turned to look at Ingeborg again and shrugged.

"You know I'm not as clever as all that," he said.

"All this light is dead," said Ingeborg. "All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It's the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn't exist, life on Earth didn't exist, even Earth didn't exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It's the past, we're surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can't do anything to stop it."
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The novel he sent to Bubis from Icaria was called The Blind Woman. As one might expect, it was about a blind woman who didn't know she was blind and some clairvoyant detectives who didn't know they were clairvoyant. More books soon came to Hamburg from the island. The Black Sea, a theater piece or a novel written in dramatic form, in which the Black Sea converses with the Atlantic Ocean an hour before dawn. Lethaea, his most explicitly sexual novel, in which he transfers to the Germany of the Third Reich the story of Lethaea, who believes herself more beautiful than any G-ddess and is finally transformed, along with Olenus, her husband, into a stone statue (this novel was labeled as pornographic and after a successful court case it became Archimboldi's first book to go through five printings). The Lottery Man, the life of a crippled German who sells lottery tickets in New York. And The Father, in which a son recalls his father's activities as a psychopathic killer, which begin in 1938, when his son is twenty, and come to an enigmatic end in 1948.

He lived for a while on Icaria. Then he lived on Amorgos. Then on Santorini. Then on Sifnos, Syros, and Mykonos. Then he lived on a tiny island, which he called Hecatombe or Superego, near the island of Naxos, but he never lived on Naxos. Then he left the islands and returned to the Continent. In those days he ate grapes and olives, big dry olives which in taste and consistency were like clods of dirt. He ate white cheese and cured goat cheese that was sold wrapped in grape leaves and could be smelled from one thousand feet away. He ate very hard black bread that had to be softened with wine. He ate fish and tomatoes. Figs. Water. The water came from a well. He had a bucket and a jerry can like the kind they used in the army that he filled with water. He swam, but the seaweed boy was dead. Still, he was a strong swimmer. Sometimes he dove. Other times he sat alone on the slopes of the hills covered in scrub, until dusk fell or dawn came, thinking, or so he claimed, but really he wasn't thinking anything at all.
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In 1997 she returned to Mexico, but this time she traveled alone because Ingrid had found a good job and couldn't come with her. Lotte's Spanish, which she had set out to learn, was much better now and she could talk on the phone with the lawyer. The trip went off without incident, although as soon as she got to Santa Teresa, she understood by the expression on Isabel Santolaya's face and then the overly long embrace into which the lawyer folded her that something strange was going on. The trial, which passed as if in a dream, lasted twenty days and at the end Klaus was found guilty of four murders.

That night the lawyer drove her back to the hotel, and since she made no move to leave, Lotte thought she had something to say and didn't know how, so she offered to buy her a drink at the bar, although she was tired and wanted nothing more than to go to bed and sleep. As they drank next to a big window from which one could see the lights of the cars as they passed along a broad avenue lined with trees, the lawyer, who seemed as tired as Lotte, began to curse in Spanish, or so Lotte thought, and then she began openly to cry. This woman is in love with my son, thought Lotte.
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This time, however, by mistake or because she was in a hurry not to miss her flight, she bought a book called The King of the Forest, by someone called Benno von Archimboldi. The book, no more than one hundred and fifty pages long, was about a one-legged father and a one-eyed mother and their two children, a boy who liked to swim and a girl who followed her brother to the cliffs. As the plane crossed the Atlantic, Lotte realized in astonishment that she was reading a part of her childhood.

The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn't lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely.

As the passengers slept, Lotte began to read the novel over again, skipping the parts that weren't about her family or her house or her neighbors or her garden, and when she had finished she had no doubt that the author, this Benno von Archimboldi, was her brother, although there was also the possibility the author had talked to her brother, a possibility Lotte immediately rejected because in her judgment there were things in the book that her brother would never have told to anyone, though she didn't stop to think that by writing them he was telling the whole world.

There was no author photograph on the cover, though there was a birth date, 1920, the year her brother was born, and a long list of titles, all published by the same publishing house. It also said that Benno von Archimboldi had been translated into a dozen languages and that for the past several years he had been mentioned as a possible Nobel recipient. As she waited in L.A. for her connection to Tucson she looked for more books by Archimboldi in the airport bookstores, but there were only books about aliens, people who had been abducted, encounters of the third kind, and sightings of flying saucers.
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Then the sluice gates opened and Lotte said it had been a long time since she saw her brother, that her son was in prison in Mexico, that her husband was dead, that she had never remarried, that necessity and desperation had driven her to learn Spanish, that she still had trouble with the language, that her mother had died and her brother probably didn't even know it, that she planned to sell the shop, that she had read a book by her brother on the plane, that the shock had almost killed her, that as she crossed the desert all she could do was think of him.
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    "Allow me to introduce myself," he said. "My name is Alexander Fürst Pückler. The, how shall I say, creator of this ice cream," he said, "was a forebear of mine, a very brilliant Fürst Pückler, a great traveler, an enlightened man, whose main interests were botany and gardening. Of course, he thought, if he ever thought about it at all, that he would be remembered for some of the many small works he wrote and published, mostly travel chronicles, though not necessarily travel chronicles in the modern sense, but little books that are still charming today and, how shall I say, highly perceptive, anyway as perceptive as they could be, little books that made it seem as if the ultimate purpose of each of his trips was to examine a particular garden, gardens sometimes forgotten, forsaken, abandoned to their fate, and whose beauty my distinguished forebear knew how to find amid the weeds and neglect. His little books, despite their, how shall I say, botanical trappings, are full of clever observations and from them one gets a rather decent idea of the Europe of his day, a Europe often in turmoil, whose storms on occasion reached the shores of the family castle, located near Gorlitz, as you're likely aware. Of course, my forebear wasn't oblivious to the storms, no more than he was oblivious to the vicissitudes of, how shall I say, the human condition. And so he wrote and published, and in his own way, humbly but in fine German prose, he raised his voice against injustice. I think he had little interest in knowing where the soul goes when the body dies, although he wrote about that too. He was interested in dignity and he was interested in plants. About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive. He had a great sense of humor, although some passages of his books contradict me there. And since he wasn't a saint or even a brave man, he probably did think about posterity. The bust, the equestrian statue, the folios preserved forever in a library. What he never imagined was that he would be remembered for lending his name to a combination of three flavors of ice cream. That I can assure you. So what do you think?"

    "I don't know what to think," said Archimboldi.

    "No one remembers the botanist Fürst Pückler now, no one remembers the model gardener, no one has read the writer. But everyone at some moment has tasted a Fürst Pückler, which is best and most pleasing in spring and fall."

    "Why not in summer?" asked Archimboldi.

    "Because in summer it can be cloying. Ices are best in summer, not ice cream."

    Suddenly the park lights came on, although there was a second of total darkness, as if someone had tossed a black blanket over parts of Hamburg.

    The gentleman sighed, he must have been about seventy, and then he said:

    "A mysterious legacy, don't you think?"

    "You're right, I do," said Archimboldi as he got up and took his leave of the descendant of Fürst Pückler.

    Soon afterward he left the park and the next morning he was on his way to Mexico.

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