2666 (13 page)

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

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

the first move."

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

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

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

"Careful of what?" Pelletier
managed to ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You think Pegasus stands for
love?"

"That's right."

"Strange," said Espinoza.

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

"And you think Pritchard knows this
stuff?"

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

"Then what do you think it all means?"

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

"After Norton's death?" said
Espinoza.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

This speech, it
may be said without exaggeration, took the Archimboldians by surprise, and they
were slow to respond. If they were on

Geraldine
Street

when the driver let them have it, they
didn't manage to speak till they came to

Saint George's Road

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