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He would happily have gone himself, but the years hadn't passed
for nothing, and Bubis could no longer travel the way he used to do. So it was
the baroness who appeared one morning in Venice, accompanied by a rather
younger Roman engineer, a thin, bronzed, handsome man who was sometimes
addressed by the title of architect and other times doctor, although he was
just an engineer, a civil engineer, and a passionate reader of Moravia, to whom
he had introduced the baroness, bringing her to one of Moravia's evenings at
home in his sprawling apartment, with a view, when night fell and dozens of
spotlights came on, of the ruins of a circus, or perhaps it was a temple, of
burial mounds and stones that the very light seemed to muddle and obscure and
that Moravia's guests watched in laughter or on the verge of tears from the
novelist's huge terrace. The novelist didn't impress the baroness or at least
didn't impress her as much as her lover had hoped, since in his mind every word
Moravia wrote was golden, but for the next few days the baroness couldn't stop
thinking about him, especially after she received the letter from her husband
and traveled, accompanied by the Moravian engineer, to wintertime Venice, where
they got a room at the Danieli, and the baroness, after she showered and
changed, but without having breakfast, went out alone with her lovely hair
disheveled, seized by an inexplicable haste.

Archimboldi's
address was on Calle Turlona in Cannaregio, and the baroness guessed correctly
that the street couldn't be too far from the train station, or perhaps from the
church of the Madonna dell’Orto, where Tintoretto had worked all his life. So
she got on a vaporetto at San Zaccaria and let herself be carried along the
Grand Canal, lost in thought, and then she got off in front of the station,
asked for directions, and set out on foot, and meanwhile she thought about
Moravia's eyes, which were nice, and Archimboldi's eyes, which she suddenly
discovered she couldn't remember, and she also thought how different those two
men were, Moravia and Archimboldi, the former bourgeois and practical and
worldly, though not above paving the way for certain subtle and timeless jokes
(not for his own sake but for the sake of his audience), whereas the latter,
especially by comparison, was essentially a man of the lower orders, a Germanic
barbarian, an artist in a state of permanent incandescence, as Bubis said,
someone who would never see the view from Moravia's terrace, the ruins cloaked
in light, and would never hear Moravia's records or go for night strolls around
Rome with friends, poets and filmmakers, translators and students, aristocrats
and Marxists, as Moravia did, always ready with a kind word, a clever remark, a
judicious comment, while Archimboldi addressed long soliloquies to himself,
thought the baroness as she walked along the Lista di Spagna to the Campo San
Geremia and then crossed over the Ponte Guglie and went down some steps to the
Fondamenta Pescaria, the unintelligible soliloquies of a maid's son or a barefoot
soldier wandering Russian soil, a hell populated with succubi, thought the
baroness, and then for no reason she remembered that in the Berlin of her
adolescence some people, especially servant girls from the country, called the
pederasts succubi, opening their eyes very wide and pretending to look
frightened, little maidservants who left their families to come to the big
houses in the rich neighborhoods, girls who delivered long soliloquies that
made it possible for them to live another day.

But did Archimboldi really
soliloquize to himself? the baroness wondered as she turned down Calle Ghetto
Vecchio, or was he addressing someone else? And if so, who was that other
person? A dead man? A German demon? A monster he had discovered when he worked
on her country estate in
Prussia
?
A monster that lived in the cellars of her house when the boy Archimboldi came
to work with his mother? A monster hiding in the Von Zumpe forest? The ghost of
the peat bogs? The spirit of the rocky beaches along the rough road between the
fishing villages?

Pure blather, thought the baroness, who had never believed in
ghosts or ideologies, only in her body and the bodies of others, as she walked
through the Campo Ghetto Nuovo and then crossed the bridge to the Fondamenta
degli Ormesini, and turned left onto Calle Turlona, all old houses, buildings
propping each other up like little old Alzheimer's patients, a jumble of houses
and mazelike passageways where distant voices could be heard, worried voices
asking questions and offering answers with great dignity, until she reached
Archimboldi's door, in a house that gave no clear indication, within or
without, as to which floor one was on, whether it was the third or the fourth,
perhaps the third and a half.

Archimboldi came to the door. His hair was long and tangled and
his beard covered his neck. He was dressed in a wool sweater and wide,
dirt-stained trousers, an unusual sight in
Venice
, where there was only water and
stones. He recognized her immediately and when the baroness came in she noticed
that his nostrils flared, as if he was trying to smell her. The place consisted
of two small rooms, separated by a plaster partition, and a bathroom, also tiny
and recently installed. The only window was in the room that served as dining
room and kitchen, and it looked onto a canal that flowed into the Rio della
Sensa. Inside, everything was a dark mauve, shading to black—a provincial
black, thought the baroness—in the second room, where Archimboldi's bed and
clothes were.

What did they do that day and the next? Probably they talked and
fucked, more the latter than the former, because that night the baroness didn't
return to the Danieli, to the distress of her engineer, who had read novels
about mysterious disappearances in Venice, especially of tourists of the weaker
sex, women seduced by the call of the flesh, women hypnotized by the libido of
Venetian pimps, slave women who lived between the same walls as the legitimate
wives of their masters, fat wives with mustaches who spoke in dialect and left
their caves only to buy vegetables and fish, Cro-Magnon women married to
Neanderthal men, and serfs educated at Oxford or in Swiss boarding schools tied
by one leg to the bed awaiting the Shadow.

In any case, the baroness didn't come back that night and the
engineer got quietly drunk at the bar of the Danieli and didn't go to the
police, in part because he was afraid of making a fool of himself and in part
because he sensed that his German lover was the type of woman who always
emerges unscathed without resort to pleas or demands. And that night there was
no Shadow, although the baroness asked questions, not many, and showed herself
willing to answer those Archimboldi thought fit to ask.

They
talked about his job as a gardener, which was real, a job working either for
the city of Venice in the few but well-tended public parks or for certain
private citizens (or law firms) who kept inner gardens, some splendid, behind
the walls of their palazzi. Then they made love again. Then they talked about
how cold it was in
Venice
,
a cold Archimboldi warded off by wrapping himself in blankets. Then they kissed
for a long time and the baroness chose not to ask how long it had been since he
was with a woman. Then they talked about some American writers who were
published by Bubis and who visited
Venice
regularly, although Archimboldi had never heard of them or read anything by
them. And then they talked about the baroness's vanished cousin, the ill-fated
Hugo Halder, and Archimboldi's family, whom Archimboldi had finally found.

And
just as the baroness was about to ask where he had found his family and under
what circumstances and how, Archimboldi got out of bed and said: listen. And
the baroness tried to listen, but she couldn't hear anything, just silence,
utter silence. And then Archimboldi said: this is what it's about, the silence,
do you hear it? And the baroness was about to say that one couldn't hear
silence, only sound, but the comment struck her as pedantic and she didn't say
anything. And Archimboldi, naked, went over to the window and opened it and
leaned half his body outside, as if he planned to throw himself into the canal,
but that wasn't his intention. And when he pulled his torso back in, he told
the baroness to come and look. And the baroness got up, naked too, and came
over to the window and watched as the snow fell on
Venice
.

The last visit Archimboldi made
to his publisher was to go over the proofs of
Inheritance
with the copy
editor and add about one hundred pages to the original manuscript. This was the
last time he saw Bubis, who would die a few years later, not without first
having published four more novels by Archimboldi, and it was also the last time
he saw the baroness, at least in
Hamburg
.

At
the time, Bubis was immersed in the sweeping and often idle debates of the
German writers of the
Federal
Republic
and the
Democratic Republic, with intellectuals and letters and telegrams streaming
through his office during the day, and at night urgent phone calls that
generally led nowhere. The atmosphere at the publishing house was one of
feverish activity. Sometimes, however, everything halted, and the copy editor
made coffee for herself and Archimboldi and tea for a new girl who worked as a
designer, because by now the house had grown and the slate of employees had
grown and sometimes, at a nearby desk, there was a young copy editor, Swiss,
why on earth he lived in Hamburg no one knew, and the baroness came out of her
office and so did the head of publicity and sometimes the secretary, and they
talked about all sorts of things, about the last movie they'd seen or the actor
Dirk Bogarde, and then the bookkeeper and even Marianne Gottlieb would drop by
with a smile, and if the laughter was very loud in the big room where the copy
editors worked, then Bubis himself would peer in with his teacup in his hand,
and they would talk not just about Dirk Bogarde but also about politics and the
dirty business that the new Hamburg officials got up to or they talked about
some writers who had no ethical sense, self-confessed and happy plagiarists who
hid expressions of mingled fear and outrage behind a cheerful mask, writers
prepared to cling to
any
reputation, with the certainty that they would
thus live on in posterity,
any
posterity, which made the copy editors
and the other employees laugh and even prompted a resigned smile from Bubis,
since no one knew better that posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to
those with front-row seats, and then they started to talk about
lapsus
calami,
many of them collected in a book published long ago in Paris and
fittingly titled
Le Musee des erreurs,
as well as others selected by Max
Sengen, hunter of errata. And one thing led to another and it wasn't long
before the copy editors got out a book (which wasn't the French
Museum of Errors
or Sengen's text), whose title Archimboldi couldn't see, and began to read
aloud a selection of cultured pearls:

"Poor
Marie! Whenever she hears the sound of an approaching horse, she is certain
that it is I."
Vie de Ranee,
Chateaubriand.

"The crew of
the ship swallowed up by the waves consisted of twenty-five men, who left
hundreds of widows consigned to misery."
Les Cages flottantes,
Gaston
Leroux.

"With
God's help, the sun will shine again on
Poland
."
The Deluge,
Sienkiewicz.

"
'Let's go!' said Peter, looking for his hat to dry his tears."
Lourdes
,
Zola.

"The
duke appeared followed by his entourage, which preceded him."
Letters
from My Mill,
Alphonse Daudet.

"With
his hands clasped behind his back, Henri strolled about the garden, reading his
friend's novel."
Le Cataclysme,
Rosny.

"With
one eye he read, with the other he wrote."
On the Banks of the Rhine,
Auback.

"Silently
the corpse awaited the autopsy."
Luck's Favorite,
Octave Feuillet.

"William
couldn't imagine the heart served for anything other than breathing."
Death,
Argibachev.

"This
sword of honor is the most beautiful day of my life."
Honneur
d'artiste,
Octave Feuillet.

"I
can hardly see anymore, said the poor blind woman."
Beatrix,
Balzac.

"After
they cut off his head, they buried him alive."
The Death of Mongomer,
Henri
Zvedan.

"His
hand was as cold as a snake's." Ponson du Terrail. And here there was no
indication of the source of the
lapsus calami.

The
following unattributed quotes from Max Sengen's collection were particularly
notable:

"The corpse
stared reproachfully at those gathered around him."

"What can a
man do who's been killed by a lethal bullet?"

"Near the city
there were roaming whole packs of solitary bears."

"Unfortunately,
the wedding was delayed fifteen days, during which time the bride fled with the
captain and gave birth to eight children."

"Three- or
four-day excursions were a daily occurrence."