2666 (141 page)

Then
she sent a telegram to the return address on the envelope in which the
manuscript had arrived and the next day she was on a plane to
Milan
. From the airport she made it to the
station just in time to catch a train to
Venice
.
That evening, in a trattoria in Cannaregio, she saw Archimboldi and gave him a
check for the advance on his new novel and the royalties generated by his
previous books.

It
was a respectable sum, but Archimboldi put the check in his pocket without a
word. Then they began to talk. They ate Venetian sardines with slices of
semolina and drank a bottle of white wine. They got up and walked around a
Venice
that was very different from the snowy wintertime
Venice
they had enjoyed
the last time they met. The baroness confessed that she hadn't been back since.

"I've been
here only a little while," said Archimboldi.

They
were like two old friends who don't need to say much to each other. It was the
beginning of fall, the weather mild, and a light sweater was enough to keep
warm. The baroness wanted to know whether Archimboldi still lived in
Cannaregio. That's right, said Archimboldi, but not on Calle Turlona.

Among his plans was
to head south.

For many years Archimboldi's
home, his only belongings, were his suitcase, which held clothes and a ream of
paper and the two or three books he was currently reading, and the typewriter
Bubis had given him. He carried the suitcase in his right hand. The typewriter
he carried in his
left hand. When the clothes got old, he threw them away.
When he had finished reading a book, he gave it away or left it on a table. For
a long time, he wouldn't buy a computer. Sometimes he went into stores that
sold computers and asked the salespeople how they worked. But at the last
minute he always balked, like a peasant reluctant to part with his savings.
Until laptop computers appeared. Then he did buy one and after a little while
he became skilled in its use. When laptops began to come with modems,
Archimboldi exchanged his old computer for a new one and sometimes he spent
hours on the Internet, searching for odd bits of news, names no one remembered
anymore, forgotten occurrences. What did he do with the typewriter Bubis had
given him? He flung it off a cliff onto the rocks!

One
day, as he was exploring the Internet, he found news of a man by the name of
Hermes Popescu, whom he was quick to identify as the secretary of General
Entrescu, whose crucified body he'd chanced to observe in 1944, as the German
army fought in retreat from the Romanian border. On an American search engine
he found the man's life story. Popescu had immigrated to
France
after the war. In
Paris
he frequented Romanian exile circles, associating
especially with those intellectuals who for one reason or another lived on the
Left Bank of the
Seine
. Little by little,
however, Popescu realized that this was all, in his own words, a farce. The
Romanians were bitterly anticommunist and they wrote in Romanian and their
prospects were bleak, their lives barely illuminated by a few faint rays of
religious or sexual light.

Popescu
soon found a practical solution. In a few deft moves (moves strongly tinged
with the absurd), he insinuated himself into murky business deals in which the
underworld, espionage, the church, and work permits mingled. Money flowed in.
Buckets of money. But he kept working. He managed teams of undocumented
Romanians. Then Hungarians and Czechs. Then North Africans. Sometimes, dressed
in a fur coat, like a phantom, he went to visit them in their hovels. The smell
of the blacks made his head swim, but he liked it. Those bastards are real men,
he liked to say. Secretly, he hoped that the smell would cling to his coat, his
silk scarf. He smiled like a father. At times he even cried. In his dealings
with the gangsters he was different. Sobriety was his distinguishing feature.
Not a ring, not a pendant, nothing shiny, not even the slightest glint of gold.

He made money and then he made more money. The Romanian
intellectuals came to see him and asked for loans, they needed money, milk for
the children, rent, a cataract operation for the wife. Popescu listened to all
of them as if he were asleep, in a dream. He gave them everything they asked
for, but with one condition, that they stop writing their screeds in Romanian
and do it in French. One day he received the visit of a crippled captain
formerly of the Romanian Fourth Army Corps, which had been under the command of
Entrescu.

When
Popescu saw the captain come in, he leaped like a boy from chair to chair. He
got up on the desk and danced a Carpathian folk dance. He pretended to urinate
in a corner and a few drops trickled out. The only thing he didn't do was
frolic on the rug. The crippled captain tried to imitate him, but his handicaps
(he was missing a leg and an arm) and his weakness (he was anemic) prevented
him.

"Ah, the nights of
Bucharest
,"
said Popescu. "Ah, the mornings of
Pitesti
.
Ah, the skies of Cluj rewon. Ah, the vacant offices of Turnu Sev-erin. Ah, the
milkmaids of
Bacau
.
Ah, the widows of
Constanta
."

Then
they walked arm in arm to Popescu's flat, on the Rue de Verneuil, very near the
Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, where they talked more and drank
more and the crippled captain had occasion to give Popescu a detailed account
of his life, heroic, yes, but full of adversity. Until Popescu, wiping away a
tear, interrupted and asked whether he too had been a witness to Entrescu's
crucifixion.

"I
was there," said the crippled captain, "we were fleeing the Russian
tanks, we had lost our artillery, we were running low on ammunition."

"So
you were running low on ammunition," said Popescu, "and you were
there?"

"I
was there," said the crippled captain, "fighting on the sacred soil
of my homeland, in command of a few ragged soldiers, the Fourth Army Corps
shrunk to the size of a division and no mess officers or scouts or doctors or
nurses or anything reminiscent of a civilized war, just tired men and a
contingent of madmen that grew by the day."

"So, a
contingent of madmen," said Popescu, "and you were there?"

"There
I was," said the crippled captain, "and we were all following General
Entrescu, we were all waiting for an idea, a sermon, a mountain, a shining
grotto, a lightning bolt in the cloudless sky, a sudden flash of lightning, a
kind word."

"So,
a kind word," said Popescu, "and you were there waiting for this kind
word?"

"Like
a man waiting for manna from heaven," said the crippled captain, "I
was waiting and the colonels were waiting and the generals who were still with
us were waiting and the callow lieutenants were waiting and so were the madmen,
the sergeants and the madmen, those who would desert in half an hour and those
who were already on their way, dragging their rifles over the parched earth,
those who left without knowing very well whether they were heading west or
east, north or south, and those who stayed behind, writing posthumous poems in
good Romanian, letters to their mothers, notes dampened with tears to the girls
they would never see again."

"So,
letters and notes, notes and letters," said Popescu, "and did you
also succumb to lyricism?"

"No,
I had no paper or pen," said the crippled captain, "I had
obligations, I had men under my command and I had to do something but I didn't
know what to do. The Fourth Army Corps had come to a halt at a country house.
More than a house, it was a palace. I had to station the healthy soldiers in
the stables and the sick soldiers in the stalls. I settled the madmen in the
granary and I took the necessary measures to set it on fire if the madness of
the madmen went beyond simple madness. I had to speak to my commanding officer
and inform him that on that great estate there was no food at all. And my
commanding officer had to speak to a general, and the general, who was ill, had
to go up the stairs to the second floor of the palace to inform General
Entrescu that the situation was untenable, that there was already a smell of
rot, that it would be best to strike camp and head west by forced marches. But
General Entrescu sometimes came to the door and other times he didn't
answer."

"So
sometimes he answered and sometimes he didn't," said Popescu, "and
you were an eyewitness to all of this?"

"I
was a witness, but I heard more than I saw," said the crippled captain,
"I and the rest of the officers of what remained of the Fourth Army Corps,
dazed, astonished, confused, some weeping and others choking back tears, some
lamenting the cruel fate of Romania, a country that for all its sacrifices and
virtues should be a beacon of light, and others gnawing their fingernails, all
downcast, downcast, downcast, until at last what was fated came to be. I didn't
see it. The madmen grew more numerous than the sane. They left the granary.
Some noncommissioned officers began to build a cross. General Danilescu had
already left, setting out north at dawn without a word to anyone, leaning on
his walking stick and accompanied by eight men. I wasn't in the palace when all
of this happened. I was nearby with some soldiers preparing defenses that were
never used. I remember we dug trenches and found bones. They're sick cows, said
one of the soldiers. They're human bodies, said another. They're sacrificial
calves, said the first. No, they're human bodies. Keep digging, I said, never
mind, keep digging. But more bones turned up. What the fuck is this? I
bellowed. What strange land is this? I shouted. The soldiers stopped digging
trenches around the palace. We heard a commotion, but we were too exhausted to
go and see what was happening. One of the soldiers said that maybe our comrades
had found food and were celebrating. Or wine. It was wine. The cellars had been
emptied and there was wine enough for all. Then, as I sat by one of the
trenches and examined a skull, I saw the cross. A huge cross that a group of
madmen was parading around the palace courtyard. When we got back, with the
news that the trenches couldn't be dug because the place looked like a
graveyard, and perhaps was a graveyard, everything was over.

"So everything was over," said Popescu, "and did
you see the general's body on the cross?"

"I saw it," said the crippled captain, "we all saw
it and then everyone began to leave, as if General Entrescu might come back to
life at any moment and punish us for what we'd done. Before I left, a patrol of
Germans arrived who were also fleeing. They told us the Russians were just two
villages away and they weren't taking prisoners. Then the Germans left and soon
afterward we were on our way, too."

This time Popescu
didn't say anything.

They
were both silent for a while and then Popescu went into the kitchen and
prepared a steak for the crippled captain, asking him, from the kitchen, how he
liked his meat, rare or well done?

"Medium
rare," said the crippled captain, still sunk in his memories of that terrible
day.

Then
Popescu served him a big steak, with a pepper sauce, and offered to cut the
meat into little pieces for him. The crippled captain thanked him with an
absent air. There was no talk while the meal lasted. Popescu stepped away for a
few seconds, saying he had to make a phone call, and when he returned the
captain was chewing his last piece of steak. Popescu smiled in satisfaction.
The captain raised a hand to his forehead, as if he were trying to remember
something or his head hurt.

"Burp,
burp, if your body demands it, my good friend," said Popescu.

The crippled
captain burped.

"How
long has it been since you ate a steak like that, eh?" asked Popescu.

"Years,"
said the crippled captain.

"And did it
taste divine?"

"It
surely did," said the crippled captain, "but talking about General
Entrescu has been like opening a door long barred."

"Unburden
yourself," said Popescu, "you're among fellow countrymen."

The use of the plural made the crippled captain jump and look
toward the door, but it was clear there were only two of them in the room.

"I'm
going to put on a record," said Popescu, "would you like to listen to
some Gluck?"

"I've
never heard of him," said the crippled captain.

"Some
Bach?"

"Yes, I like
Bach," said the crippled captain, half closing his eyes.

Back
at the captain's side, Popescu poured him some Napoleon cognac.

"Is there anything troubling you, Captain, anything on your
mind, any story you want to tell me, any way I can help you?"

The captain's lips
parted but then they closed and he shook his head.

"I need
nothing."

"Nothing,
nothing, nothing," repeated Popescu, settling in his armchair.

"The bones, the bones," murmured the crippled captain,
"why did General Entrescu bring us to a palace whose grounds were riddled
with bones?"

Silence.