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

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

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

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

Nor did they emerge unscathed from their
adventures in prostitution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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