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"Here he is," said El Cerdo, "this is
it."

Pelletier and Espinoza searched for the name the Mexican
was pointing to. Hans Reiter. One night. Paid in cash. He hadn't used a credit
card or taken anything from the minibar. Then they went back to their own
hotel, although El Cerdo asked them whether they'd like to see any tourist
sites. No, said Espinoza and Pelletier, we're not interested.

Norton, meanwhile, was at the hotel, and although she
wasn't tired she had turned off the lights and left just the television on with
the volume turned down low. Through the open windows of her room came a distant
buzzing, as if many miles away, in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city,
people were being evacuated. She thought it was the television and turned it
off, but the noise persisted. She sat on the windowsill and looked out at the
city. A sea of flickering lights stretched toward the south. If she leaned half
her body out the window, the humming stopped. The air was cold and felt good.

At the entrance to the hotel a couple of doormen were
arguing with a guest and a taxi driver. The guest was drunk. One of the doormen
was propping him up with one arm and the other doorman was listening to the
taxi driver, who, to judge by his gestures, was getting more and more upset.
Soon afterward a car stopped in front of the hotel and Norton watched as
Espinoza and Pelletier climbed out, followed by the Mexican. From up above she
wasn't entirely sure they were her friends. In any case, if they were, they
seemed different, they were walking differently, in a more virile way, if such
a thing were possible, although the word
virile,
especially applied to a
form of walking, sounded grotesque to Norton, completely absurd. The Mexican
handed the car keys to one of the doormen and then the three men went into the
hotel. The doorman who had El Cerdo's keys got in the car, then the taxi driver
directed his arm waving at the doorman propping up the drunk. Norton had the
impression that the taxi driver was demanding more money and the drunk hotel
guest didn't want to pay. From where she was, Norton thought the drunk might be
American. He was wearing an untucked white shirt over his khaki trousers, the
color of cappuccino or milky iced coffee. She couldn't tell his age. When the
other doorman came back, the taxi driver retreated two steps and said
something. His attitude, thought Norton, was menacing. Then one of the doormen,
the one who was supporting the drunk guest, leaped forward and grabbed him by
the neck. The taxi driver wasn't expecting this reaction and barely managed to
step back, but he couldn't shake off the doorman. In the sky, presumably full
of black clouds heavy with pollution, the lights of a plane appeared. Norton
lifted her gaze, surprised, because then all the air began to buzz, as if
millions of bees were surrounding the hotel. For an instant the idea of a
suicide bomber or a plane accident passed through her mind. At the entrance to
the hotel, the two doormen were beating the taxi driver, who was on the ground.
It wasn't a sustained attack. They might kick him four or six times, then stop
and give him the chance to talk or go, but the taxi driver, doubled over, would
open his mouth and swear at them, then another round of blows would follow.

The plane descended a little farther in the dark and Norton
thought she could see the expectant faces of the passengers through the
windows. Then it turned and climbed again, and a few seconds later it
disappeared into the belly of the clouds. The taillights, red and blue sparks,
were the last thing she saw before it disappeared. When she looked down, one of
the hotel clerks had come out and was helping the drunk guest, who could hardly
walk, as if he were wounded, while the two doormen dragged the taxi driver not
toward the taxi but toward the underground parking garage.

Her first impulse was to go down to the bar, where she
would find Pelletier and Espinoza talking to the Mexican, but in the end she
decided to close the window and go to bed. The hum continued and Norton thought
it must be the air-conditioning.

There's a kind of war between taxi drivers and
doormen," said El Cerdo. An undeclared war, with its ups and downs,
moments of tension and moments of truce."

"So what will happen now?" asked Espinoza.

They were sitting at the hotel bar, next to one of the big
windows that overlooked the street. Outside the air had a liquid texture. Black
water, jet-black, that made one want to reach out and stroke its back.

"The doormen will teach the taxi driver a lesson and
it'll be a long time before he comes back to the hotel," said El Cerdo.
"It's about tips."

Then El Cerdo pulled out his electronic organizer and they
copied the phone number of the rector at the
University
of
Santa Teresa
into their address books.

"I talked to him today," said El Cerdo, "and
I asked him to give you all the help he could."

"Who'll get the taxi driver out of here?" asked
Pelletier.

"He'll walk out on his own two feet," said El
Cerdo. "They'll beat the shit out of him in the garage and then they'll
wake him up with buckets of cold water so that he gets in his car and hightails
it out of here."

"But if the doormen and the taxi drivers are at war,
what do the guests do when they need a taxi?" asked Espinoza.

"Oh, then the hotel calls a radio taxi. The radio
taxis are at peace with everyone," said El Cerdo.

When they went out to say goodbye to him at the entrance to
the hotel they saw the taxi driver emerge limping from the garage. His face was
unmarked and his clothes didn't seem to be wet.

"He probably cut a deal," said El Cerdo.

"A deal?"

"A deal with the doormen. Money," said El Cerdo,
"he must have given them money."

For a second, Pelletier and Espinoza imagined that El Cerdo
would leave in the taxi, which was parked a few feet away, across the street,
with an abandoned look about it, but El Cerdo nodded to one of the doormen, who
went to get his car.

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.

They drove into Santa Teresa from the south and the city
looked to them like an enormous camp of gypsies or refugees ready to pick up
and move at the slightest prompting. They took three rooms on the fourth floor
of the Hotel Mexico. The three rooms were the same, but they were full of small
distinguishing characteristics. In Espinoza's room there was a giant painting
of the desert, with a group of men on horseback to the left, dressed in beige
shirts, as if they were in the army or a riding club. In Norton's room there
were two mirrors instead of one. The first mirror was by the door, as it was in
the other rooms. The second was on the opposite wall, next to the window
overlooking the street, hung in such a way that if one stood in a certain spot,
the two mirrors reflected each other. In Pelletier's bathroom the toilet bowl
was missing a chunk. It wasn't visible at first glance, but when the toilet
seat was lifted, the missing piece suddenly leaped into sight, almost like a
bark. How the hell did no one notice this? wondered Pelletier. Norton had never
seen a toilet in such bad shape. Some eight inches were missing. Under the
white porcelain was a red substance, like brick wafers spread with plaster. The
missing piece was in the shape of a half-moon. It looked as if someone had
ripped it off with a hammer. Or as if someone had picked up another person who
was already on the floor and smashed that person's head against the toilet,
thought Norton.

The rector of the
University
of
Santa Teresa
had a pleasant, timid appearance. He was very tall, with lightly tanned skin,
as if every day he took long meditative walks in the country. He offered them
coffee and listened to their story with patience and feigned interest. Then he
gave them a tour of the university, pointing out the buildings and telling them
which departments were housed in each. When Pelletier, to change the subject,
talked about the light in
Sonora
, the rector
waxed poetic about sunsets in the desert and mentioned a few painters, with
names they didn't recognize, who had come to live in
Sonora
or nearby
Arizona
.

When they got back to his office he offered them more
coffee and asked where they were staying. When they told him he wrote down the
name of the hotel on a slip of paper that he tucked into the breast pocket of
his jacket, then he invited them to dinner at his house. They left soon
afterward. As they made their way from the rector's office to the parking lot
they saw a group of students of both sexes walking across a lawn just as the
sprinklers came on. The students screamed and scattered.

Before they went back to the hotel they took a drive around
the city. It made them laugh it seemed so chaotic. Until then they hadn't been
in good spirits. They had looked at things and listened to the people who could
help them, but only as part of a grander scheme. On the ride back to the hotel,
they lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although
hostile
wasn't
the word, an environment whose language they refused to recognize, an
environment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldn't make their
presence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless they
argued, something they had no intention of doing.

At the hotel they found a note from Augusto Guerra, the
dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters. The note was addressed to his
"colleagues" Espinoza, Pelletier, and Norton. Dear Colleagues, he had
written without a hint of irony. This made them laugh even more, although then
they were immediately sad, since the ridiculousness of "colleague"
somehow erected bridges of reinforced concrete between
Europe
and this drifters' retreat. It's like hearing a child cry, said Norton. In his
note, after wishing them a pleasant and enjoyable stay in his city, Augusto
Guerra talked about a certain Professor Amalfitano, "an expert on Benno
von Archimboldi," who would diligently present himself at the hotel that
very afternoon to help them as best he could. In a poetic turn of phrase, the flowery
closing compared the desert to a petrified garden.

They decided not to leave the hotel as they waited for the
Archimboldi expert. According to what they could see out the windows of the
bar, this was a decision shared by a group of American tourists who were
getting deliberately drunk on the terrace, which was decorated with some
surprising varieties of cactus, some almost ten feet tall. Every once in a
while one of the tourists would get up from the table and go over to the
railing draped in half-dead plants and glance out into the street.

Then, stumbling, he would return to his friends and after a
while they would all laugh, as if the one who had gotten up was telling them a
dirty and very funny joke. None of them was young, though none was old either.
They were a group of tourists in their forties and fifties who would probably
return to the
United States
that same day. Little by little the hotel terrace filled up, until there wasn't
a single empty table. As night began to creep in from the east, the first notes
of a Willie Nelson song sounded on the terrace speakers.

When one of the drunks recognized the song, he gave a shout
and rose to his feet. Espinoza, Pelletier, and Norton thought he was about to
start dancing, but instead he went over to the terrace railing and looked up
and down the street, craning his neck, then went calmly back to sit with his
wife and friends. These people are crazy, said Espinoza and Pelletier. But
Norton thought something strange was going on, on the street, on the terrace,
in the hotel rooms, even in Mexico City with those unreal taxi drivers and
doormen, unreal or at least logically ungraspable, and even in Europe something
strange had been happening, something she didn't understand, at the Paris
airport where the three of them had met, and maybe before, with Morini and his
refusal to accompany them, with that slightly repulsive young man they had met
in Toulouse, with Dieter Hellfeld and his sudden news about Archimboldi. And
something strange was going on even with Archimboldi and everything Archimboldi
had written about, and with Norton, unrecognizable to herself, if only
intermittently, who read and made notes on and interpreted Archimboldi's books.

Have you said the toilet in your room needs to be
fixed?" asked Espinoza.

"I did tell them to do something about it," said
Pelletier. "But at the desk they suggested I change rooms. They wanted to
put me on the third floor. So I told them I was fine, I planned to stay in
my
room and they could fix the toilet when I left. I'd rather we stick
together," said Pelletier with a smile.