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Espinoza experienced something similar,
though slightly different in two respects. First, the need to be near Liz
Norton struck some time before he got back to his apartment in
Madrid
. By the time he
was on the plane he'd realized that she was the perfect woman, the one he'd
always hoped to find, and he began to suffer. Second, among the ideal images of
Norton that passed at supersonic speed through his head as the plane flew
toward
Spain
at four hundred miles an hour, there were more sex scenes than Pelletier had
imagined. Not many more, but more.

Meanwhile, Morini, who traveled by train
from Avignon to Turin, spent the trip reading the cultural supplement of
II Manifesto,
and then he slept until a
couple of ticket collectors (who would help him onto the platform in his
wheelchair) let him know that they'd arrived.

As for what passed through Liz Norton's
head, it's better not to say. Still, the friendship of the four Archimboldians
continued in the same fashion as ever, unshakable, shaped by a greater force
that the four didn't resist, even though it meant relegating their personal
desires to the background.

In 1995 they met at a panel discussion on
contemporary German literature held in Amsterdam, a discussion within the
framework of larger discussion that was taking place in the same building
(although separate lecture halls), encompassing French, English, and Italian
literature.

It goes without saying that most of the
attendees of these curious discussions gravitated toward the hall where
contemporary English literature was being discussed, next door to the German
literature hall and separated from it by a wall that was clearly not made of
stone, as walls used to be, but of fragile bricks covered with a thin layer of
plaster, so that the shouts, howls, and especially the applause sparked by
English literature could be heard in the German literature room as if the two
talks or dialogues were one, or as if the Germans were being mocked, when not drowned
out, by the English, not to mention by the massive audience attending the
English (or Anglo-Indian) discussion, notably larger than the sparse and
earnest audience attending the German discussion. Which in the final analysis
was a good thing, because it's common knowledge that a conversation involving
only a few people, with everyone listening to everyone else and taking time to
think and not shouting, tends to be more productive or at least more relaxed
than a mass conversation, which runs the permanent risk of becoming a rally,
or, because of the necessary brevity of the speeches, a series of slogans that
fade as soon as they're put into words.

But before coming to the crux of the
matter, or of the discussion, a rather petty detail that nonetheless affected
the course of events must be noted. On a last-minute whim, the organizers—the
same people who'd left out contemporary Spanish and Polish and Swedish
literature for lack of time or money—earmarked most of the funds to provide
luxurious accommodations for the stars of English literature, and with the
money left over they brought in three French novelists, an Italian poet, an
Italian short story writer, and three German writers, the first two of them
novelists from West and East Berlin, now reunified, both vaguely renowned (and
both of whom arrived in Amsterdam by train and made no complaint when they were
put up at a three-star hotel), and the third a rather shadowy figure about whom
no one knew anything, not even Morini, who, presenter or not, knew quite a bit
about contemporary German literature.

And when the shadowy writer, who was
Swabian, began to reminisce during his talk (or discussion) about his stint as
a journalist, as an editor of arts pages, as an interviewer of all kinds of
writers and artists wary of interviews, and then began to recall the era in
which he had served as cultural promoter in towns that were far-flung or simply
forgotten but interested in culture, suddenly, out of the blue, Archimboldi's
name cropped up (maybe prompted by the previous talk led by Espinoza and
Pelletier), since the Swabian, as it happened, had met Archimboldi while he was
cultural promoter for a Frisian town, north of Wilhelmshaven, facing the Black
Sea coast and the East Frisian islands, a place where it was cold, very cold,
and even wetter than it was cold, with a salty wetness that got into the bones,
and there were only two ways of making it through the winter, one, drinking
until you got cirrhosis, and two, listening to music (usually amateur string
quartets) in the town hall auditorium or talking to writers who came from
elsewhere and who were given very little, a room at the only boardinghouse in
town and a few marks to cover the return trip by train, those trains so unlike
German trains today, but on which the people were perhaps more talkative, more
polite, more interested in their neighbors, but anyway, writers who, after
being paid and subtracting transportation costs, left these places and went
home (which was sometimes just a room in Frankfurt or Cologne) with a little
money and possibly a few books sold, in the case of those writers or poets
(especially poets) who, after reading a few pages and answering the
townspeople's questions, would set up a table and make a few extra marks, a
fairly profitable activity back then, because if the audience liked what the
writer had read, or if the reading moved them or entertained them or made them
think, then they would buy one of his books, sometimes to keep as a souvenir of
a pleasant evening, as the wind whistled along the narrow streets of the
Frisian town, cutting into the flesh it was so cold, sometimes to read or
reread a poem or story, back at home now, weeks after the event, maybe by the
light of an oil lamp because there wasn't always electricity, of course, since
the war had just ended and there were still gaping wounds, social and economic,
anyway, more or less the same as a literary reading today, with the exception
that the books displayed on the table were self-published and now it's the
publishing houses that set up the table, and one of these writers who came to
the town where the Swabian was cultural promoter was Benno von Archimboldi, a
writer of the stature of Gustav Heller or Rainer Kuhl or Wilhelm Frayn (writers
whom Morini would later look up in his encyclopedia of German authors, without
success), and he didn't bring books, and he read two chapters from a novel in
progress, his second novel, the first, remembered the Swabian, had been
published in Hamburg that year, although he didn't read anything from it, but
that first novel did exist, said the Swabian, and Archimboldi, as if
anticipating doubts, had brought a copy with him, a little novel about one
hundred pages long, maybe longer, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and
twenty-five pages, and he carried the novel in his jacket pocket, and,
 
strangely,
 
the
 
Swabian remembered
Archimboldi's jacket more clearly than the novel crammed into its pocket, a
little novel with a dirty, creased cover that had once been deep ivory or a
pale wheat color or gold shading into invisibility, but now was colorless and
dull, just the title of the novel and the author's name and the colophon of the
publishing house, whereas the jacket was unforgettable, a black leather jacket
with a high collar, providing excellent protection against the snow and rain
and cold, loose fitting, so it could be worn over heavy sweaters or two
sweaters without anyone noticing, with horizontal pockets on each side, and a
row of four buttons, neither very large nor very small, sewn on with something
like fishing line, a jacket that brought to mind, why I don't know, the jackets
worn by some Gestapo officers, although back then black leather jackets were in
fashion and anyone who had the money to buy one or had inherited one wore it without
stopping to think about what it suggested, and the writer who had come to that
Frisian town was Benno von Archimboldi, the young Benno von Archimboldi,
twenty-nine or thirty years old, and it had been he, the Swabian, who had gone
to wait for him at the train station and who had accompanied him to the
boardinghouse, talking about the weather, which was bad, and then had brought
him to city hall, where Archimboldi hadn't set up any table and had read two
chapters from a novel that wasn't finished yet, and then the Swabian had gone
to dinner with him at the local tavern, along with the teacher and a widow who
preferred music or painting to literature, but who, once resigned to not having
music or painting, was in no way averse to a literary evening, and it was she
who somehow or other kept up the conversation during dinner (sausages and
potatoes and beer: neither the times, recalled the Swabian, nor the town's
budget allowed for anything more extravagant), although it might be truer to
say that she steered it with a
firm
hand on the rudder, and the men who were around the table, the mayor's
secretary, a man in the salted fish business, an old schoolteacher who kept
falling asleep even with his fork in his hand, and a town employee, a very nice
boy named Fritz who was a good friend of the Swabian's, nodded or were careful
not to contradict the redoubtable widow whose knowledge of the arts was much
greater than anyone else's, even the Swabian's, and who had traveled in Italy
and France and had even, on one of her voyages, an unforgettable ocean
crossing, gone as far as Buenos Aires, in 1927 or 1928, when the city was a
meat emporium and the refrigerator ships left port laden with meat, a sight to
see, hundreds of ships arriving empty and leaving laden with tons of meat
headed all over the world, and when she, the lady, went out on deck, say at
night, half asleep or seasick or ailing, all she had to do was lean on the rail
and let her eyes grow accustomed to the dark and then the view of the port was
startling and it instantly cleared away any vestiges of sleep or seasickness or
other ailments, the nervous system having no choice but to surrender
unconditionally to such a picture, the parade of immigrants like ants loading
the flesh of thousands of dead cattle into the ships' holds, the movements of
pallets piled with the meat of thousands of sacrificed calves, and the gauzy
tint that shaded every corner of the port from dawn until dusk and even during
the night shifts, the red of barely cooked steak, of T-bones, of filet, of ribs
grilled rare, terrible, thank goodness the lady, who wasn't a widow at the
time, had to see it only the first night, then they disembarked and took rooms
at one of the most expensive hotels in Buenos Aires, and they went to the opera
and then to a ranch where her husband, an expert horseman, agreed to race with
the rancher's son, who lost, and then with a ranch hand, the son's right-hand
man, a gaucho, who also lost, and then with the gaucho's son, a little
sixteen-year-old gaucho, thin as a reed and with bright eyes, so bright that
when the lady looked at him he lowered his head and then lifted it a little and
gave her such a wicked look that she was offended, what an insolent urchin,
while her husband laughed and said in German: you've made quite an impression
on the boy, a joke the lady didn't find the least bit funny, and then the
little gaucho mounted his horse and they set off, the boy could really gallop,
he clung to the horse so tightly it was as if he were glued to its neck, and he
sweated and thrashed it with his whip, but in the end her husband won the race,
he hadn't been captain of a cavalry regiment for nothing, and the rancher and
the rancher's son got up from their seats and clapped, good losers, and the
rest of the guests clapped too, excellent rider, this German, extraordinary
rider, although when the little gaucho reached the finish line, or in other
words the porch, he didn't look like a good loser, a dark, angry expression on
his face, his head down, and while the men, speaking French, scattered along
the porch in search of glasses of ice-cold champagne, the lady went up to the
little gaucho, who was left standing alone, holding his horse's reins in his
left hand (at the other end of the long yard the little gaucho's father headed
off toward the stables with the horse the German had ridden), and told him, in
an incomprehensible language, not to be sad, that he had ridden an excellent
race but her husband was good too and more experienced, words that to the
little gaucho sounded like the moon, like the passage of clouds across the
moon, like a slow storm, and then the little gaucho looked up at the lady with
the eyes of a bird of prey, ready to plunge a knife into her at the navel and
slice up to the breasts, cutting her wide open, his eyes shining with a strange
intensity, like the eyes of a clumsy young butcher, as the lady recalled, which
didn't stop her from following him without protest when he took her by the hand
and led her to the other side of the house, to a place where a wrought-iron
pergola stood, bordered by flowers and trees that the lady had never seen in
her life or which at that moment she thought she had never seen in her life,
and she even saw a fountain in the park, a stone fountain, in the center of
which, balanced on one little foot, a Creole cherub with smiling features
danced, part European and part cannibal, perpetually bathed by three jets of
water that spouted at its feet, a fountain sculpted from a single piece of
black marble, a fountain that the lady and the little gaucho admired at length,
until a distant cousin of the rancher appeared (or a mistress whom the rancher
had lost in the deep folds of memory), telling her in brusque and serviceable
English that her husband had been looking for her for some time, and then the
lady walked out of the enchanted park on the distant cousin's arm, and the
little gaucho called to her, or so she thought, and when she turned he spoke a
few hissing words, and the lady stroked his head and asked the cousin what the
little gaucho had said, her fingers lost in the thick curls of his hair, and
the cousin seemed to hesitate for a moment, but the lady, who wouldn't tolerate
lies or half-truths, demanded an immediate, direct translation, and the cousin
said: he says . . . he says the boss . . . arranged it so your husband would
win the last two races, and then the cousin was quiet and the little gaucho
went off toward the other end of the park, dragging on his horse's reins, and
the lady rejoined the party but she couldn't stop thinking about what the
little gaucho had confessed at the last moment, the sainted lamb, and no matter
how much she thought, his words were still a riddle, a riddle that lasted the
rest of the party, and tormented her as she tossed and turned in bed, unable to
sleep, and made her listless the next day during a long horseback ride and
barbecue, and followed her back to Buenos Aires and all through the days she
was at the hotel or went out to receptions at the German embassy or the English
embassy or the Ecuadorean embassy, and was solved only days after her ship set
sail for Europe, one night, at four in the morning, when the lady went out to
stroll the deck, not knowing or caring what parallel or longitude they were at,
surrounded or partially surrounded by forty-one million square miles of salt
water, just then, as the lady lit a
cigarette
on the first-class passengers' first deck, with her eyes fixed on the expanse
of ocean that she couldn't see but could hear, the riddle was miraculously
solved, and it was then, at that point in the story, said the Swabian, that the
lady, the once rich and powerful and intelligent (in her fashion, at least)
Frisian lady, fell silent, and a religious, or worse, superstitious hush fell
over that sad postwar German tavern, where everyone began to feel more and more
uncomfortable and hurried to mop up what was left of their sausage and potatoes
and swallow the last drops of beer from their mugs, as if they were afraid that
at any moment the lady would begin to howl like a Fury and they judged it wise
to prepare themselves to face the cold journey home with full stomachs.