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And even though Espinoza calmed himself
with the promise that he wouldn't take things any further, four days later,
once he was recovered, he called Norton and said he wanted to see her. Norton
asked whether he'd rather meet in
London
or
Madrid
. Espinoza said it
was up to her. Norton chose
Madrid
.
Espinoza felt like the happiest man in the world. Norton arrived Saturday
evening and left Sunday night. Espinoza drove her to El Escorial and then they
went to a flamenco show. He thought she seemed happy, and he was glad. Saturday
night they made love for three hours, after which Norton, instead of starting
to talk as she had before, said that she was exhausted and went to sleep. The
next day, after they showered, they made love again and left for El Escorial.
On the way back Espinoza asked her whether she'd seen Pelletier. Norton said
she had, that Jean-Claude had been in
London
.

"How is he?" asked Espinoza.

"Fine," said Norton. "I
told him about us."

Espinoza got nervous and concentrated on
the road.

"So what did he think?" he asked.

"That it's my business," said
Norton, "but sooner or later I'll have to choose."

Though he made no comment, Espinoza
admired Pelletier's attitude. There's a man who knows how to play fair, he
thought. Then Norton asked him how he felt about it.

"More or less the same," lied
Espinoza, without taking his eyes off the road.

For a while they were silent and then
Norton started to talk about her husband. This time the horror stories she told
didn't affect Espinoza in the slightest.

Pelletier called Espinoza that Sunday
night, just after Espinoza had dropped Norton off at the airport. He got
straight to the point. He said he knew Espinoza knew what was going on.
Espinoza said he appreciated the call, and whether Pelletier believed it or
not, he'd been planning to call him that very night and the only reason he
hadn't was because Pelletier had beaten him to it. Pelletier said he believed
him.

"So what do we do now?" asked
Espinoza.

"Leave it all in the hands of
fate," answered Pelletier.

Then they started to talk—and laughed
quite a bit—about a strange conference that had just been held in
Salonika
, to which only Morini had been invited.

In
Salonika
,
Morini had a mild attack. One morning he woke up in his hotel room and couldn't
see anything. He had gone blind. He panicked at first, but after a while he
managed to regain control. He lay in bed without moving, trying to go back to
sleep. He thought of pleasant things, trying out childhood scenes, a few films,
still shots of faces, but nothing worked. He sat up in bed and felt around for
his wheelchair. He unfolded it and swung into it with less effort than he had
expected. Then, very slowly, he tried to turn himself toward the room's only
window, a French door that opened onto a balcony with a view of bare, yellowish-brown
hills and an office building topped with a neon sign for a real estate company
advertising chalets in an area presumably near Salonika.

The development (which had yet to be
built) boasted the name Apollo Residences, and the night before, Morini had been
watching the sign from his balcony, a glass of whiskey in his hand, as it
blinked on and off. When he reached the window at last and managed to open it,
he felt dizzy, as if he were about to faint. First he thought about trying to
find the door to the hallway and maybe calling for help or letting himself fall
in the middle of the corridor. Then he decided that it would be best to go back
to bed. An hour later he was woken by the light coming in the open window and
by his own perspiration. He called the reception desk and asked whether there
were any messages for him. He was told there were none. He undressed in bed and
got back in the wheelchair sitting ready beside him. It took him half an hour
to shower and dress himself in clean clothes. Then he closed the window,
without looking out, and left the room for the conference.

The four of them met again at the
contemporary German literature symposium held in
Salzburg
in 1996. Espinoza and Pelletier
seemed very happy. Norton, on the other hand, was like an ice queen,
indifferent to the city's cultural offerings and beauty. Morini showed up
loaded with books and papers to grade, as if the
Salzburg
meeting had caught him at one of his
busiest moments.

All four were put up at the same hotel.
Morini and Norton were on the third floor, in rooms 305 and 311, respectively.
Espinoza was on the fifth floor, in room 509. And Pelletier was on the sixth
floor, in room 602. The hotel was literally overrun by a German orchestra and a
Russian choir, and there was a constant musical hubbub in the hallways and on
the stairs, sometimes louder and sometimes softer, as if the musicians never
stopped humming overtures or as if a mental (and musical) static had settled
over the hotel. Espinoza and Pelletier weren't bothered in the least by it, and
Morini seemed not to notice, but this was just the sort of thing, Norton
exclaimed, one of many others she wouldn't mention, that made
Salzburg
such a shithole.

Naturally, neither Pelletier nor Espinoza
visited Norton in her room a single time. Instead, the room that Espinoza
visited (once) was Pelletier's, and the room that Pelletier visited (twice) was
Espinoza's, the two of them as excited as children at the news spreading like
wildfire, like a nuclear conflagration, along the hallways and through the
symposium gatherings in
petit comité,
to
wit, that Archimboldi was a candidate for the Nobel that year, not only cause
for great joy among Archimboldians everywhere but also a triumph and a
vindication, so much so that in Salzburg, at the Red Bull beer hall, on a night
of many toasts, peace was declared between the two main factions of Archimboldi
scholars, that is, between Pelletier and Espinoza and Borchmeyer, Pohl, and
Schwarz, who from then on decided, with respect for each other's differences
and methods of interpretation, to pool their efforts and forswear sabotage,
which in practical terms meant that Pelletier would no longer veto the
publication of Schwarz's essays in the journals where he held sway, and Schwarz
would no longer veto the publication of Pelletier's studies in the journals
where he, Schwarz, was held in godlike esteem.

Morini, less excited than Pelletier and
Espinoza, was the first to point out that until now, at least as far as he
knew, Archimboldi had never received an important prize in Germany, no
booksellers' award, or critics' award, or readers' award, or publishers' award,
assuming there was such a thing, which meant that one might reasonably expect
that, knowing Archimboldi was up for the biggest prize in world literature, his
fellow Germans, even if only to play it safe, would offer him a national award
or a symbolic award or an honorary award or at least an hour-long television
interview, none of which happened, incensing the Archimboldians (united this
time), who, rather than being disheartened by the poor treatment that
Archimboldi continued to receive, redoubled their efforts, galvanized in their
frustration and spurred on by the injustice with which a civilized state was
treating not only—in their opinion—the best living writer in Germany, but the
best living writer in Europe, and this triggered an avalanche of literary and
even biographical studies of Archimboldi (about whom so little was known that
it might as well be nothing at all), which in turn drew more readers, most
captivated not by the German's work but by the life or nonlife of such a
singular figure, which in turn translated into a word-of-mouth movement that
increased sales considerably in Germany (a phenomenon not unrelated to the
presence of Dieter Hellfeld, the latest acquisition of the Schwarz, Borchmeyer,
and Pohl group), which in turn gave new impetus to the translations and the
reissues of the old translations, none of which made Archimboldi a bestseller
but did boost him, for two weeks, to ninth place on the bestseller list in
Italy, and to twelfth place in France, also for two weeks, and although it
never made the lists in Spain, a publishing house there bought the rights to
the few novels that still belonged to other Spanish publishers and the rights
to all of the writer's books that had yet to be translated into Spanish, and in
this way a kind of Archimboldi Library was begun, which wasn't a bad business.

In the
British Isles
,
it must be said, Archimboldi remained a decidedly marginal writer.

In these heady days, Pelletier happened on
a piece written by the Swabian whom they'd had the pleasure of meeting in
Amsterdam
. In the piece
the Swabian basically repeated what he'd already told them about Archimboldi's
visit to the Frisian town and the dinner afterward with the lady who had
traveled to
Buenos Aires
.
The piece was published in the
Reutlingen
Morning News
and differed from the Swabian's original account in that it
reproduced an exchange between the lady and Archimboldi, pitched in a key of sardonic
humor. The conversation began with her asking him where he was from.
Archimboldi replied that he was Prussian. The lady asked whether his was a
noble name, of the Prussian landed gentry. Archimboldi replied that it probably
was. Then the lady murmured the name Benno von Archimboldi, as if biting a gold
coin to test it. Immediately she said it didn't sound familiar and she
mentioned a few other names, to see whether Archimboldi recognized them. He
said he didn't, all he'd known of
Prussia
were its forests.

"And yet your name is of Italian
origin," said the lady.

"French," replied Archimboldi.
"It's Huguenot."

At this, the lady laughed. She had once
been very beautiful, said the Swabian. Even then, in the dim light of the
tavern, she looked beautiful, although when she laughed her false teeth slipped
and she had to adjust them with her hand. Still, the operation was not
ungraceful, as performed by her. The lady was so easy and natural with the
fishermen and peasants that she inspired only respect and affection. She had
been a widow for a long time. Sometimes she would go out riding on the dunes.
Other times she would wander down side roads buffeted by the wind off the
North Sea
.

When Pelletier discussed the Swabian's
article with his three friends one morning as they were having breakfast at the
hotel before going out into
Salzburg
,
opinions and interpretations varied considerably.

According to Espinoza and Pelletier, the
Swabian had probably been the lady's lover at the time when Archimboldi came to
give his reading. According to Norton, the Swabian had a different version of
events depending on his mood and his audience, and it was possible that he
himself didn't even remember anymore what was really said and what had really
happened on that momentous occasion. According to Morini, the Swabian was a
grotesque double of Archimboldi, his twin, the negative image of a developed
photograph that keeps looming larger, becoming more powerful, more oppressive,
without ever losing its link to the negative (which undergoes the reverse
process, gradually altered by time and fate), the two images somehow still the
same: both young men in the years of terror and barbarism under Hitler, both
World War II veterans, both writers, both citizens of a bankrupt nation, both poor
bastards adrift at the moment when they meet and (in their grotesque fashion)
recognize each other, Archimboldi as a struggling writer, the Swabian as
"cultural promoter" in a town where culture was hardly a serious
concern.

Was it even conceivable that the miserable
and (why not?) contemptible Swabian was really Archimboldi? It wasn't Morini
who asked this question, but Norton. And the answer was no, since the Swabian,
to begin with, was short and of delicate constitution, which didn't match
Archimboldi's physical description at all. Pelletier's and Espinoza's
explanation was much more plausible: the Swabian as the noble lady's lover,
even though she could have been his grandmother. The Swabian trudging each
afternoon to the house of the lady who had traveled to
Buenos Aires
, to fill his belly with
charcuterie and biscuits and cups of tea. The Swabian massaging the back of the
former cavalry captain's widow, as the rain lashed the windows, a sad Frisian
rain that made one want to weep, and although it didn't make the Swabian weep,
it made him pale, and he approached the nearest window, where he stood looking
out at what was beyond the curtains of frenzied rain, until the lady called
him,

peremptorily, and the Swabian turned his
back on the window, not knowing why he had gone to it, not knowing what he
hoped to see, and just at that moment, when there was no one at the window
anymore and only a little lamp of colored glass at the back of the room
flickering, it appeared.

So the days in Salzburg were generally
pleasant, and although Archimboldi didn't receive the Nobel Prize that year,
life for our four friends proceeded smoothly, flowing along on the placid river
of European university German departments, not without racking up one upset or
another that in the end simply added a dash of pepper, a dash of mustard, a
drizzle of vinegar to orderly lives, or lives that looked orderly from without,
although each of the four had his or her own cross to bear, like anyone, a
strange cross in Norton's case, ghostly and phosphorescent, for Norton made
frequent and rather tasteless references to her ex-husband as a lurking threat,
ascribed to him the vices and defects of a monster, a horribly violent monster
but one who never materialized, a monster all evocation and no action, although
with her words Norton managed to give substance to a being whom neither
Espinoza nor Pelletier had ever seen, as if her ex existed only in their
dreams, until Pelletier, sharper than Espinoza, understood that Norton's
unthinking diatribe, that endless list of grievances, was more than anything a
punishment inflicted on herself, perhaps for the shame of having fallen in love
with such a cretin and married him. Pelletier, of course, was wrong.