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Morini thought that
afloat
was wrong, despite its maritime ring. In fact, as they ate
dessert he felt like weeping, or better yet, fainting, sliding gently out of
his chair with his eyes fixed on Norton's face, and never waking up. But now
Norton was telling a story about a painter, the first to settle in the
neighborhood.

He was a young man, thirty-three or so,
known on the scene but not what you'd call famous. The real reason he came was
because it was cheaper to rent a studio here than anywhere else. The
neighborhood was less lively in those days. There were still old workmen living
here on their pensions, but no young people or children. Women were notably
absent: they had either died or spent all day inside, never going out. There
was just one pub, as tumbledown as the rest of the neighborhood. In short, a
lonely, decrepit place. But it seemed this sparked the painter's imagination
and inspired him to work. He was a solitary kind of person, too. Or else just
comfortable being alone.

So the neighborhood didn't frighten him.
He fell in love with it, actually. He liked to come home at night and walk for
blocks and blocks without seeing anyone. He liked the color of the streetlamps
and the light that spilled over the fronts of the houses. The shadows that
moved as he moved. The ashen, sooty dawns. The men of few words who gathered in
the pub, where he became a regular. The pain, or the memory of pain, that here
was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The
knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into
emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or
less.

The point is, he set to work more eagerly
than ever. A year later he had a show at the Emma Waterson gallery, an
alternative space in Wapping, and it was an enormous success. He ushered in
something that would later be known as the
new
decadence
or
English animalism.
The
paintings in the inaugural show of this school were big, ten feet by seven, and
they portrayed the remains of the shipwreck of his neighborhood, awash in a
mingling of grays. It was as if painter and neighborhood had achieved total
symbiosis. As if, in other words, the painter were painting the neighborhood or
the neighborhood were painting the painter, in savage, gloomy strokes. The
paintings weren't bad. Still, the show wouldn't have been so successful or had
such an impact if not for the central painting, much smaller than the rest, the
masterpiece that years later led so many British artists down the path of new
decadence. This painting, viewed properly (although one could never be sure of
viewing it properly), was an ellipsis of self-portraits, sometimes a spiral of
self-portraits (depending on the angle from which it was seen), seven feet by
three and a half feet, in the center of which hung the painter's mummified
right hand.

It happened like this. One morning, after
two days of feverish work on the self-portraits, the painter cut off his
painting hand. He immediately applied a tourniquet to his arm and took the hand
to a taxidermist he knew, who'd already been informed of the nature of the
assignment. Then he went to the hospital, where they stanched the bleeding and
proceeded to suture his arm. At some point someone asked how the accident had
happened. He answered that he had cut off his hand with a machete blow while he
was working, by mistake. The doctors asked where the amputated hand was,
because there was always the possibility that it might be reattached. He said
he'd thrown it in the river on his way to the hospital, out of sheer rage and pain.

Although the prices were astronomical, the
show sold out. The masterpiece, it was said, went to an Arab who worked in the
City, as did four of the big paintings. Shortly thereafter, the painter went
mad and his wife (he was married by then) had no choice but to send him to a
convalescent home on the outskirts of
Lausanne
or Montreux.

He lives there to this day.

Other painters, meanwhile, began to move
into the neighborhood. Mostly because it was cheap, but also because they were
attracted by the legend of the man who had painted the most radical
self-portrait of our time. Then came the architects, then some families who
bought houses that had been renovated and remodeled. Then came the boutiques,
the black-box theaters, the cutting-edge restaurants, until it was one of the
trendiest neighborhoods in
London
,
nowhere near as cheap as it was reputed to be.

"What do you think of that
story?"

I don't know what to think," said
Morini. The urge to weep—or else, faint—persisted, but he restrained it.

They had tea at Norton's apartment. Only
then did she begin to talk about Espinoza and Pelletier, but casually, as if
the matter was too familiar to be worthy of interest or discussion with Morini
(whom she had noticed was upset, although she was careful not to pry, knowing
there was rarely anything soothing about being pestered with questions), and
not even something she cared to discuss herself.

It was a very pleasant afternoon. From his
armchair, Morini admired Norton's sitting room—her books and her framed prints
hanging on white walls, her mysterious photographs and souvenirs, her
preferences expressed in things as simple as the choice of furniture, which was
tasteful, comfortable, and modest, and even in the sliver of tree-lined street
that she surely saw each morning before she left the apartment—and he began to
feel good, as if he were swaddled in these various manifestations of his
friend, as if they were also an expression of affirmation, the words of which
he might not understand but that brought him comfort nevertheless.

Shortly before he left, he asked the name
of the painter whose story he'd just heard and whether there'd been a catalog
for that terrible show. His name is Edwin Johns, said Norton. Then she got up
and searched one of the bookcases. She found a large catalog and handed it to
Morini. Before he opened it he asked himself whether it was a good idea to
insist on this, precisely now that he was so relaxed. But if I don't do it I'll
die, he told himself, and he opened the catalog, which more than a catalog was
an art book that covered or tried to cover the trajectory of Johns's career.
There was a photograph of Johns on the first page, from before his
self-mutilation, which showed a young man of about twenty-five looking straight
at the camera and smiling a half smile that might be shy or mocking. His hair
was dark and straight.

"It's a gift," he heard Norton
say.

"Thank you," he heard himself
answer.

An hour later they left together for the
airport, and an hour after that Morini was on his way back to
Italy
.

Around this time, a previously
insignificant Serbian critic, a German professor at the University of Belgrade,
published a strange article in the journal overseen by Pelletier, an article
reminiscent in a certain sense of the minuscule findings on the Marquis de Sade
published many years ago by a French critic, which comprised the facsimile
reproduction of loose papers testifying vaguely to the Marquis's visit to a
laundry, an aide-memoire of his relations with a certain theater impresario, a
doctor's bill complete with medicines prescribed, an order for a doublet
specifying buttonwork and color, etc., all of it accompanied by lengthy notes
from which only a single conclusion could be drawn: Sade had existed, Sade had
washed his clothes and bought new clothes and maintained a correspondence with
beings now definitively wiped from the slate of time.

The Serb's text was very similar. In this
case, the person traced was Archimboldi, not Sade, and the article consisted of
a painstaking and often frustrating investigation that began in
Germany
, continued through
France
,
Switzerland
,
Italy
,
Greece
, returned to
Italy
,
and ended at a travel agency in
Palermo
, where
it seemed Archimboldi had bought a plane ticket to
Morocco
. An old man, a German, said
the Serbian. The words
old man
and
German
he waved like magic wands to
uncover a secret, and at the same time they supplied the stamp of ultraconcrete
critical literature, a nonspeculative literature free of ideas, assertions,
denials, doubts, free of any intent to serve as guide, neither pro nor con,
just an eye seeking out the tangible elements, not judging them but simply
displaying them coldly, archaeology of the facsimile, and, by the same token,
of the photocopier.

To Pelletier it seemed an odd text. Before
he published it, he sent copies to Espinoza, Morini, and Norton. Espinoza said
it could lead somewhere, and even though researching and writing that way might
seem like drudge work, like the lowest of menial tasks, he thought, and said,
that it was good to have a place in the Archimboldian project for these
single-minded fanatics. Norton said she'd always had the feeling (feminine
intuition) that sooner or later Archimboldi would show up somewhere in the
Maghreb, and that the only part of the Serb's paper that was worth anything was
the ticket in the name of Benno von Archimboldi, bought a week before the
Italian plane was scheduled to depart ror Rabat. From now on we can imagine him
lost in a cave in the
Atlas Mountains
, she
said. Morini held his tongue.

Here we should clarify in the interest of
properly (or improperly) understanding the Serb's text. A reservation was
indeed made in the name of Benno von Archimboldi. And yet, that reservation was
never confirmed and at the departure time no Benno von Archimboldi appeared at
the airport. By the Serb's lights, the matter couldn't be clearer. Archimboldi
had doubtless made the reservation himself. We can imagine him at his hotel,
likely upset about something or other, maybe drunk, perhaps even half asleep,
at that abyss like hour (with its ineffably nauseating scent) when momentous
decisions are made, speaking to the girl at Alitalia and mistakenly giving her
his pen name instead of booking the seat under the name on his passport, an
error that later, the next day, he would rectify by going in person to the
airline office and buying a ticket in his own name. This explained the absence
of an Archimboldi on the flight to
Morocco
. Of course, there were
other possibilities: at the last minute, after having second (or fourth)
thoughts, Archimboldi may have decided not to take the trip, or to travel
somewhere else instead, say the
United
States
, or maybe it was all simply a joke or
misunderstanding.

The Serb's text contained a physical
description of Archimboldi. This description was plainly based on the Swabian's
account. Of course, in the Swabian's account Archimboldi was a young postwar
writer. All the Serbian had done was age him, turning that same young man, who
had traveled with his single published book to Friesland in 1949, into an old
man, seventy-five or eighty, who now had a substantial oeuvre behind him but
the same attributes more or less, as if Archimboldi, unlike most people, hadn't
changed and were still the same person. To judge by his work, our writer is
unquestionably a stubborn man, said the Serb, he's stubborn as a mule, as a
pachyderm, and if during the saddest stretch of a Sicilian afternoon he hatched
a plan to travel to Morocco, no matter that he made the reservation under the
name Archimboldi by mistake, instead of his legal name, there's no reason to
think he might not have changed his mind the very next day and gone personally
to the travel agency to buy the ticket, this time under his legal name and with
his legal passport, and that he didn't set off, like any of the thousands of
old men, German bachelors, who each day cross the skies alone heading for any
of the countries of North Africa.

Old and alone, thought Pelletier. Just one
of thousands of old men on their own. Like the
machine celibataire.
Like the bachelor who suddenly grows old, or
like the bachelor who, when he returns from a trip at light speed, finds the
other bachelors grown old or turned into pillars of salt.

Thousands, hundreds of thousands of
machines celibataires
crossing an amniotic
sea each day, on Alitalia, eating
spaghetti
al pomodoro
and drinking Chianti or grappa, their eyes half closed,
positive that the paradise of retirees isn't in Italy (or, therefore, anywhere
in Europe), bachelors flying to the hectic airports of Africa or America,
burial ground of elephants. The great cemeteries at light speed. I don't know
why I'm thinking this, thought Pelletier. Spots on the wall and spots on the
skin, thought Pelletier, looking at his hands. Fuck the Serb.

In the end, after the article came out,
Espinoza and Pelletier were forced to recognize flaws in the Serb's approach.
There had to be research, literary criticism, interpretive essays, even
informational pamphlets if required, but not this hybrid between science
fiction and half-finished
roman noir,
said
Espinoza, and Pelletier was in complete agreement.

Around this time, at the beginning of
1997, Norton felt a desire for change. To get away. To visit
Ireland
or
New York
. To distance herself abruptly from
Espinoza and Pelletier. She summoned them both to
London
. Pelletier had a feeling that nothing
serious would happen, nothing irrevocable at least, and he arrived calm, ready
to listen and say little. By contrast, Espinoza feared the worst (that Norton
had summoned them to tell them she preferred Pelletier, but also to assure him
that they'd still be friends, maybe even to ask if he'd give her away at her
approaching wedding).