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Pelletier was the first to show up at
Norton's apartment. He asked whether anything serious was wrong. Norton said
she'd rather discuss it when Espinoza got there, to keep from making the same
speech twice. As they had nothing else important to say, they began to talk
about the weather. Pelletier soon rebelled and changed the subject. Then Norton
started to talk about Archimboldi. This new subject of conversation almost did
Pelletier in. He thought again about the Serb, he thought again about that poor
writer, old and alone and possibly misanthropic (Archimboldi), he thought again
about the lost years of his own life before Norton had appeared.

Espinoza was late. Life is shit, thought Pelletier
in astonishment, all shit! - And then: if we hadn't teamed up, she would be
mine now. And then: if there hadn't been mutual understanding and friendship
and affinity and alliance, she would be mine now. And a little later: if there
hadn't been anything, I wouldn't even have met her. And: I might have met her,
since each of us has an independent interest in Archimboldi that doesn't spring
from our mutual friendship. And: it's possible, too, that she might have hated
me, found me pedantic, cold, arrogant, narcissistic, an intellectual elitist.
The term
intellectual elitist
amused
him. Espinoza was late. Norton seemed very calm. Actually, Pelletier seemed
very calm too, but that was far from how he felt.

Norton said there was nothing strange
about Espinoza's lateness. Planes get delayed, she said. Pelletier imagined
Espinoza's plane engulfed in flames, crashing onto a runway at the
Madrid
airport in a
screech of twisted steel.

"Maybe we should turn on the
television," he said.

Norton looked at him and smiled. I never
turn on the television, she said, smiling, surprised that Pelletier didn't
already know that. Of course, Pelletier did know it. But he hadn't had the
spirit to say: let's watch the news, let's see whether some plane wreck appears
on the
 
screen.

"Can I turn it on?" he asked.

"Of course," said Norton, and as
Pelletier bent over the knobs of the set, he saw her out of the corner of his
eye, luminous, so natural, making a cup of tea or moving from one room to
another, putting away a book that she had just shown him, answering the phone
and talking to someone who wasn't Espinoza.

He turned on the television. He clicked
through different channels. He saw a man with a beard dressed in cheap clothes.
He saw a group of blacks walking along a dirt track. He saw two men in suits
and ties talking slowly and deliberately, both with their legs crossed, both
glancing every so often at a map that appeared and disappeared behind their backs.
He saw a chubby woman saying: daughter . . . factory . . . meeting ... doctors
. . . inevitable, and then smiling a little and lowering her gaze. He saw the
face of a Belgian minister. He saw the smoldering remains of a plane next to a
runway, surrounded by ambulances and fire trucks. He shouted for Norton. She
was still talking on the phone.

Espinoza's plane has crashed, said
Pelletier, this time not raising his voice, and Norton, instead of looking at
the television screen, looked at him. It took her only a few seconds to realize
that the plane in flames wasn't a Spanish plane. In addition to the firemen and
rescue teams, passengers could be seen walking away, some limping, others
wrapped in blankets, their faces contorted in fear or shock, but apparently
unharmed.

Twenty minutes later, Espinoza arrived,
and during lunch Norton told him that Pelletier had thought he was in the plane
that went down. Espinoza laughed but gave Pelletier a strange look, which
Norton didn't notice, but Pelletier caught immediately. It was a sad meal, all
things considered, although Norton's behavior was perfectly normal, as if she
had run into the two of them by chance and hadn't expressly asked them to come
to
London
. They
guessed what she had to tell them before she said anything: Norton wanted to
end her romantic involvement with both of them, at least for the time being.
The reason she gave was that she needed to think and get her bearings. Then she
said she didn't want to stop being friends with either of them. She needed to
think, that was all.

Espinoza accepted Norton's explanation
without asking a single question. Pelletier would have liked to ask whether her
ex-husband had anything to do with her decision, but following Espinoza's
example, he kept quiet. After they ate they went out for a drive around
London
in Norton's car.
Pelletier insisted on sitting in back, until he saw a sarcastic flash in
Norton's eyes, and then he said he would sit anywhere, which happened to be the
backseat.

As she drove along

Cromwell Road

, Norton said that maybe
that night it would make most sense for her to sleep with both of them.
Espinoza laughed and said something meant to be funny, a continuation of the
joke, but Pelletier wasn't sure Norton was joking and he was even less sure he
was ready to participate in a
menage à
trois
. Then they went to watch the sun set near the Peter Pan statue in
Kensington
Gardens
. They sat on a bench by a giant
oak tree, Norton's favorite spot, a place she d been drawn to ever since she
was a child. At first there were people lying on the grass, but little by
little the area began to empty. Couples or elegantly dressed single women
passed briskly, toward the Serpentine Gallery or the Albert Memorial, and in
the opposite direction men with crumpled newspapers or mothers pushing baby
carriages headed toward

Bayswater
Road

.

 

As dusk fell, they watched a young
Spanish-speaking couple approach the Peter Pan statue. The woman had black hair
and was very pretty, and she reached out as if to touch Peter Pan's leg. The
man beside her was tall and had a beard and mustache and pulled a notepad out
of his pocket and jotted something down. Then he said out loud:

"
Kensington
Gardens
."

The woman wasn't looking at the statue
anymore but at the lake, or rather at something moving in the grass and weeds
that separated the little path from the lake.

"What's she looking at?" asked
Norton in German.

"It seems to be a snake," said
Espinoza.

"There aren't any snakes here!"
said Norton.

Then the woman called to the man: Rodrigo,
come see this, she said. The man seemed not to hear. He had put the little
notepad away in a pocket of his leather jacket and he was gazing silently at
the statue of Peter Pan. The woman bent down and something beneath the leaves
slithered toward the lake.

"It does actually seem to be a
snake," said Pelletier.

"That's what I thought," said
Espinoza.

Norton didn't answer but she stood to get
a better look.

That night Pelletier and Espinoza slept
for a few hours in Norton's sitting room. Although they had the sofa bed and
the rug at their disposal, they had difficulty dozing off. Pelletier tried to
talk, explain the plane wreck thing to Espinoza, but Espinoza said there was no
need for explanations, he understood everything.

At four in the morning, by common accord,
they turned on the light and started to read. Pelletier opened a book on the
work of Berthe Morisot, the first woman impressionist, but soon he felt like
hurling it against the wall. Espinoza, meanwhile, pulled Archimboldi's latest
novel,
The Head,
out of his bag and
started to go over the notes he had written in the margins, notes that were the
nucleus of an essay he planned to publish in the journal edited by Borchmeyer.

Espinoza's thesis, also espoused by
Pelletier, was that with this novel Archimboldi was drawing his literary
adventures to a close. After
The Head,
said
Espinoza, there'll be no new books on the market, an opinion that another
illustrious Archimboldian, Dieter Hellfeld, considered too risky, based as it
was on no more than the writer's age, and the same thing had been said when
Archimboldi came out with
Railroad
Perfection,
a few Berlin professors had even said it when
Bitzius
was published. At five in the
morning Pelletier took a shower, then made coffee. At six Espinoza was asleep
again but at six-thirty he woke in a foul mood. At a quarter to seven they
called a cab and straightened up the sitting room.

Espinoza wrote a goodbye note. Pelletier
glanced at it and after thinking for a few seconds, decided to leave another
note himself. Before they left he asked Espinoza whether he didn't want to
shower. I'll shower in
Madrid
,
Espinoza answered. The water is better there. True, said Pelletier, although
his reply struck him as stupid and appeasing. Then the two of them left without
making a sound and had breakfast at the airport, as they'd done so many times
before.

On the plane back to
Paris
, Pelletier began to think,
inexplicably, about the Berthe Morisot book he'd wanted to slam against the
wall the night before. Why? Pelletier asked himself. Was it that he didn't like
Berthe Morisot or something she stood for in some momentary way? Actually, he
liked Berthe Morisot. All at once it struck him that Norton hadn't bought the
book, that he'd been the one who traveled from Paris to London with the
gift-wrapped volume, that the first Berthe Morisot reproductions Norton had
ever seen were the ones in that book, with Pelletier next to her, massaging the
back of her neck and walking her through each painting. Did he regret having
given her the book now? No, of course not. Did the painter have anything to do
with their separation? The idea was ridiculous. Then why had he wanted to slam
the book against the wall? And more to the point: why was he thinking about
Berthe Morisot and the book and Norton's neck and not about the real
possibility of a
menage à trois
that
had hovered in Norton's apartment that night like a howling Indian witch doctor
without ever materializing?

On the plane back to Madrid, Espinoza,
unlike Pelletier, thought about the book he believed to be Archimboldi's last
novel, and how—if he was right, which he thought he was—there would be no more
novels by Archimboldi, and he thought about all that entailed, and about a
plane in flames and Pelletier's hidden desires (the son of a bitch could be oh
so modern, but only when it was to his advantage), and every once in a while he
looked out the window and glanced at the engines and dearly wished he was back
in Madrid.

For a while Pelletier and Espinoza didn't
call each other. Pelletier called Norton occasionally, although their
conversations were increasingly, how to put it, stilted, as if good manners
were the only thing sustaining their relationship, and he called Morini just as
frequently as ever, for with him nothing had changed.

It was the same for Espinoza, although it
took him a little longer to realize that Norton meant what she said. Naturally,
Morini noticed something wrong, but out of discretion or laziness, the awkward
and sometimes painful laziness that gripped him now and then, he preferred to
behave as if he hadn't noticed, for which Pelletier and Espinoza were grateful.

Even Borchmeyer, who in some ways feared
the tandem of Espinoza and Pelletier, noticed something new in the
correspondence he maintained with each, veiled insinuations, tiny retractions,
the faintest of doubts (all extremely eloquent, naturally, coming from them)
about the methodology they had previously shared.

Then came an assembly of Germanists in
Berlin
, a twentieth-century German literature congress in
Stuttgart
, a symposium on German literature in
Hamburg
, and a conference on the future of German
literature in
Mainz
.
Norton, Morini, Pelletier, and Espinoza attended the
Berlin
assembly, but for one reason or
another all four of them were able to meet only once, at breakfast, where they
were surrounded by other Germanists fighting doggedly over the butter and jam.
Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton attended the congress, and just as Pelletier
managed to speak to Norton alone (while Espinoza was exchanging views with Schwarz),
when it was Espinoza's turn to talk to Norton, Pelletier went off discreetly
with Dieter Hellfeld.

This time Norton noticed that her friends
were doing their best not to speak to each other, sometimes even avoiding each
other's company, which couldn't help affecting her since she felt in some way
responsible for the rift between them.

Only Espinoza and Morini attended the
symposium, and since they were in
Hamburg
anyway and killing time they went to visit the Bubis publishing house and paid
their compliments to Schnell, but they couldn't see Mrs. Bubis, for whom they'd
brought a bouquet of roses, since she was on a trip to
Moscow
. That woman, Schnell said to them, I
don't know where she gets her energy, and then he gave a pleased laugh that
Espinoza and Morini thought was a bit much. Before they left the publishing
house they gave the roses to Schnell.