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"Maybe because he knew he was going to die and he wanted it
to be at home," said Popescu.

"Wherever we dug we found bones," said the crippled
captain. "The grounds were brimming with human bones. It was impossible to
dig a trench without finding little hand bones, an arm, a skull. What was that
place? What had happened there? And why did the madmen's cross, seen from the
distance, ripple like a flag?"

"An optical
illusion, surely," said Popescu.

"I don't
know," said the crippled captain. "I'm tired."

"That's
right, you're very tired, Captain, close your eyes," said Popescu, but the
captain's eyes had been closed for quite a while.

"I'm
tired," he repeated.

"You're among
friends," said Popescu.

"It's been a
long road."

Popescu nodded
silently.

The
door opened and two Hungarians came in. Popescu didn't even look at them. With
his thumb, index finger, and middle finger very near his mouth and nose, he was
keeping time to the Bach. The Hungarians stood watching and waiting for a sign.
The captain fell asleep. When the music stopped Popescu got up and tiptoed over
to the captain.

"Son
of a Turk and a whore," he said in Romanian, though his tone was more
thoughtful than brutal.

He
beckoned for the Hungarians to approach. One on each side, they lifted the
crippled captain and dragged him to the door. The captain began to snore more
forcefully and his prosthetic leg came off on the rug. The Hungarians dropped
him on the floor and tried in vain to screw it back on.

"You clumsy
oafs," said Popescu, "leave it to me."

In
a minute, as if he'd done nothing else his whole life, Popescu replaced the leg
and then, emboldened, he checked the prosthetic arm.

"Try
not to lose any parts along the way," he said.

"Not to worry,
boss," said one of the Hungarians.

"Do we take
him to the usual place?"

"No,"
said Popescu, "you'd better throw this one in the
Seine
.
And make sure he stays in!"

"Of course,
boss," said the Hungarian who had spoken before.

At
that moment the crippled captain opened his right eye and said in a hoarse
voice:

"The bones,
the cross, the bones."

The other Hungarian
gently lowered his eyelid.

"Don't
worry," said Popescu, laughing, "he's asleep."

Many years later, when his
fortune was more than considerable, Popescu fell in love with a Central
American actress, Asuncion Reyes, a woman of extraordinary beauty, whom he
married. Asuncion Reyes's career in European film (whether French or Italian or
Spanish) was brief, but the parties she gave and attended were literally
countless. One day Asuncion Reyes asked Popescu to do something for a country
in need, since he had so much money. At first he thought she meant
Romania
but then he realized she was talking
about
Honduras
.
So that year, at Christmas, he traveled with his wife to Tegucigalpa, a city
that to Popescu, an admirer of contrasts and the bizarre, seemed divided into
three clearly distinct groups or clans: the Indians and the sick, who made up
the majority of the population, and the so-called whites, actually mestizos,
who were the minority who wielded power.

All friendly and degenerate people, affected by the heat and diet
or lack of diet, people staring nightmare in the face.

Business opportunities existed, that he saw immediately, but the
Hondurans, even the Harvard-educated ones, had a natural tendency to theft, violent
theft if possible, so he did his best to give up his original idea. But
Asuncion Reyes was so insistent that on their second Christmas trip he
contacted the country's ecclesiastical leaders, the only leaders he trusted.
Once contact had been established and after he had talked to several bishops
and the archbishop of
Tegucigalpa
,
Popescu contemplated where to invest his capital, in what branch of the
economy. The only functioning, profitable sectors were already in the hands of
the Americans. One evening, however, at a gathering hosted by the president and
the president's wife, Asuncion Reyes had a brilliant idea. It simply occurred
to her that it would be nice if
Tegucigalpa
had
something like the
Paris
metro. Popescu, who was daunted by nothing, and was able to see profit in the
most outlandish ideas, looked the president of
Honduras
in the eye and said he
could build it. Everyone got excited about the project. Popescu set to work and
made money. More money was made by the president and some ministers and
secretaries. Nor did the church come out badly. There were opening ceremonies
for cement factories and contracts with French and American companies. The
preliminaries lasted for more than fifteen years. With Asuncion Reyes, Popescu
found happiness, but then he lost it and they were divorced. He forgot the
Tegucigalpa
metro. Death
surprised him in a
Paris
hospital, asleep on a bed of roses.

Archimboldi
had almost nothing to do with other German writers, in part because the hotels
where they stayed when they went abroad weren't the hotels where he stayed. But
he did get to know a distinguished French writer, an older writer whose
literary essays had brought him fame and recognition, who told him about a
house for the vanished writers of
Europe
, a
place of refuge. The Frenchman was a vanished writer himself, so he knew what
he was talking about, and Archimboldi agreed to visit the house.

They
arrived at night, in a dilapidated taxi driven by a man who talked to himself.
The driver repeated himself, swore, repeated himself again, got angry at
himself, until Archimboldi lost patience and told him to concentrate on his
driving and be quiet. The old essayist, who didn't seem bothered by the
driver's monologue, gave Archimboldi a look of mild reproach, as if he were
afraid that the driver—the only one in town, after all—might take offense.

The
house where the vanished writers lived was surrounded by trees and flowers in a
vast garden, with a pool flanked by white-painted wrought-iron tables and
umbrellas and lounge chairs. In the back, in the shadow of some
hundred-year-old oaks, there was a space to play petanque, and beyond that was
the forest. When they arrived, the vanished writers were in the dining room,
having supper and watching the news on TV. There were lots of them and almost
all of them were French, which surprised Archimboldi, who had never imagined
there were so many vanished writers in
France
. But what struck him most
was the great number of women. All were elderly, some dressed with care, even
elegantly, and others in an obvious state of neglect, probably poets, thought
Archimboldi, wearing dirty robes and slippers, kneesocks, no makeup, their gray
hair sometimes piled in wool caps that they must have knitted themselves.

The
tables were waited on, at least in theory, by two servers dressed in white, but
the dining room actually worked like a buffet with each writer carrying his own
tray and helping himself to whatever he liked. What do you think of our little
community
¹
? asked the essayist, laughing softly, because at that
moment, at the other end of the dining room, one of the writers had fallen down
in a faint or been struck down by an attack of something and the two servers
were trying to revive him. Archimboldi said it was too soon to tell. Then they
found an empty table and filled their plates with something that looked like
mashed potatoes and spinach, accompanied by a hard-boiled egg and
a
grilled
steak. To drink they poured themselves little glasses of a heavy,
earthy-tasting local wine.

At
the end of the dining room, next to the fallen writer, there were now a couple
of young men, both dressed in white, as well as the two servers and a circle of
five vanished writers who watched as their companion was revived. After they
ate, the essayist took Archimboldi to the front desk so he could be formally
admitted, but since no one was there to help them they went to the TV room,
where several vanished writers were drowsing in front of an announcer talking
about fashion and the love affairs of French movie and TV celebrities, many of
whom Archimboldi had never heard of before. Then the essayist showed him his
bedroom, an ascetic room with a single bed, a desk, a chair, a TV, a wardrobe,
a small refrigerator, and a bathroom with a shower.

The window looked out over the garden, which was still lit. A
scent of flowers and wet grass drifted into the room. In the distance he heard
a dog bark. The essayist, who had remained standing in the doorway as
Archimboldi examined the room, handed him the keys and assured him that here,
though he might not find happiness, which in any case didn't exist, he would
find peace and quiet. Then Archimboldi went down to the essayist's room, which
was on the first floor and looked like an exact copy of the room he'd been
assigned, not so much because of the furnishings and size, but because of the
bareness. Anyone would say, thought Archimboldi, that the essayist was another
new arrival. There were no books, no clothes strewn about, no wastepaper or
personal effects, nothing to differentiate it from his room except for an apple
on a white plate on the nightstand.

As if reading his thoughts, the essayist met his eyes. His
expression was perplexed. He knows what I'm thinking and now he thinks the same
thing and can't understand it, just as I can't understand it, thought
Archimboldi. Actually, the look on their faces was more a look of sadness than
perplexity. But there's the apple on the white plate, thought Archimboldi.

"That apple has a scent at night," said the essayist.
"When I turn out the light. It smells as strongly as Rimbaud's Voyelles.'
But everything collapses in the end," said the essayist. "Everything
collapses in pain. All eloquence springs from pain."

I understand, said Archimboldi, although he didn't understand at
all. Then they shook hands and the essayist closed the door. Since he wasn't
yet tired (Archimboldi didn't sleep much, although at times he could sleep for
sixteen hours straight), he took a walk around the different parts of the
house.

In
the TV room only three vanished writers were left, all fast asleep, and a man
on TV who was apparently about to be murdered. For a while Archimboldi watched
the movie, but then he got bored and went into the empty dining room and then
walked down several corridors until he came to a kind of gym or massage room,
where a young man in a white T-shirt and white pants was lifting weights as he
talked to an old man in pajamas, both of whom glanced at him when he came in
and then kept talking, as if he wasn't there. The weight lifter seemed to be an
employee and the old man in pajamas looked less like a vanished novelist than
like a justly forgotten novelist, the typical hard-luck bad French novelist,
most likely born at the wrong time.

When
he left the house by the back door, he found two old ladies sitting together on
a porch swing at one end of a lighted porch. One was talking in a sweet and
chirping voice, like the water of a brook that runs over a bed of flat stones,
and the other was silent, watching the dark forest that stretched beyond the
petanque courts. The one who was talking struck him as a lyric poet, full of
things to say that she hadn't been able to say in her poems, and the silent one
struck him as a distinguished novelist, tired of pointless sentences and
meaningless words. The first was dressed in youthful, even childish clothes.
The second was wearing a cheap bathrobe, sneakers, and jeans.

He
said good evening in French and the old ladies looked at him and smiled, as if
inviting him to sit down with them, and Archimboldi needed no urging.

"Is this your
first night at our house?" asked the youthful old lady.

Before
he could answer, the silent old lady said the weather was improving and soon
everyone would have to go about in shirtsleeves. Archimboldi said she was
right. The youthful old lady laughed, perhaps thinking about her wardrobe, and
then she asked what he did.

"I'm
a novelist," said Archimboldi.

"But you
aren't French," said the silent old lady.

"That's
right, I'm German."

"From
Bavaria
?"
the youthful old lady wanted to know. "I was in
Bavaria
once and I loved it. Everything is
so romantic," said the youthful old lady.

"No, I'm from
the north," said Archimboldi.

The
youthful old lady feigned a shudder.

"I've been to
Hanover
, too," she
said, "is that where you're from?"

"More or less," said
Archimboldi.

"The food
there is impossible," said the youthful old lady.

Later
Archimboldi inquired what they did and the youthful old lady told him she had
been a hairdresser in Rodez until she got married and then her husband and children
wouldn't let her keep working. The other said she had been a seamstress but she
hated to talk about her work. What strange women, thought Archimboldi. When he
left them he walked into the garden, moving farther and farther from the house,
where many of the lights were still on, as if another guest were expected.
Walking aimlessly, but enjoying the night and the country smells, he came to
the front entrance, a big wooden door that didn't latch tightly and that anyone
could force. To one side he discovered a sign he hadn't seen when he arrived
with the essayist. In small, dark letters, the sign Said
  
MERCIER
   
CLINIC.
   
REST
   
HOME — NEUROLOGICAL
   
CENTER.