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Without
surprise he understood at once that the essayist had brought him to a mental
asylum. After a while he returned to the house and went up the stairs to his
room, where he retrieved his suitcase and laptop. Before he left he wanted to
see the essayist. After he knocked and received no reply, he entered the room.

The essayist was fast asleep, with all the lights off, although
light from the front door came in the window, through the parted curtains. The
bedclothes were hardly rumpled. The essayist looked like a cigarette covered
with a handkerchief. He's so old, thought Archimboldi. Then he left without a
sound and as he crossed the garden again he thought he saw a man in white
running full speed along one side of the property and ducking behind tree
trunks on the edge of the forest.

Only when he was out of the clinic, on the road, did he slow down
and try to catch his breath. The road, a dirt road, ran through woods and
gentle hills. Every so often a gust of wind made the tree branches sway and
ruffled his hair. The wind was warm. At one point he crossed a bridge. When he
got to the edge of town the dogs began to bark. Near the square in front of the
station he spotted the taxi that had brought him to the clinic. The driver
wasn't there, but when Archimboldi passed the car he saw a shape in the
backseat that moved and sometimes cried out. The doors of the station were
open, but the ticket windows hadn't opened to the public yet. Sitting on a
bench he saw three North Africans talking and drinking wine. They exchanged
nods and then Archimboldi went out to the tracks. There were two trains stopped
by some sheds.

When
he went back into the waiting room one of the North Africans was gone. He sat
at the opposite end of the room and waited for the ticket windows to open. Then
he bought a ticket on the first train out of town.

Archimboldi's
sex life was limited to his dealings with whores in the different cities where
he lived. Some whores didn't charge him. They charged him at first, but later,
when Archimboldi began to form part of the landscape, they stopped, or they
didn't always charge him, which often led to misunderstandings that were
violently resolved.

During
all those years the only person with whom Archimboldi maintained more or less
permanent ties was the Baroness Von Zumpe. Generally their contact was
epistolary, although sometimes the baroness made an appearance in the cities
and towns where Archimboldi was living and they went for long walks, arm in arm
like two ex-lovers who no longer have many secrets to tell. Then Archimboldi
accompanied the baroness to her hotel, the best the city or town had to offer,
and they parted with a kiss on the cheek, or, if the day had been particularly
melancholy, with an embrace. The next morning the baroness would leave first
thing, long before Archimboldi got up and came in search of her.

In their letters, things were
different. The baroness talked about sex, which she practiced until a very
advanced age, about increasingly pathetic or despicable lovers, about parties
at which she enjoyed herself as much as she had when she was eighteen, about
people Archimboldi had never heard of, although according to the baroness they
were household names in
Germany
and
Europe
. Of course, Archimboldi didn't
watch TV, or listen to the radio, or read the papers. He heard about the fall
of the Berlin Wall thanks to a letter from the baroness, who was in
Berlin
that night.
Sometimes, in an access of sentimentalism, the baroness asked him to come back
to
Germany
.
I have come back, Archimboldi answered. I'd like you to come back for good,
answered the baroness. Stay for longer. Now you're famous. A press conference
wouldn't hurt. Though perhaps that might be too much for you. But at least an
exclusive interview with some top cultural reporter. Only in my worst
nightmares, Archimboldi wrote her.

Occasionally they talked about
saints, because the baroness, like some women with intense sex lives, had a
mystical streak, although hers was relatively benign and was satisfied
aesthetically or through her collector's enthusiasm for medieval altarpieces
and carvings. They talked about Edward the Confessor, who died in 1066 and gave
his royal ring as alms to
Saint John
the
Evangelist himself, who naturally returned it to him years later by way of a
pilgrim from the
Holy Land
. They talked about
Pelagia or Pelaya, an Antiochene actress who, in her apprenticeship to Christ,
changed her name several times and passed as a man and assumed countless
identities, as if in a fit of lucidity or madness she had decided that her
theater was the whole
Mediterranean
and her
single, labyrinthine performance was Christianity.

With the years, the baroness's writing—she always wrote by hand—
grew shakier. Sometimes her letters were indecipherable. Archimboldi could make
out only a few words. Prizes, honors, awards, candidacies. Prizes for whom, for
him, for the baroness? Surely for him, since in her own way the baroness was
extremely modest. He could also decipher: work, printings, the lights at the
publishing house, which were the lights of
Hamburg
, when everyone had gone and only she
and her secretary were left, and her secretary helped her down the stairs to
the street where a car like a hearse awaited her. But the baroness always
recovered and after these near-death letters he received postcards from Jamaica
or Indonesia, in which the baroness, in a steadier hand, asked whether he'd
ever been to America or Asia, knowing very well that Archimboldi had never left
the Mediterranean.

Occasionally a long time passed between letters. If Archimboldi
moved, as he often did, he sent her his new address. Sometimes, at night, he
woke abruptly, thinking about death, but in his letters he avoided mentioning
it. The baroness, however, perhaps because she was older, often talked about
death, about the dead people she'd known, the dead people she'd loved and who
were now just a heap of bones or ashes, about the dead children she'd never
known and would so greatly have liked to know and rock in her arms and raise.
At moments like these one might have thought she was going mad, but Archimboldi
knew that she always maintained her equilibrium and was frank and honest. In
fact, the baroness hardly ever told a lie. Everything was an open book from the
time she visited her family's country estate, raising a cloud of dust along the
dirt road, with her friends, the golden youth of Berlin, ignorant and proud,
whom Archimboldi watched from the distance, from a window of the house, as they
got out of their cars, laughing.

At
some moment, remembering those days, he asked whether she'd ever had news of
her cousin Hugo Halder. The baroness said she hadn't, that after the war Hugo
Halder was never heard of again, and for a while, maybe just a few hours,
Archimboldi toyed with the idea that he himself was really Hugo Halder. Another
time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never
bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read
"difficult" or "dark" novels like the ones he wrote. With
the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy
the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines. When
Archimboldi wanted to know why she kept publishing him if she didn't read him,
which was really a rhetorical question since he knew the answer, the baroness
replied (a) because she knew he was good, (b) because Bubis had told her to,
(c) because few publishers actually read the books they published.

At
this point it must be said that upon Bubis's death very few believed the
baroness would remain at the head of the publishing house. They expected she
would sell the business and devote herself to her lovers and her travels, which
were her most famous interests. But the baroness took the reins of the
publishing house and there wasn't the slightest dip in quality, because she
knew how to surround herself with good readers and also because in purely
business matters she showed an aptitude that no one had glimpsed before. In a
word: Bubis's business continued to grow. Sometimes, half in jest and half
seriously, the baroness told Archimboldi that if he were younger she would name
him her heir.

When the baroness turned
eighty, this very question was asked of her in
Hamburg
literary circles. Who would take
charge of Bubis's publishing house after her death? Who would be named her
official heir? Had the baroness made a will? To whom would she leave Bubis's
fortune? There were no relatives. The baroness was the last Von Zumpe. On
Bubis's side, not counting his first wife, who had died in
England
, the rest of his family had
disappeared in the concentration camps. Neither Bubis nor the baroness had
children. There were no siblings or cousins (except Hugo Halder, who was
probably dead by now). There were no nieces or nephews (unless Hugo Halder had
had a child). It was said that the baroness planned to leave everything, except
the publishing house, to
charity, and that some picturesque NGO representatives
visited her office as one might visit the
Vatican
or the Deutsche Bank. There
were plenty of candidates to succeed the baroness. The most frequently
mentioned was a young man of twenty-five who had a face like Mann's Tadzio and
the body of a swimmer, a poet and an assistant professor at
Gottingen
, whom the baroness had assigned to
head the house's poetry list. But everything, in the end, remained in the
nebulous realm of rumors.

"I'll never die," the baroness said once to
Archimboldi. "Or I'll die at ninety-five, which is the same as never
dying."

The last time they saw each other was in a ghostly Italian city.
The Baroness Von Zumpe wore a white hat and used a cane. She talked about the
Nobel Prize and she also complained bitterly about vanished writers, a custom
or habit or joke that she believed to be more American than European.
Archimboldi was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and he listened to her carefully,
because he was going deaf, and he laughed.

And
at last we come to Archimboldi's sister, Lotte Reiter.

Lotte was born in 1930 and she was blond and had blue eyes, like
her brother, but she didn't grow as tall as him. When Archimboldi went away to
war, Lotte was nine and what she most wished for was that he would be given
leave and come home covered in medals. Sometimes she heard him in her dreams.
The footsteps of a giant. Big feet shod in even bigger Wehrmacht boots, so big
they had to be made especially for him, striding along with no regard for
puddles or brambles, making a beeline for the house where she and her parents
slept.

When she woke up she felt so sad she had to do her best not to
cry. Other times she dreamed that she too had gone to war, only to find her
brother's body riddled with bullets on the battlefield. Sometimes she told her
parents her dreams.

"They're just dreams," said her one-eyed mother,
"don't dream those dreams, my little kitten."

But her one-legged
father asked about certain details, like the faces of the dead soldiers, what
were they like? what did they look like? as if they were asleep? to which Lotte
answered yes, exactly as if they were asleep, and then her father shook his
head and said: then they weren't dead, little Lotte, it's hard to explain, but
the faces of dead soldiers are always dirty, as if the soldiers were working
hard all day and at the end of the day they didn't have time to wash their
faces.

And
yet in the dream her brother's face was always perfectly clean, his expression
sad but determined, as if despite being dead he was still capable of many
things. In her heart, Lotte believed her brother could do
anything.
And
she was always alert for the sound of his footsteps, the footsteps of a giant
who one day would approach the village, approach the house, approach the garden
where she waited for him and tell her that the war was over and he was coming
home forever and from that moment on everything would change. But what exactly
would change? She didn't know.

The
war, in any case, was endless, and her brother's visits grew farther and
farther apart until he stopped coming. One night her mother and father began to
talk about him, not knowing that she, in bed, the dun-colored blanket pulled up
to her chin, was awake and could hear them, and they talked about him as if he
were already dead. But Lotte knew her brother hadn't died, because giants never
die, she thought, or they die only when they're very old, so old one doesn't
even notice they've died, they just sit at the door to their houses or under a
tree and fall asleep and then they're dead.

One
day they had to leave the village. According to her parents they had no choice
because the war was coming. Lotte thought that if the war was coming her
brother was coming too, because he lived inside the war the way a fetus lives inside
a fat woman, and she hid so they wouldn't take her because she was sure Hans
was on his way. For hours they looked for her and at dusk her one-legged father
found her hiding in the forest. He gave her a slap and dragged her after him.

As
they moved west, along the coast, they passed two columns of soldiers and Lotte
called after them, asking whether they knew her brother. The first column was
made up of soldiers of all ages, old men like her father and fifteen-year-old
boys, some with only half a uniform, and none of them seemed very pleased to be
going where they were going, but they all answered Lotte's question politely,
saying they didn't know her brother and hadn't seen him.