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"We aren't looking for a German tourist, we're looking
for Archimboldi," Espinoza replied.

"True," said Amalfitano, and the truth was he
could imagine Archimboldi at one of the motels.

The question is, what did Archimboldi come to this city to
do, said Norton. After some argument, the three critics concluded, and
Amalfitano agreed, that he could have come to Santa Teresa only to see a friend
or to collect information for a novel in progress or for both reasons at once.
Pelletier inclined toward the possibility of the friend.

An old friend," he conjectured. "In other words,
a German like himself."

A German he hasn't seen for years, maybe since the end of
the war," said Espinoza.

An army friend, someone who meant a lot to Archimboldi and
disappeared as soon as the war ended, maybe even before it ended," said
Norton.

But it must be someone who knows Archimboldi is Hans
Reiter," said Espinoza.

Not necessarily. Maybe Archimboldi's friend has no idea
that Hans Reiter and Archimboldi are the same person. He only knows Reiter and
how to get in touch with Reiter and that's it," said Norton.

"Which isn't likely," said Pelletier.

"No, it isn't, since it assumes that Reiter has been
at the same address since the last time he saw his friend, say in 1945,"
said Amalfitano.

"Statistically speaking, there isn't a single German
born in 1920 who hasn't changed addresses at least once in his life," said
Pelletier.

"So maybe it isn't this friend who got in touch with
Archimboldi but Archimboldi himself who got in touch with him," said
Espinoza.

"Him or her," said Norton.

"I'm more inclined to think it's a man than a
woman," said Pelletier.

"Unless it's neither a man nor a woman and we're all
groping in the dark," said Espinoza.

"But then why would Archimboldi come here?" asked
Norton.

"It must be a friend, a dear friend, dear enough that
Archimboldi felt he had to make the trip," said Pelletier.

"What if we're wrong? What if Almendro lied to us or
was confused or someone lied to him?" said Norton.

"Almendro who? Hector Enrique Almendro?" said
Amalfitano.

"That's the one. You know him?" asked Espinoza.

"Not personally, but I wouldn't bet much on a tip from
Almendro," said Amalfitano.

"Why?" asked Norton.

"Well, because he's a typical Mexican intellectual,
his main concern is getting by," said Amalfitano.

"Isn't that the main concern of all Latin American
intellectuals?" asked Pelletier.

"I wouldn't say that. Some of them are more interested
in writing, for example," said Amalfitano.

"Tell us what you mean," said Espinoza.

"I don't really know how to explain it," said
Amalfitano. "It's an old story, the relationship of Mexican intellectuals
with power. I'm not saying they're all the same. There are some notable
exceptions. Nor am I saying that those who surrender do so in bad faith. Or
even that they surrender completely. You could say it's just a job. But they're
working for the state. In
Europe
,
intellectuals work for publishing houses or for the papers or their wives
support them or their parents are well-off and give them a monthly allowance or
they're laborers or criminals and they make an honest living from their jobs.
In
Mexico
, and this might be
true across Latin America, except in
Argentina
, intellectuals work for
the state. It was like that under the PRI and it'll be the same under the PAN.
The intellectual himself may be a passionate defender of the state or a critic
of the state. The state doesn't care. The state feeds him and watches over him
in silence. And it puts this giant cohort of essentially useless writers to
use. How? It exorcises demons, it alters the national climate or at least tries
to sway it. It adds layers of lime to a pit that may or may not exist, no one
knows for sure. Not that it's always this way, of course. An intellectual can
work at the university, or, better, go to work for an American university,
where the literature departments are just as bad as in Mexico, but that doesn't
mean they won't get a late-night call from someone speaking in the name of the
state, someone who offers them a better job, better pay, something the
intellectual thinks he deserves, and intellectuals
always
think they
deserve better. This mechanism somehow crops the ears off Mexican writers. It
drives them insane. Some, for example, will set out to translate Japanese
poetry without knowing Japanese and others just spend their time drinking. Take
Almendro—as far as I know he does both. Literature in
Mexico
is like
a nursery school, a kindergarten, a playground, a kiddie club, if you follow
me. The weather is good, it's sunny, you can go out and sit in the park and
open a book by Valery possibly the writer most read by Mexican writers, and
then you go over to a friend's house and talk. And yet your shadow isn't
following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You
pretend you don't notice, but you have, you're missing your fucking shadow,
though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree
of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of
alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain,
the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent,
wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life to be on time. But the
point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily, forget it. And so you
arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate
reality or reinterpret it or sing it. The stage is really a proscenium and
upstage there's an enormous tube, something like a mine shaft or the gigantic
opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. From the
opening of the mine come unintelligible noises. Onomatopoeic noises, syllables
of rage or of seduction or of seductive rage or maybe just murmurs and whispers
and moans. The point is, no one sees, really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage
machinery, the play of light and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape
of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who
are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape
of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at
any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything
beyond the proscenium, and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile, the
shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have
eyes in the backs of their heads, they can't see anything. They only hear the
sounds that come from deep in the mine. And they translate or reinterpret or
re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard.
They employ rhetoric where they sense a hurricane, they try to be eloquent
where they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of
meter where there's only a deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep
cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they're incapable of imagining an animal of
colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal. Meanwhile, the stage on
which they work is very pretty, very well designed, very charming, but it grows
smaller and smaller with the passage of time. This shrinking of the stage
doesn't spoil it in any way. It simply gets smaller and smaller and the hall
gets smaller too, and naturally there are fewer and fewer people watching. Next
to this stage there are others, of course. New stages that have sprung up over
time. There's the painting stage, which is enormous, and the audience is tiny,
though all elegant, for lack of a better word. There's the film stage and the
television stage. Here the capacity is huge, the hall is always full, and year
after year the proscenium grows by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the performers
from the stage where the intellectuals give their talks are invited to perform
on the television stage. On this stage the opening of the mine is the same, the
perspective slightly altered, although maybe the camouflage is denser and,
paradoxically, bespeaks a mysterious sense of humor, but it still stinks. This
humorous camouflage, naturally, lends itself to many interpretations, which are
finally reduced to two for the public's convenience or for the convenience of
the public's collective eye. Sometimes intellectuals take up permanent
residence on the television proscenium. The roars keep coming from the opening
of the mine and the intellectuals keep misinterpreting them. In fact, they, in
theory the masters of language, can't even enrich it themselves. Their best
words are borrowings that they hear spoken by the spectators in the front row.
These spectators are called
flagellants.
They're sick, and from time to
time they invent hideous words and there's a spike in their mortality rate.
When the workday ends the theaters are closed and they cover the openings of
the mines with big sheets of steel. The intellectuals retire for the night. The
moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible. Songs can be heard in
some bars, the notes reaching the street. Sometimes an intellectual wanders off
course and goes into one of these places and drinks mezcal. Then he thinks what
would happen if one day he. But no. He doesn't think anything. He just drinks
and sings. Sometimes he thinks he sees a legendary German writer. But all he's
really seen is a shadow, sometimes all he's seen is his
own
shadow,
which comes home every night so that the intellectual won't burst or hang
himself from the lintel. But he swears he's seen a German writer and his own
happiness, his sense of order, his bustle, his spirit of revelry rest on that
conviction. The next morning it's nice out. The sun shoots sparks but doesn't
burn. A person can go out reasonably relaxed, with his shadow on his heels, and
stop in a park and read a few pages of Valery. And so on until the end."

"I don't understand a word you've said," said
Norton.

"Really I've just been talking nonsense," said
Amalfitano.

Later they called the remaining hotels and motels and
Archimboldi wasn't at any of them. For a few hours they thought Amalfitano was
right, that Almendro's tip was probably the product of an overheated imagination,
that Archimboldi's trip to
Mexico
existed only in the recesses of El Cerdo's brain. The rest of the day they
spent reading and drinking, and none of the three could muster the energy to
leave the hotel.

That night, while Norton was checking her e-mail on the
hotel computer, she found a message from Morini. In his message Morini talked
about the weather, as if he had nothing better to say, about the slanting rain
that had begun to fall on Turin at eight and hadn't stopped until one in the
morning, and he sincerely wished Norton better weather in the north of Mexico,
where he believed it never rained and it was cold only at night, and then only
in the desert. That night, too, after replying to some messages (not Morini's),
Norton went up to her room, combed her hair, brushed her teeth, put
moisturizing cream on her face, sat on the edge of the bed for a while,
thinking, and then went out into the hallway and knocked at Pelletier's door
and next at Espinoza's door and without a word she led them to her room, where
she made love to both of them until five in the morning, at which time the
critics, at Norton's request, returned to their rooms, where they soon fell
into a deep sleep, a sleep that eluded Norton, who straightened the sheets of
her bed a little and turned out the lights but remained wide awake.

She thought about Morini, or rather she saw Morini sitting
in his wheel-chair at a window in his apartment in Turin, an apartment she had
never been to, looking out at the street and the facades of the surrounding
buildings and watching the rain falling incessantly. The buildings across the
street were gray. The street was dark and wide, a boulevard, although not a
single car went by, with a spindly tree planted every sixty feet, like a bad
joke on the part of the mayor or city planner. The sky was a blanket on top of
a blanket, with another blanket on top of that, even thicker and wetter. The
window Morini looked out was big, almost like a French door, narrower than it
was wide but very tall, and so clean that the glass, with the raindrops sliding
over it, was like pure crystal. The window frame was wooden, painted white. The
lights were on in the room. The parquet shone, the bookshelves looked
meticulously organized, and just a few paintings, in impeccable taste, hung on
the walls. There were no rugs, and the furniture—a black leather sofa and two
white leather armchairs—in no way impeded the passage of the wheelchair.
Through double doors, half open, stretched a dark hallway.

And what to say about Morini? His position in the
wheelchair expressed a certain degree of surrender, as if watching the night
rain and the sleeping neighborhood fulfilled all his expectations. Sometimes he
would rest his two arms on the chair, other times he would rest his head in one
hand and prop his elbow on the chair's armrest. His useless legs, like the legs
of an adolescent near death, were clothed in jeans possibly too big for him. He
was wearing a white shirt with the top buttons undone, and on his left wrist
his watch strap was too loose, though not so loose that the watch would fall
off. He wasn't wearing shoes but rather very old slippers, of a cloth as black
and shiny as the night. Everything he had on was comfortable, intended for
wearing around the house, and by Morini's attitude it seemed clear that he had
no intention of going in to work the next day, or that he planned to go in
late.