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"Liz."

He thought he saw a shadow at the other
end of the pool, and he moved his wheelchair in that direction. It was a long
way. The one time he looked back, Pelletier and Espinoza had vanished from
sight. A fog had settled over that part of the terrace. He went on. The water
in the pool seemed to scale the edges, as if somewhere a squall were brewing or
worse, although where Morini was heading everything was calm and silent, and
there was no sign of a storm. Soon the fog settled over Morini. At first he
tried to keep going, but then he realized that he was in danger of tipping his
wheelchair into the pool, and he decided not to risk it. When his eyes had
adjusted, he saw a rock jutting from the pool, like a dark and iridescent reef.
This didn't seem strange to him. He went over to the edge and shouted Liz's
name once more, afraid now that he would never see her again. A half turn of
the wheels was all it would take to topple him in. Then he saw that the pool
had emptied and was enormously deep, as if a gulf of moldy black tiles were
opening at his feet. At the bottom he seemed to make out the figure of a woman
(though it was impossible to be sure) heading toward the slope of rock. Morini
was about to shout again and wave when he sensed someone at his back. Two
things were instantly certain: the thing was evil and it wanted Morini to turn
around and see its face. Carefully, he backed away and continued around the
pool, trying not to look at whoever was following him, searching for the ladder
that might take him down to the bottom. But of course the ladder, which should
logically be in a corner, never appeared, and after he had rolled a few feet
Morini stopped and turned and looked into the stranger's face, controlling his
fear, a fear all the worse for his dawning certainty that he knew the person
following him, who gave off a stench of evil that Morini could hardly bear. In
the fog, Liz Norton's face appeared. A younger Norton—twenty, if that—staring
so seriously and intently that Morini had to look away. Who was the person at
the bottom of the pool? Morini could still see him or her, a tiny speck trying
to climb the rock that had now become a mountain, and the sight of this person,
so far away, filled his eyes with tears and made him deeply and inconsolably
sad, as if he were seeing his first love wandering in a labyrinth. Or himself,
with legs that still worked, lost on a hopeless climb. Also, and he couldn't
help it, and it was good that he didn't, he thought it looked like a painting
by Gustave Moreau or Odilon Redon. Then he swung around to face Norton and she
said:

"There's no turning back."

He heard the sentence not with his ears
but in his head. Norton has acquired telepathic powers, Morini thought. She
isn't bad, she's good. It isn't evil that I sensed, it's telepathy, he told
himself to alter the course of a dream that in his heart of hearts he knew was
fixed and inevitable. Then Norton repeated, in German, there's no turning back.
And, paradoxically, she turned and walked off away from the pool and was lost
in a forest that could barely be seen through the fog, a forest that gave off a
red glow, and it was into this red glow that Norton disappeared.

A week later, having interpreted the dream
in at least four different ways, Morini traveled to
London
. The decision to make the trip was a
complete break from his usual routine, since normally he traveled only to
conferences and meetings, his plane ticket and hotel room paid for by the
organization in question. This time there was no professional excuse and he
paid the hotel and transportation costs out of his own pocket. Nor can it be
said that he was answering a call of help from Liz Norton. He had talked to her
just four days before and told her he was planning to come to
London
, a city he hadn't visited in a long
time.

Norton was delighted and invited him to
stay with her, but Morini lied, saying he'd already made a reservation at a
hotel. When he landed at Gatwick, Norton was waiting for him. That day they had
breakfast together, in a restaurant near Morini's hotel, and that night they
had dinner in Norton's apartment. During dinner, bland but praised politely by
Morini, they talked about Archimboldi, about his growing renown and the
innumerable gaps in his story that remained to be filled, but later, over
dessert, the conversation took a more personal turn, tending more toward
reminiscence, and until three in the morning, when they called a cab and Norton
helped Morini into her building's old elevator, then down a flight of six
steps, everything was, as the Italian reviewed it in his mind, much more
pleasant than he'd expected.

Between breakfast and dinner, Morini was
alone, hardly daring at first to leave his room, although later, driven by
boredom, he decided to go out and went as far as
Hyde Park
,
where he wandered aimlessly, lost in thought, without noticing or seeing
anyone. Some people gazed after him in curiosity, because they had never seen a
man in a wheelchair moving with such determination and at such a steady pace.
When he finally came to a stop he found himself outside the
Italian
Gardens
,
or so they were called, although nothing about them struck him as Italian, but
who knows, he mused, sometimes people are staggeringly ignorant of what's under
their very noses.

He pulled a book out of his jacket pocket
and began to read as he regained his strength. Soon he heard a voice saying
hello, then the noise a heavy body makes when it drops to a wooden bench. He
returned the greeting. The stranger had straw-colored hair, graying and dirty,
and must have weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. They sat a moment
looking at each other and the stranger asked whether he was a foreigner. Morini
said he was Italian. The stranger wanted to know whether he lived in
London
, and then what the
book he was reading was called. Morini answered that he didn't live in London
and that the book he was reading was called
Il
libra di cucina di Juana Ines de la Cruz,
by Angelo Morino, and that it was
written in Italian, of course, although it was about a Mexican nun. About the
nun's life and some of her recipes.

"So this Mexican nun liked to
cook?" asked the stranger.

"In a way she did, although she also
wrote poems," Morini replied.

"I don't trust nuns," said the
stranger.

"Well, this nun was a great
poet," said Morini.

"I don't trust people who cook from
recipes," said the stranger, as if he hadn't heard him.

"So whom do you trust?" asked
Morini.

"People who eat when they're hungry,
I guess," said the stranger.

Then he went on to explain that a long
time ago he had worked for a company that made mugs, just mugs, the plain kind
and the kind decorated with phrases or mottoes or jokes:
Sorry, I'm On My Coffee Break!
or
Daddy Loves Mummy
or
Last
Round Today, Last Round Forever,
that sort of thing, mugs with anodyne
captions, and one day, surely due to demand, the inscriptions on the mugs
changed drastically and they started using pictures, black-and-white at first,
but then the venture did so well they switched to pictures in color, some
humorous but some dirty, too.

"They even gave me a raise," the
stranger said. "Do mugs like that exist in
Italy
?" he asked then.

"Yes," said Morini, "some
with phrases in English and others with phrases in Italian."

"Well, it was everything we could
have asked for," said the stranger. "We all worked more happily. The
managers worked more happily, too, and the boss looked happy. But after a few
months of making those mugs I realized that my happiness was artificial. I felt
happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel
happy, but I wasn't really happy. In fact, I felt worse than before they'd
given me a raise. I thought I was going through a bad patch and I tried not to
think about it, but after three months I couldn't keep pretending nothing was
wrong. I was in a terrible mood, I was much more violent than I'd been before,
any little thing would make me angry, I started to drink. So I raced up to the
problem, and finally I realized that I didn't like to make that particular kind
of mug. At night, I swear, I suffered like a dog. I thought I was going crazy,
that I didn't know what I was doing or thinking. Some of the thoughts I had
back then still scare me. One day I confronted one of the managers. I told him
I was sick of making those idiotic mugs. This manager was a good man, his name
was Andy, and he always tried to make conversation with the workers. He asked
me whether I'd preferred making the mugs we'd made before. That's right, I
said. Are you serious, Dick? he asked me. Completely serious, I answered. Are
the new mugs more work? Not at all, I said, the work is the same, but the
fucking mugs didn't do damage to me this way before. What do you mean? said Andy.
That the bloody mugs didn't bother me before and now they're destroying me
inside. So what the hell makes them different, aside from being more modern?
asked Andy. That's it exactly, I answered, the mugs weren't so modern before,
and even if they tried to hurt me, they couldn't, I didn't feel their sting,
but now the fucking mugs are like samurais armed with those fucking samurai
swords and they're driving me insane. Anyway, it was a long conversation,"
said the stranger. "The manager listened to me, but he didn't understand a
single word I was saying. The next day I asked for the pay I was due and I left
the company. I haven't worked since. What do you think of that?"

Morini hesitated before answering.

"I don't know," he said finally.

"That's what everyone says: they
don't know," said the stranger.

"What do you do now?" asked
Morini.

"Nothing, I don't work anymore, I'm a
London
bum," the stranger said.

It's as if he's pointing out a tourist
attraction, thought Morini, but he was careful not to say this out loud.

"So what do you think of that
book?" asked the stranger.

"What book?" asked Morini.

The stranger pointed one of his thick
fingers at the book, published by Sellerio, in
Palermo
, that Morini was holding delicately
in one hand.

"Oh, I think it's very good," he
said.

"Read me some recipes," said the
stranger, in a tone of voice that struck Morini as threatening.

"I don't know whether I have
time," he said, "I have to meet a friend."

"What's your friend's name?"
asked the stranger in the same tone of voice.

"Liz Norton," said Morini.

"Liz, pretty name," said the
stranger. "And what's your name, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Piero Morini," said Morini.

"Odd," said the stranger,
"your name is almost the same as the name of the author of the book."

"No," said Morini, "my name
is Piero Morini, and his name is Angelo Morino."

"If you wouldn't mind," said the
stranger, "at least read me the names of some recipes. I'll close my eyes
and imagine them."

"All right," said Morini.

The stranger closed his eyes and Morini
began to read some of the names of the recipes attributed to Sor Juana Ines de
la Cruz, slowly and with an actor's intonation.

Sgonfiotti alformaggio

Sgonfiotti alia ricotta

Sgonfiotti di vento

Crespelle

Dolce di tuorli di
uovo

Uova regali

Dolce alla panna

Dolce alle nod

Dolce di testoline di
mom

Dolce alle
barbabietole

Dolce di burro e
zucchero

Dolce alia crema

Dolce di mamey

By the time he got to
dolce di mamey,
the stranger seemed to have fallen asleep and
Morini left the
Italian
Gardens
.

The next day was much like the first. This
time Norton came to meet him at the hotel, and as Morini was paying the bill
she put his only suitcase in the boot of her car. When they left, she drove the
same way he'd taken to
Hyde Park
the day
before.

Morini realized it and watched the streets
in silence, and then the appearance of the park, which looked to him like a
film of the jungle, the colors wrong, terribly sad, exalted, until the car
turned and disappeared down other streets.

T
hey ate together in a neighborhood
that Norton had discovered, a neighborhood near the river, where there had once
been a few factories and dry docks and where boutiques and food shops and
fashionable restaurants had now opened in the renovated buildings. A small
boutique occupied the same number of square feet as four workers' houses,
calculated Morini. The restaurant, twelve or sixteen. Liz Norton's voice
praised the neighborhood and the efforts of the people who were setting it back
afloat.