Authors: Roberto Bolaño
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary Collections, #Mystery & Detective, #Mexico, #Caribbean & Latin American, #Cold Cases (Criminal Investigation), #Crime, #Literary, #Young Women, #Missing Persons, #General, #Women
They spent the free time they had, which
was ample, strolling the paltry (in Pelletier's opinion) sites of interest in
Augsburg, a city that Espinoza also found paltry, and that Morini found only
moderately paltry, but still paltry in the final analysis, while Espinoza and
Pelletier took turns pushing the Italian's wheelchair since Morini wasn't in
the best of health this time, but rather in paltry health, so that his two
friends and colleagues considered that a little bit of fresh air would do him
no harm, and in fact might do him good.
Only Pelletier and Espinoza attended the
next German literature conference, held in
invited too, was in worse health than usual just then, causing his doctor to
advise him, among other things, to avoid even short trips. It wasn't a bad
conference, and despite their full schedules, Pelletier and Espinoza found time
to eat together at a little restaurant on the Rue Galande, near
Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where, besides talking about their respective projects
and interests, during dessert they speculated about the health (the ill health,
the delicate health, the miserable health) of the melancholy Italian, ill
health that nevertheless hadn't prevented him from beginning a book on
Archimboldi, a book that might be the grand Archimboldian opus, the pilot fish
that would swim for a long time beside the great black shark of the German's
oeuvre, or so Pelletier explained that Morini had told him on the phone,
whether seriously or in jest he wasn't sure. Both Pelletier and Espinoza
respected Morini's work, but Pelletier's words (spoken as if from inside an old
castle or a dungeon dug under the moat of an old castle) sounded like a threat
in the peaceful little restaurant on the Rue Galande and hastened the end of an
evening that had begun in an atmosphere of cordiality and contentment.
None of this soured Pelletier's and
Espinoza's relations with Morini.
The three met again at a German-language
literature colloquium held in
Literary Studies,
a monograph devoted to the work of Archimboldi.
It wasn't the first time they'd contributed to the journal. In Number 44,
there'd been a piece by Espinoza on the idea of God in the work of Archimboldi
and Unamuno. In Number 38, Morini had published an article on the state of
German literature instruction in
had presented an overview of the most important German writers of the twentieth
century in France and Europe, a text that incidentally sparked more than one
protest and even a couple of scoldings.
But it's Number 46 that matters to us,
since not only did it mark the formation of two opposing groups of
Archimboldians—Pelletier, Morini, and Espinoza versus Schwarz, Borchmeyer, and
Pohl—it also contained a piece by Liz Norton, incredibly brilliant, according
to Pelletier, well argued, according to Espinoza, interesting, according to
Morini, a piece that aligned itself (and not at anyone's bidding) with the
theses of the three friends, whom it cited on various occasions, demonstrating a
thorough knowledge of their studies and monographs published in specialized
journals or issued by small presses.
Pelletier thought about writing her a
letter, but in the end he didn't. Espinoza called Pelletier and asked whether
it wouldn't be a good idea to get in touch with her. Unsure, they decided to
ask Morini. Morini abstained from comment. All they knew about Liz Norton was
that she taught German literature at a university in
full professor.
The Bremen German literature conference
was highly eventful. Pelletier, backed by Morini and Espinoza, went on the
attack like Napoleon at Jena, assaulting the unsuspecting German Archimboldi
scholars, and the downed flags of Pohl, Schwarz, and Borchmeyer were soon routed
to the cafes and taverns of Bremen. The young German professors participating
in the event were bewildered at first and then took the side of Pelletier and
his friends, albeit cautiously. The audience, consisting mostly of university
students who had traveled from Göttingen by train or in vans, was also won over
by Pelletier's fiery and uncompromising interpretations, throwing caution to
the winds and enthusiastically yielding to the festive, Dionysian vision of
ultimate carnival (or penultimate carnival) exegesis upheld by Pelletier and
Espinoza. Two days later, Schwarz and his minions counterattacked. They
compared Archimboldi to Heinrich Boll. They spoke of suffering. They compared
Archimboldi to Günter Grass. They spoke of civic duty. Borchmeyer even compared
Archimboldi to Friedrich Dürrenmatt and spoke of humor, which seemed to Morini
the height of gall. Then Liz Norton appeared, heaven sent, and demolished the
counterattack like a Desaix, like a Lannes, a blond Amazon who spoke excellent
German, if anything too rapidly, and who expounded on Grimmelshausen and
Gryphius and many others, including Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim,
better known as Paracelsus.
That same night they ate together in a
long, narrow tavern near the river, on a dark street flanked by old Hanseatic
buildings, some of which looked like abandoned Nazi offices, a tavern they
reached by going down stairs wet from the drizzle.
The place couldn't have been more awful,
thought Liz Norton, but the evening was long and agreeable, and the
friendliness of Pelletier, Morini, and Espinoza, who weren't standoffish at
all, made her feel at ease. Naturally, she was familiar with most of their
work, but what surprised her (pleasantly, of course) was that they were
familiar with some of hers, too. The conversation proceeded in four stages:
first they laughed about the flaying Norton had given Borchmeyer and about
Borchmeyer's growing dismay at Norton's increasingly ruthless attacks, then
they talked about future conferences, especially a strange one at the
University of Minnesota, supposedly to be attended by five hundred professors,
translators, and German literature specialists, though Morini had reason to
believe the whole thing was a hoax, then they discussed Benno von Archimboldi
and his life, about which so little was known. All of them, from Pelletier to
Morini (who was talkative that night, though he was usually the quietest),
reviewed anecdotes and gossip, compared old, vague information for the
umpteenth time, and speculated about the secret of the great writer's
whereabouts and life like people endlessly analyzing a favorite movie, and
finally, as they walked the wet, bright streets (bright only intermittently, as
if Bremen were a machine jolted every so often by brief, powerful electric
charges), they talked about themselves.
All four were single and that struck them
as an encouraging sign. All four lived alone, although Liz Norton sometimes
shared her
brother who worked for an NGO and who came back to
All four were devoted to their careers, although Pelletier, Espinoza, and
Morini had doctorates and Pelletier and Espinoza also chaired their respective
departments, whereas Norton was just preparing her dissertation and had no
expectation of becoming the head of her university's German department.
That night, before he fell asleep,
Pelletier didn't think back on the squabbles at the conference. Instead he
thought about walking along the streets near the river and about Liz Norton
walking beside him as Espinoza pushed Morini's wheelchair and the four of them
laughed at the little animals of
which watched them or watched their shadows on the pavement while mounted
harmoniously, innocently, on each other's backs.
From that day on or that night on, not a
week went by without the four of them calling back and forth regularly,
sometimes at the oddest hours, without a thought for the phone bill.
Sometimes it was Liz Norton who would call
Espinoza and ask about Morini, whom she'd talked to the day before and whom
she'd thought seemed a little depressed. That same day Espinoza would call
Pelletier and inform him that according to Norton, Morini's health had taken a
turn for the worse, to which Pelletier would respond by immediately calling
Morini, asking him bluntly how he was, laughing with him (because Morini did
his best never to talk seriously about his condition), exchanging a few
unimportant remarks about work, and later telephoning Norton, maybe at
midnight, after putting off the pleasure of the call with a frugal and
exquisite dinner, and assuring her that as far as could be hoped, Morini was
fine, normal, stable, and what Norton had taken for depression was just the
Italian's natural state, sensitive as he was to changes in the weather (maybe
the weather had been bad in Turin, maybe Morini had dreamed who knows what kind
of horrible dream the night before), thus ending a cycle that would begin again
a day later, or two days later, with Morini calling Espinoza for no reason,
just to say hello, that was all, to talk for a while, the call invariably taken
up with unimportant things, remarks about the weather (as if Morini and even
Espinoza were adopting British conversational habits), film recommendations,
dispassionate commentary on recent books, in short, a generally soporific or at
best listless phone conversation, but one that Espinoza followed with odd
enthusiasm, or feigned enthusiasm, or fondness, or at least civilized interest,
and that Morini attended to as if his life depended on it, and which was
succeeded two days or a few hours later by Espinoza calling Norton and having a
conversation along essentially the same lines, and Norton calling Pelletier,
and Pelletier calling Morini, with the whole process starting over again days
later, the call transmuted into hyperspecialized code, signifier and signified
in Archimboldi, text, subtext, and paratext, reconquest of the verbal and
physical territoriality in the final pages of
Bitzius,
which under the circumstances was the same as talking
about film or problems in the German department or the clouds that passed
incessantly over their respective cities, morning to night.
They met again at the postwar European
literature colloquium held in
were funded by their universities, and Pelletier and Espinoza presented papers
on the import of Archimboldi's work. Pelletier's paper focused on insularity,
on the rupture that seemed to separate the whole of Archimboldi's oeuvre from
the German tradition, though not from a larger European tradition. Espinoza's
paper, one of the most engaging he ever wrote, revolved around the mystery
veiling the figure of Archimboldi, about whom virtually no one, not even his
publisher, knew anything: his books appeared with no author photograph on the
flaps or back cover; his biographical data was minimal (German writer born in
Prussia in 1920); his place of residence was a mystery, although at some point
his publisher let slip in front of a
Spiegel
reporter that one of his manuscripts had arrived from Sicily; none
of his surviving fellow writers had ever seen him; no biography of him existed
in German even though sales of his books were rising in Germany as well as in
the rest of Europe and even in the United States, which likes vanished writers
(vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers,
and where his work was beginning to circulate widely, no longer just in German
departments but on campus and off campus, in the vast cities with a love for
the oral and the visual arts.
At night Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and
Norton would have dinner together, sometimes accompanied by one or two German
professors whom they’d known for a long time, and who would usually retire
early to their hotels or stay until the end of the evening but remain
discreetly in the background, as if they understood that the four-cornered
figure formed by the Archimboldians was inviolable and also liable to react
violently to any outside interference at that hour of the night. By the end it
was always just the four of them walking the streets of Avignon, as blithely
and happily as they'd walked the grimy, bureaucratic streets of Bremen and as
they would walk the many streets awaiting them in the future, Norton pushing
Morini with Pelletier to her left and Espinoza to her right, or Pelletier
pushing Morini with Espinoza to his left and Norton walking backward ahead of
them and laughing with all the might of her twenty-six years, a magnificent
laugh that they were quick to imitate although they would surely have preferred
not to laugh but just to look at her, or the four of them abreast and halted
beside the low wall of a storied river, in other words a river tamed, talking
about their German obsession without interrupting one another, testing and
savoring one another's intelligence, with long intervals of silence that not
even the rain could disturb.
When Pelletier returned from Avignon at
the end of 1994, when he opened the door to his apartment in Paris and set his
bag on the floor and closed the door, when he poured himself a glass of whiskey
and opened the drapes and saw the usual view, a slice of the Place de Breteuil
with the UNESCO building in the background, when he took off his jacket and
left the whiskey in the kitchen and listened to the messages on the answering
machine, when he felt drowsiness, heaviness in his eyelids, but instead of
getting into bed and going to sleep he undressed and took a shower, when
wrapped in a white bathrobe that reached almost to his ankles he turned on the
computer, only then did he realize that he missed Liz Norton and that he would
have given anything to be with her at that moment, not just talking to her but
in bed with her, telling her that he loved her and hearing from her lips that
she loved him too.