2666 (5 page)

And then the lady spoke. She said:
"Can anyone solve the riddle?"

That's what she said, but she didn't look
at any of the townspeople or address them directly.

"Does anyone know the answer to the
riddle? Does anyone understand it? Is there by chance a man in this town who
can tell me the solution, even if he has to whisper it in my ear?"

She said all of this with her eyes on her
plate, where her sausage and her serving of potatoes remained almost untouched.

And then Archimboldi, who had kept his
head down, eating, as the lady talked, said, without raising his voice, that it
had been an act of hospitality, that the rancher and his son were sure the
lady's husband would lose the first race, and they had rigged the second and
third races so the former cavalry captain would win. Then the lady looked him
in the eye and laughed and asked why her husband had won the first race.

"Why? why?" asked the lady.

"Because the rancher's son,"
said Archimboldi, "who surely rode better and had a better mount than your
husband, was overcome at the last minute by selflessness. In other words, he
chose extravagance, carried away by the impromptu festivities that he and his
father had arranged. Everything had to be squandered, including his victory,
and somehow everyone understood it had to be that way, including the woman who
came looking for you in the park. Everyone except the little gaucho."

"Was that all?" asked the lady.

"Not for the little gaucho. If you'd
spent any longer with him, I think he would have killed you, which would have
been an extravagant gesture in its own right, though certainly not the kind the
rancher and his son had in mind."

Then the lady got up, thanked everyone for
a pleasant evening, and left.

"A few minutes later," said the
Swabian, "I walked Archimboldi back to the boardinghouse. The next
morning, when I went to get him to take him to the station, he was gone."

Astounding Swabian, said Espinoza. I want
him all to myself, said Pelletier. Try not to overwhelm him, try not to seem
too interested, said Morini. We have to treat the man with kid gloves, said
Norton. Which means we have to be very nice to him.

B
ut the Swabian had already said
everything he had to say, and even though they coddled him and took him out to
the best restaurant in Amsterdam and complimented him and talked to him about
hospitality and extravagance and the fate of cultural promoters trapped in
small provincial towns, it was impossible to get anything interesting out of
him, although the four were careful to record every word he spoke, as if they'd
met their Moses, a detail that didn't go unnoticed by the Swabian and in fact
heightened his shyness (which, according to Espinoza and Pelletier, was such an
unusual trait in a former cultural promoter that they thought the Swabian must
be some kind of impostor), his reserve, his discretion, which verged on the
improbable
omerta
of an old Nazi who
smells danger.

Fifteen days later, Espinoza and Pelletier
took a few days' leave and went to
Hamburg
to visit Archimboldi's publisher. They were received by the editor in chief, a
thin, upright man in his sixties by the name of Schnell, which means quick,
although Schnell was on the slow side. He had sleek dark brown hair, sprinkled
with gray at the temples, which only accentuated his youthful appearance. When
he got up to shake hands, it occurred to both Espinoza and Pelletier that he
must be gay.

"That faggot is the closest thing to
an eel I've ever seen," Espinoza said afterward, as they strolled through
Hamburg
.

Pelletier chided him for his comment, with
its markedly homophobic overtones, although deep down he agreed, there was
something eellike about Schnell, something of the fish that swims in dark, muddy
waters.

Of course, there was little Schnell could
tell them that they didn't already know. He had never seen Archimboldi, and the
money, of which there was more and more, was deposited in a Swiss bank account.
Once every two years, instructions were received from the writer, the letters
usually postmarked
Italy
,
although there were also letters in the publisher's files with Greek and
Spanish and Moroccan stamps, letters, incidentally, that were addressed to Mrs.
Bubis, the owner of the publishing house, and that he, naturally, hadn't read.

"There are only two people left here,
besides Mrs. Bubis, of course, who've met Benno von Archimboldi in
person," Schnell told them. "The publicity director and the copy
chief. By the time I came to work here, Archimboldi had long since
vanished."

Pelletier and Espinoza asked to speak to
both women. The publicity director's office was full of plants and photographs,
not necessarily of the house authors, and the only thing she could tell them
about the vanished writer was that he was a good person.

"A tall man, very tall," she
said. "When he walked beside the late Mr. Bubis they looked like a
ti.
Or a
li."

Espinoza and Pelletier didn't understand
what she meant and the publicity director wrote the letter
l
and then the letter
i
on
a scrap of paper. Or maybe more like a
le.
Like this.

And again she wrote something on the scrap
of paper.

le

"The
l
is Archimboldi, the
e
is
the late Mr. Bubis."

Then the publicity director laughed and
watched them for a while, reclining in her swivel chair in silence. Later they
talked to the copy chief. She was about the same age as the publicity director
but not as cheery.

She said yes, she had met Archimboldi many
years ago, but she didn't remember his face anymore, or what he was like, or any
story about him that would be worth telling. She couldn't remember the last
time he was at the publishing house. She advised them to speak to Mrs. Bubis,
and then, without a word, she busied herself editing a galley, answering the
other copy editors' questions, talking on the phone to people who
might—Espinoza and Pelletier thought with pity—be translators. Before they
left, refusing to be discouraged, they returned to Schnell's office and talked
to him about Archimboldian conferences and colloquiums planned for the future.
Schnell, attentive and cordial, told them they could count on him for whatever
they might need.

Since they didn't have anything to do
except wait for their flights back to
Paris
and
Madrid
, Pelletier and Espinoza went walking around
Hamburg
. The walk
inevitably took them to the district of streetwalkers and peep shows, and then
they both lapsed into gloom and began telling each other stories of love and
disillusionment. Of course, they didn't give names or dates, they spoke in what
might be called abstract terms, but despite the seemingly detached presentation
of their misfortunes, the conversation and the walk only sank them deeper into
a state of melancholy, to such a degree that after two hours they both felt as
if they were suffocating.

They took a taxi back to the hotel in
silence.

A surprise awaited them there. At the desk
there was a note from Schnell addressed to both of them, in which he explained
that after their conversation that morning, he'd decided to talk to Mrs. Bubis
and she had agreed to see them. The next morning, Espinoza and Pelletier called
at the publisher's apartment, on the third floor of an old building in
Hamburg
's upper town. As
they waited they looked at the framed photographs on one wall. On the other two
walls there were canvases by Soutine and Kandinsky and several drawings by
Grosz, Kokoschka, and Ensor. But Espinoza and Pelletier were much more
interested in the photographs, which were almost all of writers they disdained
or admired, and in any case had read: Thomas Mann with Bubis, Heinrich Mann
with Bubis, Klaus Mann with Bubis, Alfred Doblin with Bubis, Hermann Hesse with
Bubis, Walter Benjamin with Bubis, Anna Seghers with Bubis, Stefan Zweig with
Bubis, Bertolt Brecht with Bubis, Feuchtwanger with Bubis, Johannes Becher with
Bubis, Oskar Maria Graf with Bubis, bodies and faces and vague scenery,
beautifully framed. With the innocence of the dead, who no longer mind being
observed, the people in the photographs gazed out on the professors' barely
contained enthusiasm. When Mrs. Bubis appeared, the two of them had their heads
together trying to decide whether a man next to Bubis was Fallada or not.

Indeed, it is Fallada, said Mrs. Bubis.
When they turned, Pelletier and Espinoza saw an older woman in a white blouse
and black skirt, a woman with a figure like Marlene Dietrich, as Pelletier
would say much later, a woman who despite her years was still as strong willed
as ever, a woman who didn't cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it
with curiosity and elegance. A woman who plunged into the abyss
sitting down.

"My husband knew all the German
writers and the German writers loved and respected my husband, even if a few of
them said horrible things about him later that weren't always even
accurate," said Mrs. Bubis, with a smile.

They talked about Archimboldi and Mrs.
Bubis had tea and cakes brought in, although she drank vodka, which surprised
Espinoza and Pelletier, not that she would start to drink so early, but that
she wouldn't offer them a drink too, a drink they would in any case have
refused.

"The only person at the press who
knew Archimboldi's work to perfection," said Mrs. Bubis, "was Mr.
Bubis, who published all his books."

But she asked herself (and by extension,
the two of them) how well anyone could really know another person's work.

"For example, I love Grosz's
work," she said, gesturing toward the Grosz drawings on the wall,
"but do I really know it? His stories make me laugh, often I think Grosz
drew what he did to make me laugh, sometimes I laugh to the point of hilarity,
and hilarity becomes helpless mirth, but once I met an art critic who of course
liked Grosz, and who nevertheless got very depressed when he attended a
retrospective of his work or had to study some canvas or drawing in a
professional capacity. And these bouts
of depression or sadness would last for weeks. This art critic was a friend,
but we'd never discussed Grosz. Once, however, I mentioned the effect Grosz had
on me. At first he refused to believe me. Then he started to shake his head.
Then he looked me up and down as if he'd never laid eyes on me before. I
thought he'd gone mad. That was the end of our friendship. A while ago I was
told that he still says I know nothing about Grosz and I have the aesthetic
sense of a cow. Well, as far as I'm concerned he can say whatever he likes.
Grosz makes me laugh, Grosz depresses him, but who can say they really know
Grosz?

"Let's suppose," said Mrs.
Bubis, "that at this very moment there's a knock on the door and my old
friend the art critic comes in. He sits here on the sofa beside me, and one of
you brings out an unsigned drawing and tells us it's by Grosz and you want to
sell it. I look at the drawing and smile and I take out my checkbook and buy
it. The art critic looks at the drawing and
isn't
depressed and tries to make me reconsider. He thinks it isn't a Grosz. I
think it is. Which of us is right?

"Or let's tell the story a different
way. You," said Mrs. Bubis, pointing to Espinoza, "present an
unsigned drawing and say it's by Grosz and try to sell it. I don't laugh, I
look at it coldly, I appreciate the line, the control, the satire, but nothing
about it tickles me. The art critic examines it carefully and gets depressed,
in his normal way, and then and there he makes an offer, an offer that exceeds
his savings, and that if accepted will condemn him to endless afternoons of
melancholy. I try to change his mind. I tell him the drawing strikes me as
suspicious because it doesn't make me laugh. The critic says finally I'm looking
at Grosz like an adult and gives me his congratulations. Which of the two of us
is right?"

Then they went back to talking about
Archimboldi and Mrs. Bubis showed them a very odd review that had appeared in a
Berlin
newspaper after the publication of
Ludicke,
Archimboldi's first novel. The review, by someone named Schleiermacher,
tried to sum up the novelist's personality in a few words.

Intelligence: average.

Character: epileptic.

Scholarship: sloppy.

Storytelling ability: chaotic.

Prosody: chaotic.

German usage: chaotic.

Average intelligence and sloppy
scholarship are easy to understand. What did he mean by epileptic character,
though? that Archimboldi had epilepsy? that he wasn't right in the head? that
he suffered attacks of a mysterious nature? that he was a compulsive reader of
Dostoevsky? There was no physical description of the writer in the piece.

"We never knew who this man
Schleiermacher was," said Mrs. Bubis, "and sometimes my late husband
would joke that Archimboldi himself had written the review. But he knew as well
as I did that it wasn't true."

Near midday, when it was time to leave,
Pelletier and Espinoza dared to ask the only question they thought really
mattered: could she help them get in touch with Archimboldi? Mrs. Bubis's eyes
lit up. As if she were at the scene of a fire, Pelletier told Liz Norton later.
Not a raging blaze, but a fire that was about to go out, after burning for
months. Her no came as a slight shake of the head that made Pelletier and
Espinoza abruptly aware of the futility of their plea.