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Archimboldi
and Ingeborg weren't questioned, possibly thanks to Leube's intercession. By
evening Ingeborg had begun to hallucinate and that very night she was taken to
the
Kempten
hospital. Leube didn't accompany them, but the next morning, as Archimboldi
smoked in the corridor just inside the entrance to the hospital, he saw Leube
appear, dressed in a wool jacket, very old and worn, although not without a
certain style, with a tie and a pair of crude low boots that looked handmade.

They
spoke for a few minutes. Leube said no one in the village knew about Ingeborg's
nighttime flight, and if questions were asked, it would be best if Archimboldi
said nothing. Then he inquired whether the patient (that was what he said: the
patient) was receiving the proper treatment, although by the way he asked it
was clear he assumed it couldn't be otherwise, about the hospital food, about
the medicine she was being given, and then, abruptly, he left. Before he went,
without saying a word, he handed Archimboldi a package wrapped in cheap paper.
Inside was a good chunk of cheese, bread, and two kinds of cured meat, the kind
they ate every night.

Archimboldi
wasn't hungry, and when he saw the cheese and the cured meat he felt an
overpowering urge to vomit. But he didn't want to throw the food away and
finally he left it in the drawer of Ingeborg's night table. During the night
she was delirious again and didn't recognize Archimboldi. At dawn she vomited
blood and when they took her for X-rays she shouted at him not to leave her
alone, not to let her die at a miserable hospital like this. I won't, promised
Archimboldi in the corridor, as the nurses hurried away with the stretcher
where Ingeborg fought for her life. Three days later the fever began to
subside, although Ingeborg's mood shifts became more pronounced.

She almost didn't speak to
Archimboldi and when she did it was to demand that he get her out of there. In
the same room were two other women with lung ailments who soon became
Ingeborg's mortal enemies. According to her, they envied her for being from
Berlin
. After four days
the nurses were fed up with Ingeborg and at least one doctor saw her— sitting
very still in bed, with her smooth hair falling over her shoulders— as the
incarnation of Nemesis. A day before she was released, Leube appeared again at
the hospital.

He
came into the room, asked Ingeborg a few questions, and then gave her a little
package identical to the one he had given Archimboldi several days before. The
rest of the time he remained silent, sitting stiffly in a chair, every so often
casting curious glances at the other patients and their visitors. When he left
he told Archimboldi he wanted to speak to him in private, but Archimboldi
didn't feel like talking to Leube, so instead of taking him to the hospital
canteen he stood with him in the corridor, which flustered Leube, who had hoped
to talk in a quieter spot.

"I just wanted to tell you," he said, "that the
young lady was right. I killed my wife. I pushed her into a ravine. The
Virgin's ravine. Actually, I don't remember anymore. It might have been the
Flower ravine. But I pushed her into a ravine and I watched her body fall,
battered against the outcroppings of rock. Then I opened my eyes and searched
for her. There she was down below. A spot of color on the stone slabs. For a
long time I stared. Then I went down and slung her over my shoulder and climbed
up with her, but she didn't weigh a thing anymore, it was like climbing up with
a bundle of sticks. I brought her into the house through the back door. No one
saw me. I washed her carefully, I dressed her in clean clothes, I laid her out
on the bed. How did no one notice all her bones were broken? I said she had
died. What did she die of? they asked. Of sorrow, I said. When you die of sorrow
it's as if you've broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over,
cracked your skull. That's sorrow. I made the coffin myself in a night's work
and the next day I buried her. Then I took care of the papers in
Kempten
. I won't tell you
the clerks thought it was normal. Some were suspicious. I saw the looks on
their faces. But I didn't say anything and they registered the death. Then I
went back to the village and kept living. Alone forever," he whispered
after a long pause. "As it should be."

"Why have you
told me this?" asked Archimboldi.

"So
you can tell the young lady. I want her to know. It's for her sake I'm telling
you, so she knows. Agreed?"

"All
right," said Archimboldi, "I'll tell her."

When they left the
hospital they returned to
Cologne
by train, but they didn't last three days there. Archimboldi asked Ingeborg if
she wanted to visit her mother. Ingeborg answered that one of her plans was
never to see her mother or sisters again. I'd like to travel, she said. The
next day Ingeborg applied for a passport and Archimboldi took up a collection
among their friends. First they were in
Austria
and then
Switzerland
and
from
Switzerland
they moved
on to
Italy
.
They visited Venice and Milan, like a couple of vagabonds, and between the two
cities they stopped in Verona and slept at the boardinghouse where Shakespeare
slept and ate at the trattoria where Shakespeare ate, now called Trattoria
Shakespeare, and went into the church where Shakespeare once sat and thought or
played chess with the parish priest, because Shakespeare, like the two of them,
spoke no Italian, but to play chess there was no need to speak Italian or
English or German or even Russian.

And
since there wasn't much else to see in Verona, they traveled to Brescia and
Padua and Vicenza and other cities along the rail line between Milan and
Venice, and then they were in Mantua and Bologna and they spent three days in
Pisa making love like mad, and they swam in Cecina and Piombino, across from
the island of Elba, and then they visited Florence and made their way to Rome.

What
did they live on? Probably Archimboldi, who had learned many things working at
the bar on the Spenglerstrasse, turned to petty theft. Robbing American
tourists was easy. Robbing Italians was only a little more difficult.
Archimboldi might have asked for another advance from the publishing house and
he might have received it by mail, or perhaps it was the Baroness Von Zumpe
herself who delivered it by hand, curious to meet her former servant's
companion.

But
the meeting was in a public place, and only Archimboldi came. He had a beer,
took the money, thanked her, and left. Or that was how the baroness described
it to her husband in a long letter written from a castle in Senigallia where
she spent fifteen days lying in the sun and going for long swims. Long swims
that Ingeborg and Archimboldi couldn't take or that they postponed for another
reincarnation, because Ingeborg's health was failing as summer came to an end,
and the possibility of returning to the mountains or checking into a hospital
was rejected without further discussion. The beginning of September found them
in
Rome
, both
dressed in shorts, dune- or desert-yellow colored, as if they were ghosts of
the Afrika Korps lost in the catacombs of the early Christians, lonely
catacombs where all that could be heard was the erratic drip of some nearby
gutter and Ingeborg's cough.

Soon, however, they drifted
toward
Florence
and from there, walking
or hitchhiking,
they headed to the
Adriatic
. By then, the
Baroness Von Zumpe was in Milan as the guest of some Milanese editors, and from
a cafe bearing an uncanny resemblance to a Romanesque cathedral, she wrote a
letter to Bubis in which she gave news of her hosts, who wished Bubis could be
there, and of some Turin editors she had just met, one old and very jovial who
always referred to Bubis as his brother-in-arms, and one young, Leftist, very
handsome, who said that editors, too, why not, should do their part to change
the world. On the same trip, at one party or another, the baroness had met a
number of Italian writers, some of whom had books that might be interesting to
translate. Of course, the baroness could read Italian, although her daily
activities somehow left no time for reading.

Every night there was a party. And when there wasn't a party her
hosts conjured one up. Sometimes they left Milan in a caravan of four or five
cars and drove to a town on the shores of Lake Garda called Bardolino, where
someone had a villa, and dawn often found them all, tired and happy, dancing at
some trattoria in Desenzano, under the curious gaze of the locals who had been
up all night (or had just risen), drawn by the revelry.

One morning, however, she received a
telegram from Bubis saying that Archimboldi's wife had died in a remote village
on the Adriatic coast. Without knowing quite why, the baroness began to weep as
if she had lost a sister and that same day she informed her hosts that she was
leaving Milan for the remote village, without knowing very well whether she
would have to take a train or a bus or a taxi, since there was no mention of
the village in her travel guide. The young Leftist editor from
Turin
offered to drive
her, and the baroness, who'd had a few dalliances with him, was so grateful
that the editor was taken aback.

The trip was a threnody or an epicede, depending on the
countryside through which they were passing, recited in an increasingly
exaggerated and infectious Italian. At last they reached the mysterious
village, exhausted after having gone through an interminable list of dead
family members (the baroness's as well as the editor's) and lost friends, some
of whom were also dead, though they didn't know it. But they still had the
strength to inquire after a German man whose wife had died. The villagers,
surly and hard at work mending their nets and caulking their boats, told them
that a German couple had in fact arrived a few days before and shortly
afterward the man had left alone because the woman had drowned.

Where had the man gone? They didn't know. The baroness and the
editor asked the village priest, but he didn't know anything either. They also
asked the gravedigger and he repeated like a litany what they had already
heard: the German had left a little while ago and the German woman wasn't
buried in the cemetery, because she had drowned and her body was never found.

That
evening, before they left the village, the baroness insisted on driving up a
mountain from which there was a view of the whole area. She saw winding paths
in shades of yellow that vanished in the middle of little leaden-colored
clusters of trees, the clusters like spheres swollen with rain, she saw hills
covered in olive trees and specks that moved with a slowness and bewilderment
that seemed of this world and yet intolerable.

For
a long time there was no news of Archimboldi. Despite expectations,
Rivers
of Europe
kept selling and a second edition was printed. Soon afterward the
same thing happened with
The Leather Mask.
Archimboldi's name appeared
in two essays on new German fiction, though he was mentioned in passing each
time, as if the authors of the essays were never entirely sure that some joke
wasn't being played on them. A few young people read him. His books were cult
objects, a caprice of university students.

Four
years after Archimboldi's disappearance, Bubis received the weighty manuscript
of
Inheritance,
a novel more than five hundred pages long, full of
crossings out and addenda and lengthy and often illegible footnotes.

The
package had been sent from Venice, where Archimboldi, or so he said in
a
short letter enclosed with
the manuscript, had been working as a gardener, something Bubis thought must be
a joke, because work as a gardener, he thought, is hard enough to find in any
Italian city, let alone Venice. In any case, the publisher's reply was swift.
That same day he wrote back, asking what advance Archimboldi wanted and
requesting a more or less reliable address at which to send him the money,
his
money, which had gradually been accumulating over the last four years.
Archimboldi's response was even briefer. He gave an address in Cannaregio and
signed off with the usual pleasantries, wishing Bubis and his wife a happy New
Year, because the end of December was approaching. Over the course of the next
few days, very cold days all over Europe, Bubis read the manuscript of
Inheritance
and despite the chaos of the text, in the end he was left with a feeling of
great satisfaction, because Archimboldi had lived up to all the hopes he had
placed in him. What hopes were these? Bubis didn't know, or care to know. They
certainly didn't involve Archimboldi's steady output, which was something any
hack could achieve, or his storytelling powers, of which Bubis had been
convinced since
The Endless Rose,
or his capacity to inject new blood
into the sclerotic German language, a deed accomplished, in Bubis's judgment,
by two poets and three or four fiction writers, among whom he counted
Archimboldi. But it wasn't that. What, then? Bubis didn't know, although he
felt it, and not knowing didn't trouble him in the least, among other reasons
perhaps because knowing only led to trouble, and he was a publisher and God's
ways truly were mysterious.

Since
the baroness was in
Italy
at the time, where she had a lover, Bubis called her and asked her to go and
visit Archimboldi.