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And
then came the commentary. The Swiss boy, for a start, declared that the
Chateaubriand quote was entirely
unexpected,
particularly because one
sensed it had a sexual subtext.

"Highly
sexual," said the baroness.

"Which is hard to believe
considering that it's Chateaubriand," said the copy editor.

"Well, the
allusion to horses is clear enough," said the Swiss boy.

"Poor
Maria!" the head of publicity exclaimed in conclusion.

Then
they talked about Henri, about Rosny's
Fateful Day,
a cubist text,
according to Bubis. Or the perfect expression of nervous activity and the
pursuit of reading, according to the designer, because Henri read not only with
his hands clasped behind his back but also as he strolled about the garden.
Which could be very pleasant at times, according to the Swiss boy, who turned
out to be the only one of those present who occasionally read as he walked.

"The possibility also exists," said the copy editor,
"that our Henri has invented a device that allows him to read with his
hands free."

"But
how," asked the baroness, "does he turn the pages?"

"Very
simple," said the Swiss boy, "with a little stick or metal wand that
he manipulates with his mouth and that is, of course, part of the reading
device, which probably takes the form of a folding tray. One must also keep in
mind that Henri is an inventor, which means he belongs to the class of
objective men, and he's reading a novel
by a friend,
which is a great
responsibility, because his friend will want to know whether he liked the book,
and if he liked it he'll want to know whether he liked it a lot, and if he
liked it a lot he'll want to know whether Henri considers it a masterpiece, and
if Henri admits he thinks it's a masterpiece his friend will want to know
whether he's written one of the great works of French letters, and so on until
poor Henri's patience is exhausted, since he surely has better things to do
than hang that ridiculous device around his neck and pace up and down the
garden."

"In
any case," said the head of publicity, "by all indications Henri
doesn't
like what he's reading. He's upset, he's afraid his friend's book is no
good, he's reluctant to admit the obvious: his friend has written a piece of
trash."

"And
how do you deduce that?" the copy editor wanted to know.

"By
the way Rosny presents him to us. The hands clasped behind the back: disquiet,
absorption. He reads on foot and in constant motion: resistance to the facts,
agitation."

"But
the act of using the reading machine saves him," says the designer.

Then
they talked about the Daudet quotation, which, according to Bubis, wasn't an
example of
lapsus calami
but of the writer's sense of humor, and about
Luck's
Favorite,
by Octave Feuillet (Saint-L6 1821-Paris 1890), a highly
successful writer in his day and a foe of the realist and naturalist novel,
whose works had fallen into the most
grievous
oblivion, into the most
deserved
oblivion, and whose
lapsus,
"Silently the corpse awaited the
autopsy," in some sense prefigured the fate of his own books, said the
Swiss boy.

"Doesn't
Feuillet have something to do with the French word
feuilleton?”
asked
old Marianne Gottlieb. "I seem to remember it means both the literary
supplement of a particular newspaper and the serial novels published in
it."

"They're
probably the same thing," said the Swiss boy enigmatically.

"The
word
feuilleton
certainly does come from Feuillet, the prince of serial
novels," said Bubis, feigning confidence, though he wasn't entirely sure.

"But my
favorite is Auback's," said the copy editor.

"He must be
German," said the secretary.

"That's
a good one: 'with one eye he read, with the other he wrote,' it wouldn't be out
of place in a biography of Goethe," said the Swiss boy.

"Leave Goethe
alone," said the head of publicity.

"Auback
might have been French, too," said the proofreader, who had lived in
France
for many years.

"Or
Swiss," said the baroness.

"And
what do you think of 'His hand was as cold as a snake's'?" asked the
bookkeeper.

"I
prefer Henri Zvedan: 'After they cut off his head, they buried him
alive,'" said the Swiss boy.

"There's
a certain logic to it," said the copy editor. "First they cut off his
head. The killers think the victim is dead, but they're in a hurry to get rid
of the body. They dig a grave, toss the body in, cover it with dirt. But the
victim isn't dead. The victim hasn't been guillotined. They've cut off his
head, which in this case might mean they've cut his throat, or tried to cut his
throat. There's lots of blood. The victim loses consciousness. His attackers
take him for dead. After a while, the victim wakes. The earth has stanched the
bleeding. He's buried alive. There you go. End of story," said the copy editor.
"Doesn't that make sense?"

"No,"
said the head of publicity.

"You're right,
it doesn't," admitted the copy editor.

"It makes a little bit of
sense, dear," said Marianne Gottlieb, "history is full of special
cases."
 

"But this one doesn't make sense," said the copy editor.
"Don't try to make me feel better, Mrs. Marianne."

"I
think it does make some sense," said Archimboldi, who couldn't stop
laughing, "although it isn't my favorite."

"Which one is
your favorite?" asked Bubis.

"The
Balzac," said Archimboldi.

"Ah, that's a
great one," said the copy editor.

And the Swiss boy
recited:

"I
can hardly see anymore, said the poor blind woman."

After
Inheritance,
the next manuscript Archimboldi sent to Bubis was
Saint Thomas
,
the
apocryphal biography of a biographer whose subject is a great writer of the
Nazi regime, in whom some critics wanted to see a likeness of Ernst Jünger,
although clearly it isn't Jünger but a fictional character. At the time,
Archimboldi still lived in
Venice
,
as far as Bubis knew, and he was probably still working as a gardener, although
the advances and checks the publisher sent him periodically would have
permitted him to write full-time.

The next manuscript, however, arrived from a Greek island, the
island
of
Icaria
, where Archimboldi had rented a
little house in the rocky hills with the sea in the distance. Like the final
surroundings of Sisyphus, thought Bubis, and he told Archimboldi so in a letter
in which he notified him, as usual, that the text had arrived and been read,
and in which he suggested three forms of payment, so Archimboldi could choose
the one that suited him best.

Archimboldi's
response surprised Bubis. In it he said that Sisyphus, once he was dead, had
escaped from hell by means of a legal stratagem. Before Zeus freed Thanatos,
Sisyphus asked his wife not to perform the usual funeral rites, knowing that
the first thing Death would do was come for him. So when he got to hell, Hades
scolded him and all the infernal lords naturally clamored to the skies or the
vault of hell and tore out their hair and took offense. But Sisyphus said it
was his wife's fault, not his, and he requested permission to return to Earth
to punish her.

Hades considered
it: the proposal Sisyphus made was reasonable and freedom was granted to him on
the condition that he stay away for only three or four days, long enough to get
his just vengeance and set in motion, however belatedly, the proper funeral
rites. Of course, Sisyphus jumped at the chance—not for nothing was he the
craftiest man in the world—and he returned to Earth, where he lived happily to
a ripe old age, and didn't go back to hell until his body failed him.

According
to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus
occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected
moment, Sisyphus will devise something and he'll come back to Earth,
Archimboldi ended his letter.

The
novel he sent to Bubis from
Icaria
was called
The
Blind Woman.
As one might expect, it was about a blind woman who didn't
know she was blind and some clairvoyant detectives who didn't know they were
clairvoyant. More books soon came to
Hamburg
from the island.
The Black Sea,
a theater piece or a novel written in
dramatic form, in which the Black Sea converses with the Atlantic Ocean an hour
before dawn.
Lethaea,
his most explicitly sexual novel, in which he
transfers to the Germany of the Third Reich the story of Lethaea, who believes
herself more beautiful than any goddess and is finally transformed, along with
Olenus, her husband, into a stone statue (this novel was labeled as
pornographic and after a successful court case it became Archimboldi's first
book to go through five printings).
The Lottery Man,
the life of a
crippled German who sells lottery tickets in
New York
. And
The Father,
in which a
son recalls his father's activities as a psychopathic killer, which begin in
1938, when his son is twenty, and come to an enigmatic end in 1948.

He lived for a while on
Icaria
. Then he lived on Amorgos. Then on Santorini. Then
on Sifnos, Syros, and
Mykonos
. Then he lived
on a tiny island, which he called Hecatombe or Superego, near the
island
of
Naxos
,
but he never lived on
Naxos
. Then he left the
islands and returned to the Continent. In those days he ate grapes and olives,
big dry olives which in taste and consistency were like clods of dirt. He ate
white cheese and cured goat cheese that was sold wrapped in grape leaves and
could be smelled from one thousand feet away. He ate very hard black bread that
had to be softened with wine. He ate fish and tomatoes. Figs. Water. The water
came from a well. He had a bucket and a jerry can like the kind they used in
the army that he filled with water. He swam, but the seaweed boy was dead.
Still, he was a strong swimmer. Sometimes he dove. Other times he sat alone on
the slopes of the hills covered in scrub, until dusk fell or dawn came,
thinking, or so he claimed, but really he wasn't thinking anything at all.

After
he moved back to the Continent, he was reading a German paper on a terrace in
Missolonghi when he learned of Bubis's death.

Thanatos had come to Hamburg, a city he knew like the palm of his
hand, while Bubis was in his office reading a book by a young writer from
Dresden, a viciously funny book that made him laugh until he shook. His laughter,
according to the publicity chief, could be heard in the lobby and the
bookkeeper's office and also in the copy editors' office and the meeting room
and the reading room and the bathroom and the room that served as kitchen and
pantry, and it even reached the office of the boss's wife, which was the
farthest away of all.

Suddenly,
the laughter ceased. Everybody at the publishing house, for one reason or
another, remembered the time, eleven twenty-five in the morning. After a while,
the secretary knocked at Bubis's door. No one answered. Afraid to disturb him,
she decided to wait. Shortly thereafter she tried to transfer a call to him. No
one picked up the phone in Bubis's office. This time the call was urgent, and
the secretary, after knocking several times, opened the door. Bubis was slumped
over, amid his books artfully scattered across the floor, and he was dead,
although the expression on his face was happy.

His
body was burned and his ashes were scattered over the waters of the Alster. His
widow, the baroness, took the helm of the publishing house and declared that
she had no intention of selling the company. Nothing was said about the
manuscript by the young author from
Dresden
,
who had already had problems with censorship in the Democratic Republic. When
he had finished reading, Archimboldi read the whole story again and then a
third time and then he got up shaking and went for a walk around Missolonghi,
which was full of memorials to Byron, as if Byron had done nothing in
Missolonghi but stroll about, from inn to tavern, from backstreet to little
square, when it was common knowledge that he had been too ill to move and it
was Thanatos who walked and looked and took note, Thanatos who visited not just
in search of Byron but also as a tourist, because Thanatos is the biggest
tourist on Earth.

And
then Archimboldi wondered whether he should send a card to the publishing house
with his condolences. And he even imagined the words he would write. But then
he decided that none of it made sense, and he didn't write or send anything.

More
than a year after Bubis's death, when Archimboldi was living in
Italy
again, the manuscript of his latest novel, titled
The Return,
arrived at
the publishing house. The Baroness Von Zumpe had no desire to read it. She gave
it to the copy editor and told her to prepare it for publication in three
months.