2666 (16 page)

Deeply affected by their reunion,
Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton met at a bar, or rather at the tiny cafeteria
(truly Lilliputian: two tables and a counter at which no more than four people
fit shoulder to shoulder) of an unorthodox gallery only a little bigger than
the bar, which exhibited paintings but also sold used books and clothes and
shoes, located on Hyde Park Gate, very near the Dutch embassy. The three
expressed their admiration for the
Netherlands
, a thoroughly
democratic country.

At this bar, according to Norton, they
made the best margaritas in
London
,
a distinction of little interest to Pelletier and Espinoza, although they
feigned enthusiasm. They were the only ones there, of course, and despite the
time of day, the single employee or owner looked as if he were asleep or had
just woken up, in contrast to Pelletier and Espinoza, who, though each had
woken at seven and taken a plane, then separately endured the delays of their
respective flights, were fresh and full of energy, ready to make the most of
their London weekend.

Conversation, it's true, was difficult at
first. In the silence, Pelletier and Espinoza watched Norton: she was as pretty
and seductive as ever. Sometimes they were distracted by the little ant steps
of the gallery owner, who was taking dresses off a rack and carrying them into
a back room, returning with identical or very similar dresses, which he left
where the others had been hanging.

Though the silence didn't bother Pelletier
or Espinoza, Norton found it stifling and felt obliged to tell them, quickly
and rather ferociously, about her teaching activities during the time they
hadn't seen each other. It was a boring subject, and soon exhausted, so Norton
went on to describe everything she had done the day before and the day before
that, but once again she was left with nothing to say For a while, smiling like
squirrels, the three of them turned to their margaritas, but the quiet became
more and more unbearable, as if within it, in the interregnum of silence,
cutting words and cutting ideas were slowly being formed, never a performance
or dance to be observed with indifference. So Espinoza decided it would be a
good idea to describe a trip to
Switzerland
,
a trip that hadn't involved Norton and that might amuse her.

In his telling, Espinoza didn't leave out
the tidy cities or the rivers that invited contemplation or the springtime
mountainsides clothed in green. And then he spoke of a trip by train, once the
work that had brought the three friends together was finished, into the
countryside, toward one of the towns halfway between Montreux and the foothills
of the Bernese Alps, where they hired a car that took them along a winding but
scrupulously paved road toward a rest clinic that bore the name of a late
nineteenth-century Swiss politician or financier, the Auguste Demarre Clinic,
an unobjectionable name behind which lay concealed a civilized and discreet
lunatic asylum.

It hadn't been Pelletier's or Espinoza's
idea to visit such a place. It was Morini's idea, because Morini had somehow
learned that a man he considered to be one of the most disturbing painters of
the twentieth century was living there. Or not. Maybe Morini hadn't said that.
Either way, the name of this painter was Edwin Johns and he had cut off his
right hand, the hand he painted with, then had it embalmed, and attached it to
a kind of multiple self-portrait.

"How is it you never told me this
story?" interrupted Norton. Espinoza shrugged his shoulders. "I
thought you'd heard it from me," said Pelletier. Although after a few
seconds he realized that in fact she hadn't. Norton, to everyone's surprise,
burst into inappropriate laughter and ordered another margarita. For a while,
as they were waiting for their drinks to be brought by the owner, who was still
taking down and hanging up dresses, the three of them sat in silence. Then, at
Norton's pleading, Espinoza had to resume his tale. But he didn't want to. You
tell it," he said to Pelletier, "you were there, too."
Pelletier's story then began with the three Archimboldians contemplating the
iron gate that rose in welcome to the Auguste Demarre lunatic asylum, while also
blocking the way out
 
(and preventing the
entrance of any importunate guests). Or rather, the story begins seconds
before, with Espinoza and Morini in his wheelchair surveying the iron gate and
the iron railings that vanished to right and left, shaded by a venerable and
well-tended grove of trees, as Pelletier, half in and half out of the car, paid
the driver and arranged a reasonable time for him to drive up from the town to
retrieve them. Then the three turned to face the bulk of the asylum, which could
just be seen at the end of the road, like a fifteenth-century fortress, not in
its architecture but in the effect of its inertness.

And what was this effect? An odd
conviction. The certainty that the American continent, for example, had never
been discovered, or in other words had never
existed,
and that this had in no way impeded the sustained economic
growth or normal demographic growth or democratic advancement of the Helvetian
republic. Just one of those strange and pointless ideas, said Pelletier, that
people exchange on trips, especially if the trip is manifestly pointless, as
this one was shaping up to be.

Next they made their way through all the
formalities and red tape of a Swiss lunatic asylum. At last, without having
seen a single one of the mental patients taking the cure, they were led by a
middle-aged nurse with an inscrutable face to a small cottage in the rear
grounds of the clinic, huge grounds that enjoyed a splendid view but sloped
downward, which Pelletier, who was pushing Morini's wheelchair, thought must
not be very calming for the disturbed or the severely disturbed.

To their surprise, the cottage turned out
to be a cozy place, surrounded by pine trees, with rosebushes along a low wall,
and armchairs within that mimicked the comfort of the English countryside, a
fireplace, an oak table, a half-empty bookcase (the titles were almost all in
German and French, besides a few in English), a special table with a computer
and modem, a Turkish divan that clashed with the rest of the ; furnishings, a
bathroom containing a toilet, a sink, and even a shower with a sliding plastic
door.

"They don't have it too bad,"
said Espinoza.

Pelletier went over to a window and looked
out at the view. At the, foot of the mountains, he thought he saw a city. Maybe
it's Montreux, he said to himself. Or maybe it was the town where they'd hired
the car. After all, you couldn't see the lake. When Espinoza came over to the
window he thought the houses were the town, certainly not Montreux. Morini sat
still in his wheelchair, his gaze fixed on the door.

W
hen the door opened, Morini was
the first to see him. Edwin Johns had straight hair, starting to thin on top,
and pale skin. He wasn't especially tall, but he was still thin. He wore a gray
turtleneck sweater and a leather blazer. The first thing he noticed was
Morini's wheelchair, which evinced pleasant surprise, as if clearly he hadn't
been expecting anything quite so concrete. Morini, meanwhile, couldn't help
glancing at Johns's right arm, where the hand was missing, and to his own great
surprise, not at all pleasant, he discovered that where there should only have
been emptiness, a hand emerged from Johns's jacket cuff, plastic of course, but
so well made that only a careful and informed observer could tell it was artificial.

Behind Johns a nurse came in, not the one
who had attended them but another one, a little younger and much blonder, who
sat in a chair by one of the windows and took out a fat paperback, which she
began to read, oblivious to Johns and the visitors. Morini introduced himself
as a professor of literature from the
University
of
Turin
and an admirer of Johns's work, and then proceeded to introduce his friends.
Johns, who had remained standing all this time, offered his hand to Espinoza
and Pelletier, who shook it carefully, then sat in a chair at the table and
watched Morini, as if they were the only two people in the cottage.

At first Johns made a slight, almost
imperceptible effort to start a conversation. He asked whether Morini had
bought any of his art. Morini replied in the negative. He said no, then he
added that he couldn't afford Johns's work. Espinoza noticed then that the book
the nurse was reading so intently was an anthology of twentieth-century German
literature. He elbowed Pelletier, and the latter asked the nurse, more to break
the ice than because he was curious, whether Benno von Archimboldi was included
in the anthology. At that moment they all heard the caw or squawk of a crow.
The nurse said yes. Johns began to blink and then he closed his eyes and ran
his prosthetic hand over his face.

It's my book," he said, "I
loaned it to her."

Unbelievable," said Morini,
"what a coincidence."

But of course I haven't read it, I don't
speak German." Espinoza asked why he'd bought it, then.

“For the cover," said Johns.
"The drawing is by Hans Wette, a fine painter. And as far as coincidence
is concerned, it's never a question of believing in it or not. The whole world
is a coincidence. I had a friend who told me I was wrong to think that way. My
friend said the world isn't a coincidence for someone traveling by rail, even
if the train should cross foreign lands, places the traveler will never see
again in his life. And it isn't a coincidence for the person who gets up at six
in the morning, exhausted, to go to work; for the person who has no choice but
to get up and pile more suffering on the suffering he's already accumulated.
Suffering is accumulated, said my friend, that's a fact, and the greater the
suffering, the smaller the coincidence."

"As if coincidence were a
luxury?" asked Morini.

At that moment, Espinoza, who had been
following Johns's monologue, noticed Pelletier next to the nurse, one elbow
propped on the window ledge as with the other hand, in a polite gesture, he
helped her find the page where the story by Archimboldi began. The blond nurse,
sitting in the chair with the book on her lap, and Pelletier, standing by her
side, in a pose not lacking in gallantry. And the window ledge and the roses
outside and beyond them the grass and the trees and the evening advancing
across ridges and ravines and lonely crags. The shadows that crept
imperceptibly across the inside of the cottage, creating angles where none had
existed before, vague sketches that suddenly appeared on the walls, circles
that faded like mute explosions.

"Coincidence isn't a luxury, it's the
flip side of fate, and something else besides," said Johns.

"What else?" asked Morini.

"Something my friend couldn't grasp,
for a reason that's simple and easy to understand. My friend (if I may still
call him that) believed in humanity, and so he also believed in order, in the
order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with.
He believed in redemption. Deep down he may even have believed in progress.
Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny.
Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are.
Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God
at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his
senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find
communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect
with us."

Then, just then, Espinoza—and Pelletier,
too—heard or sensed that Morini was formulating the question he had come to
ask, his voice low his torso so far inclined they feared he would tumble out of
his wheel-chair.

"Why did you mutilate yourself?"

Morini's face seemed to be pierced by the
last lights rolling across the grounds of the asylum. Johns listened
impassively. His attitude suggested a presentiment that the man in the
wheelchair had come on this visit in search of an answer, like so many others
before him. Then Johns smiled and posed a question of his own.

"Are you going to publish this
conversation?"

"Certainly not," said Morini.

"Then why ask me a question like
that?"

"I want to hear you say it
yourself," whispered Morini.

In a movement that to Pelletier seemed
slow and rehearsed, Johns lifted his right hand and held it an inch or so from
Morini's expectant face.

"Do you think you're like me?"
asked Johns.

"No, I'm not an artist,"
answered Morini.

"I'm not an artist either," said
Johns. "Do you think you're like me?"

Morini shook his head back and forth, and
his wheelchair moved too. For a few seconds Johns looked at him with a faint
smile on his thin, bloodless lips.

"Why do you think I did it?" he
asked.

"Honestly, I don't know," said
Morini, looking him in the eye.

Dusk had settled around Morini and Johns
now. The nurse made a move as if to get up and turn on the light, but Pelletier
lifted a finger to his lips and stopped her. The nurse sat down again. The
nurse's shoes were white. Pelletier's and Espinoza's shoes were black. Morini's
shoes were brown. Johns's shoes were white and made for running long distance,
on the paved streets of a city or cross-country. That was the last thing
Pelletier saw, the color of the shoes and their shape and stillness, before
night plunged them into the cold nothingness of the
Alps
.