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Archimboldi's situation in
Italy
, it must be said, was very different from
his situation in
France
.
For one thing, Morini wasn't his first translator. As it happened, the first
novel by Archimboldi to fall into Morini's hands was a translation of
The Leather Mask
done by someone called
Colossimo for Einaudi in 1969. In
Italy
,
The Leather Mask
was followed by
Rivers of Europe
in 1971,
Inheritance
in 1973, and
Railroad Perfection
in 1975; earlier, in
1964, a publishing house in
Rome
had put out a
collection of mostly war stories, titled
The
Berlin
Underworld.
So it could be said that Archimboldi wasn't a complete unknown
in
Italy
,
although one could hardly claim that he was successful, or somewhat successful,
or even barely successful. In point of fact, he was an utter failure, an author
whose books languished on the dustiest shelves in the stores or were
remaindered or forgotten in publishers' warehouses before being pulped.

Morini, of course, was undaunted by the
scant interest that Archimboldi's work aroused in the Italian public, and after
he translated
Bifucaria Bifurcata
he
wrote two studies of Archimboldi for journals in Milan and Palermo, one on the
role of fate in
Railroad Perfection,
and
the other on the various guises of conscience and guilt in
Lethaea,
on the surface an erotic novel, and in
Bitzius,
a novel less than one hundred
pages long, similar in some ways to
Mitzi's
Treasure,
the book that Pelletier had found in an old Munich bookstore, and
that told the story of the life of Albert Bitzius, pastor of Lutzelflüh, in the
canton of Bern, an author of sermons as well as a writer under the pseudonym
Jeremiah Gotthelf. Both pieces were published, and Morini's eloquence or powers
of seduction in presenting the figure of Archimboldi overcame all obstacles,
and in 1991 a second translation by Piero Morini, this time of
Saint Thomas
,
was published in
Italy
. By then, Morini was teaching
German literature at the
University
of
Turin
, the doctors had
diagnosed him with multiple sclerosis, and he had suffered the strange and
spectacular accident that left him permanently wheelchair-bound.

Manuel Espinoza came to Archimboldi by a
different route. Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish
literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his
university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a
writer. The only German authors he was (barely) familiar with were three
greats: Hölderlin, because at sixteen he thought he was fated to be a poet and
he devoured every book of poetry he could find; Goethe, because in his final
year of secondary school a teacher with a humorous streak recommended that he
read
The Sorrows of Young Werther,
in
whose hero he would find a kindred spirit; and Schiller, because he had read
one of his plays. Later he would discover the work of a modern author, Jünger,
with whom he became acquainted more by osmosis than anything else, since the
Madrid writers he admired (and deep down hated bitterly) talked nonstop about Jünger.
So it could be said that Espinoza was acquainted with just one German author,
and that author was Jünger. At first he thought Jünger's work was magnificent,
and since many of the writer's books were translated into Spanish, Espinoza had
no trouble finding them and reading them all. He would have preferred it to be
less easy. Meanwhile, many of his acquaintances weren't just Jünger devotees;
some of them were the author's translators, too, which was something Espinoza
cared little about, since the glory he coveted was that of the writer, not the
translator.

As the months and years went by, silently
and cruelly as is often the case, Espinoza suffered some misfortunes that made
him change his thinking. It didn't take him long, for example, to discover that
the group of Jungerians wasn't as Jungerian as he had thought, being instead,
like all literary groups, in thrall to the changing seasons. In the fall, it's
true, they were Jungerians, but in winter they suddenly turned into Barojians
and in spring into Orteganites, and in summer they would even leave the bar
where they met to go out into the street and intone pastoral verse in honor of
Camilo Jose Cela, something that the young Espinoza, who was fundamentally
patriotic, would have been prepared to accept unconditionally if such displays
had been embarked on in a fun-loving, carnivalesque spirit, but who could in no
way take it all seriously, as did the bogus Jungerians.

Worse was discovering what the members of
the group thought about his own attempts at fiction. Their opinion was so
negative that there were times—some nights, for example, when he couldn't
sleep—that he began to wonder in all seriousness whether they were making a
veiled attempt to get him to go away, stop bothering them, never show his face
again.

And even worse was when Jünger showed up
in person in Madrid and the group of Jungerians organized a trip to El Escorial
for him (a strange whim of the maestro, visiting El Escorial), and when
Espinoza tried to join the excursion, in any capacity whatsoever, he was denied
the honor, as if the Jungerians deemed him unworthy of making up part of the
German's
garde du corps,
or as if
they feared that he, Espinoza, might embarrass them with some naive, abstruse
remark, although the official explanation given (perhaps dictated by some
charitable impulse) was that he didn't speak German and everyone else who was
going on the picnic with Junger did.

That was the end of Espinoza's dealings
with the Jungerians. And it was the beginning of his loneliness and a steady
stream (or deluge) of resolutions, often contradictory or impossible to keep.
These weren't comfortable nights, much less pleasant ones, but Espinoza
discovered two things that helped him mightily in the early days: he would
never be a fiction writer, and, in his own way, he was brave.

He also discovered that he was bitter and
full of resentment, that he oozed resentment, and that he might easily kill
someone, anyone, if it would provide a respite from the loneliness and rain and
cold of
Madrid
,
but this was a discovery that he preferred to conceal. Instead he concentrated
on his realization that he would never be a writer and on making everything he
possibly could out of his newly unearthed bravery.

He continued at the university, studying
Spanish literature, but at the same time he enrolled in the German department.
He slept four or five hours a night and the rest of the time he spent at his
desk. Before he finished his degree in German literature he wrote a twenty-page
essay on the relationship between Werther and music, which was published in a
Madrid
literary magazine and a
Gottingen
university journal. By the time he
was twenty-five he had completed both degrees. In 1990, he received his
doctorate in German literature with a dissertation on Benno von Archimboldi. A
Barcelona
publishing house
brought it out one year later. By then, Espinoza was a regular at German
literature conferences and roundtables. His command of German was, if not
excellent, more than passable. He also spoke English and French. Like Morini
and Pelletier, he had a good job and a substantial income, and he was respected
(to the extent possible) by his students as well as his colleagues. He never
translated Archimboldi or any other German author.

Besides Archimboldi, there was one thing
Morini, Pelletier, and Espinoza had in common. All three had iron wills.
Actually, they had one other thing in common, but we'll get to that later.

Liz Norton, on the other hand, wasn't what
one would ordinarily call a woman of great drive, which is to say that she
didn't draw up long- or medium-term plans and throw herself wholeheartedly into
their execution. She had none of the attributes of the ambitious. When she
suffered, her pain was clearly visible, and when she was happy, the happiness
she felt was contagious. She was incapable of setting herself a goal and
striving steadily toward it. At least, no goal was appealing or desirable
enough for her to pursue it unreservedly. Used in a personal sense, the phrase
"achieve an end" seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred
the word
life,
and, on rare
occasions,
happiness.
If volition is
bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore
easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton
was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war.

This was something she'd been told once
when she was a student, and she loved it, although it didn't make her read
William James, then or ever. For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure,
not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths, as Morini,
Espinoza, and Pelletier believed it to be.

Her discovery of Archimboldi was the least
traumatic of all, and the least poetic. During the three months that she lived
in
Berlin
in
1988, when she was twenty, a German friend loaned her a novel by an author she
had never heard of. The name puzzled her. How was it possible, she asked her
friend, that there could be a German writer with an Italian surname, but with a
von
preceding it, indicating some kind
of nobility? Her German friend had no answer. It was probably a pseudonym, he
said. And to make things even stranger, he added, masculine proper names ending
in vowels were uncommon in
Germany
.
Plenty of feminine proper names ended that way. But certainly not masculine
proper names. The novel was
The Blind
Woman,
and she liked it, but not so much that it made her go running out to
buy everything else that Benno von Archimboldi had ever written.

Five months later, back in
England
again, Liz Norton received a gift in the mail from her German friend. As one
might guess, it was another novel by Archimboldi. She read it, liked it, went
to her college library to look for more books by the German with the Italian
name, and found two: one was the book she had already read in
Berlin
, and the other was
Bitzius.
Reading the latter really did
make her go running out. It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular
sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The
oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would
have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned
round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass
and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words
like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely
audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had
drunk a steaming cup of peyote.

But the truth is that she had only had tea
to drink and she felt overwhelmed, as if a voice were repeating a terrible
prayer in her ear, the words of which blurred as she walked away from the
college, and the rain wetted her gray skirt and bony knees and pretty ankles
and little else, because before Liz Norton went running through the park, she
hadn't forgotten to pick up her umbrella.

The first time Pelletier, Morini,
Espinoza, and Norton saw each other was at a contemporary German literature
conference held in
Bremen
in 1994. Pelletier and Morini had met before, during the German literature
colloquiums held in Leipzig in 1989, when the GDR was in its death throes, and
then they saw each other again at the German literature symposium held in
Mannheim in December of the same year (a disaster, with bad hotels, bad food,
and abysmal organizing). At a modern German literature forum in
Zurich
in 1990, Pelletier
and Morini met Espinoza. Espinoza saw Pelletier again at a twentieth-century
German literature congress held in Maastricht in 1991 (Pelletier delivered a
paper titled "Heine and Archimboldi: Converging Paths"; Espinoza
delivered a paper titled "Ernst Jünger and Benno von Archimboldi:
Diverging Paths"), and it could more or less safely be said that from that
moment on they not only read each other in the scholarly journals, they became
friends, or they struck up something like a friendship. In 1992, Pelletier,
Espinoza, and Morini ran into each other again at a German literature seminar
in
Augsburg
.
Each was presenting a paper on Archimboldi. For a few months it had been
rumored that Benno von Archimboldi himself planned to attend this grand event,
which would convene not only the usual Germanists but also a sizable group of
German writers and poets, and yet at the crucial moment, two days before the
gathering, a telegram was received from Archimboldi's
Hamburg
publishers tendering his apologies.
In every other respect, too, the conference was a failure. In Pelletier's
opinion, perhaps the only thing of interest was a lecture given by an old
professor from
Berlin
on the work of Arno Schmidt (here we have a German proper name ending in a
vowel), a judgment shared by Espinoza and, to a lesser extent, by Morini.