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You did the right thing," said Espinoza.

The clerk told me they were planning to replace the toilet
but they couldn't find the right model. He didn't want me to leave with a
negative impression of the hotel. A nice person, after all," said
Pelletier.

The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was
mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except
that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something
authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible
richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a
castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent
university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less
melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor
put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish
beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had
the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border. Espinoza and Pelletier saw
him as a failed man, failed above all because he had lived and taught in
Europe, who tried to protect himself with a veneer of toughness but whose
innate gentleness gave him away in the act. But Norton's impression was of a
sad man whose life was ebbing swiftly away and who would rather do anything
than serve them as guide to Santa Teresa.

That night the three critics went to bed on the early side.
Pelletier dreamed of his toilet. A muffled noise woke him and he got up naked
and saw from under the door that someone had turned on the bathroom light. At
first he thought it was Norton, even Espinoza, but as he came closer he knew it
couldn't be either of them. When he opened the door the bathroom was empty. On
the floor he saw big smears of blood. The bathtub and the shower curtain were
crusted with a substance that wasn't entirely dry yet and that Pelletier at
first thought was mud or vomit, but which he soon discovered was shit. He was
much more revolted by the shit than frightened by the blood. As he began to
retch he woke up.

Espinoza dreamed about the painting of the desert. In the
dream Espinoza sat up in bed, and from there, as if watching TV on a screen
more than five feet square, he could see the still, bright desert, such a solar
yellow it hurt his eyes, and the figures on horseback, whose movements—the
movements of horses and riders—were barely perceptible, as if they were living
in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that
looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness
that kept whoever watched the painting from losing his mind. And then there
were the voices. Espinoza listened to them. Barely audible voices, at first
only syllables, brief moans shooting like meteorites over the desert and the
framed space of the hotel room and the dream. He recognized a few stray words.
Quickness,
urgency, speed, agility.
The words tunneled through the rarefied air of the
room like virulent roots through dead flesh. Our culture, said a voice. Our
freedom. The word
freedom
sounded to Espinoza like the crack of a whip
in an empty classroom. He woke up in a sweat.

In Norton's dream she saw herself reflected in both
mirrors. From the front in one and from the back in the other. Her body was
slightly aslant. It was impossible to say for sure whether she was about to
move forward or backward. The light in the room was dim and uncertain, like the
light of an English dusk. No lamp was lit. Her image in the mirrors was dressed
to go out, in a tailored gray suit and, oddly, since Norton hardly ever wore
such things, a little gray hat that brought to mind the fashion pages of the
fifties. She was probably wearing black pumps, although they weren't visible.
The stillness of her body, something reminiscent of inertia and also of
defenselessness, made her wonder, nevertheless, what she was waiting for to
leave, what signal she was waiting for before she stepped out of the field
between the watching mirrors and opened the door and disappeared. Had she heard
a noise in the hall? Had someone passing by tried to open her door? A confused
hotel guest? A worker, someone sent up by reception, a chambermaid? And yet the
silence was total, and there was a certain calm about it, the calm of long
early-evening silences. All at once Norton realized that the woman reflected in
the mirror wasn't her. She felt afraid and curious, and she didn't move,
watching the figure in the mirror even more carefully, if possible.
Objectively, she said to herself, she looks just like me and there's no reason
why I should think otherwise. She's me. But then she looked at the woman's
neck: a vein, swollen as if to bursting, ran down from her ear and vanished at
the shoulder blade. A vein that didn't seem real, that seemed drawn on. Then
Norton thought: I have to get out of here. And she scanned the room, trying to
pinpoint the exact spot where the woman was, but it was impossible to see her.
In order for her to be reflected in both mirrors, she said to herself, she must
be just between the little entryway and the room. But she couldn't see her.
When she watched her in the mirrors she noticed a change. The woman's head was
turning almost imperceptibly. I'm being reflected in the mirrors too, Norton
said to herself. And if she keeps moving, in the end we'll see each other. Each
of us will see the other's face. Norton clenched her fists and waited. The
woman in the mirror clenched her fists too, as if she were making a superhuman
effort. The light coming into the room was ashen. Norton had the impression
that outside, in the streets, a fire was raging. She began to sweat. She
lowered her head and closed her eyes. When she looked in the mirrors again, the
woman's swollen vein had grown and her profile was beginning to appear. I have
to escape, she thought. She also thought: where are Jean-Claude and Manuel? She
thought about Morini. All she saw was an empty wheelchair and behind it an
enormous, impenetrable forest, so dark green it was almost black, which it took
her a while to recognize as
Hyde Park
. When
she opened her eyes, the gaze of the woman in the mirror and her own gaze
intersected at some indeterminate point in the room. The woman's eyes were just
like her eyes. The cheekbones, the lips, the forehead, the nose. Norton started
to cry in sorrow or fear, or thought she was crying. She's just like me, she
said to herself, but she's dead. The woman smiled tentatively and then, almost
without transition, a grimace of fear twisted her face. Startled, Norton looked
behind her, but there was no one there, just the wall. The woman smiled at her
again. This time the smile grew not out of a grimace but out of a look of
despair. And then the woman smiled at her again and her face became anxious,
then blank, then nervous, then resigned, and then all the expressions of
madness passed over it and after each she always smiled. Meanwhile, Norton,
regaining her composure, had taken out a small notebook and was rapidly taking
notes about everything as it happened, as if her fate or her share of happiness
on earth depended on it, and this went on until she woke up.

When Amalfitano told them he had translated
The Endless
Rose
for an Argentinian publishing house in 1974, the critics' opinion of
him changed. They wanted to know where he had learned German, how he had
discovered Archimboldi, which books of his he had read, what he thought of him.
Amalfitano said he had learned German in
Chile
,
at the
German
School
, which he had attended from the
time he was small, although when he turned fifteen he had moved, for reasons
that were neither here nor there, to a public high school. He had come into
contact with Archimboldi's work, as far as he could recall, at the age of
twenty, when he read
The Endless Rose, The Leather Mask,
and
Rivers
of Europe
in German, books he borrowed from a library in
Santiago
. The library had only those three
and
Bifurcaria Bifurcata,
but this last he had begun and couldn't
finish. It was a public library, augmented by the collection of a German man
who had accumulated many books in German and who had donated them before he
died to the
municipality
of
Nunoa
, in
Santiago
.

Of course, Amalfitano admired Archimboldi, although he felt
nothing like the adoration the critics felt for him. Amalfitano, for example,
thought that Günter Grass or Arno Schmidt was just as good. When the critics
wanted to know whether the translation of
The Endless Rose
had been his
idea or an assignment, Amalfitano said that as far as he remembered, it had
been the Argentinian publisher's idea. In those days, he said, I translated
everything I could and I worked as a proofreader, too. As far as he knew, it
had been a pirate edition, although the possibility didn't occur to him till
much later and he couldn't say for sure.

When the critics, much more kindly disposed toward him now,
asked what he was doing in Argentina in 1974, Amalfitano looked at them and
then at his margarita and said, as if he had repeated it many times, that in
1974 he was in Argentina because of the coup in Chile, which had obliged him to
choose the path of exile. And then he apologized for expressing himself so
grandiloquently. Everything becomes a habit, he said, but none of the critics
paid much attention to this last remark.

"Exile must be a terrible thing," said Norton
sympathetically.

"Actually," said Amalfitano, "now I see it
as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or
what is generally thought of as fate."

"But exile," said Pelletier, "is full of
inconveniences, of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and
interfere with anything you try to do that's important."

"That's just what I mean by abolishing fate,"
said Amalfitano. "But again, I beg your pardon."

The next morning Amalfitano was waiting for them in the
hotel lobby. If the Chilean professor hadn't been there they would surely have
told one another the nightmares they'd had the night before and who knows what
might have come to light. But there was Amalfitano, and the four set off
together to have breakfast and plan the day's activities. They went over the
possibilities. In the first place, it was clear that Archimboldi hadn't stopped
by the university. At least not the Faculty of Arts and Letters. There was no
German consulate in Santa Teresa, so any steps in that direction could be ruled
out from the start. They asked Amalfitano how many hotels there were in town.
He said he didn't know, but he could find out right away, as soon as they were
done with breakfast.

"How?" Espinoza wanted to know.

"By asking at the reception desk," said
Amalfitano. "They must have a list of all the hotels and motels in the
area."

"Of course," said Pelletier and Norton.

As they finished breakfast they speculated again about the
motives that might have compelled Archimboldi to travel to Santa Teresa. That
was when Amalfitano learned that no one had ever seen Archimboldi in person.
The story struck him as amusing, though he couldn't say exactly why, and he
asked why they wanted to find him when it was clear Archimboldi didn't want to
be seen. Because we're studying his work, said the critics. Because he's dying
and it isn't right that the greatest German writer of the twentieth century
should die without being offered the chance to speak to the readers who know
his novels best. Because, they said, we want to convince him to come back to
Europe
.

"I thought," said Amalfitano, "that Kafka
was the greatest German writer of the twentieth century."

Well, then the greatest postwar German writer or the
greatest German writer of the second half of the twentieth century, said the
critics.

"Have you read Peter Handke?" Amalfitano asked
them. "And what about Thomas Bernhard?"

Ugh, said the critics, and until breakfast was over
Amalfitano was attacked until he resembled the bird in Azuela's
Mangy
Parrot,
gutted and plucked to the last feather.

At the reception desk they were given the list of every
hotel in the city. Amalfitano suggested that they call from the university,
since it appeared that Guerra and the critics were on such excellent terms, or
that Guerra felt a respect for them bordering on reverence and even fear, a
fear, in turn, not without its element of vanity or coquetry, although cunning,
to be fair crouched behind the coquetry and fear, since'even if Guerra's
cooperation came down to the wishes of Rector Negrete, it was no secret to
Amalfitano that Guerra planned to get something out of the visit of the
distinguished European professors, for as we all know the future is a mystery and
we never know when we may come to a bend in the road or what unexpected places
our steps may lead us. But the critics didn't want to use the university phone
and they made calls on their room accounts. To save time, Espinoza and Norton
called from Espinoza's room, and Amalfitano and Pelletier called from
Pelletier's room. After an hour the results couldn't have been more
disheartening. No Hans Reiter was registered at any hotel. After two hours they
decided to give up calling and go down to the bar for a drink. All they had
left were a few hotels and some motels on the outskirts of the city. Looking
over the list more carefully, Amalfitano said most of the motels on the list
rented rooms by the hour or were really brothels, places where it was hard to imagine
a German tourist.