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"You do know," said Rebeca, in a sad voice he
didn't recognize. "Are you leaving
Mexico
?" she asked him.

"Someday I have to go," he answered.

When he got back to the hotel, Pelletier wasn't on the
terrace or at the pool or in any of the lounges where he usually hid away to
read.
He
asked at the desk whether it had been long since his friend
went out and they told him that Pelletier hadn't left the hotel at all. He went
up to Pelletier's room and knocked on the door, but no one answered. He knocked
again, banging several times, to no avail. He told the clerk he was afraid
something had happened to his friend, that he might have had a heart attack,
and the clerk, who knew them both, went up with Espinoza.

"I doubt anything bad has happened," he said to
Espinoza in the elevator.

After opening the door with the passkey, the clerk didn't
cross the threshold. The room was dark and Espinoza turned on the light. On one
of the beds he saw Pelletier with the bedspread pulled up to his chin. He was
on his back, his face turned slightly to one side, and he had his hands folded
on his chest. There was a peaceful expression on his face that Espinoza had
never seen before. Espinoza called out to him:

"Pelletier, Pelletier."

The clerk, his curiosity getting the better of him,
advanced a few steps and advised him not to touch Pelletier.

"Pelletier," shouted Espinoza, and he sat down
beside him and shook him by the shoulders.

Then Pelletier opened his eyes and asked what was going on.
"We thought you were dead," said Espinoza.

"Mo " said Pelletier, "I was dreaming I was
on vacation in the Greek islands and I rented a boat and I met a boy who spent
the whole day diving.

"It was a beautiful dream,
 
he said.

"It sure does sound relaxing," said the clerk.

"The strangest part of the dream," said
Pelletier, "was that the water was alive."

•

The first few hours of my first night in
Turin
, said Norton in her letter, I spent in
Morini's guest room. I had no trouble falling asleep, but all of a sudden a
thunderclap, real or in my dream, woke me, and I thought I saw Morini and his
wheelchair silhouetted at the end of the hallway. At first I ignored him and
tried to go back to sleep, until suddenly it struck me what I'd seen: to one
side the outline of the wheelchair in the hallway and to the other side the
figure of Morini, not in the hallway but in the sitting room, with his back to
me. I started awake, grabbed an ashtray, and turned on the light. The hallway
was deserted. I went to the sitting room and no one was there. Months before, I
would've just drunk a glass of water and gone back to bed, but nothing would
ever be the same again. So I went to Morini's room. When I opened the door the
first thing I saw was the wheelchair to one side of the bed, and then the bulk
of Morini, who was breathing steadily. I whispered his name. He didn't move. I
raised my voice and Morini's voice asked me what was wrong. "I saw you in
the hallway," I said. "When?" asked Morini.

A minute ago, when I heard the thunder." "Is it
raining?" asked Morini. "It must be," I said.

“I wasn't in the hallway, Liz," said Morini.

“I saw you there. You had gotten up. The wheelchair was in
the hallway, facing me, but you were at the end of the hallway, in the sitting
room, with your back to me," I said.

“It must have been a dream," said Morini.

“The wheelchair was facing me and you had your back to
me," I said.

“Calm down, Liz," said Morini.

"Don't tell me to calm down, don't treat me like a
fool. The wheel-chair was looking at me, and you were standing there cool as
can be, not looking at me. Do you understand?"

Morini allowed himself a few minutes to think, propped on
his elbows.

"I think so," he said. "My chair was
watching you while I was ignoring you, yes? As if the chair and I were a single
person or a single being. And the chair was bad precisely because it was
watching you, and I was bad too, because I had lied to you and I wasn't looking
at you."

Then I started to laugh and I said that really, as far as I
was concerned, he could never be bad, and neither could the wheelchair, since
it was of such great use to him.

The rest of the night we spent together. I told him to move
over and make room for me and Morini obeyed without a word.

"How could it have taken me so long to realize you
loved me?" I asked him afterward. "How could it have taken me so long
to realize I loved you?"

"It's my fault," said Morini in the dark,
"I'm hopeless at these things."

In the morning Espinoza gave the clerks and the guards and
the waiters at the hotel some of the rugs and serapes he'd been accumulating.
He also gave rugs to the two women who cleaned his room. The last serape—a very
pretty one, with a red, green, and lavender geometric motif—he put in a bag and
told the clerk to have it sent up to Pelletier.

"An anonymous gift," he said.

The clerk winked at him and said he would take care of it.

When Espinoza got to the crafts market she was sitting on a
wooden bench reading a pop magazine full of color photos, with articles on Mexican
singers, their weddings, divorces, tours, their gold and platinum albums, their
stints in prison, their deaths in poverty. He sat down next to her, on the
curb, and wondered whether to greet her with a kiss or not. Across the way was
a new stall that sold little clay figurines. From where he was Espinoza could
make out some tiny gallows and he smiled sadly. He asked the girl where her
brother was, and she said he'd gone to school, like every morning.

A woman with very wrinkled skin, dressed in white as if she
were about to get married, stopped to talk to Rebeca, so he picked up the
magazine, which the girl had left under the table on a lunch box, and leafed
through it until Rebeca's friend was gone. A few times he tried to say
something, but he couldn't. Her silence wasn't unpleasant, nor did it imply
resentment or sadness. It was transparent, not dense. It took up almost no
space. A person could even get used to silence like this, thought Espinoza, and
be happy. But he would never get used to it, he knew that too.

When he got tired of sitting he went to a bar and asked for
a beer at the counter. Around him there were only men and no one was alone.
Espinoza swept the bar with a terrible gaze and immediately he saw that the men
were drinking but eating too. He muttered the word
fuck
and spat on the
floor, less than an inch from his own shoes. Then he had another beer and went
back to the stall with the half-empty bottle. Rebeca looked at him and smiled.
Espinoza sat on the sidewalk next to her and told her he was going home. The
girl didn't say anything.

"I'll be coming back to Santa Teresa," he said,
"in less than a year, I swear."

"Don't swear," said the girl, smiling in a
pleased way.

"I'll come back to you," said Espinoza,
swallowing the last of his beer. "And maybe we'll get married and you'll
come to
Madrid
with me."

It sounded as if the girl said: that would be nice, but
Espinoza couldn't hear her.

"What? What?" he asked.

Rebeca was silent.

When he got back that night, Pelletier was reading and drinking
whiskey by the pool. Espinoza sat in the deck chair next to him and asked what
their plans were. Pelletier smiled and set his book on the table.

"I found your gift in my room," he said,
"and it's perfect. Even charming."

"Ah, the serape," said Espinoza, and he let
himself fall back on the deck chair.

There were many stars in the sky. The green-blue water of
the pool danced on the tables and on the pots of flowers and cacti, in a chain
of reflections stretching off to a cream-colored brick wall, behind which lay a
tennis court and a sauna that Espinoza had successfully avoided. Every so often
the
pock
of a racquet could be heard, and muted voices commenting on the
game.

Pelletier stood up and said let's walk. He headed toward
the tennis court, followed by Espinoza. The court lights were on and two men
with big bellies were struggling through an inept game, making the two: women
watching them laugh. The women were sitting on a wooden bench, under an
umbrella like those around the pool. Beyond them, behind a wire fence, was the
sauna, a cement box with two tiny windows like the portholes of a sunken ship.
Sitting on the brick wall, Pelletier said:

"We aren't going to find Archimboldi."

"I've known that for days," said Espinoza.

Then he leaped and leaped again until he was sitting on the
wall, his legs dangling down toward the tennis court.

"And yet," said Pelletier, "I'm sure
Archimboldi is here, in Santa Teresa."

Espinoza looked at his hands, as if he feared he had hurt
himself. One of the women got up from her seat and ran onto the court. When she
reached one of the men, she said something in his ear and then she ran back off
the court. The man she'd spoken to lifted his arms, opened his mouth, and threw
back his head, all without making the slightest sound. The other man, dressed
just like the first in spotless white, waited until his opponent had finished
his silent rejoicing and was calm, and then he tossed the ball. The match
started up again and the women laughed some more.

"Believe me," said Pelletier in a very soft
voice, like the breeze that was blowing just then, suffusing everything with
the scent of flowers, "I know Archimboldi is here."

"Where?" asked Espinoza.

"Somewhere, either in Santa Teresa or else
nearby."

"So why haven't we found him?" asked Espinoza.

One of the tennis players fell and Pelletier smiled.

"That doesn't matter. Because we've been clumsy or
because Archimboldi is extraordinarily good at self-concealment. It means
nothing. The important thing is something else entirely."

"What?" asked Espinoza.

"That he's here," said Pelletier, and he motioned
toward the sauna, the hotel, the court, the fence, the dry brush that could be
glimpsed in the distance, on the unlit hotel grounds. The hair rose on the back
of Espinoza's neck. The cement box where the sauna was looked like a bunker
holding a corpse.

"I believe you," he said, and he really did
believe what his friend was saying."

"Archimboldi is here," said Pelletier, "and
we're here, and this is the closest we'll ever be to him."

•

I don't know how long we'll last together, said Norton in
her letter. It doesn't matter to me or to Morini either (I think). We love each
other and we're happy. I know the two of you will understand.

2
 
THE PART ABOUT AMALFITANO

I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa, Amalfitano
said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week. Don't you? Don't
you really? he asked himself. Really I don't, he said to himself, and that was
as eloquent as he could be.

He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full
bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen—living room—dining room with
windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench
worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from
the north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and came
from the south. He had books he'd kept for more than twenty-five years. Not
many. All of them old. He had books he'd bought in the last ten years, books he
didn't mind lending, books that could've been lost or stolen for all he cared.
He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliar
return addresses, books he didn't even open anymore. He had a yard perfect for
growing grass and planting flowers, but he didn't know what flowers would do
best there—flowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (so
he thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He
had a monthly salary.

He had a daughter named
Rosa
who had always lived with him. Hard to believe, but true.

Sometimes, at night, he remembered
Rosa
's
mother and sometimes he laughed and other times he felt like crying. He thought
of her while he was shut in his office with
Rosa
asleep in her room. The living room was empty and quiet, and the lights were
off. Anyone listening carefully on the porch would have heard the whine of a
few mosquitoes. But no one was listening. The houses next door were silent and
dark.

Rosa
was seventeen and she was
Spanish. Amalfitano was fifty and Chilean.
Rosa
had had a passport since she was ten. On some of their trips, remembered
Amalfitano, they had found themselves in strange situations, because
Rosa
went through customs by the gate for EU citizens and
Amalfitano went by the gate for non-EU citizens. The first time,
Rosa
threw a tantrum and started to cry and refused to be
separated from her father. Another time, since the lines were moving at
different speeds, the EU citizens' line quickly and the noncitizens' line more
slowly and laboriously,
Rosa
got lost and it
took Amalfitano half an hour to find her. Sometimes the customs officers would
see
Rosa
, so little, and ask whether she was
traveling alone or whether someone was waiting for her outside.
Rosa
would answer that she was traveling with her father,
who was South American, and she was supposed to wait for him right there. Once
Rosa
's suitcase was searched because they suspected her
father of smuggling drugs or arms under cover of his daughter's innocence and
nationality. But Amalfitano had never trafficked in drugs, or for that matter
arms.