2666 (8 page)

Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza,
worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long
conversations on the phone.

Pelletier made the first call, which
lasted an hour and fifteen minutes. The second was made three days later by
Espinoza and lasted two hours and fifteen minutes. After they'd been talking
for an hour and a half, Pelletier told Espinoza to hang up, the call would be
expensive and he'd call right back, but Espinoza firmly refused.

The first conversation began awkwardly,
although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it
difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty
minutes were tragic in tone, with the word
fate
used ten times and the
word
friendship
twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times,
nine of them in vain. The word
Paris
was
said seven times,
Madrid
,
eight. The word
love
was spoken twice, once by each man. The word
horror
was spoken six times and the word
happiness
once (by Espinoza). The
word
solution
was said twelve times.
The word
solipsism
seven times. The
word
euphemism
ten times. The word
category,
in the singular and the
plural, nine times. The word
structuralism
once (Pelletier). The term
American
literature
three times. The words
dinner
or
eating
or
breakfast
or
sandwich
nineteen
times. The words
eyes
or
hands
or
hair
fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly.
Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed. In fact, they
both laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked their
voices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of the
Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminable
suburbs surrounding
Paris
and
Madrid
.

The second conversation, radically longer
than the first, was a conversation between friends doing their best to clear up
any murky points they might have overlooked, a conversation that refused to
become technical or logistical and instead touched on subjects connected only
tenuously to Norton, subjects that had nothing to do with surges of emotion,
subjects easy to broach and then drop when they wished to return to the main
subject, Liz Norton, whom, by the time the second call was nearing its close,
both had recognized not as the Fury who destroyed their friendship, black clad
with bloodstained wings, nor as Hecate, who began as an
au pair
, caring for children, and ended up learning witchcraft and
turning herself into an animal, but as the angel who had fortified their
friendship, forcibly shown them what they'd known all along, what they'd
assumed all along, which was that they were civilized beings, beings capable of
noble sentiments, not two dumb beasts debased by routine and regular sedentary
work, no, that night Pelletier and Espinoza discovered that they were generous,
so generous that if they'd been together they'd have felt the need to go out
and celebrate, dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not
last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home
in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed), and for lack of
celebration or revelry they hailed this virtue with an unspoken promise of
eternal friendship, and sealed the vow, after they hung up their respective
phones in their respective apartments crammed with books, by sipping whiskey
with supreme slowness and watching the night outside their windows, maybe
seeking unconsciously what the Swabian had sought outside the widow's window in
vain.

Morini was the last to know, as one would
expect, although in Morini's case the sentimental mathematics didn't always
work out.

Even before Norton first went to bed with
Pelletier, Morini had felt it coming. Not because of the way Pelletier behaved
around Norton but because of her own detachment, a generalized detachment,
Baudelaire would have called it spleen, Nerval melancholy, which left Norton
liable to embark on an intimate relationship with anyone who came along.

Espinoza, of course, he hadn't predicted.
When Norton called and told him she was involved with the two of them, Morini
was surprised (although he wouldn't have been surprised if Norton had said she
was involved with Pelletier and a colleague at the University of London or even
a student), but he hid it well. Then he tried to think of other things, but he
couldn't.

He asked Norton whether she was happy.
Norton said she was. He told her he had received an e-mail from Borchmeyer with
fresh news. Norton didn't seem very interested. He asked her whether she'd
heard from her husband.

"Ex-husband," said Norton.

No, she hadn't heard from him, although an
old friend had called to tell her that her ex was living with another old
friend. Morini asked whether the woman had been a very close friend. Norton
didn't understand the question.

"What close friend?"

"The one who's living with your ex
now," said Morini.

"She doesn't live with him, she's
supporting him, it's completely different."

"Ah," said Morini, and he tried
to change the subject, but he drew a blank.

Maybe I should talk to her about my
illness, he thought bitterly. But that he would never do.

Around this time, Morini was the first of
the four to read an article about the killings in
Sonora
,
which appeared in
II Manifesto
and
was written by an Italian reporter who had gone to
Mexico
to cover the Zapatista guerrillas.
The news was horrible, he thought. In
Italy
there were serial killers, too, but they hardly ever killed more than ten
people, whereas in
Sonora
the dead numbered well over one hundred.

Then he thought about the reporter from
II Manifesto
and it struck him as odd
that she had gone to
Chiapas
, which is at the
southern tip of the country, and that she had ended up writing about events in
Sonora
, which, if he wasn't mistaken, was in the north,
the northwest, on the border with the
United States
. He imagined her
traveling by bus, a long way from
Mexico
City
to the desert lands of the north. He imagined her
talking to Subcomandante Marcos. He imagined her in the Mexican capital.
Someone there must have told her what was happening in
Sonora
. And instead of getting on the next
plane to
Italy
, she had
decided to buy a bus ticket and set off on a long trip to
Sonora
. For an instant, Morini felt a wild
desire to travel with the reporter.

I'd love her until the end of time, he
thought. An hour later he'd already forgotten the matter completely.

A little later he got an e-mail from
Norton. He thought it was strange that Norton would write and not call. Once he
had read the letter, though, he understood that she needed to express her
thoughts as precisely as possible and that was why she'd decided to write. In
the letter she asked his forgiveness for what she called her egotism, an
egotism that expressed itself in the contemplation of her own misfortunes, real
or imaginary. She went on to say that she'd finally resolved her lingering
quarrel with her ex-husband. The dark clouds had vanished from her life. Now
she wanted to be happy and sing
[sic].
Until
probably the week before, she added, she'd loved him still, and now she could
attest that the part of her past that included him was behind her for good. I'm
suddenly keen on my work, she said, and on all those little everyday things
that make human beings happy. And she also said: I wanted you, my patient
Piero, to be the first to know.

Morini read the letter three times. With a
heavy heart, he thought now wrong Norton was when she said her love and her
ex-husband and everything they'd been through were behind her. Nothing is ever
behind us.

Pelletier and Espinoza, meanwhile,
received no such confidences. But Pelletier noticed something that Espinoza
didn't. The London-Paris trips had become more frequent than the Paris-London
trips. And as often as not, Norton would show up with a gift—a collection of
essays, an art book, catalogs of exhibitions that Pelletier would never see,
even a shirt or a handkerchief—which had never happened before.

Otherwise, everything was the same. They
screwed, went out to dinner, discussed the latest news about Archimboldi. They
never talked about their future as a couple. Each time Espinoza came up in
conversation (which was rare), both adopted a strictly impartial, cautious, and
above all friendly tone. Some nights they even fell asleep in each other's arms
without making love, something Pelletier was sure didn't happen with Espinoza.
But he was wrong, because relations between Norton and Espinoza were often a
faithful simulacrum of Norton's relations with Pelletier.

The meals were different, better in
Paris
; the setting and the scenery were different, more
modern in
Paris
;
and the language was different, because with Espinoza Norton spoke mostly
German and with Pelletier mostly English, but overall the similarities
outweighed the differences. Naturally, with Espinoza there had also been nights
without sex.

If Norton's closest friend (she had none)
had asked which of the two friends she had a better time with in bed, Norton
wouldn't have known what to say.

Sometimes she thought Pelletier was the
more skillful lover. Other times, Espinoza. Viewed from outside, say from a
rigorously academic standpoint, one could maintain that Pelletier had a longer
bibliography than Espinoza, who relied more on instinct than intellect in such
matters, and who had the disadvantage of being Spanish, that is, of belonging
to a culture that tended to confuse eroticism with scatology and pornography
with coprophagy, a confusion evident (because unaddressed) in Espinoza's mental
library, for he had only just read the Marquis de Sade in order to check (and
refute) an article by Pohl in which the latter drew connections from
Justine
and
Philosophy in the Boudoir
to one of Archimboldi's novels of the
1950s.

Pelletier, on the other hand, had read the
divine Marquis when he was sixteen and at eighteen had participated in a
menage à trois
with two female fellow
students, and his adolescent predilection for erotic comics had flowered into a
reasonable, restrained adult collection of licentious literature of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In figurative terms: Pelletier was more
intimately acquainted than Espinoza with Mnemosyne, mountain goddess and mother
of the nine muses. In plain speech: Pelletier could screw for six hours
(without coming) thanks to his bibliography, whereas Espinoza could go for the
same amount of time (coming twice, sometimes three times, and finishing half
dead) sheerly on the basis of strength and force of will.

And speaking of the Greeks, it would be
fair to say that Espinoza and Pelletier believed themselves to be (and in their
perverse way, were) incarnations of Ulysses, and that both thought of Morini as
Eurylochus, the loyal friend about whom two very different stories are told in
the
Odyssey.
The first, in which he
escapes being turned into a pig, suggests shrewdness or a solitary and
individualistic nature, careful skepticism, the craftiness of an old seaman.
The second, however, involves an impious and sacrilegous adventure: the cattle
of Zeus or another powerful god are grazing peacefully on the island of the Sun
when they wake the powerful appetite of Eurylochus, so that with clever words
he cajoles his friends to kill the cattle and prepare a feast, which angers
Zeus or whichever god it is no end, who curses Eurylochus for putting on airs
and presuming to be enlightened or atheistic or Promethean, since the god in
question is more incensed by Eurylochus's attitude, by the dialectic of his
hunger, than by the act itself of eating the cattle, and because of this act,
or because of the feast, the ship that bears Eurylochus capsizes and all the
sailors die, which was what Pelletier and Espinoza believed would happen to
Morini, not in a conscious way, of course, but in a kind of disjointed or
instinctual way, a dark thought in the form of a microscopic sign throbbing in
a dark and microscopic part of the two friends' souls.

Near the end of 1996, Morini had a
nightmare. He dreamed that Norton was diving into a pool as he, Pelletier, and
Espinoza played cards around a stone table. Espinoza and Pelletier had their
backs to the pool, which seemed at first glance to be an ordinary hotel pool.
As they played, Morini watched the other tables, the parasols, the deck chairs
lined up along both sides of the pool. In the distance there was a park with
deep green hedges, shining as if with fresh rain. Little by little people began
to leave, vanishing through the different doors connecting the outdoor space,
the bar, and the building's rooms or little suites, suites that Morini imagined
consisted of a double room with kitchenette and bathroom. Soon there was no one
left outside, not even the bored waiters he'd seen earlier bustling around.
Pelletier and Espinoza were still absorbed in the game. Next to Pelletier he
saw a pile of poker chips, as well as coins from various countries, so he
guessed Pelletier was winning. And yet Espinoza didn't look ready to give up.
Just then, Morini glanced at his cards and saw he had nothing to play. He
discarded and asked for four cards, which he left facedown on the stone table,
without looking at them, and with some difficulty he set his wheelchair in
motion. Pelletier and Espinoza didn't even ask where he was going. He rolled
the wheelchair to the edge of the pool. Only then did he realize how enormous
it was. It must have been at least a thousand feet wide and more than two miles
long, calculated Morini. The water was dark and in some places there were oily
patches, the kind you see in harbors. There was no trace of Norton. Morini
shouted.