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The rain out the window, as he'd said in his e-mail, was
falling obliquely, and there was something of the peasant fatalist in Morini's
lassitude, his stillness and surrender, his uncomplaining and total abandonment
to insomnia.

The next day they went to see the crafts market, which had
been meant as a trading post for everyone living near Santa Teresa, where
craftspeople and peasants from all over the region would bring their goods by
cart or burro, even cattlemen came from Nogales and Vicente Guerrero and horse
dealers from Agua Prieta and Cananea, but now the market was kept up solely for
American tourists from Phoenix, who arrived by bus or in caravans of three or
four cars and left the city before nightfall. Still, the critics liked the
market, and even though they weren't planning to buy anything, in the end
Pelletier picked up a clay figurine of a man sitting on a stone reading the newspaper,
for next to nothing. The man was blond and two little devil horns sprouted from
his forehead. Espinoza bought an Indian rug from a girl who had a rug and
serape stall. He didn't actually like the rug very much, but the girl was nice
and he spent a long time talking to her. He asked her where she was from,
because he had the sense that she'd traveled from somewhere far away with her
rugs, but the girl said she was from right here, Santa Teresa, from a
neighborhood west of the market. She also said she was in high school and that
if things went well, she planned to study to become a nurse. She wasn't just
pretty but intelligent, too, thought Espinoza, though possibly too thin and
delicate for his taste.

Amalfitano was waiting for them at the hotel. They took him
out to lunch and then the four of them went to visit the offices of all the
newspapers in Santa Teresa. At each place they looked through the papers dating
from a month before Almendro saw Archimboldi in
Mexico City
to the previous day. They couldn't
find a single sign to indicate that Archimboldi had passed through the city.
First they looked in the death notices. Then they plowed through Society and
Politics and they even read the items in Agriculture and Livestock. One of the
papers didn't have an arts section. Another devoted one page a week to book
reviews and listings of arts events in Santa Teresa, although it would have
been better off allotting the page to sports. At six that evening they left the
Chilean professor outside one of the newspaper offices and went back to the
hotel. They showered and then each checked his or her e-mail. Pelletier and
Espinoza wrote to Morini informing him of their meager findings. In both
messages they announced that if nothing changed soon, they would return to
Europe
within the next few days. Norton didn't write to
him. She hadn't answered his previous message and she didn't feel like facing
up to that motionless Morini watching the rain, as if he had something to tell
her and at the last moment had decided not to. Instead, and without saying
anything to her two friends, she called Almendro's number in
Mexico City
and, after some fruitless efforts
(El Cerdo's secretary and then his maid couldn't speak English, although both
tried) she managed to reach him.

With enviable patience, and in English polished at
Stanford, El Cerdo once again told her everything that had happened, beginning
with the call from the hotel where Archimboldi was being interrogated by three
policemen. Without contradicting himself, he again described his first meeting
with Archimboldi, the time they spent in Plaza Garibaldi, the return to the
hotel where Archimboldi collected his suitcase, the mostly silent trip to the
airport, and then Archimboldi's departure for
Hermosillo
, after which he never saw him
again. Following this, Norton's questions were all about Archimboldi's physical
appearance. Nearly six and a half feet tall; his hair gray and thick, though he
had a bald spot in back; thin; obviously strong. "An old, old man,"
said Norton.

"No, I wouldn't say that," said El Cerdo.
"When he opened his suitcase I saw lots of medicine. His skin was covered
in age spots. Sometimes he seemed to get very tired but then he would recover
easily or pretend to."

"What were his eyes like?" asked Norton.

"Blue," said El Cerdo.

"No, I already know they're blue, I've read all his
books many times and they couldn't not be blue, I mean what were they like,
what was your impression of them."

At the other end of the line there was a long silence, as
if the question were completely unexpected or as if it were something El Cerdo
had asked himself many times, and still couldn't answer.

"That's a hard question," said El Cerdo.

"You're the only person who can answer it. No one has
seen him in a long time, and your situation is privileged, if I may say
so," said Norton.

"Christ," said El Cerdo.

"What?" said Norton.

"Nothing, nothing, I'm thinking," said El Cerdo.

And after a while he said:

"He had the eyes of a blind man, I don't mean he
couldn't see, but his eyes were just like the eyes of the blind, though I could
be wrong about that."

That night they went to the party that Rector Negrete had
planned in their honor, although it was only later that they discovered it was
in their honor. Norton strolled through the gardens and admired the plants as
the rector's wife named them one by one, although afterward she forgot all the
names. Pelletier chatted for a long time with Guerra, the dean, and with
another professor from the university who had written his thesis in Paris about
a Mexican who wrote in French (a Mexican who wrote in French?), yes indeed, a
most extraordinary, peculiar, excellent writer whose name the university
professor mentioned several times (Fernandez? Garcia?), a man who came to a
rather bad end because he had been a collaborator, yes indeed, a close friend
of Celine and Drieu La Rochelle and a disciple of Maurras, shot by the
Resistance, the Mexican writer, that is, not Maurras, a man who stood firm
until the end, yes indeed, a real man, not like so many of his French
counterparts who fled to Germany with their tails between their legs, this
Fernandez or Garcia (or Lopez or Perez?) didn't leave home, he waited like a
Mexican for them to come after him and his knees didn't buckle when they
brought him (dragged him?) down the stairs and flung him against a wall, where
they shot him.

Espinoza, meanwhile, was sitting the whole time next to
Rector Negrete and various distinguished gentlemen of the same age as the host,
men who spoke only Spanish and a very little bit of English, and he had to
endure a conversation in praise of the latest signs of Santa Teresa's
unstoppable progress.

None of the three critics failed to notice Amalfitano's
constant companion that night. He was a handsome and athletic young man with
very fair skin, who clung to the Chilean professor like a limpet and every so
often gestured theatrically and grimaced like a madman, and other times just
listened to what Amalfitano was saying, constantly shaking his head, small
movements of almost spasmodic denial, as if he were abiding only grudgingly by
the universal rules of conversation or as if Amalfitano's words (reprimands, to
judge by his face) never hit their mark.

They left dinner having received a number of proposals, and
with a suspicion. The proposals were: to give a class at the university on
contemporary Spanish literature (Espinoza), to give a class on contemporary
French literature (Pelletier), to give a class on contemporary English
literature (Norton), to give a master class on Benno von Archimboldi and
postwar German literature (Espinoza, Pelletier, and Norton), to take part in a
panel discussion on economic and cultural relations between Europe and Mexico
(Espinoza, Pelletier, and Norton, plus Dean Guerra and two economics professors
from the university), to visit the foothills of the Sierra Madre, and, finally,
to attend a lamb barbecue at a ranch near Santa Teresa, a barbecue that was
predicted to be massive, with many professors in attendance, in a landscape,
according to Guerra, of extraordinary beauty, although Rector Negrete declared
that it was really quite severe and that some found it unsettling.

The suspicion was: that Amalfitano might be gay, and the
vehement young man his lover, a dreadful suspicion since by the end of the
night they had learned that the young man in question was the only son of Dean
Guerra, Amalfitano's direct boss and the rector's right-hand man, and unless
they were greatly mistaken, Guerra had no idea what kind of business his son
was mixed up in.

"This could end in a hail of bullets," said
Espinoza.

Then they talked about other things and afterward they went
to sleep, exhausted.

The next day they went for a drive around the city, letting
themselves be carried by chance, in no hurry, as if they were really hoping to
find a tall old German man walking the streets. The western part of the city
was very poor, with most streets unpaved and a sea of houses assembled out of
scrap. The city center was old, with three- or four-story buildings and arcaded
plazas in a state of neglect and young office workers in shirtsleeves and
Indian women with bundles on their backs hurrying down cobblestoned streets,
and they saw streetwalkers and young thugs loitering on the corners, Mexican
types straight out of a black-and-white movie. Toward the east were the middle-
and upper-class neighborhoods. There they saw streets with carefully pruned
trees and public playgrounds and shopping centers. The university was there,
too. To the north were abandoned factories and sheds, and a street of bars and
souvenir shops and small hotels, where it was said no one ever slept, and
farther out there were more poor neighborhoods, though they were less crowded,
and vacant lots out of which every so often there rose a school. To the south they
discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they
even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the
terminally ill and a team of the starving to death, and there were two highways
that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and
neighborhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and, sometimes, in
the distance, the silhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the
maquiladoras.

The city, like all cities, was endless. If you continued
east, say, there came a moment when the middle-class neighborhoods ended and
the slums began, like a reflection of what happened in the west but jumbled up,
with a rougher orography: hills, valleys, the remains of old ranches, dry riverbeds,
all of which went some way toward preventing overcrowding. To the north they
saw a fence that separated the
United States
from
Mexico
and they gazed
past it at the
Arizona
desert, this time getting out of the car. In the west they circled a couple of
industrial parks that were in their turn being surrounded by slums.

They were convinced the city was growing by the second. On
the far edge of Santa Teresa, they saw flocks of black vultures, watchful,
walking through barren fields, birds that here were called turkey vultures, and
also turkey buzzards. Where there were vultures, they noted, there were no
other birds. They drank tequila and beer and ate tacos at a motel on the Santa
Teresa-Caborca highway, at outdoor tables with a view. The sky, at sunset,
looked like a carnivorous flower.

They returned to find Amalfitano waiting for them with
Guerra's son, who invited them to dinner at a restaurant specializing in the
food of northern
Mexico
.
The place had a certain ambience, but the food didn't) agree with them at all.
They discovered, or believed they discovered, that the bond between the Chilean
professor and the dean's son was more socratic than homosexual, and this in
some way put their minds at ease, since the three of them had grown
inexplicably fond of Amalfitano.
       

•

For three days they lived as if submerged in an undersea
world. They watched television, seeking out the strangest and most random news,
they reread novels by Archimboldi that suddenly they didn't understand, they
took long naps, they were the last to leave the terrace at night, they talked
about their childhoods as they had never done before. For the first time, the
three of them felt like siblings or like the veterans of some shock troop
who've lost their interest in most things of this world. They got drunk and
they got up late and only every so often did they deign to go out with
Amalfitano on walks around the city, to visit any attractions that might
possibly be of interest to a hypothetical German tourist getting on in years.

And yes, in fact, they went to the lamb barbecue, and their
movements were measured and cautious, as if they were three astronauts recently
arrived on a planet about which nothing was known for sure. On the patio where
the barbecue was being held they gazed at several smoke pits. The professors of
the
University
of
Santa Teresa
displayed a
rare talent for feats of country living. Two of them raced on horseback.
Another sang a
corrido
from 1915. In a practice ring for bullfights some
of them tried their luck with the lasso, with mixed results. Upon the
appearance of Rector Negrete, who had been shut up in the main house with a man
who seemed to be the ranch foreman, they dug up the barbecue, and a smell of
meat and hot earth spread over the patio in a thin curtain of smoke that
enveloped them all like the fog that drifts before a murder, and vanished
mysteriously as the women carried the plates to the table, leaving clothing and
skin impregnated with its aroma.