2666 by Roberto Bolaño

woman called to the man: Rodrigo,
come see this, she said. The man seemed not to hear. He had put the little
notepad away in a pocket of his leather jacket and he was gazing silently at
the statue of Peter Pan. The woman bent down and something beneath the leaves
slithered toward the lake.
    "It does actually seem to be a
snake," said Pelletier.
    "That's what I thought," said
Espinoza.
    Norton didn't answer but she stood to get
a better look.
    That night Pelletier and Espinoza slept
for a few hours in Norton's sitting room. Although they had the sofa bed and
the rug at their disposal, they had difficulty dozing off. Pelletier tried to
talk, explain the plane wreck thing to Espinoza, but Espinoza said there was no
need for explanations, he understood everything.
    At four in the morning, by common accord,
they turned on the light and started to read. Pelletier opened a book on the
work of Berthe Morisot, the first woman impressionist, but soon he felt like
hurling it against the wall. Espinoza, meanwhile, pulled Archimboldi's latest
novel, The Head, out of his bag and
started to go over the notes he had written in the margins, notes that were the
nucleus of an essay he planned to publish in the journal edited by Borchmeyer.
    Espinoza's thesis, also espoused by
Pelletier, was that with this novel Archimboldi was drawing his literary
adventures to a close. After The Head, said
Espinoza, there'll be no new books on the market, an opinion that another
illustrious Archimboldian, Dieter Hellfeld, considered too risky, based as it
was on no more than the writer's age, and the same thing had been said when
Archimboldi came out with Railroad
Perfection, a few Berlin professors had even said it when Bitzius was published. At five in the
morning Pelletier took a shower, then made coffee. At six Espinoza was asleep
again but at six-thirty he woke in a foul mood. At a quarter to seven they
called a cab and straightened up the sitting room.
    Espinoza wrote a goodbye note. Pelletier
glanced at it and after thinking for a few seconds, decided to leave another
note himself. Before they left he asked Espinoza whether he didn't want to
shower. I'll shower in
Madrid
,
Espinoza answered. The water is better there. True, said Pelletier, although
his reply struck him as stupid and appeasing. Then the two of them left without
making a sound and had breakfast at the airport, as they'd done so many times
before.
    On the plane back to
Paris
, Pelletier began to think,
inexplicably, about the Berthe Morisot book he'd wanted to slam against the
wall the night before. Why? Pelletier asked himself. Was it that he didn't like
Berthe Morisot or something she stood for in some momentary way? Actually, he
liked Berthe Morisot. All at once it struck him that Norton hadn't bought the
book, that he'd been the one who traveled from Paris to London with the
gift-wrapped volume, that the first Berthe Morisot reproductions Norton had
ever seen were the ones in that book, with Pelletier next to her, massaging the
back of her neck and walking her through each painting. Did he regret having
given her the book now? No, of course not. Did the painter have anything to do
with their separation? The idea was ridiculous. Then why had he wanted to slam
the book against the wall? And more to the point: why was he thinking about
Berthe Morisot and the book and Norton's neck and not about the real
possibility of a menage à trois that
had hovered in Norton's apartment that night like a howling Indian witch doctor
without ever materializing?
    On the plane back to Madrid, Espinoza,
unlike Pelletier, thought about the book he believed to be Archimboldi's last
novel, and how—if he was right, which he thought he was—there would be no more
novels by Archimboldi, and he thought about all that entailed, and about a
plane in flames and Pelletier's hidden desires (the son of a bitch could be oh
so modern, but only when it was to his advantage), and every once in a while he
looked out the