2666 by Roberto Bolaño Page B

with her. Oh white hind, little hind,
white hind, murmured Espinoza. Pelletier assumed he was quoting a classic, but
without comment asked him whether they were really going to become enemies. The
question seemed to surprise Espinoza, as if the possibility had never occurred
to him.
    That's absurd, Jean-Claude," he said,
although Pelletier noticed he thought for a long time before he answered.
    By the end of the night, they were drunk
and the young waiter had to help them both out of the bar. What Pelletier
remembered best was the strength of the waiter who hauled them, one on each
side, to the elevators in the lobby, as if he and Espinoza were adolescents, no
older than fifteen, two weedy adolescents clamped in the powerful arms of this
young German who had stayed until closing time, when all the veteran waiters
had already gone home, a country boy, to judge by his face and build, or a
laborer, and he also remembered something like a whisper that he later
understood was a kind of laugh, Espinoza's laugh as he was lugged by the
peasant waiter, a soft chuckle, a discreet laugh, as if the situation weren't
merely ridiculous but also an escape valve for his unspoken sorrows.
    One day, when more than three months had
gone by since their visit to Norton, one of them called the other and suggested
a weekend in
London
.
It's unclear whether Pelletier or Espinoza made the call. In theory, it must
have been the one with the strongest sense of loyalty, or of friendship, which
amounts to the same thing, but in truth neither Pelletier nor Espinoza had a
strong sense of any such virtue. Both of them paid it lip service, of course.
But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed in
passion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both voted
Socialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in the
possibility of self-realization.
    The salient point is that one called and
the other said yes, and one Friday afternoon they met at the London airport and
got a cab to a hotel, then another cab, now very close to dinnertime (they had
made a reservation for three at Jane & Chloe), to Norton's apartment.
    From the sidewalk, after they paid the
driver, they looked up at the lighted windows. Then, as the cab drove off, they
saw Liz's silhouette, the beloved silhouette, and then, as if a breath of foul
air had wafted into a commercial for sanitary pads, the silhouette of a man
that made them freeze, Espinoza with a bouquet of flowers in his hand,
Pelletier with a Jacob Epstein book wrapped in the finest paper. But the
pantomime above didn't end there. In one window, Norton's silhouette gestured,
as if trying to explain something that her interlocutor refused to understand.
In the other window, the man's silhouette, to the horror of its two gaping
spectators, made a kind of hula-hooping motion, or what looked to Pelletier and
Espinoza like a hula-hooping motion, first the hips, then the legs, the torso,
even the neck! a motion that contained a hint of sarcasm and mockery, unless
behind the curtains the man was undressing or melting, which seemed very
unlikely; the motion, or the series of motions, expressed not only sarcasm but
cruelty and assurance too, the assurance plain, since he was the strongest one
in the apartment, the tallest, the most muscular, the hula-hooper.
    And yet there was something strange about
Liz's silhouette. To the extent that they knew her, and they thought they knew
her well, Norton wasn't the sort to stand for slights, especially in her own
apartment. So it was possible, they decided, that the man's silhouette wasn't
actually hula-hooping or insulting Liz but laughing, and laughing with her, not
at her. But Liz's silhouette didn't seem to be laughing. Then the man's
silhouette disappeared: maybe he had gone to look at books, maybe to the
bathroom or the kitchen. Maybe he had dropped onto the sofa, still laughing.
And just then Norton's silhouette drew near the