Read Online 2666 by Roberto Bolaño - Free Book Online

and cups of tea. The Swabian massaging the back of the
former cavalry captain's widow, as the rain lashed the windows, a sad Frisian
rain that made one want to weep, and although it didn't make the Swabian weep,
it made him pale, and he approached the nearest window, where he stood looking
out at what was beyond the curtains of frenzied rain, until the lady called
him,
    peremptorily, and the Swabian turned his
back on the window, not knowing why he had gone to it, not knowing what he
hoped to see, and just at that moment, when there was no one at the window
anymore and only a little lamp of colored glass at the back of the room
flickering, it appeared.
    So the days in Salzburg were generally
pleasant, and although Archimboldi didn't receive the Nobel Prize that year,
life for our four friends proceeded smoothly, flowing along on the placid river
of European university German departments, not without racking up one upset or
another that in the end simply added a dash of pepper, a dash of mustard, a
drizzle of vinegar to orderly lives, or lives that looked orderly from without,
although each of the four had his or her own cross to bear, like anyone, a
strange cross in Norton's case, ghostly and phosphorescent, for Norton made
frequent and rather tasteless references to her ex-husband as a lurking threat,
ascribed to him the vices and defects of a monster, a horribly violent monster
but one who never materialized, a monster all evocation and no action, although
with her words Norton managed to give substance to a being whom neither
Espinoza nor Pelletier had ever seen, as if her ex existed only in their
dreams, until Pelletier, sharper than Espinoza, understood that Norton's
unthinking diatribe, that endless list of grievances, was more than anything a
punishment inflicted on herself, perhaps for the shame of having fallen in love
with such a cretin and married him. Pelletier, of course, was wrong.
    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