Read Online 2666 by Roberto Bolaño - Free Book Online Page B

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