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civilized interest,
and that Morini attended to as if his life depended on it, and which was
succeeded two days or a few hours later by Espinoza calling Norton and having a
conversation along essentially the same lines, and Norton calling Pelletier,
and Pelletier calling Morini, with the whole process starting over again days
later, the call transmuted into hyperspecialized code, signifier and signified
in Archimboldi, text, subtext, and paratext, reconquest of the verbal and
physical territoriality in the final pages of Bitzius, which under the circumstances was the same as talking
about film or problems in the German department or the clouds that passed
incessantly over their respective cities, morning to night.
     
    They met again at the postwar European
literature colloquium held in
Avignon
at the end of 1994. Norton and Morini went as spectators, although their trips
were funded by their universities, and Pelletier and Espinoza presented papers
on the import of Archimboldi's work. Pelletier's paper focused on insularity,
on the rupture that seemed to separate the whole of Archimboldi's oeuvre from
the German tradition, though not from a larger European tradition. Espinoza's
paper, one of the most engaging he ever wrote, revolved around the mystery
veiling the figure of Archimboldi, about whom virtually no one, not even his
publisher, knew anything: his books appeared with no author photograph on the
flaps or back cover; his biographical data was minimal (German writer born in
Prussia in 1920); his place of residence was a mystery, although at some point
his publisher let slip in front of a Spiegel reporter that one of his manuscripts had arrived from Sicily; none
of his surviving fellow writers had ever seen him; no biography of him existed
in German even though sales of his books were rising in Germany as well as in
the rest of Europe and even in the United States, which likes vanished writers
(vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers,
and where his work was beginning to circulate widely, no longer just in German
departments but on campus and off campus, in the vast cities with a love for
the oral and the visual arts.
    At night Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and
Norton would have dinner together, sometimes accompanied by one or two German
professors whom they’d known for a long time, and who would usually retire
early to their hotels or stay until the end of the evening but remain
discreetly in the background, as if they understood that the four-cornered
figure formed by the Archimboldians was inviolable and also liable to react
violently to any outside interference at that hour of the night. By the end it
was always just the four of them walking the streets of Avignon, as blithely
and happily as they'd walked the grimy, bureaucratic streets of Bremen and as
they would walk the many streets awaiting them in the future, Norton pushing
Morini with Pelletier to her left and Espinoza to her right, or Pelletier
pushing Morini with Espinoza to his left and Norton walking backward ahead of
them and laughing with all the might of her twenty-six years, a magnificent
laugh that they were quick to imitate although they would surely have preferred
not to laugh but just to look at her, or the four of them abreast and halted
beside the low wall of a storied river, in other words a river tamed, talking
about their German obsession without interrupting one another, testing and
savoring one another's intelligence, with long intervals of silence that not
even the rain could disturb.
     
    When Pelletier returned from Avignon at
the end of 1994, when he opened the door to his apartment in Paris and set his
bag on the floor and closed the door, when he poured himself a glass of whiskey
and opened the drapes and saw the usual view, a slice of the Place de Breteuil
with the UNESCO building in the background, when he took off his jacket and
left the whiskey in the kitchen and listened to the messages on the