"Shroud" - читать интересную книгу автора (Banville John)

THREE

Those were, Cass Cleave considered, the best days of all the days, not many, not very many, that they were to spend together. She had a task, which was to take care of him. Never had she felt so free of herself. All of her energy and attention was directed toward him. She thought at first he would die, he was so listless and turned inward. She could scarcely tell the difference between his good eye and his bad, for they both seemed equally blank, although he was constantly watching her, she could sense it. If he were to die he would die; it would have been ordained. That was the word that came to her: ordained. She had an almost sanctified sense of purpose. She tended him with that equal mixture of solicitude and harshness that she remembered from the nuns who ran the hospitals where she had spent so much of her childhood. She saw herself, like them, in white, moving silently, on silent feet, carrying something. At other times she was a Christian thrown to the lions before whom the lions had knelt down in meekness; she heard the savage clamour all around her of the crowd crying out for her blood, saw the circle of blue sky above, felt the hot dust under her bare feet. And indeed, he was like some big, ailing beast, lying in his lair, panting softly in the heat, the eyelids slowly closing and slowly opening again, the yellowed gaze directed always a little to the side of her but seeing her all the same. He seldom spoke; entire days went past when she did not hear a word from him. It was May. In. ii\e mornings, %tv^ Nvould go down, to \kve \ofcfc›^ AT\d ^«?i\\. YffiSil wo one was looking and gather up the newspapers that were set out on a big table there for the guests to read, armfuls of them, and bring them back to the room and sit on a chair at the bedside reading aloud to him, choosing items at random. Occasionally he would chuckle at a report of some absurdity, some calamity. When he was tired of listening to her he would turn his face aside and lift a hand and bat the air jadedly, waving her away. He developed a grimace, he would screw up his eyes and smack his lips disgustedly, as if he had a foul taste in his moudi. He smelled, too, no matter how thoroughly she washed him. It was a smell she recognised from long ago but could not think from where, sweetish and soft, not entirely unpleasant, a smell as of something that had died under a bush. She learned to stay out of the lavatory for a good quarter of an hour after he had used it. He said his liver must be rotting. None of this she minded.

One day the hotel manager stopped her by the fountain in the lobby and spoke to her, smiling broadly without warmth, holding his hands before his breast, the fingers splayed, like a singer in an opera. He asked her if Vander required the doctor to come again. She said no. He said the hotel was concerned. She noticed that, like the doctor's, his hair too was dyed; it looked as if it had been smeared all over with ink. At the lift she turned and he was still standing by the desk, watching her.

She liked the evenings best of all, when the daylight began to go and she could draw the curtains. Then they might be alone together in the world, not another soul existing. She would order dinner to be brought up, always something simple, an omelette or soup for him, pasta for herself. He demanded wine, of course, but she pretended not to hear, and then he swore at her. The old waiter from the first night did not appear again. She wondered if she might have imagined him; she had imagined others, often, figures who stepped out of her dreams and walked up and down in the world, real as real people. When the food was finished and she had put the tray on the floor outside in the corridor she would run a bath and lie in it for a long time. She felt so weary. The tepid water soothed her. She looked along the pallid length of herself; her skin had the dullish gleam of tarnished silver, and when she stirred, quick flashes ran along her flanks, like phosphorescence. She always left the bathroom door ajar, worrying that he would creep out of bed and get dressed and make his escape. What would she do without him? He was her vocation now.

She did not sleep. That is, she slept, but so lightly it hardly counted as sleep. She would lie beside him under the sheet, her eyes lightly closed, holding his hand if he would let her, and her mind would drift over all sorts of things, memories, imaginings, notions of the future, a possible future, with him. Sometimes she would dream, too, strange, delicate dreams such as she had never experienced before, if it could be said of dreams that they are experienced. At dawn she was always wide awake. Even though the light could not penetrate the heavy curtains she would know the sun had risen. Each night the wind died and in the morning started up again. It had a name, he told her, it was called the Fôhn, pronounced Fenn, blowing out of season. Everyone complained of it, the waiters, the chambermaid, throwing their eyes to heaven and making a clicking noise at the back of their throats. The chambermaid she had trouble with at first. She wanted to maintain the room herself, clean the bathroom and change the bed linen and even vacuum the floors, but the maid obviously thought this a scandalous idea, not to be countenanced, and there was a tussle between them every morning over the clean towels and the clean sheets. Then Vander said something to the maid in Italian, making a threat, or offering some inducement, and there were no more arguments after that. The woman was from the south. She was short and bandy and ageless, with skin so dark it had a greenish tinge. She smelled of dishwater. Now when Vander spoke to her, after the first time, she laughed at the things he said, and probably blushed, too, only her blushes could not be seen because she was so swarthy, and made little crowing sounds of delight, waggling her head, and sometimes even threw her hands in the air and ran out of the room, squealing. Then, when she had gone and they were left alone again, he would turn a spiteful look on her before lying down on his back like a corpse and closing his eyes and pulling the sheet to his chin.

In time, out of boredom, she supposed, he began to talk to her again. It was not conversation, of course, he was not interested in anything she might say. He told her things, scraps of reminiscence, gossip about dead scholars, old jokes, fanciful tales, sitting up in bed in an old grey cardigan, red-eyed and unshaven. He spoke about his dead wife. "Magda," he said, " Magdalena," looking into the past and frowning as if in puzzlement, shaking his head. "She was a standing affront to all the things I held cheap." He chuckled, waggling his eyebrows at her, inviting her to admire his wit. He had her go out and buy packs of cards, and they played together for hours. He taught her intricate, arcane games she had never heard of. She told him she loved him and he laughed at her and said not to be a fool, but she noticed how he looked away from her quickly, showing, like a startled horse, the whites of his eyes, the yellows, rather. She said her heart was his. "Heart?" he said, throwing back his head and baring his teeth in that way that he did. "Heart? If it could think, the heart would stop beating. A great writer whom you have not read wrote that. Do not talk to me of heart." That was his way, to laugh, and pretend to be outraged, and cite quotations. Her names for him were Harlequin, and sometimes Svidrigailov. He called her Cassandra. She said if she was Cassandra then he was Agamemnon. Gagamemnon, more like, he said, and did not smile, but scowled. "Today," he told her, "todav you will learn how to play piquet."

The ceaseless beating of the wind outside excited her. She felt suspended, weightless, airborne, almost. It was like being in a plane in those moments after the initial scramble into the sky when the machine is suddenly freed not only of the earth but of its own desperate effort of flight and for a minute or two pours in a sort of thrumming silence upwards smoothly through the air as if it were flying not of its own accord but had been thrown somehow. Once on a flight going somewhere she had sat beside a man, an engineer, who knew about these things, and when she said she could never understand how the engines stayed on the plane he said what was more remarkable was that the plane could hold on to the engines. She saw straight away what he meant. That was how it was with her, she was the plane and her mind was the jet engines trying to speed away from it. She was barely held together. The slightest jolt might make her fly apart into a million pieces. Everything was like that, the particles all fused together and trying to pull asunder. One instant of imbalance, one dip in the equilibrium, and it would all explode. Yes yes, the voices said eagerly, explode, all explode…

He did not die. At the end of a fortnight he was strong enough to get up and sit by the open window in the sun. Now he was ignoring her again. He grew restless, and paced the floor, his dead leg dragging. One day when she was out of the room for only a minute he managed to bribe the chambermaid to bring him a bottle of whisky. When she tried to take it from him he swung a fist at her, his soiled eyes glaring. But he did not drink the whisky, and he did not die.

As he got better she got worse. All the voices came back, joining all together, jostling to get at her. They said he was wicked, that he would harm her, kill her, even. At night now she fell into a kind of coma in which she could not move her limbs although her mind kept on, tumbling over and over like an electric motor gone out of control. The chambermaid told her that the Holy Shroud was to be put on public display, people from all over the world had come to the city for this rare and momentous occasion. By now Vander was well enough to go out, and she asked him if he would take her to see it. She told him how the Shroud was kept in a silver casket within an iron box inside a marble case in a black marble chapel. It had been taken to France by St. Veronica herself, who had fled the Holy Land after the Crucifixion along with Mary the Mother of God and sailed in a ship along the Mediterranean first to Cyprus and then to the coast of France and settled at last in the Languedoc. Cathars. The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Freemasons. The Duc d'Orléans, heir in waiting to the French throne. She had studied it all, she had made discoveries, she knew secrets. He mocked her, and said the Shroud was a fake; he said he knew about fakes. Did she really think it was the image of the crucified Christ? But he got up and got dressed. He said he felt dizzy. He said that he would probably fall over in the street, and she would have to drag him by the heels back to the hotel. He described her going along with her head down, clutching his legs like the shafts of a cart, and him behind her on the ground, his arms thrown back in the shape of aV and his jacket and his shirt pulled up and his head bumping on the pavement. He laughed, and lit a cigarette, and coughed. When they came outside, that hot wind was blowing again, making their lips dry and coating their eyelids with a fine film of grit. The city looked unreal, sprawled in the turbulent heat under acid sunlight. They walked in a murk of underwater shadow along the polished marble pavements of the Via Roma, under the tall arcades. She linked her arm tightly in his and wondered if he could feel her trembling. Crowds of people were milling in the dusty piazzas, criss-crossing back and forth about them, blank of expression or frowning vaguely, as if in the aftermath of some tremendous but impalpable event. At first they all seemed to be wandering aimlessly, but then it came to her that there must be a pattern to so much movement, and she saw it as if from above, far above, the myriad lines of people merging and melting and forming again, the design at every point shifting and yet always remaining the same, the immense complex of individuals flowing into and through itself under the guidance of secret, immutable laws, and she at the centre of it all, its unwilling, moving focus. When they entered the Duomo, Vander sat down on a bench to rest, and his stick fell to the floor with an exaggerated clatter. A blue-jawed priest was hearing confessions, sitting in full view in his open box in an attitude of angry dejection, his head inclined to catch the urgent murmurings of an old woman kneeling at his right knee. The Chapel of the Holy Shroud was shut. Why was it shut? She could not understand it. Had the maid lied to her? She hurried agitatedly here and there, asking tourists with their cameras if they knew why the chapel was shut. She could feel Vander watching her, his grin. The tourists stared at her and moved on, uneasily ignoring her pleading questions. She confronted the confessor in his box. He frowned, and spoke a sentence brusquely in a hoarse, angry whisper. She went and crouched beside Vander and squeezed his hand in hers. "It is being shown somewhere else," she said, and gnawed on a thumbnail, looking up at him.

Outside, the heat was worse than ever, the dense air drumming, making her think of a great brass gong that someone has struck. The people walking about were fewer now, most of them gone into the restaurants and hotels in search of shade and coolness. Vander again complained of feeling dizzy. His brow and upper lip were stippled with beads of sweat, and there were dark patches of damp on his jacket under the armpits and down the back. A man with carrot-coloured hair went past. He was wearing a blazer and a dirty yellow shirt and soiled running shoes; he looked, she thought, like an off-duty clown. Vander seemed to know him, and tried to say something to him, but the fellow hurried on, glancing back nervously over his shoulder.

At last they found the place where the Shroud was on display. It seemed to be in a big striped marquee set up in a grassy square between a church and a small, squat palace; when they got inside, however, they discovered that the marquee was only an elaborate entrance to the church, or to the palace, they could not tell which, but it must be in one of them that the Shroud was on show. The light under the canvas was cottony and dense, like the light in a dream. There were ticket booths, and souvenir stalls, and upright plastic display panels that lit up when this or that button was pressed and recounted the history of the Shroud. Vander began to read one of them and snorted. They went on. A stream of people pressed against them, blank-faced and vague, like the people in the piazza. Vander tried to buy entry tickets but the man in the glass booth shook his head and made a sideways chopping motion with his hand. "Chiuso," he said, grimly pleased. "Chiuso." Vander spoke rapidly, raising his voice, but the man shook his head again, and gave a great, shoulder-rolling shrug. "Domani," he said. So that was it: she had not been meant to see it. All along, she had not been meant to see it; that too was part of the pattern. Relief flowed through her, like a liquid flowing just under the skin, warm and swift as blood. She began to weep, or laugh, or both at once. With a hiccuppy sob she turned quickly and walked away from Vander, from the man in the booth. Outside the marquee she stood on the scant grass and wiped her tears, taking big, wobbly breaths. She looked about in all directions, a hand to her forehead shielding her eyes against the noonday glare. What was she searching for, what did she expect to see? She did not know. She had the impression of something huge and dreadful hovering over the city, invisible, a phantom of the air, palpitant and bright, unbearably bright, too bright to be seen.

By the time Vander had followed her back to the hotel she was in the room lying on the bed in the dimness with the curtains drawn. For a second she did not know who he was, standing in the doorway with the light of the corridor behind him. She had a vague, disembodied sensation. Had she suffered a seizure without knowing it? He came in and shut the door and crossed the room and stood beside the bed, looking down at her. She could hear his harsh breathing. He was trying to make out if she was sleeping or awake. He threw something on to the bed beside her. She sat up, and he went and opened the curtains. The light dazzled her eyes. She picked up the thing he had left on the bed. It was a cardboard tube. Inside was a reproduction of the Shroud, printed on a long narrow strip of imitation parchment. She tried to unroll it along the length of the bed but it kept snapping shut again, like a window blind; she put her sandals on one end of it and a heavy guidebook on the other to weight it down. Vander stood at the window with his back turned to her, his face lifted at an angle, as if he were searching for something in the sky, as she had searched, standing on the grass outside the marquee. She stayed still there for a long time, kneeling on the bed, studying the curiously tranquil face of the crucified Saviour. "It looks like you," she said to Vander's back. "Just like you."

There was something wrong inside her; she felt something slip and swell. She hurried into the bathroom and was sick.

She wrote in her notebook, her hand flying over the pages. The Treaty of Vienna what year? reinstated the Savoyard Kings and gave them suzerainty over the city of. Adelaide of Susa married Otho son of Humbert the White-Handed. His hands are mottled, old. Suzerainty over. How would they not be when the rest of him is old? The child with no face. No the doll had no Jace. Emanuele Filiberto the Iron-Headed. White hand iron head no face. Father. I am writing down these things so you will know. It is because of you that 1 am here. I asked you how to live and you said not to live but only act. And laughed. I do not know what to do. All the time I feel I am Jailing. He will not catch me. The ancient marquisates of Ivrea and Monferrato, iron mountain does that mean ferrous ferrous, at the foot of the iron mountains the mountains the mountains

He asked her what she was writing, tried to read over her shoulder. He sounded like her father, the way he spoke, teasing her, making fun of her. He imitated her accent, called her his colleen, his Cathleen Ni Houlihan, his wild Irish girl. She saw herself lying down under his hand, docile as… as something, she did not know what. She devised ways of making him attend her. She saw herself as a puppet, with lacquered cheeks and fixed mad grin, popping up in front of him, look at me, look at me! She told him about Otho and Adelaide. He only laughed. The weeks went on, the summer burgeoned. The voices spoke to her about him, always about him, now. His hands were beautiful, she was afraid of them, those long, fine fingers. Again and again he asked her what Max Schaudeine had told her, demanding to know. She lied to him, said she knew nothing more about him than that he had written those things for the newspaper. Then he would look at her, thinking, thinking, his jaw working. He was afraid of her, she could see it. But she would not harm him. No, she would not harm him. Harlequin.

Many years ago, in America, I found myself stalled for a couple of semesters on a high, snowy campus way out west. I was waiting to take up the first of what would prove to be a pleasingly ascending succession of posts at Arcady, and had been invited to fill the interval at Frozen Peaks, where what was to be required of me in the way of work would be happily small and the remuneration seductively large. Magda liked the place, its bleak Slavic prospects, its white birches and blue birds, and we might have stayed if I had let her have her way. We had been there a week, huddling against the cold in a rented, grey-painted wood-frame house with a swing on the porch and a big tree in the garden scrambled all over by beady-eyed squirrels, when we were invited by the President of the college to a party celebrating the end, or the beginning, of some part of the university year – for all the time I spent in the academic New World I never quite got the hang of its rituals. It was a not disagreeable occasion. The President lived in a fine old colonial house on a hill above the campus. There was an enormous log fire in the entrance hall that gave off cracks like gunshots, and we were greeted by a soft-spoken elderly negro in a white jacket and white gloves bearing silver mugs of steaming and, as I was quickly to discover, extremely strong punch. Magda and I knew no one, but it did not matter. People kept coming up and talking to us, in that breezy and yet intimate, indeed faintly suggestive, way peculiar to college people and their spouses in the more out-of-the way necks of the American wood. Polka-dotted bow ties were much in evidence, and the dresses the women were wearing diat year were tight in the bosom and full in the skirts, and after the third mug of punch and a week of breathing the thin mountain air, I was overcome by the blurred sense of having stumbled into die midst of a flock of brightly plumed, cacophonous birds, the females of which all seemed plumply, pinkly available.

President Frost – how he loved his title – was a big, rangy, robust Swede with a shock of flaxen hair and an open smile and a handshake diat could have cracked walnuts. He welcomed me with warm indifference and introduced me to his wife, a handsome, large-boned woman in shimmering scarlet who for some reason thought I was Russian, and remarked widi an apologetic laugh that she was sure the bitty old snowfalls in this part of the world could not compare with the boreal blizzards to which I must be accustomed. She immediately took charge of Magda, whom she somewhat resembled, while the President plucked me by the sleeve and led me off into a corner of the room where, as he said, we could be out of die way of all diis flapdoodle. He spoke of this and that in a practised, easy way, rocking relaxedly on his heels and looking out over the heads of his guests – we were of a height, the two of us – like a scout scanning the mountaintops, not waiting for a contribution from me, and probably not listening to himself, eidier. Then he paused and turned widi his woodsman's lopsided grin and looked me speculatively up and down. "Let me give you a piece of advice, son," he said. "You're a fine-looking young fella, despite your war-wounds, and I don't doubt half the female students here will fall for you. But go careful, and remember: never screw a nut." We were both silent for a moment – what could I possibly have said? – and he went on looking into my face with an admonitory twinkle, then gave a great plosive laugh and, having driven a punch playfully into my shoulder, linked his arm in mine and said we should go and join the ladies.

I have been looking into Mandelbaum's Syndrome. It was not easy to find information on, for Mr. Mandelbaum is choosy, and comes to call only on a select, misfortunate few. The malady will present itself in disparate forms, which makes it difficult to identify with certainty, but there are a number of telltale signs which are constant. The seizures, presaged by their aura, most commonly a phantom odour or perfume, are characteristic, and frequently they lead the physician mistakenly to diagnose epilepsy. Schizophrenia too is a common misdiagnosis, although there are some authorities who consider the syndrome to be no more – no more! – man a rarefied form of that deplorable affliction. In Doctor Vander's opinion, Mr. Mandelbaum occupies a redoubt three-quarters of the way toward the bad end of the scale between manic depression and full-blown dementia. The patient will suffer delusions, hear voices, manifest compulsive behaviour, and will be prey to bouts of paranoia, sometimes of an extreme nature. I am quoting here. There is no cure. Palliatives have been tried, Oread, for example, and the lithium carbonate – based Empusa, and even the various Lémures and Lamia, with discouragingly poor results. The prognosis for those inflicted with the syndrome is not a promising one, although long-term statistics are scarce, since sufferers rarely survive – rarely permit themselves to survive, that is – into old or even middle age.

I knew that Cass Cleave was mad. Well, not mad, exactly, but not sane either. The very first time I spoke to her face-to-face, in the hotel lobby that spring morning, I saw straight off mat she was unhinged. I did not mind. In fact, that was the very thing that drew me to her. There was her youth, of course, and her peculiar, skewed beauty – which, by the way, it took me a long time to discern – but it was the chaos and violence of her mind that fascinated me most. Hers was not a comfortable presence in which to be. By day there were the unstaunchable streams of disconnected talk punctuated with profound silences under which could be sensed the telegraph-wire fizzing of her over-stretched nerves, while in the night I would feel her lying sleepless there in that hotel bed beside me, her mind racing, mounted perilously on its waking, runaway nightmare. She was a battleground where uncon-tainable forces waged constant war. She was all compulsion, down to the way she gnawed her already well-gnawed nails until the quicks of them bled. I would catch her watching me from under her hair with a kind of savage surmise, like an animal watching from its covert the approach of the hunter. I knew when she was about to start hearing her voices, from the way she held her head at that peculiar tilt, still and alert and breathlessly expectant. At times I could tell the voices were so intense that I fancied I caught something of them myself, a sort of slithery din, like the noise of rain on a roof. Then the fugues began, I think I am employing the term correctly. She would fix on some tiny, concrete detail and elaborate upon it in fantastic flights of invention. In her version of the world everything was connected; she could trace the dissolution of empires to the bending of a blade of grass, with herself at the fulcrum of the process. All things attended her. The farthest-off events had a direct effect on her, or she had an effect on them. The force of her will, and all her considerable intellect, were fixed upon the necessity of keeping reality in order. This was her task, and hers alone.

She had recompense, of a sort. The affliction which darkened her mind also made it burn with a fierce, a frightening, intensity. If her brain had been right she might have been a real scholar; not a great one, probably, but a scholar all the same. There was a demented brilliancy to the way she could connect the seemingly unconnectable strands of the warp and weft of a subject and weave a shining something out of them, however quickly it might unravel in her hands. I was aware in myself of a professional disapproval, a distress, almost; had she been my student, so I fatuously told myself, I might have been able to show her how to turn her excess energies in a disciplined direction. She could not keep at a thing until it was done. Her enthusiasms were brief, her conclusions inconclusive. Worse, she had no detachment, could not divide herself from her subject – how should she, since she was the one, true subject? Thus in the thesis she had begun on Rousseau's children, and had never finished – she had brought it with her, a great wad of dog-eared foolscap, thinking to impress me – she drew a sly but unmissable comparison between the fate of those miserable babes, no sooner born than abandoned into the care of an orphanage by the philosopher and their mother, and what she saw as her own spiritually orphaned plight. And Kleist, whose last, fraught hours on earth she had attempted to chronicle in exhaustive detail, was, in her conception of him, as I quickly understood, nothing much more than a harbinger of her. She had been in and as quickly out of half a dozen academic institutions: her papa, according to her a once renowned but now broken-down actor, was financially indulgent. I wonder that she did not find her way to Arcady. However, what made her most difficult, most infuriating, to deal with, was that even in her maddest flights of fantasy there was always somewhere a hard grain of simple, sane, commonplace reality, for which she would demand, and get, acknowledgement, and then use that acknowledgement as a hook to draw one deeper into the whirlpool of her delusions. She was cunning. She could always judge – well, not always, not ultimately – how far to go, and when to stop. I can see her still, sitting cross-legged on the bed, her elbows on her knees and her head sunk between her shoulder blades and a hand thrust in her hair, talking, talking, talking, and then suddenly looking up sideways, sharply, measuring at a glance the scale of my scepticism, or exasperation, or boredom, and adjusting accordingly the intensity of her insistences.

Strangest of all the manifestations of her condition, eerier even than the seizures she was subject to, were those states of utter absence into which she would suddenly fall, without warning, and from which she was not to be roused or recalled until whatever other place it was she had been in was ready to release her. For it was absence. Although she may have seemed in those intervals like a catatonic, she would retain a quality of such vividness, such – what shall I say? – such immanence, that it was plain she was fully conscious, but, as it were, conscious somewhere else. I confess I found these lapses extremely unnerving. She would falter, and stop still as a breathing statue, and I would feel her leaving herself, as the ancients believed they could feel the soul abandoning the body of one who was dying. I too would halt, transfixed, as if I had felt the passing of a ghost, and wait for her to come back. We never spoke of any of this. I never asked where she had been, or even if she was aware of having been gone. In fact, I never mentioned any of the signs of her condition, and certainly not the condition itself, held in check as I was by a reserve that was as arbitrary and as rigid as any primitive taboo. Just as she was preserving the world, so I must preserve something in her, some last and vital shred of decorum, privacy, equilibrium. However, lest I present an image of myself bent low in hieratic submission at the feet of a capricious moon goddess – although they were lovely, in their way, those large, long, slender, pale feet of hers – I should say that my treatment of her in general was not pretty, no, not pretty at all. She was demented, and hardly more than a child, a lost poor damaged soul who trusted me, and I betrayed that trust. In defence of myself, although I do not deserve defending, I shall adduce only two articles of evidence, the first of which is a product of the second. I was embarrassed. Now, there is embarrassment, and there is embarrassment. That under which I sweated was of a kind usually experienced only in those dreams in which one finds oneself caught trouserless in a public place. Do not mistake me. My shame was not that I had taken advantage of a creature who was a fraction of my age and of unsound mind. I did not care how the hotel waiters might smirk, or Franco Bartoli frown, or Kristina Kovacs offer me her sadly smiling, patronising sympathy; where lust and its easements are concerned I am and always was beyond good and evil, or at least beyond delicacy and bad taste. No. The trouble lay elsewhere. This is the second line of evidence for my defence, and the source of my embarrassment: the fact, simply, that I loved her.

I have allowed I hope a decent interval for the laughter, the jeers and the catcalls to subside. Now I must qualify this startling declaration. It was a great surprise to me, a great shock, at this late, last stage of my life, to find myself host to such a sudden and unfamiliar, if not forgotten, emotion. Inside every old man, or inside this one, anyway, there lives on an unageing youth who never had enough of love, of the Keats and moonlight variety, and who at the least encouragement and in the most unsuitable circumstances will leap out, posy in paw and glans athrob, ready to scale the ivy to the rose-hung balcony and his beloved's bedchamber. He is of a serious, a solemn, bent, this flushed and swooning Romeo; he is after more than mere gratification of the flesh. Despite the pococurantish pose to which in the matter of love I am given like all my kind – men, I mean, old or young – I approach the female body on the knees of my soul. Never, since that April evening in my earliest springtime when bad little Lili Erstenheim lifted her skirts for me in the shadows under the staircase of our apartment building and laughing seized my rigid virginity and slipped it effortlessly, like a lollipop, into the hot hollow between her skinny thighs, never, I say, have I been able to breach that holy of holies, wherever I have encountered it, without a numinous shiver. To thrust a limb of one's living flesh into the living flesh of another, how can that be other than a sacred or a sacrilegious act?

I do not say that this heightened state of reverence survives intact into the afterwards of sweat and tangled sheets and that peculiarly melancholy smell of sea-wrack and ammonia that lingers when the tide of love has ebbed. After the first time, the first two times, in the hotel room, when, half-drunk and obscurely terrified, I had thrown myself upon Cass Cleave in her bed, my mind naturally turned at once to the question of how to get rid of her. Bitter experience in my early academic life had taught me a simple but peremptory lesson, namely, that one might take a student to bed once and get away with it, but to repeat the performance is as good as giving a pledge of life-long passionate devotion, involving marriage and children, a nice big house, and dinner parties, foreign travel, a place in the country, companionship throughout a long and vigorous retirement, then tears at the graveside and a comfortable inheritance to follow. As I lay there through that long afternoon I considered carefully my little predicament. True, Cass Cleave was not the vengeful rival bent on destroying me and my reputation that I had expected; she was, I estimated, just a bright though unstable young woman who had stumbled on a great man's youthful follies, and was eager to see what profit might be made of her discovery. Perhaps merely these hours of passion in the peccant professor's arms would be enough to buy her silence? After all, I told myself, that rascal Schaudeine might not have revealed to her the real secret, that is, the secret of my, or, should I say, Axel Vander's, true identity. Yes, a kiss, a rough cuddle, a few well-fashioned endearments – never before, my darling child, never have I known such, such…! – and then I could get up from this bed and put on my hat and be gone. But I could not do it. At first, it was easy to find excuses not to have done with her just yet. I must have time, must I not, in which to worm out of her the full extent of what she knew about me? And she was disturbed in her head, remember: if I let her go now, who could say what things she might not invent to incriminate me? Even if she were only to bruit it abroad that I had taken her to bed I would be a laughingstock – is there anything more horribly funny than a lustful and infatuate old man? – and besides, I would not have been surprised if under some antique but still flourishing law of this paternalist and fervidly Catholic country the monstrous disparity in age between us were to make me guilty, in a technical sense, of rape. No, no, I must keep her le strategy to adopt.

Try as I might, though, I could not hide from myself the fact, intolerably shamibeside me, under surveillance, that was the only safe and sensibng to me now, that I was as gone on her as any gonadolescent on his girl. She was, I suppose, the last fire in the winter of my life. This is the part I wish I could skip. How I squirm, thinking of it. I wanted to please her. I wanted her to admire me. I wanted her to deliquesce in my arms, helpless with astonished desire and adoration. I did all the foolish things an old man does when he falls in love with a girl. I tried to seem young, naturally. I made light of my physical afflictions. Why, I even bought a bright new neck-tie. I used to entertain the happy daydream – I am blushing, blushing – of taking her to some exclusive and fabulously expensive clinic where she would be cured of her malady, where together we would banish the interloper Mr. Mandelbaum and mend her mind. In my reveries I conjured the place, a sparkling white complex cunningly designed to look like a ski lodge, clinging to an Alpine crag, with hushed corridors and an ever-smiling staff, and an open verandah where my love in her spotless smock would lie drowsing in the crystalline, pine-scented air, I on one side of her, holding her hand in mine as gently as if it were a sleeping bird, and on the other the good Herr Doktor Jungfreud, with beard and specs and tobacco pipe, smiling down upon us both benignly, working the cure already just by the kindliness of his eye. Then we would set out gloriously on our travels together. We would go everywhere, to Paris, to New York, to Zacatecoluca, to Hy Brasail the Isle of the Blest! And I would teach her things, I would teach her everything that I had learned in a long life. For I knew, of course, that the way to her heart was through my mind. I would write at last the masterpiece that all these years, I would tell her, had been locked inside me, waiting for her to come with the key. She would be my Beatrice, my Laura, my Trilby. What times we should have – what time: for her, I would live forever. It was a splendid fantasy. However, had I harboured any real, honest, human feelings for her I would have protected her and not let her drop from my safe-keeping like a drunk man dropping a brimming glass. Even that is not quite right, I did not even have drunkenness to blame for my lack of care. It was plain inattention. The object of my true regard was not her, the so-called loved one, but myself, the one who loved, so-called. Is it not always thus? Is not love the mirror of burnished gold in which we contemplate our shining selves? Ah, see how I seek to wriggle out of my culpability: since all lovers really love themselves, I am only one among the multitude. It will not do; no, it will not do.

I am, as is surely apparent by now, a thing made up wholly of poses. In this I may not be unique, it may be thus for everyone, more or less, I do not know, nor care. What I do know is that having lived my life in the awareness, or even if only in the illusion, of being constantly watched, constantly under scrutiny, I am all frontage; stroll around to the back and all you will find is some sawdust and a few shaky struts and a mess of wiring. There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text. I have manufactured a voice, as once I manufactured a reputation, from material filched from others. The accent you hear is not mine, for I have no accent. I cannot believe a word out of my own mouth. I used Cass Cleave as a test of my authentic being. No, no, more than that: I seized on her to be my authenticity itself. That was what I was rooting in her for, not pleasure or youth or the last few crumbs of life's grand feast, nothing so frivolous; she was my last chance to be me.

Incidentally, I find it curious that I failed to note how much my present love-struck state resembled that phantasmagoric parody of amorousness into which poor Magda blundered at the end. She seemed to have reverted in her mind to our earliest days together. She would sit down beside me and stroke my hand, or the side of my neck, murmuring endearments. Her smile, coy yet eager, was the smile of a girl surprised by passion for the first time. Her broad forehead lost its lines, her eyes grew clear. She would follow me about the house, heaving lovelorn sighs or, worse, softly, lewdly laughing. I did not know how to deal with these grotesque displays of ardour. And anyway, in her ruined understanding she was surely embroidering the past, for certainly I had no recollection of ever having engaged with her in this kind of erotic playfulness. Perhaps she was mistaking me for someone else, my predecessor the Pole, for instance. But would that muscle-bound little tyke have submitted himself any more willingly than I would to such shows of needful and suggestive affection? Maybe it was another kind of love she was acting out. Maybe she took me for the child she had never been able to have – an early, botched abortion had left her barren – and thought I was her huge, ancient, peg-legged, Cyclopian son. Yet it was alarming how affected I could be by her when she was in this state. Once, when we were seated side by side on the couch in the lounge, where I was trying to read, and with a little moan of tenderness she laid her heavy head on my shoulder – it was noon and I had already begun the day's drinking – I suddenly burst into tears. Magda lifted her head and looked at me with what seemed pleased surprise. She put her hand up to my face and caught a single tear on her fingertip before it fell and examined it wonderingly, the plump clear bead shining there, magnifying the whorls of her skin and bearing on its brim a tiny, curved reflection of the window in front of which we were seated.

I need hardly say I shed no tears in Cass Cleave's presence. As fond an old satyr I may have been as ever stumbled in the wake of fair-limbed nymph, but I had not forfeited all my instinct for cunning and concealment. I was careful to seem to be holding her at emotional arm's length. I laughed at her, and grasped her wrist and squeezed it in my iron claw until she turned pale with pain. Yet for all the swagger and strutting before her, there must at times have been in me a faltering, a flinching, an abject, beseeching light in glance or gaze, that even she, the self-obsessed, could not but recognise and know what was betokened.

I tried, I tried to know her. I tried to see her plain and clear. I tried to put myself into her inner world, but even at those moments, all too rare, when I managed to hack my way through the thickets of fantasy and illusion inside which she was trapped I – came only to an immemorial, childhood place, a region of accent-less and unemphatic prose, exclusive haunt of the third person. She would not be known; there was not a unified, singular presence there to know. She was one of those creatures – Magda was another such – who exist on a median plane between the inanimate and the super-animate, between clay and angels. Despite any claims to the contrary I may seem to make, I am an ordinary soul. My hungers are human, my aspirations mundane. On the lip of the grave I was happy and grateful to get my hands on a girl – should I deny it? And she, what did she want, of me? At the time I thought, because it was convenient to think so, that profit was what she was after, self-advancement, a little fame, or, if fame was not for the having, notoriety at least. How I misjudged her.

When did it happen, this famous falling in love, when did I drown in that Rubicon? Impossible to say, exactly, yet I fix on a certain remembered moment which when I call it to mind produces what seems the most telling, most piercing, pang of all the pangs of pain to which I am subject now. It was at the end of that term of imposed para-hospitalization in the hotel room, during which she would not let me out of her sight for more than minutes at a time. My liver had at last made a recovery of sorts from the alcoholic insults I had been piling on it for decades, and with a particular vengeance since coming to the city. Not since youth had I been entirely sober for a full day at a stretch, and now, after a fortnight without a drink, I was so clear-headed that I almost felt dizzy. I registered hardly a tremor anywhere, I, who had not known a completely steady hand since early manhood. I had that heightened sense of self-awareness, that scarcely bearable feeling of being open to the world like a wound, that was last experienced in childhood, when illness seemed a chrysalis out of which one would struggle into a new and quivering, still sticky, not quite opaque version of a former, less developed, self. Everything around me was intensely sharp and clarified and almost painful to the touch, and even to the sight. That day, the day which I am remembering, it was coming on for twilight, the wind had died, the air was hot and still, and I was standing by the open window of the hotel room, re-learning how to knot my tie – extraordinary how illness can deprive one of the simplest skills – and there was traffic below in the street, and there were the sounds of people, and birds of some variety were circling slowly at an immense height, if I leaned forward and craned my neck I could glimpse them up there in the powdery, purple, late sky. I had my back turned to Cass Cleave, but her three-quarters reflection was to be seen beside me in the mirror of the wardrobe door. Something in her attitude made me pause. She was sitting on the side of the unmade bed, motionless, barefoot, her shoulders slumped, holding her shoes one in each hand and gazing before her with a look of helpless desolation that seemed to me echoed somehow, and somehow made all the more awful, by the heartless, glaring whiteness of the bed sheet where she sat and the malignant glint of the mahogany headboard beside her. I had seen this look before, it came over her always when the intolerable difficulty of being uniquely and inescapably herself brought her like this to a baffled halt in the midst of some perfectly ordinary and trivial bit of life's necessary business. For her, a pair of shoes, left and right, could be as insoluble as any conundrum with which the world might confront her. I noted with a kind of horrified tenderness the translucent white skin at her temples where her pinned-up hair was drawn back, and the shape of her knees under the light material of her frock, and the twin faint gleams of reflected window light along her shin-bones. For a moment I was dazzled by the otherness of her. Who was she, what was she, this unknowable creature, sitting there so plausibly in that deep box of mirrored space? Yet it was that very she, in all the impenetrable mysteriousness of her being entirely other, that I suddenly desired, with an intensity that made my heart constrict. I am not speaking of the flesh, I do not mean that kind of desire. What I lusted after and longed to bury myself in up to the hilt was the fact of her being her own being, of her being, for me, unreachably beyond. Do you see? Deep down it is all I have ever wanted, really, to step out of myself and clamber bodily into someone else. Everything had gone still. I dared not move; I thought that if I tried to turn I would not be able to, as if the air had turned into a solid medium in which I was stuck fast. I fancied I could hear the faint calling of those far birds. Then she bent forward with a sigh and set her shoes on the floor, one beside the other, and the movement disturbed the air and made the mirror tremble, and a watery shiver ran across the glass, and the cries of the birds became the traffic noises in the street, and she stood up, and began to say something, and then I did turn to her, the real not the mirrored she, and at my look – in that moment I must have seemed the madder of the two of us – her eyes widened, and she wavered, seeming to shrink back and at the same time to lean irresistibly into me, and I put my ape arms around her and held her with such force in my decrepit, foul embrace that she gasped, and I felt the flutter of her expelled breath against my neck, and if I had been able to speak, I do not know what I would have said.

Despite such mysteriously intense passages, when I look back to then, which is still the recent past after all, it is strange how little I can see, how little remains that is not remote, diffuse, gone small and indistinct in time's misted-over window pane. Of the three-odd months – and the hyphen, by the way, is optional – that we were together, that she was with me, or I was widi her – I am not sure how to frame the thing – I retain only fragments, pitifully scarce. How did we pass the time, how fill the ordinary hours, the suspended mornings and torpid noons, the evenings that were all deserted corridors and air as dense as the shock-wave after an explosion? I see us sitting opposite each other at a table in the hotel's huge, muffled dining room, where the light falls down from the chandeliers like the light in a mortuary, and the waiters stand about in their cream jackets, fiddling with their bow ties and gloomily inspecting their fingernails. The only other regular is there, an elderly, silver-haired gentleman who lived permanently in a suite on the top floor, and had his own table in a corner by the mirrors, who makes subdued, knitting sounds with his knife and fork and at intervals will pause in eating to clear his throat delicately into a fine, white fist. These are the only sounds I hear, the clicking of the cutlery and the old man clearing his throat. We must have talked, Cass Cleave and I, or she at least must have talked to me, since she was forever talking, at table and in bed, on the streets, in trams and taxis, telling me things, but all that persists, in my ears, is a sort of deep, hollow hum, the kind of hum that lingers for a time in an auditorium after the audience has left. We did things together, she and I, visited places, museums and the like, as diligent as any pair of tourists. We went to Milan, to the Brera, to look at Mantegna's dead Christ and Bellini's Greek Madonna. We made an excursion to Genoa, and spent a pleasant afternoon there strolling in the vast cemetery of Stagione, where the air smelled faintly, sweetly, of the decaying corpses that lay under the clay and in marble vaults everywhere about, and she was fascinated by the larger than life-sized stone scenes of the domestic doings of the dead that lined the long, arcaded walkways. But even in my memories of those more memorable days, what I see of her is not her, but something far less substantial, a wavering presence that seems hardly more than the idle dream of an old man's afternoon. Is it simply because I was so old and she so young that I have kept so little of her? How could I be expected to see her clearly, peering rheumily as I must across the chasm of the years that yawned between us?

As time went on the matter that had brought her to me in the first place came up between us with less and less frequency. When I thought of it I would make a renewed effort, more or less determined, to get her to disclose the full extent of what she knew about me and my shady, not to say shrouded, past, but always without success. Why would she have told me, when she thought that my not knowing what she knew was the hold that she had over me? I admit that more than once I resorted to force in trying to extract a confession from her. I can see her still, in the hotel room, crouched in the narrow space between the bed and the wall where I had pushed her to her knees, her face, pale with pain, turned back to look up at me as I lean over her, with my horrible grin, twisting her arm past the level of her shoulder blade and threatening to break it if she will not tell me all – all, mind! – that was told to her that day in Antwerp by Schaudeine the fixer. How curiously calm she is, how solemn-seeming, despite the hurt that I am doing to her. It was, of course, a game that we were playing. By now, what mattered was not what she might know about my paltry misdeeds. Whatever I may say, all along I had been waiting for, hoping for, someone to spring out at me like this with my secret held in her hands and threatening to show it for all the world to see. What is the good of a secret, where is the power in it, if no one knows of its existence? In peril now of imminent exposure, and the disgrace, revulsion and general mockery that would inevitably follow, my attitude was one not of dread so much as a sort of jaunty fatalism. Where before I had skulked in trepidation, afraid and yet not knowing exactly what it was I feared, now I saw myself as besieged, stalwart, a roundhead suddenly become a cavalier. I felt, I confess it, quite the dashing villain.

But let me try, once more, a last time, while the mood is on me, to describe how it really was between Cass Cleave and me. I propose a series of scenes, as in a frieze, depicting a pale girl capered about by an old man, against the background of a marble cityscape. The oldster is in motley, masked and plumed, pinned all over with diamond patches, with a monstrous codpiece strapped under his belly. In each of the panels he is striking an elaborate attitude for the girl's benefit. Now he is the gay blade, hand on hip, now the demon lover, rampant, irresistible, now the unresting scholar with his taper and his book. The girl stands before him gazing upon these antics with a patient expression, forbearingly, a dreamy Columbine, waiting for him to doff the mask and motley; how eerily he reminds her of her father, playing his parts. See, here they are now, in the heights across the river, on a narrow, upwardly curving road overhung by dark trees. It is a deserted, sultry, knife-grey evening, and Franco Bartoli, that lugubrious Innamorato, has invited them to dinner. They are alighting from a taxi. She helps the old boy with his walking stick and his useless leg. She tries not to let him see her seeing the palsied shaking of his big, white-knuckled hand clamped on the handle of the stick. A waft of warm wind sways the trees, silvering the leaves; she thinks again not for the first time how the city seems to breathe, wearily, like a living, ancient thing. She takes the old man's arm and they set out across the road. For a second she sees him looming naked above her, huge and scrawny and sagging, hair wild and eyes ablaze, his old mouth open. Then she sees herself holding him; she is like the anatomically impossible Madonna in that painting they saw somewhere, cradling a giant Christ on splayed knees with no more effort than if she were dandling a babe.

The apartment building where Bartoli lives is old but instead of a front door there is a sheer pane of plate-glass that at first they take to be black and opaque. Vander flourishes his stick and presses the doorbell with the point of it. They hear the bell's nasal buzzing far off somewhere inside. They wait, blankly contemplating their own faceless shadows standing before them in the glass. In the sombre, wind-tossed air of evening she is for a moment suddenly someone else. Light floods the hall – the glass is clear, not black – making it a stark white cell, with Franco Bartoli stepping into it. At sight of him Vander begins to breathe heavily down his nostrils, as if he had just ceased from punching someone. "Behold!" he says with a snicker. "A shape all light…!"

Nimbly the little man advanced toward them, like a clockwork toy in a toy-shop window, seeming as always to fleet along on the tips of his toes, and perkily smiling. He paused within and pressed a button in a panel on the wall and the glass door slid aside smoothly. He welcomed them with a gesture of his body that was part curtsey and part pirouette, and reached up and seized Van-der's upper arm in a manly grasp, while simultaneously bending to brush his warm, dry lips over the back of Cass Cleave's hand. "Two of you!" he said. "What a good surprise." Cass Cleave had not been invited, but Vander had insisted she must come, and here she was. Bartoli shooed them ahead of him down the hall, flapping his tiny hands. He was wearing a tight little suit and a white shirt with big stiff cuffs and a tie of sky-blue, shiny stuff. Vander trailed his stick along the floor, making the rubber tip squeal on the marble tiles. Now a steel door thick enough to seal a vault confronted them. Bartoli rapped the metal with his knuckles, remarking proudly what an effort and expense it had been to have it installed. Vander was peering at him closely with a frown. "The beard!" he said now, and laughed. "You have shaved it off!" And indeed he had, revealing babyishly plump, pale cheeks and a prominent button chin with a notch in it. He blushed and lowered his eyelids bashfully, and turned aside and pressed something and the steel door opened. All inside, in contrast to the glass and marble and metal of the entrance hall, was old worn wood and thick brown drapery and uneven, creaking parquet. The lighting was low and yellowish, seeming to emanate weakly from the walls themselves, and there was a faintly unclean, elderly, old-fashioned smell. They heard voices from a farther room. They moved along a book-lined passage, picked their way across a mysteriously unlit space where unidentifiable dim objects loomed, and entered a lofty, narrow dining room crowded with large pieces of furniture, overpowering and dark. Seated at the dinner table, their faces lifted expectantly, were Kristina Kovacs, and a burly, self-consciously handsome, middle-aged man with a swept-back mane of oiled, iron-grey hair. As Vander and Cass Cleave were being led in, there entered simultaneously through an opposite door a tiny old lady swathed in black lace, whom they took to be Bartoli's mother. Fixing on Bartoli, the old woman launched at once into voluble speech, lifting a pair of trembling brown claws. Bartoli too held up his hands, shushing her, and sought to introduce the large man to Vander and Cass Cleave, but his efforts were drowned by the old woman's unstoppable cawing. Taking her by the shoulders he turned her about and gave her a firm little shove, and she tottered out of the room through the door where she had entered, still gabbling. The large man rose and reached across the table and shook hands vigorously with Vander while bending on Cass Cleave a keen, appraising glance. Bartoli was moving around the table fussily, pulling back chairs and straightening the cutlery. Vander leaned down and said something to Kristina Kovacs, and she smiled up at him and patted his hand where it rested briefly on her shoulder. Cass Cleave stood canted awkwardly with one foot crossed on the other and her hands behind her back, staring blankly into an abyss. Bartoli now was rapidly clearing an extra place for her at the table, and the grey-haired man and Kristina Kovacs had to shift their chairs, and for a moment all was confused movement and murmuring, while Vander looked on in smiling, large enjoyment. There entered then a second old woman, smaller even than the first. Her round little face was perfectly smooth, and she had a tiny, sharp, curved nose like a finch's beak. This, it turned out, was the real Signora Bartoli. She stood in the doorway and looked upon the company with an expression of placid enquiry, sweetly smiling, as if she had heard their voices and had wandered in to see who the strangers might be. Her son shouted at her to be seated; she was quite deaf. The grey-haired man was offering Cass Cleave a cigarette from a silver holder. Bartoli, having manoeuvred his mother to her place, stood beside his chair at the head of the table, beaming. Now the first old lady reappeared, bearing aloft in both frail hands a broad platter of rice. Bartoli poured the wine. The rice exuded the under-arm aroma of wild mushrooms. The tiny cook retreated to the kitchen. They sat. They ate. He said. She said.

Human occasions, how strange they are. And yet, why do I say so? What are the unstrange occasions against which I measure them? The human is all we have. And people are simple, too much so. Consider Franco Bartoli, now, perched brightly there at the head of the table, with his newly smooth jowls and his little bluish chin, indecently cleft. He is quick, he misses nothing. He can engage in one conversation while listening to another. Tonight he is safe at the centre of his little world of women, smiled upon by his happily vacant old mother and fussed over by Maria the cook, with Kristina Kovacs on his right hand and Cass Cleave opposite and me safely off at the table's other end. The grey-haired fellow too is a source of assurance for him, speaking with loud, guttural authority on a diverse range of subjects, quaffing great draughts of wine and shooting in my direction the measuring, menacing glance of a hired heavy. I have still not discovered who or what he is, and will not. His huge hands are markedly unsteady; he seems to be labouring under a suppressed, general rage. He bears a striking resemblance to the poet Montale, but when I enquire if he might perchance be a relative of the great Ligurian, he merely stares at me, frowning darkly, as if I have said something insulting. His initial flare of interest in Cass Cleave quickly fizzles out; no sooner has she begun to tell him about her latest obsession, the commedia dell'arte and its origins – Susarion and his players, the Roman circus, Plautus, pilgrim plays, and, if I heard her correctly, something about the Mohammedan invasions – than his eye wanders back speculatively in the direction of Kristina Kovacs. But Kristina too will not hold his vigorous attentions. She would have, once, but no longer. That hollowed-out look she has is more pronounced than ever, it seems that if one were to touch her with a fingertip her skin might break up and fall from her in powdered fragments. She has grown vague in manner, too. For extended periods she and Signora Bartoli will sit in silence, with the same expression, gazing at the tablecloth without seeing it, not quite smiling, not wholly here. In the midst of these marionettes Cass Cleave is speaking earnestly and fast, while trying inexpertly to smoke another of Montale's cigarettes. "The ancient phallophori," she is saying, staring desperately into his face, "daubed with soot and adorned with the phallus, would leap upon gourds, performing all manner of obscene acrobatics." This is really aimed at me, and I recognise it; she has been reading my books again. I smile at her sternly. Mon-tale frowns, nodding, baffled, drinks another draught of wine. She laughs unsteadily; tears sparkle on the rims of her eyes. All stare at her, even Kristina Kovacs, even Bartoli's vague mother. Although I too am looking at her she will no longer look back at me. Now say that… Now say…

Say what? I am running out of things to say. There I am, as usual, with my glass of drink and my cigarette, smiling about me savagely, entertaining my old Caligulan dream of a world with a single neck for me to wring. My kind should be rounded up and corralled off somewhere, Madagascar, say, although I do not like the smell of cloves. Or is that Zanzibar? She wrote: I am going to America. The jolt, like an electric shock to the heart, as I stood there in the mild autumn light in Franco Bartoli's garden room with the scrap of paper in my trembling hand. That word, heart. I am like a stoker in the bowels of a ship, at night, on a raging sea, with only the thinnest skin of metal to save me from the black weight of waters. I look at my hand, catch sight of my old, my so old hand, and am halted. The falling flesh. Today, over our spiked coffees at the Caffè Bicerin, my new friend Dr. Zoroaster permitted me to see the numbers tattooed on his wrist. It was coy but quite deliberate, the way he turned up his hand that was holding his cigarette and let the cuff of his fine silk shirt fall back, like a stage magician pretending to show that he is hiding nothing. I made no remark, and nor did he. I was shaken, however; I still am. I have the disquieting sense that something that was dispatched to me a long time ago and went astray has suddenly turned up, something I would have been loath to take delivery of then and need even less now.

Somehow I got into an argument with the truculent Montale. Well, no, to be honest, I knew very well what I was doing. I was bored, I wanted amusement, I wanted to put on a show for Cass Cleave. The source of disagreement was some fashionable scribbler whose work Montale insisted on loudly trumpeting and whom I dismissed as a charlatan. Montale at once became heated, his face going puce under its playboy's tan. He said he believed I had not read the wretch's stuff, which was true, for all that it mattered. The rest of the table sat silent as we strove there, two moth-eaten warriors lunging and parrying with our greatswords. Franco Bartoli looked back and forth between us, his neck at each swivel seeming to grow longer and thinner, as if there were some kind of corkscrew mechanism inside it. Kristina Kovacs, her head inclined and eyes downcast, was absently rolling and unrolling a corner of her napkin under the palm of a flattened hand. Bartoli's mother, who from the first had taken Cass Cleave to be my daughter, would turn to her at each new feint of mine, and smile at her, and nod, with lips compressed and eyes widening, mutely congratulating her on her papa's fine turn of sharp-edged phrase, although I am sure she could not hear a word of what I was saying. Cass Cleave, meanwhile, was fixed on me with what I took to be an almost ecstatic intensity, her eyes alight and her fists clenched in front of her on the table, more and brighter unshed tears standing in her eyes. How I swirled and skirled for her, flashing my blade, captivated by my own ferocity and fighting skill. Franco Bartoli at last spoke up. Yes, Bartoli, that puny manling, from somewhere found the nerve to interrupt me. "Professor Vander," he said, addressing Montale and smoothly smiling, "holds that every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic's task to nose out. Is that not so, Axel?" I hesitated. I considered. Montale, like his host, was smiling now, nastily, flexing his shoulders and shooting his cuffs. I took a deep, a calming breath. "I have been re-reading," I said to Franco, gazing up thoughtfully into a gloomy corner of the room, "those essays of yours on Shelley." Now, Shelley is Franco's specialty. He has got the poet wrong, of course – child of nature and champion of revolution, Apollonian prophet, drunken imbiber of the sublime, the usual Romantic claptrap – as I have tried to make him see, on more than one occasion. Self-deluding rhetoricians such as Bartoli are the monumental stonemasons of our trade. Over the buried bodies of the mighty dead they erect their marble statues, the frozen, idealised images to which I never miss the opportunity of taking a ten-pound hammer, as, for instance, now. I had squared my elbows and leaned forward to deliver the first withering blow when something… some thing happened. Grown old, the imagination, as I have been finding out, tends to play unnerving tricks. Visions that in youth or even middle age would seem no more than daydreams, mere dawdlings along the margins of fantasy, reify into what feel overwhelmingly like actual and immediate experiences. The familiar will shift and slide, will change places with things never seen before. A known face will turn into that of a stranger, a window will open on to a vista, menacing and dark, that was not there a moment ago. So it happened now. Under the dim canopy of brownish light in which I sat, attended by the silent sentinels of big black sideboards and looming bookcases, I saw the top of the table ripple and sway, and through this suddenly liquid surface something broke which seemed at first a submerged root or stump of tree. Up it came, and up, slowly, effortfully, a bloated, faceless thing with horrid head and straining shoulders and dripping chest, all hung about with fronds of water weed and wrack. There were no sounds, only the speechless shadows pressing in upon the darkling place, and the dark waters moving. The figure, although featureless, was facing me, and struggling, as it seemed, to frame a question, meant for me. The visitation, hallucination, whatever it was, lasted no more than a second or two, and was gone. I looked about. All was as it had been, Bartoli blackly frowning, and Mon-tale's double clenching his fists, and Kristina Kovacs rolling die corner of her napkin, and Bartoli's mother maundering, miles away. And then, all at once, without warning, Cass Cleave gave a terrible, high, hair-raising shriek and turned her eyes up in her head and slid from her chair and with an awful clatter disappeared under the table. Now came another flash and in it I saw again the skidding lorry, the girl spinning, the blood dripping from the porcelain of her ear.

Some things, real things, seem to happen not in the world itself but in die gap between actuality and the mind's apprehending; the eye registers the event but die understanding lags. For a moment all sat still, in startled silence. It was Montale who acted first. Without rising from his chair, and despite his bulk, he turned adroitly to the side and leaned forward, below die level of the table, humping his porpoise's big back, and we heard him saying something down there in a muffled tone to the stricken girl, something to which she did not reply. Kristina Kovacs was looking at me with a peculiar, still, and, I thought, sad expression the meaning of which eludes me even now. Franco Bartoli clamped his hands on the edge of the table and pressed down hard, as if he too had seen it turn into a tub of fouled and drowning waters that he thought might be in danger of capsizing. He said something, and then hopped up and hurried away to the kitchen, and reappeared a moment later bearing in his hand a glass of water. Behind him I glimpsed Maria the ancient cook hanging back in horror, clinging to the door jamb and peeping in on the disordered scene out of one unwilling eye. Signora Bartoli sat with her palms pressed to either side of her face, like that figure on the bridge in the Munch painting, producing not a scream, however, but a curious, distressed, chirping sound, like that which a hungry or a frightened fledgling might make. Now Montale, with much grunting, straightened up from under the table with Cass Cleave draped limply across his arms, her head turned a little toward his chest and her bare arms delicately drooping. Against the muted lamplight and the large, vague shadows of the room it was a pre-Raphaelite scene: the swooning girl in the embrace of the big, square, stern-faced man, and the rest of us arrayed in a semi-circle looking on, mute and grave, constrained, it seemed, in a sort of nerveless torpor. I made to rise, but Kristina Kovacs, still with that peculiar, sorrowing look, laid a hand on mine to stay me, and rose herself instead and followed after Montale, who in turn, with Cass Cleave in his arms, and walking with the delicate, slightly pigeon-toed step that is surprisingly common among large men, was following Franco Bartoli, still holding out before him in his hands the untouched and somehow sacral glass of water. And so they processed slowly from the room. As Montale leaned sideways to manoeuvre himself through the doorway he had to lift up Cass Cleave's legs and I was afforded a fleeting sight under her dress of the undersides of her long, glimmering thighs and at the top of them a taut triangle of white cotton, and the vile old beast in me stirred itself and lifted up its questing snout. Which is worse, I wonder, that I should be capable of arousal at such a moment, or that I should feel the necessity to record the fact here? Then they were gone through the door and I was left alone with the chirping woman and the old cook's single, disconcerting and, so it seemed, greedily ogling eye.

It was a long time, and very late, before they would allow me to see her. Why I should have accepted their authority over her I do not know. I kept to my place at the table for a while, moodily smoking and drinking the dregs of the wine bottles; I suppose I was not altogether sober. The cook silently withdrew into her lair, and with the others gone Signora Bartoli grew calm again, and sat sighing and murmuring to herself, trying to pick up invisible crumbs from the table with fumbling fingertips, in that way of the old, as I know, for lately I often catch myself doing the same thing. Presently, however, she began casting alarmed, sideways glances in my direction, in an increasingly agitated fashion, I suspect it was that as the minutes moved on she was progressively forgetting what had happened, and was wondering who this mistily familiar stranger might be, or how he had come to be here, alone with her, in her own dining room, from which, as the scattered place settings seemed to attest, another group of mysterious and unruly guests had lately and precipitately fled. Then Franco Bartoli came back, all pursed and accusingly silent – had Cass Cleave come round and spilled my secrets to him? – and sat down, keeping his eyes downcast and softly clearing his throat. The moments creaked past. He would not speak, and nor would I, so that a sort of wordless contest formed itself between us in which we were both determined to prevail. I watched him narrowly, and considered firing off a fresh salvo on the topic of the Eton Atheist and his poetical works, just for the hell of it; before I could touch taper to powder, however, Montale reappeared, in quietly masterful mode, although a little unsteady on his toes, for he too had been drinking unstintingly throughout the evening. He said that Cass Cleave was asleep and should not be disturbed – remarkable, how everyone becomes a physician on these occasions – and dealt me in his turn an accusing look. He stood for a moment in heavy silence, his hands braced on the back of a chair and his bullish shoulders bunched inside his straining jacket, glaring at a plate, as though he were struggling with the urge to come round to my side of the table and take me by the scruff and chuck me out into the night – he could probably have done it, too, for I admit I was not in full possession of my strength – but Bartoli spoke to him rapidly in Italian, saying something I did not catch, and after another moment of menacing hesitation he nodded grimly and let go his grip on the chair, and, with a bow to Bartoli's mother and a parting glare at me, turned and trundled off. The silence returned. Bartoli began clearing his throat again, annoyingly. Maria the cook came in and crept around the table, stealthily gathering the dishes, giving me a wide berth. I stood up, making as much commotion as possible, and stumped out of the room, going I knew not where.

When Kristina Kovacs came to look for me I was standing in the book-lined passageway through which earlier we had entered, leaning against the shelves holding a big book up to the light and pretending to read in it. She stood before me quietly for a moment, her head bowed and hands clasped. She had taken on the distinct air of a nun, in her black dress with its white lace collar, and for a giddy moment I thought she was trying to think how to frame the news that Cass Cleave was dead. In the sallow light of the narrow passageway her skin had a sickly, moist pallor and the rims of her eyelids were inflamed. With a jolt, I was struck by the amazing fact that this woman who was here now would in a little while be here no more, would be, indeed, nowhere, that her flesh that I had intimately known would soon be falling off the bones, and in time the bones themselves would fall to dust, and then the dust itself would disappear. Always a shock, when one comes smack up against death like that, as if for the first time. I mean, one can be aware that a person is dying and yet not have acknowledged it, not have absorbed it, fully. Mortal illness, after all, is only a matter of acceleration. Who knows, I might be gone before she goes. It is a rum business. I stand amazed before the ungainsayable certainty that in a hundred years' time every creature now alive on this earth, with the exception of a few giant turtles and the odd hardy herder of yaks in the Ladakhs, will be dead. I do not necessarily deplore this arrangement – think of the crowding if it were to be otherwise. And indeed, I often feel it is not so much the passing of the present lot that should appal me as the prospect of our replacement by a fresh cast of fools and knaves, with their needs, loves, terrors, their little tragedies. Yes, the poor old world would be better rid of us entirely; leave it to the ants, I say. Meanwhile, however, here is the dying though still living Kristina Kovacs demanding my attention. "Axel," she said, "you must do something about this girl." Why, I wonder, do people always think the employment of one's first name will add irresistible weight to their pronouncements? Calmly I closed the book I had been inspecting, keeping an index finger between the pages to mark my place – it was, not that it matters, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the London 1888 facsimile of the 1499 original, in mint condition, as the old book thief in me could not help noting with nostalgic interest – and assumed an expression of polite, perplexed enquiry. Kristina sighed. She indulges me, does Kristina, and never more than mildly chides me for my reprehensible ways. "What are you doing with her?" she said. "You can see she is sick." Sick, I expostulated, sick? "Yes," she said, "sick. And she has shown me the bruises." Bruises, bruises, what bruises? What had the child been saying about me? "Are you by any chance jealous, Kristina?" I said. The possibility had just occurred to me at that moment, I had spoken the thought before I was aware of having it. These little instances of unpremeditated insight convince me that the machines will never take over from us. Goodness, how discursive I am being today, with all this talk of insects, and machinery – whatever next? But Kristina, now, jealous… She gazed at me for a long moment, then turned aside with a weary, a despairing, shrug. "She wants to see you," she said. The bedroom where they had put Cass Cleave was large and square and high-ceilinged; stepping into it was like stepping straight into the past. Occupying the centre of the room was an enormous, high, iron bed in the chilly wastes of which my girl looked like a lost Arctic explorer fast-frozen in an ice floe. An electric lamp with a brown shade was burning weakly on a low table beside her, while all around on every available surface there was set out an unnerving array of devotional prints, all of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or the two of them together, mother and son vying with each other in expressions of sorrow, and seeping wounds, and ever bigger and bloodier bleeding hearts. I sat down gingerly on the side of the bed; it swayed, the springs wearily protesting. Cass Cleave's eyes were closed, and her face was drawn and without colour, not unlike the many doleful faces of the Virgin and her virginal Son ranged round about, and just as unreally, as ethereally, beautiful. Only her head and hands were visible, which increased the impression of her having succumbed in the effort of trying to free herself from the frozen medium of pillowcase and sheets. I was still lugging the Hypnerotomachia; I laid it down now on the bed beside her and she moved a hand sideways and touched the cover, still with her eyes closed, tracing the texture of the binding with her fingertips, as if she were blind. She smiled. "Well," I said, not harshly, "what happened to you?" For a while she said nothing. I could feel her thinking. There was not a sound around us anywhere. Idly I entertained the thought that we might both have died, without noticing, and that this dim-lit chamber crowded with hearts and thorns and plaster tears was all that there would be of the next world. "The different air," Cass Cleave said, very softly. "The different smells. If you got used to that, a foreign country would not be foreign any more." I said, yes, that was true, I supposed. I looked about, and even whistled a little, softly, to myself; one can be bored no matter what the circumstances. On the wall above the bed there was a large, framed, faded photograph of a young man with longish hair, dressed in the fashion of a previous century, dark coat and high stiff collar and stock, whose slightly crossed but burning eyes stared down upon me with an expression of deep animosity and challenge. Despite the antiquity of the picture, the fellow in it bore a marked resemblance to old Signora Bartoli, whose bedroom, I surmised, this must be. Cass Cleave moved her fingers from the cover of the book and touched my hand. She was looking at me now. "I want to go to America," she said. I nodded, indulging her. "Of course you do," I said. I could have lied, I could have said I would take her to Arcady with me, but I did not. It is no matter; it was not my America she meant.

That night, what was left of it, I slept alone for the first time in months. Or did not sleep, but lay in a sort of conscious daze, rather, attended by my familiar demons. I have always been prey to night terrors – hardly surprising, I suppose – but lately they are mainly of the waking kind. When I was young my dreams were all chaos, lust and violence, now in my old age sleep is a room of quiet marvels into which I am nightly ushered. It is the ante-room of death; in it, my fears are stilled. Tonight, however, that door was locked against me, and I lay on my back under a humid sheet with my hands folded on my chest like the dead Christ in his shroud and listened to the restless world's carousings. The city seemed to be celebrating one of this festive country's many feast days, for the streets outside were loud with revellers until the early hours. Or it may have been an hallucination: at one particularly clamorous stage of the celebrations I crept to the window and looked down and saw a sort of heraldic cavalcade passing along the street, young men in doublets and striped hose carrying banners and gowned girls with elaborate headdresses mounted on prancing steeds, followed by a band of motleyed minstrels. Toward dawn the crowds, phantom or real, at last dispersed, and then the all too real garbage trucks and delivery men took over. The curtain edges were lightening when I thought I saw Cass Cleave come into the room. She sat by me in the shadows and did not speak. I tried to touch her, to feel her warmth, but my winding-sheet held me fast and I could not move a limb. What was I thinking of, to leave her in the care of others, at such a time? But then, I was not aware that it was such a time. All the same, of the many derelictions of which I have been guilty in my life, this one seems to me now the most reproachable.

I do not know what passed between Kristina Kovacs and Cass Cleave that night, while I cowered in my forsaken bed, what confidences were offered, what pledges given. Kristina has not volunteered to tell me, and I have not had the heart to ask. I harbour no resentment against her. She acted for what she thought was the best, as unwitting mischief-makers usually do. If she does know my poor secrets she likely does not care, so engrossed is she in the hard business of dying. I sit with her for hours, in the evenings especially, and often late into the night. I think that for most of the time she forgets I am there. I can sense her labouring over her pain: it is as if she is trying to hew something out of tbe most unmalleable material, to fashion something that is beyond her powers and her failing strength. The doctors insisted that she undergo radium treatment, the only result of which I can see is that now she is entirely bald. She refuses to wear a wig. In this shorn state she has acquired an austere, elemental beauty; her pharaonic head, held frailly aloft and faintly trembling on the delicate, fleshless column of her neck, is stark and absolute, all line and plane and angled shadow. Sometimes when I am sitting with her I stroke her head; it seems to comfort her, and she nudges against my hand, with an almost forceful insistence, like a cat. Her scalp is warm and always a little moist, and there is a vein that beats beneath it, very fast. I accused her lightly that night at Franco Bar-toli's of being jealous, but I am the one who is jealous now. Whatever I may call what I felt for Cass Cleave – the word love, in my mouth, has acquired a blasphemous overtone – I know that Kristina in some way came to share it. They had only that one night together, and I am no more willing to speculate on how they spent it than I am to ask Kristina to tell me. I am prevented by a sort of prudishness, or do I mean pudency; the blaze that burns the jealous lover feels so like the heat of lust.

When in the morning I went back to Franco Bartoli's apartment he was not there, or at least did not appear, and instead Kristina received me, still in her black dinner dress, more ashen and red-rimmed than ever. She said she had not slept, but had spent the night at Cass Cleave's bedside. This seemed perfectly natural to my ears, as natural as the fact that I had, without any intention that I can now discern, packed Cass Cleave's bag and brought it with me from the hotel. I do believe that at these times our thinking is thought for us. Kristina when I handed her the bag made no comment. She led me into the dining room where we had eaten dinner the night before and bade me sit down at the table. In the spiked sunlight of morning the place had a slightly sweaty, panting atmosphere, as if the night's revels in the streets had broken in here and had only lately been quelled. Cass Cleave was right, it is the different air, the different smells, that mark a place as foreign. This room, fusty and watchful, was meant to be lived in only after dark, and the sunlight coming in at the window was scandalously bright and brash. Odd to think that for others, for Franco and his mother, for the old cook, this place was as familiar as the palms of their own hands. I have never belonged anywhere… I cleared my throat and enquired after Cass Cleave, diffident as a hospital visitor. Kristina was pouring coffee for me and did not lift her eyes from the cup. I could see my face reflected in the polish of the dining table, foreshortened, indistinct, the upper part of it seeming sinisterly masked. I was trying, inconse-quently but with some irritation, to recall the exact distinction between the terms gemutskrank and geisteskrank. "She wishes to be alone," Kristina Kovacs said. "For a while. She has things to consider." I nodded, not seeing how else to respond. There seemed a nice point of etiquette in play here, an etiquette to which I was not party. I felt distantly a dull, dragging sense of sundering and release, as the ship must feel in the first moment of heaving away from the dockside; it was, I realise now, an initial, premonitory twinge of the coming pains of loss. "I love her, you know," I heard myself say, almost peevishly, and would have gone red all over if my ancient hide were less leathery. Now it was Kristina's turn to nod, pursing her lips. I could hear the old cook scratching about in the kitchen. "Nevertheless," I said, overly loud, sounding to my own ears like a Victorian paterfamilias reluctantly acceding to a fortune hunter's request for his homely daughter's hand, "nevertheless, I shall let her go, if that is what she wants." Kristina, still looking down, pondered my words for a moment, and then looked up at me and smiled. "Oh, Axel," she said softly, "only someone incapable of love could love so selflessly."

Later, when I saw Cass Cleave, she was in Bartoli's garden, a cramped, sunless box of stubby grass and wilting foliage wedged between two high, stuccoed walls and the blank-windowed rear of another, looming apartment house. She was sitting on a wrought-iron chair in a corner beside a blue-blossoming bush, very straight, her slender neck extended and her hands calmly folded in her lap. Her hair, I noticed, had grown appreciably longer in the months that she had been with me, and was gathered now and tied behind her head in what I believe is called a chignon. She was barefoot, and was wearing an old-fashioned white linen night-gown, lent to her by Bartoli's mother, no doubt. Placed there, all pale and russet, in front of the stained white wall, she might have been posing for a photograph, or awaiting, indeed, the arrival of the firing squad. As I approached, she looked up, her gaze not quite focused, and smiled vaguely, as if she were not sure whether I was real or only a comfortably familiar hallucination. I stood before her in the still and lifeless air, jabbing at the coarse grass with my stick. She waited, incurious, directing her blurred smile here and there. I said that I had heard that she wished to be left alone, and was unable to suppress the unexpected note of pique in my tone. I said she should know that Kristina Kovacs was ill, that she was, in fact, dying. I said that I had slept with her once, long ago, in Prague. "Yes," Cass Cleave said, "she told me." So. "And what," I asked, "did you tell her, in return?" She did not answer. I sighed. I had my little speech prepared. A livid cloud was creeping stealthily toward the sun. "You must understand," I said, "I shall have to go back to my life, and so must you go back to yours." I lightly laughed. "I have spent so much money here," I said, "my agent in Arcady, who handles my financial affairs, believes I am being blackmailed – which," with an archly frowning smile, "I am, in a way." I paced a step to right, to left, pivoting on my stick. I said that of course I loved her, but love is only an urge to isolate and be in total possession of another human being. "By loving you," I said, "I took you from the world, and now, I am giving you back. Do you see?" She listened to all this in silence, her head judiciously inclined, and now she nodded. I sighed again, impatiently. "Are you going to betray me?" I said. "Those newspaper things – will you reveal them, and betray me?" She sat quite still for a moment, then looked up with a little shiver, smiling, as if she were waking from a brief, refreshing sleep, and glanced about, in pleased surprise, it seemed, at the blue bush, and the white wall, and at me, standing before her, leaning on my stick. "We never saw the Shroud," she said. She rose from the iron chair and linked her arm in mine, and together we started back across the garden, toward the open garden window, where Kristina Kovacs stood, waiting for us, with her arms tightly folded under her bosom. "I have," Cass Cleave said softly, "something to tell you."

She left the city that day. Kristina Kovacs came to the hotel to inform me of her departure – her flight – bringing Franco Bartoli with her. When I saw them in the lobby, sitting side by side on the white couch by the indoor fountain where I had caught my first, unrecognising glimpse of the girl, they looked like a pair of errant children miserably awaiting their due of punishment. A thunderstorm that had been threatening for days had broken at last and was striding about the sky in lavish fury, banging its fists together and flinging down bolt upon jovian bolt with scarce a pause. A group of guests and one or two staff were crowded in the open front doorway, watching the palls of rain sweep along the street and sending up a collective sigh of appreciation and awe at each lightning flash. "But you said you would let her go," Kristina Kovacs said, looking up at me and blinking. "I thought – " The noise of the rain from outside was louder than the splashing water in the fountain. I struck the marble floor a blow with my stick. There are times when anger is a kind of pain, whining in one's head, high-pitched and hot, like a toothache. "You thought?" I cried. "You thought? You did not think!" Kristina went on blinking helplessly. No, she did not know where Cass Cleave had gone to; she had given her money, a considerable sum, enough for her to travel on for weeks, for months, perhaps. I made her promise, I made her swear, to tell me at once if she should hear from her. "You do not understand," I said, shaking my head from side to side, old wounded brute. "You do not understand!" I could have broken down and wept for rage. I had walked them to the door. A crackle of lightning lit the street, the crowd said Ahh! Kristina Kovacs went to the reception desk to borrow an umbrella, and Franco Bartoli laid a hand solicitously on my arm. "We thought you wanted to be rid of her," he said. "We thought you would be glad." I nodded wearily and said that yes, yes, glad, I was glad, of course. For a week I heard nothing. I seem to have done little else but pace, up and down my room, along the hotel corridors, from street to street, muttering, talking to myself and to Cass Cleave, railing at her and calling down curses on her head. In my overheated memory, the background to that interminable interval is all rolling, rumbling noise and thunder flashes, as if the storm that broke over the city on the day of her departure had continued on, without abating, day after day, night after empty night, in sympathy somehow with the turmoil in my heart. Then at last, banal as can be, came a postcard, from Genoa, with an antique photograph on the front showing, of course, a panoramic view of the Stagione cemetery. There is to be an eclipse of the sun, she wrote, do you think the world will end? Although she had given no address I had myself taxied at once to the station and was in Genoa by noon. I swung myself off the train and walked out into the sun and set off blindly up the first street facing me. The day was foully hot and the harbour stank. Crowds, cobbles, tottering palazzi.The street, a winding gorge, narrowed and then narrowed again, and then grew narrower still, and soon I was elbowing my way through a sort of souk where enormous, blue-black men in white djellabas lounged at stalls displaying slices of fried food and spilling bags of grain and unskinned kid goats with slashed windpipes hanging up by their little black hoofs. I sat down in a café and drank a glass of anis. The fat Arab proprietor leaned comfortably on the counter picking his teeth and talked to me in demotic French about his wives and his good-for-nothing sons. It was siesta time, the shutters were coming down. A circling fan in the ceiling stirred the drooping twists of flypaper. And at that moment, in that cheerfully alien place, I knew at last that she was lost to me for good. For good: how the language mocks us. I trailed back to the station, where I had to wait a peculiarly agonising hour for the next northbound train. It was late afternoon when I returned to the hotel, exhausted and feeling obscurely ashamed. I pulled the curtains in the room and climbed into the bed that still smelled faintly, or so I fancied, of her.

As the days went on more postcards came, from Rapallo, from Santa Margherita, from the five towns of the Cinque Terre, places I had never been to and had to imagine. I followed her progress along the Ligurian coast in a big old atlas that Franco Bartoli took down for me from a high shelf in that book-lined hallway of his. By now I had left the hotel and moved in with him and his Marna. It was a temporary arrangement, while I looked for somewhere permanent in which to set up my missing person bureau. Every afternoon Franco and I went together in his little car to the hospital on the city's industrial outskirts where Kristina Kovacs was undergoing a final, futile round of treatments. Most days we found her in a state of prostration and sleepy shock, like a survivor who has been pulled out of the rubble a week after an earthquake. Franco Bartoli was awkward in her presence, or perhaps it was only because I was there; he would sit on the metal hospital chair with his palms pressed between his knees, clearing his throat and stretching his neck up out of his too tight shirt-collar, or falling into protracted bouts of vacant staring from which he would emerge with a guilty start, casting a furtive glance at Kristina Kovacs and at me. He brought her flowers, they were a form of attempted propitiation, elaborate sprays of orchids and lilies and tuberoses that imparted an odour of the mortuary to the already faintly fetid air of the sick-room. Kristina had become touchingly dependent on him, asking him in a voice as thin as paper to do little services for her, to change the water in the vase on the window sill, to retrieve a dropped book, to ring for the nurse. The chemicals they were plying her with made her thirsty, and he would fill her water glass repeatedly and perch beside her on the bed and put an arm around her shoulders and help her to drink, and I would have to turn away and walk to the window and look out at the view of factories and shopping complexes smoking in the relentless summer heat. I brought Cass Cleave's postcards as they arrived, and Kristina had the nurses pin them on the wall beside her bed. Some days she would pass an entire visit lying motionless on her side, facing away from Franco and me, with a hand under her cheek, gazing steadily at these gaudy scenes of nude blue skies and silky seas. After we had left her Franco and I would go to a bar at the other side of an unrelievedly busy intersection, which we had to cross in zigzag fashion, perilously hurrying from one whimsical set of traffic lights to another. The bar was a nondescript place frequented by long-distance lorry drivers, solitary and haunted-eyed, and swarthy young thugs of uncertain provenance who passed the time playing the pinball machine in relentless, seething silence. As we sat there at the smeared metal counter, Franco with his coffee and me with my grappa, I would sense him trying to frame all the things that he wished to say, all the things that he felt he should be able to say, and failing every time; he was like the espresso machine behind the bar, a gleaming, big-bellied monster with countless knobs and gauges, that was forever building up a head of steam and never getting anywhere.

By the way, I do not know if it is a portent, or, if it is, what it might portend, but I have found Mama Vander's pill-box! It had slipped through a hole in the pocket of a jacket that I seldom wear and lodged in the lining. I am childishly delighted to have it back, and have been feeding it, at the rate of a tablet per visit, from Kristina Kovacs's store of pain-killers, against the day when I may need to kill my own pain, for good. Kristina will not go short: Dr. Zoroaster keeps her generously, not to say criminally, well supplied. It is he who tends her, now that she has left the hospital; they spend much time alone together, I hear them quietly talking, hour on hour, I do not know of what.

In my time at Bartoli's apartment his mother kept carefully out of my way. I felt a certain sympathy for her. It must have been distressing to be confronted anew each morning by this startling stranger, for I am certain that overnight, every night, monotonously as in a fairy-tale, the fact of my lodging there slipped through her hopelessly porous memory. Maria, the ancient cook, on the other hand, took a great shine to me, her colosso, and plied me coquettishly with all sorts of delicacies and sweetmeats, plates of pasta smothered in fresh truffles, and slices of panforte that threatened to pull out by the roots my few remaining molars, and tiny glasses of a metal-bright, thick, sweet liqueur with floating coffee beans and a wisp of ghostly blue flame trembling on the brim. She and Franco Bartoli between them had rigged up a makeshift study for me in a room at the back of the apartment looking on to the gloomy garden; here, as Franco indicated, in a tone of hushed reverence, I would be free to do my work without fear of interruption. That room became for him a hallowed place, a sanctum of intellectual sacrifice, a tabernacle of the real presence – he was, I discovered with some surprise, devoutly religious – consecrated here at the heart of his little domestic establishment. I would hear him creaking past the door on tiptoe, could almost feel him smiling in excited happiness and pride at his good fortune in having Vander the Great for a house guest. I had not known he held me in such high, such heroic, regard. No detractor ever ruffled the placid surface of my self-esteem, but an eager admirer can make me cringe for shame. I did not have the heart to tell poor Franco that my work, such as it was, had all been done, and there would be no more. Instead, I went each morning dutifully into that room, with the look of a man whose gaze is fixed unswervingly on immortality, and shut the door firmly behind me, and felt all outside it go still, waiting for the soundless roar of my mighty intellect starting up its engine. All a sham. For hours I would sit there, slumped in an uncomfortable antique chair, an elbow on the card table that served as a desk, my chin on my fist, gazing out at the place by the garden wall where Cass Cleave mat last day had stood up from her chair and taken my arm and walked me off across the parched and crackling grass and told me, so calmly, smiling, with eyes cast down, as though it were the simple answer to an unanswerably complicated question, that she was going to have a child, and that it would be mine.

How is it that men are always astonished by the phenomenon of conception? It might have been understandable in primitive times, when we believed it was the wind that got women with child, but what excuse is there for us in this jadedly over-informed age?True, in the course of a long life I had slept with many women without once, so far as I was informed, impregnating a single womb. What prankster god of fertility had decreed that at the very end I should be allowed to shoot one of his potent arrows straight to its secret and palpitant home? Who would have thought that my dry old seed could still sprout? What an embarrassment! How foolish I felt! And yet, how grateful, too. I saw at once, you see, the implications, the possibilities, what I shall call the saving grace, of this absurdly wonderful happening. Let me be clear; it was not I who would be saved. For once, perhaps really for the first time, it was others I was thinking of. Growing already inside this girl was the enfolded bud of what would be a world reclaimed. Out of the unimaginably complex coils in the hollow heart of the blastula I had set swelling in her belly there had already sprung the new beginnings of my people, my lost people. It was as simple as that. My gentle mother, my melancholy father, my siblings put to summary death before they had lived, all would find their tiny share in this new life. Oh, fond old man! How could I have thought this world would allow for such redemption?

The final postcard bore a brightly tinted picture of a church on a rock in the middle of an improbably berylline bay. She sent it in a package, along with her fountain pen, of all things. Dearest Svidrigailov - I am going to America - Your Cassandra. She had posted it in the town of Chiavari three days previously. She must have calculated that it would take just that time, no more, no less, to reach me. I marvel at her faith in the reliability of this country's postal system, although it proved remarkably well founded, for it was a mere ten minutes later, as I was standing helplessly by the window in the garden room with the postcard in one hand and her pen in the other, trying to think what to do, that Franco Bartoli tapped at the door and put in his head warily and whispered that there was a person – una persona – on the telephone who wished to speak to me.

Of all the traditional characters of the Italian comedy, Harlequin is at once the most individual and the most enigmatic. Who is this inexplicable being? Are his head and his heart made like our own? If an effigy were to be raised to him it must be made of rubber, for only rubber could receive the impress of his fierce and subtle spirit, created by the gods in a moment of incontrollable mirthfulness and malice. He is called by many names, and no one can say which was rightfully and originally his; many authorities maintain his name was first of all a sobriquet. He is without doubt of divine essence, if not, indeed, Mercury himself, god of twilight and the wind, the patron of thieves and panders. He is Proteus, too, now delicate, now offensive, comic or melancholic, sometimes lashed into a Jrenzy of madness. He is the creator of a new form of poetry, accented by gestures, punctuated by somersaults, enriched with philosophic reflections and incongruous noises. He is the first poet of acrobatics and unseemly sounds. His black half-mask completes the impression of something savage and fiendish, suggesting a cat, a satyr, an executioner. Consider how he is viewed by public opinion, and try to conceive, if you can, how he could ignore this opinion or confront it! Scarcely have the authorities assigned his dwelling, scarcely has he taken possession of it, when other men move their houses elsewhere so they no longer have to see his. Here he lives alone with his mate, whose voice is the only voice he knows and without which he would hear only groans. The day comes. A dismal signal is given. He sets out, with a black hue and a red eye. It is morning. He arrives at a public square packed with a pressing and panting crowd. He is thrown a poisoner, a parricide, a blasphemer. There is a thrilled, a terrible silence. He seizes the condemned one, stretches him on the rack, then takes and breaks him on the wheel. The head dangles down, the hair hangs on end, the mouth, gaping like a furnace, emits a bloody word, begging for death. It is finished. He steps down; he holds out his bloodstained hand; he is thrown from afar a few gold coins, which he carries away through a double row of men drawing back in horror. He returns home, sits down to table and eats, then goes to his bed and sleeps. Awaking on the morrow, he thinks not at all of what he did the day before. Is this a man?Yes. God receives him in his shrines and allows him to pray. He is not a criminal and yet no tongue would say of him that he is virtuous, that he is honest, that he is admirable. No moral praise seems appropriate for him, since this would suppose a relation with other human beings, and he has none. He has none, this Harlequin.

So this, she saw, was where it would end. There was nowhere farther for her to go, and she was glad. She had watched from the deck of the little ferry boat the five towns receding into the evening vaguenesses of sea and sky and the humped night rising plum-blue behind the headlands, and thought how she too was disappearing, into the dark. That was how it had been all along, since she had left Turin, if not before, if not long before, a secret, gradual process of thinning and fading. The world was letting her go, as he too had let her go. She understood clearly what was happening, what must happen, so that the pattern would be complete. She had tried to explain it to Kristina Kovacs, the way everything was a part of everything else, the way it was all ordained, but Kristina had not understood. Kristina, she saw clearly, was trying to save her, as once she in turn had thought it was her task to save him. But that was not it, that was not it at all. Now they were docking, and she had a moment almost of bliss as the boat glided in silence toward the quayside, where vague figures waited, strangely still, until an old man in a seaman's cap stepped forward nimbly and caught the rope one of the sailors threw to him. The water swayed, smooth as oil, its surface running with coloured lights, peach and mauve and rose. Bats flitted in the sombre air. There were cafés and bars and little restaurants all along the quay, and, behind that, the village climbed the hillside, lamps in the windows of the houses, so many lives. There was a lamp too, or a lantern, above the door of the church that stood on its jagged promontory outlined against the darkening sky. A sailor from the ferry carried her bag all the way up to the hotel. How simply everything was happening.

She wrote again in her notebook, calm now, sitting under a lamp by the open window of her room, a moth making its tiny soft racket around the bulb and the small waves breathing below on the shingle. Columbine is sick. The Doctor is called. Oh, save me, save me, Dot-tore! Columbine is going to have a baby. The Old Man is angry. She smiled and put away the notebook and folded her arms on the table and laid her head on her arms. She felt herself slipping gradually down a dark, immense incline. That is time, she thought, time is the curve, it steepens. Everything she had ever done, her smallest acts, even in earliest infancy, had brought her to this moment, these unavoidable moments, the last. So strange, and yet so simple. She lifted her head with an effort, for she was tired, and sat for a while, listening to the drowsy noises of the night. She had gone to see the doctor, the elegant old doctor with the dyed hair. He had been kind, moving his priestly hand over her belly, sighing. She saw the numbers on his wrist and understood. He had wanted her to go into a clinic, to end it, to have it ended. "What will you do?" he had asked. "Where will you turn?" And he had looked at her for a long time. "Ah, signorina!"

The postcard would arrive tomorrow. She was glad she had sent him the pen along with it. She wanted him to know all that she knew.

In the bedroom in Franco Bartoli's apartment after she had collapsed that night Kristina Kovacs had got into bed beside her. So hot, there, and airless, and yet how cool Kristina's hand had felt, resting on her heart. She had slept, knowing the woman was lying awake, watching over her. She could feel Kristina's fear, it was like a living presence, a third person lying with them, veiled, silent, unappeasable. Later she woke, and Kristina had talked to her, soothingly, as if she were talking through an open window to a madwoman out on a ledge. Well, what else are you, she asked herself now, what else are you, but a madwoman, on a ledge? She smiled into the darkness outside the window. She had looked in Kristina's handbag and found a phial of sleeping pills and thought of stealing them, but did not. She knew Kristina was watching her. She wondered if that was what he had asked her to do, to watch over her, and make sure she did not take the pills, or leap from the ledge.

She opened her guidebook at random and read about Shelley's death. He had been to Livorno to see Lord Byron. The schooner was the Ariel. The poet, and Edward Williams, and a boy to tend the sail. Why did they give the other names, even the name of the boat, and not say what the boy's name was? They burned Shelley's body on the beach. She put the book away and rose from the chair and stood a moment motionless, listening; not a sound, anywhere, except the little waves. She went out and locked the door behind her and went as quietly as she could down the stairs and out into the night. Who was it she was afraid would hear her, try to hold her back? There was no one. The man at the desk with the grey hair and the moustache did not even lift his eyes as she went past.

The air outside was warm, and had a strong, astringent smell, like the smell of iodine. It was the sea. She could taste salt on her lips. All these vivid things, as if they knew they were the last. She walked down through the hushed streets to the harbour. She knew where she was going. On the quayside people were out strolling, not many, the last of the tourist boats had left long ago. She was aware of glances, women's, mostly. Did they know, just by looking at her? Would they remember her? The sea was invisible, just a blackness, with no horizon, as if half the world out there had fallen clean away. Tomorrow the sun's eclipse, tonight her own. There were no voices in her head any more; they had said all they had to say, had done all they had to do. She imagined them behind her, the horde of them, standing back, big-eyed, their hands over their mouths, staring in gleeful expectation, unable to credit that she was doing at last what they had been urging for so long that she must do.

She climbed the steep, cobbled hill to the church. The lantern was still burning over the stone lintel. The door was open, the doorway hung with a heavy leather curtain worn smooth along one edge by the generations of hands pushing it aside. Penny candles, a vaulted roof, stone floor, a statue of the Virgin all blues and pinks and creams, her eyes uplifted in a transport of sorrow. Such quiet. She sat in the corner of a bench. Every tiniest act, all adding up, bringing her to this. A priest came in, an elderly man, short and fat and perfectly bald. He looked at her in surprise and went out again. Father. There was a door at the side behind the altar. She rose from the bench and went forward. The door was old, its wood chill and damp to the touch, slimed by the night air. It opened, squealing on its hinges. How simply! Here was a little square stone balcony under a gaping sky, with white water snarling around the rocks far, far below. She scrambled on to the parapet, dislodging a piece of stone and grazing her knee. A night breeze pressed her skirt against her legs, so cool, so soft. She put her hands over her womb, feeling the warmth that was not hers. If only she knew the boy's name, the boy on the Ariel. He was drowned too. All the lost ones. Her knee smarted where she had grazed it; so insistent, everything, demanding to be noticed, to be noted. She heard someone enter the church behind her and say something, she did not understand the words. Hurry, now. She saw herself falling before she fell, falling down that quickening curve. Someone right there now, it was the priest, the old priest, she saw the light glint on his bald brow and remembered the waiter, the statue of the horseman in the dark; remembered everything. Signorina! She took a big breath, and for an instant was a child again, her father behind her, saying, Jump. Slowly, swooningly, her eyes ecstatically lifted, like the eyes of the statue of the Madonna, she leaned out into the nothing, as the priest at her back in vain reached forward his restraining hands. Time. Night. Water.

Franco Bartoli drove me in his little car all the way down to that far corner of the coast. When we got to La Spézia we buzzed hotly through the town and on to Lerici, from where I was to take a boat across the bay. It was past dinner hour when we arrived, however, and the boats had stopped running. I would have to stay the night. I chose the Hotel Shelley, to Franco's tight-lipped disapprobation; I might have lodged at the Albergo Lord Byron. Poets, you have not lived in vain. Franco offered, in a wan sort of way, to stay and keep me company, but I said no, he must go back, his dolce mama would be fretting. The truth is, I could not have borne his company for another minute. He departed, casting a last commiserating look at me through the windscreen as he briskly turned the car on the quayside and shot off into the gloaming. I telephoned the hotel where she had been staying a few short leagues away across that deceptively innocent-looking sea, and was told they were still searching for the body. I ate a queasy dinner and retired to my room with a bottle of whisky and one of Kristina Kovacs's most powerful bromides, and at once plunged into a series of outlandish nightmares with themes from Hokusai in his most outrageously lascivious marine mode, through which there bobbed at intervals the image of a drowned and bloated poet adrift on a burning sea. When I came out on the harbour next morning I found that the ferries would not be running until the afternoon; that eclipse was to take place presently, and it was considered bad luck to sail before it was past. I crawled back into my sour bed and slept until noon, missing the eclipse, unless a terrified, eventless dream-passage through a region of radiant murk was not a dream at all but a half-waking glimpse of solar occlusion. When at length I woke fully I was sprawled steaming in a bolt of sunlight falling unhindered and full upon me through an open window, and for a few blessed moments I did not know where I was or why I was there.

I am always angry in times of greatest stress. It is a not uncommon reaction, so Dr. Zoroaster informs me, especially in that day's circumstances. I shouted at the receptionist in my hotel, at the fellow selling tickets for the ferry, and then at a sun-blackened Charon in a jaunty peaked cap with an anchor on it who, as I was boarding the ferry at last, offered me a helping hand and almost managed to tip me off the gangplank into the sea. I was also less than civil to the polite young man who met me on the quay at the other side, an emissary from what in my mind was still Cass Cleave, the living girl. The afternoon was sunny, and quick with freshets of warm wind. The hotel clerk, let us call him Mario, a swarthy beanpole with an adam's apple that seemed to be worked by weak elastic, cowered before me as if I might be about to strike him with my stick, which I might well have done had we not been caught up in the mill of disembarkation. I demanded to hear what had happened, I must know everything, right away, now, here on the quayside, this minute, everything! Come on, I shouted into his frightened face, tell me! and I grasped him by the elbow and gave him a violent shake. When he began to speak, however, I would not listen, and instead turned him about and ordered him to take me to where it had happened. We climbed up through the village. There had been a priest, Mario was saying, he had arrived too late, the signorina had… He joined his hands together and mimed the act of diving. "She jumped, signore." Her body had still not been found.

After the church – there was nothing there, of course, and the priest was about his duties elsewhere and not to be seen – I went to the hotel, a small, shabby establishment, and made them show me her room. They left me there alone, closing the door on me softly. I searched through her bag, not knowing what I hoped to find. There were some soiled underclothes in a zipped side pocket, I lifted them out and examined them, these profane relics, and put the stained seams in my mouth and sucked them, to have a last savour of her familiar secretions. Then I went into the bathroom and washed them in the handbasin. The water gulped and clicked, bathing my wrists, a silvery unction. I thought of her down in the deeps of the sea, her eyes open, gazing sightlessly up at the surface swaying far above her. First I draped her silks, as clean now as I could make them, on the towel rail to dry, but thought that would not do, and stuffed them into my pocket instead. Then I returned to the basin and bathed my brow; lifting the towel away, I would not have been surprised to find the bloody image of my face imprinted on it. I went and sat at the table by the window and leafed through her notebook. Poor Columbine. On our trip to Genoa that day she had lost me briefly in the cemetery. I had wandered off up some steps to one of the latter-day sections, where the city's recently dead merchants and mafiosi are buried and the statuary is modernly pretentious. It was cool and quiet there, under the colonnades, and I tarried idly for a while, reading the inscriptions on the tombs and entertaining thoughts of the eternal. As I was about to descend again to the lower level I saw her below me, pacing a sunlit patch of gravel, and I stopped behind a pillar to observe her. She was in a state of some agitation, I could see. With her arms tightly folded and her head down, she was walking rapidly here and there in a seemingly senseless, zigzag pattern. She would stand absolutely still for a moment, as if weighing up profound alternatives, then set off abruptly at a headlong stride, only to halt again after a dozen stiff-legged paces and repeat the process, pausing, considering, and plunging off in a new direction. She kept this up for some minutes, but broke off when at last she spied me skulking behind my pillar. We stood and gazed at each other. I do not know what she was thinking. Perhaps she had thought that I had left her, finally, had just decided to disappear and abandon her here among the dead and their monuments. Strangely, or perhaps not strangely, it is the memory of moments such as this that weighs on me most heavily now, the moments, as I suppose, of her deepest desperation.

I went downstairs, her underthings a wet lump in my pocket, and spoke to the proprietor, a handsome, grey-haired fellow with garlic on his breath. I showed him a fistful of traveller's cheques and said I should prefer it if he would forget that I had been here. He said nothing, only considered a moment and then gave the faintest of shrugs. He stood impassively looking on while I signed the cheques, leaning on his fists on the desk. From a shadowy region behind him his wife made a soundless entrance. She was a corpulent person with three chins and a suspicious eye. Mario the clerk, too, was there. A wonder the entire village did not come jostling into the doorway to have a look at me. When I had handed over the cheques I said that I wished to rest now, and asked if I might lie down in her room, the room that had been hers. Signor Albergo demurred, saying another guest was expected at any moment. I looked at him, and he relented. I went up and lay on the bed where Cass Cleave had lain. As the day waned, I thought of many things, for example that phenomenon, the existence of which I chanced upon in the course of my reading on Mr. Mandel-baum and his ways, which is known among neurologists as the anarchic hand. This remarkable and rare disorder – there are no more than half a hundred recorded cases – is the result of a peculiar form of rebellion deep within the nervous system. Otherwise normal and sound in limb, the sufferer will find himself subject to the tyranny of one or other of his hands, which seemingly on a whim and of its own volition will perform actions independent of him and often against his own best interests. At table, he will find the recalcitrant hand force-feeding him food he does not wish to eat; he will encounter someone in the street, and instead of proffering itself in salutation his hand will fly up and slap the surprised acquaintance across the face. At times the behaviour of the hand will be so obstreperous that its fellow on the other side will be called upon to quell its antics; the resulting struggle can be violent in the extreme, and end in self-lacerations and fellings to the floor. One patient even suffered repeated attempts to strangle herself, and might have succumbed had there not been others by to rush forward and tear the suicidal, or murderous, hand from her throat. What I wondered, lying on the bed that day in that utterly emptied hotel room, was whether a half of the self itself might be an anarch, bent on the destruction of the whole. For it is one thing to think of Cass Cleave willingly leaping out of the light of the world, and altogether another to entertain the possibility that even as she made away with herself, clasped in her own unbreakable embrace, one side of her was crying out in terror, like a child being borne off in the arms of a fiend.

I caught the last ferry. The young man Mario accompanied me to the quayside, I do not know why; perhaps his parents – he was the son of the proprietors, did I mention that? – wished to be sure I had left the vicinity before they cashed the boodle. Or perhaps the fact of my bereavement required a ceremonial symmetry to be observed, and having met me at the boat he must see me off on it as well. He was adamantly polite, matching his pace to mine and offering me a steadying arm as I stepped on to the swaying gangplank. He waited on the dock, too, while the boat was pulling away, and even waved farewell. It was twilight, his white shirt had an unearthly glow. In fact, his name was not Mario, I do not know why I called him that, but Angelo; the emissaries of Heaven take the most unlikely forms. Adio, Angelo. With vigorous churnings the boat turned about and we glided out of the harbour and headed for the horizon where the day's last radiance lingered, trembling on the brink. I stood at the stern and took the sodden wad of underclothes out of my pocket and dropped it into the sea, where it swirled a moment, opening like a Japanese water flower, and then was dragged down into the dark under the waves. In Lerici the shell-blue night was already falling. She left me at the silent time… I should have waited until the sea had given up her body. Yes, I should have waited.

All that long afternoon I had been dogged by the sensation of there being somehow more than one of me. When I looked in the places where she had been, or touched the things that had been hers, it was if another were looking with me, through my eyes, touching those things through my fingertips. Afterwards it came to me, with the force of certainty, that by some form of sympathetic magic I must have been anticipating, I must have been foregoing, as it were, how it would be for her father, when he came there, and took the ferry, and walked up the hill to the church, and stood in that hotel room that was so full of her not being in it. I fear that between us we destroyed her, old Thespis and I. She said one day that she loved him, and I said why would she not, since he was her father, but she shook her head, closing her eyes and wincing in that way that she sometimes did, and said no, I did not understand, that what she meant was that she was in love with him, and always had been. I thought it fanciful nonsense, meant to impress or shock me, and made no more remark. Late one night, after she was dead, I telephoned the number I had found among her things, and was answered on the first ring by a man's voice. He sounded unnervingly alert, as if he had been lying sleepless, waiting for someone to call, waiting for me, perhaps. I tried to say something but I was too drunk, and was weeping besides. An actor he is, or was, so she told me. I am sure we would have many things in common, he and I. After all, I am an actor too, though only an inspired amateur. The difference is that the part I play is mine alone, and may not be taken by anyone else, on or off the stage. But then, should that not also have been true of Axel Vander?

There were further surprises in store for me, further shocks. One day at the card table in Franco Bartoli's garden room I was writing the opening pages of this record, using the fountain pen that she had sent to me, when the thing ran dry. I could find no ink in the house, and Franco was away. I went out, and after a tedious and listless search – the day was trying to rain, and schoolchildren were kicking leaves in the gutters – I happened at last upon a pen shop in a narrow back street down by the river. The place inside had, disquietingly, the desiccated, glue-and-wormwood smell of the schoolrooms of my childhood. The shop was so narrow that I had to insert myself sidelong between the counter and the display of writing implements and marbled notebooks on the wall opposite. The woman behind the counter, florid and disproportionately large, and dressed all in black, with painted eyebrows and a piled-up hive of lacquered hair, had something in her manner that was indefinably institutional; she might have been a hospital matron, or the wardress of an open prison, or, indeed, simply a schoolmistress. She met my request with a show of stylised professionalism, holding successive bottles of ink up to her bosom for my inspection and pointing out the descriptions on their labels with a long, scarlet fingernail. When I chose a bottle, at random, she nodded approvingly, closing her eyes slowly and pursing her lips, as if I had passed a test for exceptional good taste and breeding. She asked if I had brought the pen with me, and if I would like to fill it now. This invitation, along with the schoolroom smell and the proximity enforced on us by the confined space, raised a suggestion of intimacy that was at once worrying and oddly welcome, and I felt like a small boy who had been kept back for special favours after lessons. Almost shyly I produced the pen and unscrewed the barrel, not without resistance, for there was something inside, papers of some kind, tightly wrapped around what turned out to be one of those disposable cartridges – "Ecco, signore, una segreta!" – and held fast with a strand of silk, which after a miniature struggle I succeeded in untying, and unfolded the scraps of paper and laid them out side by side on the glass counter and tried to hold them flat under splayed fingertips. At first, because the papers kept curling and the lights under the glass were shining through them, I could not make out the printed words. Then I saw his picture, and mine, and our names, his misspelled. The shop woman, leaning forward so that her brow was almost touching mine and I could smell the not unpleasant, soapy scent of her hair, let fall a soft, shivery sigh, as if it were a buried treasure we had unearthed there between us. Then she looked up into my face, and an expression of concern, of solicitude, even, came into her eyes, and she reached out and laid one of her hands tenderly over one of mine. So strange they are, rare, certainly, affecting, but faintly discomfiting, too, those moments when some stranger steps out of the crowd and for no reason other than simple good-heartedness offers a word of consolation, a sustaining arm. What had she seen in me to spark such sympathy? The flinch, the wild stare, the panicked feint to this side now to that, the frozen helplessness. Look at me there, caught in the headlights, speechless with surprise and pain, my last poor secrets all on show, ready to lay my head upon this woman's bombasined bosom and weep my hard heart dry.

But here is the surprising thing. The profoundest shock was not the trick Cass Cleave had played on me, nor what was here revealed, namely that all along she had been aware of who I was and was not. As I goggled at those ancient scraps of newsprint, the Staandard announcement of his death and the two photographs that had accompanied his travesty of an interview with me in the Gazet, I was thinking not of him, nor even of Cass Cleave, but of Magda. And in that moment I realised at last what I had always known without knowing, that she too had been privy to my secret. Oh, I do not say she knew for certain that I was not Axel Vander, or that the bourgeois origins I professed to despise, the indulgent parents, the grand apartment, the poor relations, were not mine but his; I do not say she knew all this in detail. Her knowledge of my duplicity ran deeper than more detail, it reached far down into my very essence. Do not ask me how she had found me out. Perhaps she met someone who had been acquainted with me before I was Axel Vander – America in those days was rife with other people's secrets – or maybe her spurned Pole had nosed out something about me and my past and had confronted her with it. Or maybe it was simply that she guessed. No matter, no matter. What I marvel at is her silence. All those years when I thought I was preserving myself through deceit, it was really she who was keeping me whole, keeping me intact, by pretending to be deceived. She was my silent guarantor of authenticity. That was what I realised, as I stood that day in the stationer's shop on the Via Bonafous and one whole wall of my life fell down and I was afforded an entire vista of the world that I had never glimpsed before.

In an access of wonderment, the wonderment of a child who has found out one of the adult world's big secrets, I had to tell someone of these discoveries. Kristina Kovacs would not do; to her, so far advanced in dying, it would all have come as no more than a distant twittering, the mere gossip of the merely living. That I should blurt out such things to Franco Bartoli was unthinkable. I might have confided in his mother, certainly my secrets would have been safe with her, no sooner heard than forgotten. However, in the end it was Dr. Zoroaster that I turned to as confidant and confessor. It was on the day that he helped me to move Kristina Kovacs into the apartment here. Yes, I have brought her to live with me, or, more accurately, to die, as she herself remarked, with one of her wry smiles that are so rare now. There had been an ambulance from the hospital, and two blue-jawed helpers in white coats, who looked more like barbers than medical attendants but were gentle all the same, had manoeuvred her up the stairs in a wheelchair and got her into bed – I have given over my bedroom to her, and fixed up a crib for myself on the couch in the other room. The Doctor had given her a sedative, and she was barely conscious, muttering to herself in a language I could not identify, her poor head lolling. Bald and shrunken, still in her white hospital gown, she had the look of a wigless eighteenth-century savant at his levee. The Doctor and I were standing together at the foot of the bed, watching her, when I heard myself starting to tell him everything. Well, no, not everything; lifelong habits of dissembling die hard. I told him how Cass Cleave had known things about me, without saying what those things were, exactly, and how when I discovered what she knew I realised at once and for the first time that my wife had known them too. He listened with calm attention, standing there in his big coat and his scarf, not looking at me but keeping his gaze bent on the by now comatose woman. The city's first snow of the season had begun to fall, and a chill breath was seeping in at the low window beside the bed, and all around us was a muffled hush. As the waning year progressively turns paler the more pronounced becomes the Assyrian swarthiness of Dr. Zoroaster's face; he has the fierce dark eye and raptor's profile of a desert monarch. One of the most striking aspects of his curious presence, at once unsettling and reassuring, is the quality of stillness he maintains. He seems to function on a principle of intermittent entropy. He will rise out of immobility and silence into movement and speech and then subside into himself again and be as if he had not stirred or spoken. At times it will take so long for him to reply to a question or formulate a remark that it will seem he is not attending to the outer world at all, but is at rest in some remote, inner sphere of enervated contemplativeness, oblivious calm. It is, I suppose, the dwelling place of one who has survived. Now he allowed an extra lengthy silence to elapse, and, since already I regretted having spoken, I was entertaining the wistful hope that he might forgo any response at all. He was lighting a cigarette with that conjuror's gestural grace which is another of his characteristics, his hands making slow hoops through which wreaths of smoke drifted and drooped, and had I not been so mesmerised watching him perform I might have registered sooner the strangeness of what it was he had begun to say. He asked if I had noticed the surprise that he had shown when I had first told him my name. "You remember?"he said. "It was a pleasant occasion. We were having coffee, at the Bicerin." I remembered, but I did not remember him being surprised; what would constitute an expression of surprise, anyway, in that mummified, regal mask that is his face? He was surprised, he said, because he had heard the name Axel Vander before, a long time ago, in altogether different circumstances and surroundings. Here he paused, a hand holding the cigarette suspended before his mouth and his eyes narrowed against the smoke, remembering. He turned slowly and walked out of the bedroom into the study, where lamplight and snowlight were joined in feeble contest. He went to the window and gazed out through its grimy panes, watching the white flakes drifting down into the street. I could feel my heart beating, a tentatively apprehensive measure, getting ready for what shocks might come. "Snow," the Doctor murmured. "Yes, snow." He had encountered the Vanders, he said, in a place in a forest, a sort of way station, while they and he were awaiting transportation elsewhere. They were a middle-aged couple, healthy still but in a state of great emotional distress. They had exchanged for food the last of a small cache of diamonds they had managed to bring with them, concealed in the linings of their clothes, and their prospects, like the prospects of all those brought to that place, were bleak. Already they had lost a son, destroyed, so they told him, by the actions of a treacherous friend. "Destroyed?" I said faintly. Or perhaps I only thought of saying it. I sat down slowly at my desk and leaned an arm on it. There are certain exhalations that sound like one's last breath. Where were they bound, the Vanders, I asked, where were they being transported to? He shrugged, without turning from the window. "East," he said.

I am waiting for Franco Bartoli to come, as he comes every day, to visit Kristina Kovacs. He is growing his beard again, as if in an attempt to compensate for the loss of Kristina's hair. I think she does not always recognise him. I leave them alone together, although I suspect Franco wishes I would stay. When he has done his duty and paid his visit I invite him to sit with me for a while before he leaves; we drink a glass of wine, he sniffles a little, blows his nose and tries to talk about things, Kristina Kovacs, his work, happenings out in the great world; Cass Cleave he does not mention, no doubt to spare my feelings. I tell him again Dr. Zoroaster's curious story about the people he met in the camp in the forest, the people calling themselves Vander. I am really retelling it to myself. What am I to think? I recall Axel's father doing his Moses and Rahel routine, how persuasive a mimic he was. But if they…? If Axel…?What am I to think? Franco Bartoli finishes his wine and, sighing, departs. When I have heard his car drive away I put on my slouch hat, take up my stick, and, having looked in on Kristina, go out and stroll the winter streets, my daily promenade, my daily harlequinade. I think on what a gallimaufry we are, Franco and poor Kristina, the Doctor, me. The city is quiet at this time of year. The dead, though, have their voice. The air through which I move is murmurous with absences. I shall soon be one of them. Good. Why should I have life and she have none? She. She.