“Don’t worry, sweetie, I won’t bite,” they would whisper to him, smiling and baring crooked incisors.
The desk clerk leaned to his ear and asked discreetly if he didn’t like women.
“I like very much! Like black hair, burning eyes, rum-pum-pum!” Pedro Alvarez replied emphatically. He made a shape with his hands in the air, put his arm around it, and his dark eyes flashed nostalgically.
In the hotel restaurant nothing was to his taste. He would fork up now a lump of kasha, now a slice of tongue, now a noodle; he would examine it closely then put it back on the plate.
“I hope he dies of hunger, the fussy so-and-so!” the cook would exclaim when the dishes were brought back untouched. In the evenings Pedro Alvarez would don a shirt with a frilly front. He would visit the famous Stitchings casino, which glowed with light pure as crystal, and where one can only break the bank once, for afterward one is never admitted again. He almost got out of Stitchings thanks to a connecting voyage to Genoa, where he could have transferred to the great transatlantic liner the Giuseppe Garibaldi, as a first-class passenger. He only needed to wait a couple of days, but he couldn’t keep still. He yearned for the green baize, the colored chips, the past moment of triumph. Excluded categorically from the casino because of his excessive good luck, stopped politely but firmly at the entrance each time by the doormen in their white gloves, he began to frequent the dark gambling dens down by the port, from which the relentless chink of chips could be heard all night long. In those places the ball in the roulette wheel spun faster than anywhere else, the black and the red blurred together, and the losses never ended. At such moments Pedro Alvarez had no choice but to play on, if he did not wish to be stuck in Stitchings forever. He soon discovered that his frilly shirtfront was too dazzling, and his eyes too dark, for him to be able to walk safely down Salt Street. But there was no other way from the Hotel Angleterre to the neighborhood of the portside gambling dens.
He departed for Buenos Aires in a casket lined with ice, a copy of the bill of lading stuck on its lid, a switchblade wound in his back. In the ports he was transferred from one hold to the next, borne effortlessly on the platforms of cranes. Along with the casket, the black valise and the photographic equipment were shipped too, all at the expense of the Hotel Angleterre. The invoice, sent to Buenos Aires in the hope that Prince Belorukov-Mukhin would cover the costs incurred, came back by return mail, crossed out with a flourish of the pen, without a word of explanation.
The group portrait of the hotel staff was mounted in the gilt frame that remained after the photograph of Prince Belorukov was torn to shreds. But the image began to fade from the light. One of the maids was the first to notice that the figures were disappearing in the gloom. Then later they could no longer be seen at all, as if night had fallen once and for all behind the glass.
“It’s a bad sign, the worst there could be,” the maids would say in consternation.
“You silly things, he was just skimping on the chemicals toward the end, that’s all,” said the pharmacist’s boy, laughing at them. He knew what was what: he’d watched the Argentine developing the negatives, and had even held on to a few of them on the sly as a keepsake.
Mr. Lapidus spent entire days locked in Natalie Zugoff’s darkened room.
“Gone and buried,” he kept repeating.
“She fled,” he would say at other times. “Through a gap in the clouds. Only her suitcases were left behind.”
He would raise his eyes and let his gaze stray across the plaster rosette in the very center of the ceiling, over and over, as if he were bewitched. His meals were brought from the restaurant; he ate lying on the bed, the blinds down and the bedside lamp on, like a hotel guest who has forgotten why he came.
The doctor came to auscultate his painful heart.
“Am I alive?” the proprietor asked in a fading voice.
“You know perfectly well yourself, Mr. Lapidus,” the doctor replied as he put away his stethoscope. “Since you asked the question, you know the answer.”
The doctor assured him that he had encountered all sorts of strange cases in the course of his practice. He said that the heart can hurt for a long time after death.
“Life,” he would say, “in itself is neither bad nor good. It’s the same with death. The key is getting the right proportions. Alas, my good sir, as with all things, so with this one, hardest of all is to find the right point.”
During this time the doctor was preoccupied above all else by the typhoid fever that had broken out in the back buildings on Salt Street. Typhoid is a wartime disease, and in the corner stores along the street people were saying that since there was typhoid, war must be on its way. The housewives were once again sifting flour into impregnated canvas sacks.
“Maybe it already is wartime,” the doctor said to the hotel proprietor, “it’s just that we don’t know it yet.”
Those sick with typhoid lingered for the longest time, unable to decide whether to live or die.
“Get better again? So we can just go back to wearing rags and tatters?” they would say, laughing harshly at the doctor behind his back as he ran breathless among the moldering floors of the back buildings. But in the final hour their bad blood boiled: they couldn’t bring themselves to abandon even those rags when they thought about how much they’d cost at the used clothing store. Freed from the hope that had sustained their respect for boundaries, those who had died of typhoid thumbed their noses at mourning black and, making roll-up cigarettes from scraps of newspaper, lay idly on their wretched shakedowns while their family went in search of a loan to pay for the funeral. Then, when they realized no one could stop them from doing anything, they started getting up, going out to the jakes in the courtyard, visiting the pub on the corner.
Rumors spread about a tailor with a bevy of children who after he died, just as during his life, spent his days and nights at his work. About a young mother who refused to lie down in her casket because she was busy rocking her baby. About an only child who for the sake of peace and quiet was allowed to have her fill of playing with her new doll. One jealous husband was said to have wanted to prevent his wife from remarrying; a tightfisted wife would examine the household finances every day after her death, criticizing endlessly. By all accounts the victims of typhoid by now included even universally respected industrialists, owners of large department stores, and majority shareholders in insurance companies.
“These are huge sums of money,” the town hall officials would whisper. “In essence they’re mortmain property that belongs to the municipality, if it weren’t for all this refusing to be buried, this hole-and-corner life, which ought to be punished with the full force of the law.”
“The dead are running the show,” the habitués of Corelli’s café said. “They’re affecting exchange rates, interest rates, government commissions.”
And over their coffee cups they would peer at one another through gold-rimmed spectacles. In the meantime, in the crowded tavern a man had jumped up onto a chair and was screaming hoarsely:
“We can’t be made fools of so easily! Under the ground is where they belong!”
Gasping for breath, he shouted the name of old Strobbel as if he were calling for help, using all his strength to keep himself on the surface of churning waves. Strobbel, who had passed away not long before, struck by a petard during a street disturbance, was at rest in his coffin, ostentatious in immaculate black and white, with a stern, contemptuous expression on his face. It was said he didn’t even need to die, that the injuries were not life-threatening. But Strobbel had asked no one’s opinion and as usual had had no time for pointless delays: he was immediately placed upon a catafalque comme il faut, a funerary candle at his head. All the property that remained to him — the Chinese vases from his famous private collection — he left to the town. Once his eyes were closed he did not deign to open them again; he was buried without further ado in the Strobbels’ porcelain-faced family tomb. The funeral was attended by large numbers of grammar school boys, who had sewn prewar military buttons bearing a crowned lion onto their uniforms, pricking their fingers in the process. These buttons served to mark the opponents of splitting hairs, the enemies of all that was obscure. The masters at the grammar school took a ruler and rapped the knuckles of boys who wore them, but anyone who didn’t could get a sock in the jaw in a dark corner, after which they would be spitting teeth. In a short while the fashion for uhlan buttons spread beyond the walls of the grammar school. They appeared on the overcoats of young men with metal-tipped walking canes who longed for a return to the order of prewar times and were resolved to use any means necessary when it came to curbing the insolence of the dead.