If I hadn’t gained self-confidence by writing in that harbor pub, and the courage to stand by my own notes, I wouldn’t have called Maria, and the text wouldn’t have been finished in time. If I hadn’t taken that tour of the harbor, and hadn’t got worked up about interpreting, I wouldn’t have ended up writing in the harbor bar. So exactly the same inclination that had put him in the greatest danger, had also saved him. Perlmann sighed. That connection made him feel that he didn’t just owe the redeeming turn of events to a concatenation of coincidences, but that they had their origin within him, in his way of thinking and feeling.
He went into the shower and washed his hair. The water stung his scratches. But it was a salutary sting, because it meant that the fog of alcohol and pills was beginning to clear. He showered, hot and cold, and then the same again. New life flowed through him, and now he felt sober and clear again.
It wasn’t at all true that he had saved himself. Precisely the opposite was the case. If I hadn’t phoned Maria, the pigeonholes would have been empty on Saturday morning. I would have taken Leskov’s text again and wouldn’t have had to live through that whole nightmare with the tunnel. His fanatical obsession with the translation had brought him not only to the brink of plagiarism, but also to the brink of murder and suicide. Back in Genoa, the frantic, desperate search for presence in the familiarity of foreign languages had for a moment given him the courage to stand up for himself, not least in front of the others, and because of that same courage he had ended up spending three endless days and nights in a world of fantasies and terror which had absolutely nothing to do with the real world.
All that saved me was coincidences, banal coincidences and inattentions. A sluice opened up in Perlmann’s head, and he was deluged by a cascade of if-thens. If that equalizer hadn’t been scored, there wouldn’t have been a penalty shoot-out. Giovanni would have been on top of things and would have passed on the instruction to copy Leskov’s text. Then on Saturday morning both texts would have been in the pigeonholes, and that would have allowed me to rectify matters without loss of face. If Giovanni had done what he was supposed to, and if Maria hadn’t finished because of the people from Fiat, only the fatal text would have made it to the pigeonholes; the disaster would have taken place in the real world and not just in my imagination. If Giovanni had just left Leskov’s text on the shelf under the counter, my pigeonhole would have been the only one empty on Saturday morning. I would have checked, learned what had really happened, and there would never have been a murder plan. But perhaps I wouldn’t have checked, paralyzed as I was. If Giovanni had left the text on the shelf, then when Signora Morelli was distributing them she would have noticed that my pigeonhole was the only one that was empty, and then she would have looked for the original by the photocopier. If my pigeonhole had been in a row with the pigeonholes of the others, I wouldn’t have switched rooms; the signora would have hesitated when distributing the texts, then seen that the text in my pigeonhole was a different one; she would have looked for the original by the photocopier, and when I came back from Portofino I would have had two texts in my pigeonhole, and Maria’s card would have resolved the matter. So if I hadn’t had this exaggerated need for empty space, I would have been spared the tunnel. If when I returned from Portofino there hadn’t been all that noise in the next room, I would have taken Silvestri’s copy out of the pigeonhole and discovered the true state of affairs. And if, arriving with Leskov, I had glanced at the feared text in my hand, just a single short glance, I wouldn’t have needed to imagine wading out into the dark water.
Perlmann knew it was absurd, this orgy of unreal conditional clauses, but it also devoured his sense of relief, so that he yearned now for the tears he had shed when he first discovered his redemption. But that knowledge didn’t help, the search for more and more connections was like an involuntary addiction. If Larissa hadn’t been plagued by a guilty conscience, she wouldn’t have urged Leskov to make a fresh application; there would have been no telegram and no fear of exposure, and what had appeared the night before would not have been a planned suicide, only a nagging feeling of guilt. If the waiter hadn’t brought me the telegram just as I was about to talk to Evelyn about Leskov’s text, I would have been able to tell by what she said that something was wrong, and even then I would have been spared the bulldozer. If there hadn’t been a wedding party at the Regina Elena tonight, I might have asked them to call for a cab, and then I would have told Kirsten in Konstanz about an act of plagiarism that didn’t even take place. Perlmann stopped.
So for days now they had been holding his notes, headed by an Italian sentence that must have seemed mannered and pretentious. He picked up the computer printout. It was fifty-two pages long. I could have told from the thickness of the pages. Seventy-three pages in my pigeonhole compared to fifty-two in everyone else’s; that’s a difference that could have been spotted from a mile off. And this evening, when I turned up, I could have felt in my hand that it couldn’t be Leskov’s text: that the sheaf of papers was too thin.
He let the pages slip through his fingers and weighed the pile in his hand. He didn’t dare flick through it properly and tentatively read it, and he took care to ensure that his eye didn’t get caught on the top page. Now that he felt like the survivor of a disaster, he didn’t want to alarm himself on top of everything else – with trashy metaphors or a maudlin tone, for example. And he didn’t want to encounter his written English right now, either – English that was seldom exactly wrong, and yet never had the effortless precision that he would have wished for. He slipped the papers into the desk drawer.
Angelini’s remark on Sunday evening, he thought, now appeared in a new light. Un lavoro insolito, he had called the text. And it was no wonder, either, that no one else had wasted a word about the text. That they had basically pretended it had never existed.
In six and a half hours he would have to go up the three steps to the veranda and sit down at the front. All the people sitting there looking at him would have his text in front of them, from the first page to the last. Only I and I alone don’t know what’s in it. That was a plainly incorrect, nonsensical thought, Perlmann knew. Even on Friday, on the ship, he had gone through the notes in his head. But the thought wouldn’t go away. In fact, it swelled still further. They knew more about him than he knew himself. They were waiting, and he couldn’t think of anything to say. They delivered their criticisms, and he had no response to give.
It couldn’t be the case that the unimaginable relief that had filled him even just an hour before was already being stifled by a new anxiety. It just couldn’t be. I didn’t become a fraud and I didn’t become a murderer. What other reason can there be for being anxious now? Perlmann clutched that thought and then tried with a single lurch to wrest away the inner freedom that would make him invulnerable to everything the others might or might not say, to their faces and their stares, and also to the stares which, in the awkward silence, fell on the gleaming table top.
He phoned Giovanni. He could do him a favor right now, and sort him out with two pots of strong coffee. He still had six hours. That wasn’t enough for a complete lecture. But he could write a memo that could be further developed orally. The thing was to develop something in the abstract and draw up the outlines of a conception. Then the discussion would focus on that. He could say, off-handedly, that the distributed text was incidental; he had only wanted to provide a small insight into the observations that he had used as his starting point.