He hadn’t even reached the big jetty when it was clear to him that he wouldn’t manage to do it now. He was shivering with weakness, and his reactions were grotesquely delayed, as if his brain were working in slow motion. Under the stare of a policeman he stopped in a no-parking zone and wiped the sweat from his cold hands.
Just as he was about to turn and drive back, his eye fell on the Hotel Imperiale on the hill. There was something about it. Again his brain made an eerily long pause. The waiter. I didn’t wait for him. And I didn’t pay. That means bilking on top of everything else. Compared to everything else this was so preposterous that Perlmann pulled his face into a grin. Very slowly he drove up to the hotel and waited for several minutes outside the gate until even the most distant oncoming traffic had passed.
It was the same waiter. He assessed Perlmann with a dismissive glance. The pale, unshaven face. The soiled jacket. The blood-stained trousers. The unpolished shoes.
‘I forgot to pay yesterday,’ Perlmann said and took a handful of cash from his pocket.
‘We aren’t used to guests like that here,’ the waiter said stiffly.
‘And it isn’t a habit of mine,’ Perlmann said with a weary smile. ‘I think it was a sandwich, a whisky and a mineral water.’
‘Two waters,’ the waiter said abruptly.
‘I’m sorry. Yesterday I was a bit… a bit under the weather.’
‘I can see that. And I’d also say that we could do without a second visit from you,’ the waiter said and simply stuffed the three 10,000 lire notes in the pocket of his red jacket.
The two things – being barred and that movement – assembled themselves in Perlmann’s feelings into something strangely liberating. He looked the waiter in the eyes with undisguised contempt. ‘Do you know what you are? Uno stronzo.’ And because he wasn’t sure whether the insult was strong enough, he added his own translation, ‘An asshole. A great big asshole.’ The waiter’s face colored. ‘Stronzo,’ Perlmann said again and went outside.
On the way back he felt more confident and, all of a sudden, he felt properly hungry – a sensation that he had almost forgotten over the past few days. At a stand-up bar he ate several slices of pizza. The five o’clock news was just coming to an end on the television behind the bar, and a weather map appeared. Perlmann stared at the clouds to the east of Genoa. They were white, not grey. But then the clouds on maps like that always were. Weren’t they?
‘Do you know the road from Genoa via Lumarzo to Chiávari?’ he asked the man in the vest who was taking the pizza out of the oven with a long shovel.
‘Of course,’ said the man, without interrupting what he was doing.
‘Do you think it’s going to rain there tonight? Up by the tunnel, I mean.’
The man paused abruptly, left the shovel half inside the oven and turned round.
‘Are you kidding?’
‘No, no,’ Perlmann said quickly, ‘I really need to know. It’s very important.’
The man in the vest took a drag on his cigarette and looked at him as if he were someone very simple, perhaps even disturbed.
‘How on earth am I supposed to know that?’ he said mildly.
‘Yes,’ Perlmann said quietly and left far too big a tip.
‘That conversation last night,’ Perlmann said to Signora Morelli when she set Frau Hartwig’s yellow envelope and another little one for him on the reception counter, ‘I…’
She folded her hands and looked at him. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a tiny twitch in the corner of her mouth.
‘What conversation?’
Perlmann gulped and shifted the two envelopes until they were exactly parallel at the edge of the counter. ‘Grazie,’ he said quietly and looked at her.
She gave only the hint of a nod.
The room smelled of Leskov’s sickly tobacco. The haze had escaped, but the open window hadn’t been able to do anything about the penetrating smell. Except it was cold now. Perlmann tipped a mountain of pipe ash and charred tobacco into the toilet and shut the window.
Frau Hartwig’s envelope contained two letters. One was his invitation to Princeton, written on expensive paper that looked like parchment, and signed by the President. The invitation had been issued because of his outstanding academic achievements, it said. And the President assured him that it would be a great honor to have him as a guest for a while. Perlmann didn’t read the letter twice, but immediately put it back in the envelope and threw it in the suitcase.
The other was an invitation to give a guest lecture. He was to open a series of lectures, and it was very important to the organizer that Perlmann should be the first speaker. The letter talked about works that he had finished three years ago, but which had only appeared in print at the beginning of the year. Back then, he thought, everything had still seemed all right. Except that he had been getting increasingly bored with his things. And every now and again he had woken up in the middle of the night and hadn’t known where to go from here. He hadn’t had long conversations with himself when that had happened; few thoughts came to him on such occasions. He listened to music, and he usually stood at the big window as he did so. Then Agnes was surprised to find him at his desk so early.
In the other envelope there was a note from Angelini. Unfortunately, he had to go back to Ivrea that afternoon. He wished Perlmann a speedy recovery, and hoped it was nothing serious. He would try to come to the last dinner on Friday, although he couldn’t yet promise anything. At the end was his private telephone number.
The words were friendly, if conventional. Perlmann read them several times. He thought back to their first meeting and the enthusiastic phone calls that had followed. You couldn’t say that these words gave off a sense of disappointment. Not at all. And not detachment or coldness. But he sensed them. He, Philipp Perlmann, had revealed himself to be a bad investment.
He turned on the six o’clock news. But on that channel they only had a schematic weather map that was no use to him. No big change to be expected tomorrow. A little while before, the roads had been almost dry again. He walked over to the window. There was no point now in staring up into the starless night sky.
He took a long shower and then lay down in bed. The pillow smelled of Leskov’s tobacco. He fetched another one from the wardrobe. The sheets and the wool blanket smelled too. He pulled off the sheet and covered himself with replacement blankets from the wardrobe. The heating intensified the smell. He turned it off and opened the window. His body was vibrating with exhaustion, but sleep wouldn’t come. He didn’t take any pills. On the seven o’clock news the clouds around Genoa looked denser than they had done two hours before. Outside it was still dry. He was shivering, and fetched the last blanket from the wardrobe. It was too noisy on the coast road, and he closed the window. If he set off at half-past five, he would be there by first light. He set his alarm for five. He went to sleep at about eight.
He saw no bulldozer, no tunnel walls. In fact, he saw nothing at all. No seeing took place. It was simply the case that he hadn’t the strength to take his hands off the wheel. He held it tightly and turned it to the left, further and further to the left. It could be that he was the one who turned it. Or else it was something inside him, a force, a will, but it was alien to him and not really his. And perhaps the wheel had gained its autonomy, and was guiding his hand against his will. He no longer knew what was going on; the impressions piled up on top of each other and he didn’t know what – of all of it – he was most afraid of. He was completely paralyzed by fear, and he had the feeling of losing control of his bodily functions, particularly his abdomen. That took half an eternity, in which he expected a collision at every moment, and then he woke up with a twitch of his whole body that had something terrible about it, something uncanny, because it too completely escaped his control; it was an animal, a biological twitch that seemed to come from a very deep region of his brain.