‘They aren’t wardens,’ Millar said, struggling to maintain his self-control, ‘they’re nurses.’
‘Wardens is what they called them in Oakland,’ Silvestri said urgently. ‘The same word that you use for prisons.’
‘They’re nurses,’ Millar repeated, trying to stay calm, and then turned, wine bottle in hand, with a forced smile to Perlmann. ‘There are happier subjects. How did you enjoy my new paper?’
Perlmann felt Silvestri’s excitement vibrating within himself. He shoved a second piece of meat, far too big, into his mouth and made a gesture of apology as he chewed. ‘It’s OK,’ he said at last and attempted a smile that was supposed to express the fact that he didn’t take Millar’s criticism of him amiss.
‘I understand,’ Millar grinned when Perlmann failed to say anything more. ‘You can save your reply till tomorrow. I’ll look forward to it.’
Back in his room, Perlmann worked out his revulsion with particularly forceful movements and sat down at the desk with forced brio. Millar’s papers were, as usually, shatteringly brilliant; one could tell that as soon as one started flicking through them. His subheadings almost always took the form of a question, and his original questions, which had prompted so much research, had made him famous. There was also the fact that his vocabulary was unusually large for an academic author, and he had developed an unmistakeable style, juggling skilfully with the vividness of idiomatic phrases, and didn’t shy away from putting a slang expression in the middle of a dry sentence summing up data of some kind, and making it explode like a bomb. There were also people who found Millar’s style shrill and vain, but they had always been in a minority, and by now no one dared to say it out loud. Only Achim Ruge, who wrote in a desiccated, legalistic style, had made a remark to that effect at a conference some time before, and it had been passed on in whispers.
Perlmann had no reservations; not a single one. He had started with the newer of the two papers, to put Millar’s criticism behind him. He couldn’t think of a response. As he sat in front of his empty notepad, pen brandished, a fortissimo sounded from Millar’s room every now and again. Millar’s criticism was harsh, actually devastating. Perlmann was baffled that it didn’t touch him. It was a bit like having a local anaesthetic, and after reading Millar’s critical passages he felt almost cheerful.
But then, when he had finished the paper, he was shocked by his indifference. To express reservations, to be able to react to a criticism, you have to have opinions, opinions that can be formulated and stated. And that was exactly what he didn’t have. For some time he had been a man without opinions, at least as far as his subject was concerned. He agreed with everything, as long as it wasn’t obvious nonsense. It had never been so clear to him as now.
He stepped to the open window. The strip of light at Sestri Levante was now quite regular and still. What had it been like when he still had opinions? Where had they come from? And why had the source dried up? Can you decide to believe something? Or do opinions just happen to you?
Ruge’s room had been in darkness before, and now the light from Millar’s window went out as well. But it was better to wait another half hour before moving. Two days out of thirty-three. So one sixteenth had already gone. It was a sum like the ones he had done at school. And like then it felt peculiar: all of a sudden it seemed like a huge amount. In fact, he thought, it had all gone fairly quickly, and if it went on like that it would soon be over. That there was still fifteen times the same amount of time to come seemed almost trivial. A moment later it seemed like an eternity: once and again and again… You had to think of the whole thing like a long-distance runner. You had to concentrate on it and overcome the next, manageable segment.
He furtively opened the door and reassured himself that no one was in the corridor. Then he ran, crouching, to the stairs, his suitcases held just above the ground, and hurried to the top floor, taking the steps two at a time in spite of the heavy luggage. Panting, he set the suitcases down in his new room and hurried back again. Together with his grammar and his dictionary, Millar and Leskov’s papers formed a big, shapeless stack, which he covered with his coat. After a searching glance through the room he used the key to avoid the noise of the slamming door.
The ceiling light in the new room cast a cold, diffuse light that recalled a station waiting room. On the other hand, the beam of light from the standard lamp beside the red armchair was warm and clear, an ideal light for reading. Once it was lit, the rest of the expansive room sank into a calming darkness that belonged to him alone. After a while he crossed this darkness to the bathroom and took half a sleeping pill. Until it took effect, he would just manage to scamper through Millar’s first text in bed. It was a difficult text with lots of formulae. But for that reason he’d hardly be able to do it tomorrow. Perlmann set his alarm clock for half-past seven. He would, he thought in his half-sleep, have to simulate an opinion for tomorrow’s session. It wouldn’t be enough to capture it in words; it was a matter of staging the opinion inside oneself as well. Was it possible to do that, fighting against the certainty that one lacked any opinion?
6
The waiter who brought him his coffee the following morning passed no remark about the new room. As he approached the round table beside the red armchair, Perlmann covered Leskov’s paper with the hotel brochure and pushed it aside to make space for the tray. He did it with a quick, furtive motion which unsettled him vaguely, but which he immediately forgot.
There was no time now for Millar’s first paper, which he hadn’t got round to reading the night before, because the five minutes of snoozing that he had allowed himself after the ringing of the alarm clock had turned into half an hour. Perlmann looked again at the passages that Millar quoted from his own writings. He could hardly believe that he himself should have written them. Not because he thought they were bad. But the author of those lines had a grasp of his subject and a firmness of opinion that Perlmann was so unable to remember that he suspected he had not even been present when they were written. That remote, alien author was not a bit closer to him than Millar’s academic voice, so that he felt like a referee in a dispute between strangers; a referee whose neutrality went so far that he pursued argument and counter-argument without the slightest desire to become involved himself. Afterwards, when he walked through the lobby, turned into the corridor leading to the lounge and approached the steps to the Marconi Veranda, he was still engaged in a vain attempt to stand up for himself.
Millar began by explaining the theoretical motifs and long-term research interests that had guided him in the present work. After a few sentences he got up and started walking back and forth, his arms folded in front of his chest. He wore dark blue trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt with epaulettes, which had clearly been left in a suitcase for a long time. Although his hair was still damp, it looked oddly dull, and there wasn’t a sign of its usual reddish gleam. The manner in which he put his case was like a resolute admiral addressing his men. As he set one well-formed sentence against another in his sonorous voice, he radiated the certainty of someone who knew his own world perfectly and didn’t doubt for a moment that he was in precisely the right place in that world – a world in which – as in an officer’s mess, there were immutable rules like, for example, the rule that one had to appear on time for breakfast. Perlmann had never been to the Rockefeller University at which Millar worked, but somehow it struck him as quite natural that people who went in and out of it were people like Brian Millar. He looked across to Giorgio Silvestri, who, rocking back and forth on his chair, had almost lost his balance a moment ago and had only managed to keep himself from falling by supporting himself on the window behind him. He would have liked to exchange a glance and a smile with Silvestri, but feared that would betray too much of his desire for complicity against Millar.