He picked up Leskov’s paper. He had only retained a few of the words he had copied out, and it was a while before he found his way back into the flow of his thoughts. In his next step Leskov now wanted to show that this kind of articulated self-image, on which our memory is based, can only come about through linguistic contouring, through the telling of stories. This announcement was followed immediately by a paragraph that gave Perlmann the feeling that he didn’t speak a word of Russian, so opaque was it even after the second and third reading. He tried to leave the whole passage alone and go on after it. But that didn’t work. The paragraph appeared to contain an argument that was the key to everything else, and if one hadn’t understood it, that which followed seemed unfounded, almost random. What he really wanted to do was hurl the paper into the corner. But then he resigned himself to being once more nothing but a schoolboy where this piece of writing was concerned, and not a reader with a command of Russian, and he began to dissect the individual sentences as if in a Latin class.
Slowly, half-sentence by half-sentence, the text yielded up its meaning. But at the crux of the argument there was a block of four sentences which remained impenetrable in the face of all his analytical effort and patience. What almost drove Perlmann to despair was the fact that it wasn’t as if the words weren’t in his dictionary. That was true of two of the words, but they were adjectives that struck him as negligible. All the other unfamiliar words were in the dictionary, but still he couldn’t wrestle any meaning from those sentences, let alone anything like a coherent argument. In the face of all experience, however, Perlmann acted as if it could be forced, he walked up and down and repeatedly murmured the four sentences, which he by now knew off by heart, out loud, imploring and gesticulating so that he might have been mistaken for a madman. He only paused when there was a knock at the door.
He quickly stuffed Leskov’s paper and the dictionary in the desk drawer, before opening the door, which clattered as it caught in the chain.
‘Oh, I’m disturbing you,’ said Evelyn Mistral when she saw his face in the chink.
‘No, no, wait,’ Perlmann said quickly and closed the door to get rid of the chain.
She had learned of his new room number from Signora Morelli after ringing and knocking in vain. Now, with her hands in the pockets of her rust-red jeans, she let her eye wander around the whole of the room and then pounced on the wing chair, into which she proceeded to slump.
The bed was the reason for the change, Perlmann said. He had the usual problem with his back.
‘And you like to be on your own,’ she said with a quiet twitch at the corners of her mouth, and sank cross-legged slightly deeper into the chair.
Perlmann didn’t know whether he was startled by her accuracy or delighted.
‘You know,’ she said, after asking him for a cigarette, which she then just puffed on, ‘I have an eye for these things. My father spent his whole life suffering from claustrophobia, which he kept strictly secret. In the cinema, for example, he always sat on the end seat of an empty row, even if he had to keep standing up to let people past, and he often disappeared through the emergency exit when the cinema got too full. If people were jostling each other on the pavement, he was quite capable of walking out into the traffic. And, of course, he avoided elevators like the plague; he only made an exception for those old ones where you can look through the glass doors and the elevator shaft into the stairwell. The worst thing was that when he was operating he always had the other doctors and nurses around him. On more than one occasion he came close to giving up. But I only understood the full extent of his problem when I found him one night in our huge kitchen, sitting like a pile of misery over a glass of brandy, which he never normally drank. A very good friend, perhaps his best friend, whom he spoke to on the phone at least once a week and who was a great support to him when my mother fell seriously ill, had announced that he was moving from Seville to Salamanca, where our house was. “I felt as if I was petrified,” my father said. “I felt as if I was suffocating. I hope José Antonio didn’t notice.” And then, this a man who wasn’t used to alcohol, and who, coming from Valladolid, spoke the most pin-sharp Spanish that you can imagine, started talking in a clumsy, blurred pronunciation, about how we had to move away, possibly to the Far East, to Barcelona, perhaps, or Zaragoza; he didn’t even need a job as a surgeon. “You see, otherwise I’m going to lose José Antonio,” he said with tears in his eyes. At the same time, he was a very affectionate father. I’ve never understood how that worked. But since then I’ve been able to recognize people who need a lot of empty space around them very quickly, and I’m seldom mistaken. Of course, I don’t mean you suffer from claustrophobia,’ she concluded with a smile.
He could tell her. He could spill all his desperation straight from his soul into her – as if they were sitting together in the big kitchen. Perlmann lit a cigarette and walked to the window for a moment to collect his words.
‘But I came about something quite different,’ she said, when he turned towards her to speak. ‘First of all I wanted to say how impressed I was by the inner freedom with which you talked about your work this morning. I didn’t, as you will have noticed afterwards, have the impression that Brian really refuted everything you had to say. But the peace, the delight, in fact, with which you summed up the possibility of general error! How do you do that?’
‘Perhaps it’s a matter of age,’ Perlmann said with a lump in his throat, and could have sunk into the ground over the stupidity of his answer.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ she smiled, unsure how seriously he had meant it. ‘At any rate I thought it was great. And the other thing was: I’d like to talk to you about your new topic. I was really excited by what you hinted at yesterday morning, because the influence that linguistic articulation has on memory must be very closely connected with the process of linguistic refinement of the imagination which is the subject of my research. ¿Verdad?’
Perlmann apologized and went to the bathroom, where he ran warm water over his cold hands for several minutes. He had to gain time above all, and then make sure that she did most of the talking. Back in the room he suggested having a coffee at the marina. He liked the light and the smell when the sun broke through after a rain shower, as it was doing now.
She found the idea of remembered scenes into which, even if it wasn’t done explicitly, one projected an image of oneself, illuminating, and was beginning to consider how this might relate to scenes from dreams and fantasies. Sometimes she leaned back, arms folded over her head, her eyes gazing through half-closed lids at the sea, and thought out loud about examples. She was so keyed up that she gave a start when the waiter appeared, and knocked a coffee cup out of his hand as her arm came down. Then, when the waiter flirted with her and forgave her everything, Perlmann heard her speaking Italian for the second time. She spoke it as effortlessly as she did Spanish, only the harsh vowels were unusual. Her mother had been Italian, she explained, and both were spoken casually at home.
‘Like with Giorgio, except that it was the other way round. We often laughed, because we didn’t know which we should apologize for. His suggestion is: until twenty-three minutes past two Spanish, after that Italian,’ she laughed.
This interlude had not, as Perlmann had hoped, distracted her from the subject, and now she asked him whether, in the case of memory, he knew a reason why the differentiation of the introduced self-image had to occur in the medium of language. She herself had long been in search of a corresponding explanation for the case of fantasy and will. It wasn’t enough for her, she said with a face on which Perlmann suddenly thought he was seeing her matte-silver glasses for the first time, that there was a clear connection between the development of the abilities in question. She wanted something that could make visible a closer, a deeper, connection, so to speak, between the phenomena. Could he help her with that?