It was just before half-past seven when Perlmann stopped, exhausted, halfway down page 43. Two dozen pages of the vocabulary notebook were full, and on the right, next to the line that ran down the middle of the page, there were many gaps. Another twenty-five pages. If he got up very early tomorrow he would be able to finish it. And now he wanted to know: that business about the inventive elements in memory was all well and good, but where, in Leskov’s essay, was the experienced, sensory content of memory? The last time he saw him, his father had, as always, been wearing his wool felt jacket, and the fact that the color of the wool had alternated between dark olive green and light charcoal, depending on the light, was really not something that he had invented; it bothered him now, in memory, exactly as it had at the time. Or the loud thump with which the frozen lumps of earth had fallen on his mother’s coffin: what did Leskov make of that? Sensory content? He wrote in the margin.
Before he went to dinner, he flicked absently through Ruge’s paper. If I start on it on Monday, I’ll still have fifteen days for my own contribution. It was only when he reached the stairs that he realized the idea didn’t throw him into a panic. He paused. It was as if the thought had occurred in the mind of someone else, someone completely uninvolved, and the weird idea crept over him that he was splitting away from himself.
‘I knocked on your door several times yesterday and today, Phil. I wanted to talk about the baffling question you asked me at the session,’ Millar said across the length of the table when the waiter had brought the soup. ‘And then, when you weren’t at dinner, I started to get worried. We all did, by the way.’
Perlmann felt that his fear of Millar was suddenly turning into black humor, accompanied by a pleasing sense of dizziness like the one he always felt when he had his first cigarette of the morning.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. Deadpan was how he would have described his face at that moment.
‘I know that now,’ said Millar, and lowered his head. ‘Evelyn’s just told me about the business with the new room.’
Perlmann looked into the sea-green of her eyes. She had her face under control, but her eyes contained a certain roguish laughter that seemed to have its origins right in the dark yellow particles of the iris.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The bed. My back. Do you get that, too?’
‘No,’ replied Millar, ‘I don’t. Not at all.’
‘He just couldn’t stand being between us, Brian,’ Ruge grinned.
Millar picked up his tone. ‘And we’re such nice guys, Phil. But seriously: can we make an appointment for tomorrow?’
The panic mustn’t show in his voice, and Perlmann ran his fingertips along his forehead, back and forth, and then again.
‘I’ve got a lot going on tomorrow,’ he said, and was pleased when he noticed that the quiver in his voice had remained a mere idea. ‘I’ll let you know some time next week.’
‘OK,’ Millar drawled, and Perlmann was sure that his drawl expressed a hint of suspicion. Or at least the drawl contained the message that suspicion would be inevitable if the matter were to be postponed again.
Perlmann lifted his plate and tried to get the last bit of soup into his spoon. With this kind of spoon that was something of a feat, and so it was that he didn’t notice Carlo Angelini until Silvestri got up to hug him. Angelini darted Perlmann an apologetic grin and walked around the table to greet the ladies first. Finally, he fetched a chair from the next table and sat down beside Perlmann. Unfortunately, he would have to leave again tomorrow morning, he said, but he wanted at least to look in this evening. How was it going?
‘Benissimo,’ said Evelyn Mistral, when Perlmann hesitated. Everything was perfect, Millar agreed, and before von Levetzov could speak, he thanked Angelini on behalf of the group.
Angelini listened to the explanation of how the work had been organized, and then asked about the subjects under discussion.
‘I know more or less what you’re working on,’ he said to Perlmann, who no longer had the faintest idea what he had told him back in Lugano. And then, with a smile that alternated between pride and irony, Angelini announced that the mayor of Santa Margherita was going to hold a reception for them all.
From the corners of his eyes, Perlmann saw Laura Sand pretending to blow her nose to keep from exploding with laughter. Only a small party, Angelini said, and the high point would be the appointment of Perlmann, as leader of the project, as an honorary citizen of the town.
‘With a certificate and a medal,’ he grinned. ‘It will begin on the Monday of the final week, so three weeks the day after tomorrow,’ he said after glancing at his pocket diary. ‘At eleven o’clock in the morning. Of course, I will be there as well.’
If Silvestri gives a presentation in the fourth week, I will gain a day because of the reception.
‘Then you just give your paper on Monday afternoon,’ von Levetzov said to Perlmann.
‘And, of course, we expect something very special from a newly fledged freeman of the town,’ Ruge chuckled.
Angelini invited everyone for a drink in the drawing room. It was puzzling what connected Angelini and Silvestri, Perlmann thought as he walked behind the two of them, and saw them joking like very good friends. Angelini, the Italian yuppie in his elegant suit, who moved in the world of conventions like a fish in water, and Silvestri, this insubordinate, anarchically minded individualist, who happened this evening to be wearing a rumpled black shirt on top of everything. Was it something from their school days? Or because they both came from Florence?
My hatred of conventions, he thought when he heard the fragments that Angelini addressed, in turn, to his colleagues. That hatred had been in Perlmann long before he met Agnes. But it was only because the feeling had found an echo in her that he had become fully aware of it. What Agnes had been most unable to bear was people who not only thought and acted conventionally but felt conventionally as well. People who felt what they thought they ought to feel. Her attempts to capture the subject in photographs were a failure. He heard her dark, sonorous voice, which could sound so brave before sometimes collapsing into the deepest melancholy: At best you can show what people feel, and not that it would be more authentic to feel differently now. There are no pictures for that. The hatred of conventional feeling had been a strong bond between them. But it had often alienated her from people they liked. It had, against her will, made her shy of people.
‘This might be the moment to play something for us,’ von Levetzov said to Millar, pointing to the grand piano with a smile full of flattering respect. He’s treating him like his brilliant star pupil, who has outgrown him through his diverse and towering talents. And he didn’t need that. Not him.
‘Oh, yes, that would be super!’ exclaimed Evelyn Mistral.
Perlmann was irritated by her girlish enthusiasm and the teenage vocabulary that he had liked so much on her arrival, because it matched the red elephant on her suitcase. In defiance of all reason, he was furious about her enthusiasm, and internally reproached her for it – as if she were obliged to know what a nightmare Millar was gradually becoming to him, and as if she owed him making these sensations her own.