Perlmann was glad that it was a long way to Portofino. He had found a rhythm of walking through which pain and despair held one another in suspension. It was an unstable equilibrium, and when he had at one point to stop and let a group of scouts pass him in single file, the sensations tumbled in upon him; he was defenselessly delivered over to them, and only after a few minutes of renewed walking had he managed to detach himself from them to any extent. The rhythmical movement and the after-effect of the sleeping pills merged into a state in which, with half-closed eyes directed at the tarmac, he occasionally managed to think nothing at all.
Into such a phase of inner emptiness fell the sudden suspicion that his earlier explanation for his nocturnal action was not at all true. The truth is that I wanted to put it behind me as quickly as possible, whatever it might be, so that I could go on sleeping. Waking at ten, he hadn’t so much as thought about the possibility of handing in nothing at all and standing there empty-handed in front of everyone, and that was, of course, no accident. To that extent there was a degree of truth in the explanation that assumed a decision-making process, however unconscious it might be. But there could be no question of making a decision between his own notes and Leskov’s paper. What had happened was something far simpler, more banaclass="underline" he had picked up Leskov’s text because it was to hand, because all he had to do was open the suitcase. Finding out whether Maria, contrary to expectation, had finished typing out his own paper had been too much for him at that point. He had wanted nothing else but to lie down as soon as possible and yield to the persistent effect of the pills. There might also have been the fact, he thought, biting his lip, that he had avoided a question concerning Maria, because a childish sense of hurt at her businesslike remark on the phone still lingered. At any rate, he said to himself with embittered, self-destructive violence, he had basically been quite glad that the arrival of the people from Fiat had effectively removed that possibility.
Perlmann was startled by the banality of this explanation; by the fact that in a matter upon which so much depended he had allowed himself to be motivated by something so primitive as a need for sleep – and self-induced sleep at that. The pills. They made the decision. He wasn’t sure whether that wasn’t, in the end, even worse than if it had been an unconscious but still genuine decision to commit fraud. Because what struck him now, while he blindly walked, as the truth, meant only that he had in that unhappy moment lost himself as a decision-maker, as a subject of his actions.
Perlmann only became aware that he had arrived in Portofino when he found himself in the square where the buses turned to make the journey back. He was puzzled to be here now. He had no business here in Portofino, where he was stuck as if in a cul-de-sac. He wanted above all to stay in motion, to hold his inner misery in check, he was afraid of coming to a standstill and being delivered over to his tormenting sensations with no possibility of defending himself. He took the street along which the tourists would stream down to the water during the holiday season. At this time of year most of the shops were closed. The radiant weather and the dead impression that the place created did not suit one another. Most of the restaurants around the little marina were shut as well. Outside the last café down at the quay he sat down at a bistro table and ordered coffee and cigarettes from an old and sulky waiter who didn’t deign to look at him.
It was his first coffee that morning, and he greedily drank two cups. Again he became aware of his stomach and choked down two dried-up rolls that he had fetched from the counter inside. With his eyes closed, he listened to the quiet sound of the boats bumping gently against one another. For a few minutes, in a state between half-sleep and voluntary activity of the imagination, he managed to create the illusion of being on holiday: a man who could afford to drink coffee on a beautiful November morning in the famous town of Portofino; unattached, a free man who was able to go off travelling while others had to work; someone who could make his own choices and wasn’t accountable to anyone. But then he suddenly became aware once more of his actual situation. He was a fraud – an undiscovered fraud, admittedly, but a fraud nonetheless. And now Portofino seemed like a trap.
He could no longer bear it. He called for the waiter, looked in vain for him in the empty bar, and then, because he couldn’t find anything smaller, left far too large a bill beside his cup and walked quickly back to the main street. He bought a ticket from the driver of the waiting bus, who was standing outside and smoking, and took a seat at the back. He was the only passenger. When the driver stamped out his cigarette and sat down at the steering wheel, Perlmann jumped out at the last moment. Astonished, the driver watched him in the rear-view mirror, then set off.
Perlmann didn’t want to go back, and he wanted to sleep. He was tempted just to lie down on the bench by the bus stop, but that was too public. A hotel. He counted his money. It would only be enough, if at all, for a very cheap room. He was relieved to have a goal for a moment, and walked through the narrow alleyways of the town. Many hotels had closed for the winter, and of the ones that were open, even the shabbiest-looking dives were more than he could afford.
At last he found a room in an albergo that opened up on to a narrow alley full of garbage bins. The landlord – a squat, fat man with a moustache and suspenders – studied him with a suspicious and contemptuous look: a man without luggage and without much money, wanting a room at half-past eleven in the morning. Perlmann had to haggle. He only wanted the room for a few hours. OK, until five o’clock, discount, cash in advance.
He took off the grubby cover and lay down on the bed with his hands folded behind his head. The ceiling, its plaster crumbling, was covered with yellow and brown water stains; cobwebs had formed in the corners, and in the middle hung an ugly lamp of yellow plastic that was supposed to imitate amber.
Self-defense, he thought: couldn’t one regard what he had done as a form of self-defense? Powerless to do anything about it, he had lost his academic discipline, which had won him respect and a social position, and now he had been pushed against the wall by the expectations of others, demanding constant new achievements and threatening to withdraw their respect, and he had been forced to defend himself. And the only way he had managed to do that was through Leskov’s text. You could see that as a defense of his own life. It had not happened casually or for the sake of some cheap advantage, but simply in order to avert something that would have amounted to his professional and, in the end, his personal annihilation. Self-defense, in fact.
OK, if you were going to be literal about it, you might describe what he was doing as plagiarism. At that moment the others were holding in their hands a text which, even though his name wasn’t on it, they assumed was his text, even though he had only translated it and not written it himself. But that way of looking at things was fundamentally superficial, and didn’t do justice to the real process. Because he hadn’t translated the text just like that, without any internal involvement or intellectual engagement, as a professional translator in an agency might have done. Piece by piece he had allowed Leskov’s thought-processes to pass through his mind. He had repeatedly measured it against examples from his own memory, and in the end, to mention only this, he had actually spent many hours, whole days, in fact, on his attempt to structure Leskov’s fragmentary reflections into a consistent theory of appropriation. So one couldn’t really say that the text that had been distributed contained nothing of his own thoughts.