Usually it took about ten minutes or so to warm himself with his own breath, to lock himself in, undo his buttons, sit down and then just breathe and keep breathing until he felt the room beginning to warm a little, taking up position at about five o’clock or quarter past five when he was sure not to be disturbed, for it was too early for the others and he could relax, and what was more, he added much later one evening, this was the only place he could relax, because he needed this half hour in the morning, this security and silence in the landing toilet, and he did in fact sit there about half an hour waiting for the urge, so he had time to gaze and stare, and did indeed take the opportunity for gazing and staring, this being a time before he could actually begin to think, the sort of time when a man sleepily gazes at things, when he truly soaks up everything that meets his gaze, the world before him, and, as they say, he said, even a crack in the wall or the door or the concrete floor becomes intimately familiar to him, so it was no wonder that one morning he noticed that near the top of the wall on his right, a wall that had been tiled from floor to ceiling, one of the tiles was not quite as it should be, that something about it was different from the day before or the day before that, though he didn’t notice that straightaway for while he was sitting with his trousers around his ankles, propping his head on his hands, he was looking down or ahead, at the bolt on the door, not up, and it was only after he had finished and pulled up his trousers that he happened to glance up and saw the change, which, he decided, consisted of the grouting around the tile having been removed, and it was so obvious that the grouting had gone that he couldn’t help seeing it immediately, so he put down the toilet seat and stood on it so he could reach the tile, tapped it and could hear that it was hollow behind, and by carefully pushing at one corner of it succeeded somehow in extracting the tile, behind which — there! — he could see a deeper space had been created and that the space had been filled with little plastic sachets, full, God forbid, of a white powder much like flour, not that he looked too closely or dared open one because he was a little frightened, his first reaction being that it was bad things in there, though to be perfectly honest, as he confessed later, he didn’t know what precisely bad things was, but he knew somehow, by some means, and it was somehow obvious that it was bad, and he didn’t even begin to guess who might have put it there, for it might have been anyone, and the most likely explanation was that was one of the lodgers in the apartment below, so he put the tile back, finished buttoning his trousers, flushed the toilet and quickly returned to his room.
There is an intense relationship between proximate abjects, a much weaker one between objects further away, and as far as the really distant ones there is none at all, and that is the nature of God, said Korin after a long period of meditation, but suddenly didn’t know whether he had said that aloud or only to himself and cleared his throat a few times, then instead of returning to his interrupted story said nothing for a while, hearing only the shuffling of the newspaper as the interpreter’s lover leafed through its pages.
It was Kasser who suffered most from the cold, he said eventually, breaking his silence, from the moment they disembarked from the enormous decareme on the shores of the Tyne, received their horses, were joined by a body of armed escort that had been ordered for them, and set out on the road along the inner edge of the Vallum, and he was so cold that when they arrived at the first military post, garrison said Korin, he had to be lifted off his horse because he was so stiff, he said, that he could no longer feel his limbs or get them to execute his will, and was carried into the fort, sat in front of the fire and two gypsies were summoned to rub his back, his arms and his legs until they set off again, this time toward Condercum, moving on from there too in the same way, through several stops until, on the afternoon of the third day, they reached Corstopitum, that being their destination as well as their starting point according to the Praetorius Fabrum since they were bound to report some time soon on the condition of the Wall, which was why they made a tour of The Immortal Work of the Most Heavenly Caesar, after a good few days of rest of course which were necessary chiefly to allow the vapors of the brigantine medicinal herbs to take effect and cure Kasser’s aches and pains, a treatment he might have been glad of when they arrived at Calpe following the vicissitudes of the journey from Lisbon, which, once again, caused him the most suffering, and it was in fact the figure of Kasser, said Korin with a distant look, Kasser alone of the four of them, that underwent some subtle yet definite transformation, mutation, in the second half of the manuscript, his sensitivity or over-sensitivity, his vulnerability to injuries of various kinds, becoming ever more marked, a fact he mentioned now only because the attention of the others to Kasser became ever more intense, sometimes it being Bengazza, sometimes Toót asking him if “everything was all right” as they traveled on in the coach under the protection of the Prince of Medina, while at other times, at the Albergueria for instance, it was Toót who secretly tried to find some army surgeon, and succeeded in finding one in the “hope of alleviating the strange distress continually afflicting Señor Casser,” explained Korin, shaking his head, in other words, after the fourth chapter there was an imperceptibly increasing, concentration, a matter of delicate emphasis — or nuance, as Korin put it — on Kasser, and this constant concentration cast an anxious shadow even across the first hours of their arrival — for example when they found a space at a table on the crowded ground floor of the Albergueria, and everyone was keeping a wary eye on whether Kasser was eating the food put before him by the landlady, and later, after supper, when they were trying to guess whether he was listening at all to the conversation around him in which a mass of people, each in his own peculiar language, was analyzing the worrying and somewhat nightmarish state of affairs in the bay with its gently rocking but stranded vessels in the thick fog, the hopeless vacuum of the fatally becalmed sea, and, closer to the shores of Gibraltar, the melancholy shades of drifting schooners from Genoa and Venetian galera da mercato, the joints of whose masts gave an occasional muffled shriek as they shifted slightly in the deaf air.