Go round again, they told the driver from the backseat, turn right at the corner, do a circle and when you get back to 159th Street again take your fucking foot off the gas and cruise very slowly past the houses, because it wasn’t true that they couldn’t find it, it simply couldn’t be true how much these fucking houses resembled each other, for they’d find the motherfucker, they most certainly would, they said, sooner or later it would all click into place, and they’d go round and round all night if need be, because it was somewhere on the right-hand side, either that house, said one of them, or the one next to the Vietnamese, said the other, having gone round three times already, and how the fuck could it have happened that they had really paid so little attention, but really, the driver called back, surely two normal mothers could not have given birth to such a pair of fuckheads, it being the third time they had gone around, then that guy comes out and they lay into him without even looking back and now nobody knows where to look for him, and don’t anyone tell him how to handle the gas ‘cause he’d leave them here to drown in their own shit, let them do the driving and try to find him by themselves, and when it comes to that, they retorted in the back, they’ll just keep going round in circles until that lousy rat shows his stinking face, so let’s stop here, one suggested, but no, the other snapped back, just keep going, and whatthefuck, the driver slammed his hands down on the wheel, is that what they really want, to spend the whole fucking night going around in circles in this filthy, rotten, shithole of a side street? and so they continued at a snail’s pace down 159th Street, moving so slowly that pedestrians passed them by, turning at the next corner and circling the block to return to 159th Street, a Lincoln with three people on board, which was all the Vietnamese grocer saw when, after a while, he went out to see what the devil was going on out there, the car having passed the shop several times, reappearing every few minutes, and repeating this procedure time after time, a light blue Lincoln Continental MK III, he told his wife later, with decorative chrome flashing, with leather upholstery and dazzling rear lights and, naturally, the slow, dignified, hypnotic swaying of the spoiler.
The Albergueria was not exactly an inn, said Korin to the woman on the bed, the sheer extent of it would tell you as much, since people don’t build them of such size, of such astonishing, quite incredible largeness, nor was the Albergueria exactly “built” as such, if by building one meant something planned, for it simply grew, year by year, grew larger, higher, wider, more complete—expansion was the word Korin used — with countless rooms upstairs, ever more staircases, ever more floors full of nooks and hallways, exits and connecting passages, a corridor here, a corridor there in entirely incomprehensible order, while along this or that corridor, you might suddenly come across some vague focus of attention, a kitchen or a laundry with the doors removed, from which steam was continually billowing, or, equally suddenly, on some floor or other, between two guest rooms, you’d see an open bathroom with enormous tubs, the tubs filled with the steaming bodies of men surrounded by the slight running figures of Berber boys with towels covering their private parts, and stairs leading everywhere from inside these rooms, stairs that passed office-like quarters on certain levels, with commercial signs on the door and impatient queues of Provençals, Sardinians, Castilians, Normans, Bretons, Picardians, Gascons, Catalans and countless unclassifiable others, as well as priests, sailors, clerks, dealers, money-changers and interpreters, not forgetting a miscellaneous bunch of whores from Granada and Algiers on the stairs and down the corridors, whores everywhere, everything so enormous, so confusing and so complicated that no one was able to comprehend it all, because there wasn’t one single owner here but infinite numbers of them, each of them keeping an eye only on what was theirs and not caring about the rest and therefore lacking the foggiest notion of the place as a whole, which was in fact true of everyone there, and one should say, said Korin massaging the nape of his neck, that if this was the case on the upper levels, it was even more so on the ground floor, down below, for there chaos and incomprehensibility, the impenetrable situation, said Korin, was the general rule, it being impossible to be certain of anything, of whether, for instance, this space with its marvelously frescoed ceiling supported by roughly fifty columns and below it the vast, all-encompassing gloom constituted a dining hall, a customs house, a surgery, a bar, a financial exchange, a vast confessional, a marine recruitment agency, a brothel, a barber’s shop, or all of these together at the same time; the answer in fact being “everything at the same time,” said Korin, for the ground floor, the downstairs as he called it, was a monstrous Babel of voices morning, noon, evening and night, full of monstrous numbers of people continually coming and going, and what was more, added Korin blinking, it was as if they all existed in a slightly non-historical space, so that there were enemies and fugitives, hunters and pursued, the defeated as well as those about to be defeated; for here you would find the suspicious agent of a bunch of Algerian pirates consorting with the secret emissary of the Inquisition at Aragon, undercover Moroccan dealers in gunpowder in conversation with traveling salesmen from Medina carrying little statuettes of Stella Maris, Capocorsicans en route to Tadjikistan, Misur and Algiers walking shoulder to shoulder with beautiful melancholy homeless Sephardics who just a year ago had been expelled by Isabella, as well as crushed Sicilian Jews exiled by the Sicilians themselves, all of them in a state between genuine hope and despair, revulsion and dream, calculation and waiting for miracles, here, in the empire recovered but two years ago from the migrating Catholic Kings, every one of them living in expectation—another expectancy, said Korin — waiting to see if three frail caravelles would return and if they did so, whether the world would change, a world, which like the Albergueria with its becalmed ships in the bay, itself seemed becalmed, had suspended its activities, yet permitting all this — the chaos and confusion of the ground floor and the floors above ran riot — while outside some missing power, the power of peace, somehow balanced the equation, the peace that Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót were happily enjoying on the journey from Lisbon to Ceuta — that’s the way it was, and that in point of fact, was the state of affairs behind the thick and secure walls of the villa at Corstopitum too, for within them, he said, they felt a kind of inner calm settling on them, a calm that felt like being reborn, as Falke put it, after several weeks of having walked the length of the Vallum and returned — for Corstopitum to them meant security, the guarantee of which was the extraordinary wall constructed some thirty miles away from where they were — for the sensation for example, said Korin, of entering the baths of the villa that had been made available to them by the will of the cursus publicus, the joy of casting a glance at the wonderful mosaic floor and mosaic-covered walls, of sinking into the water of the basin and allowing the flush of hot water to reach every part of one’s frozen limbs, was the kind of feeling, the kind of morale-raising luxury for the protection of which you required at least a proper Vallum or its equivalent, so that the kind of security experienced at Corstopitum, that calm and peace, signified a genuine triumph, a triumph over that which lay beyond the Vallum, the forces of barbaric darkness, of bare necessity, of savage passions and the desire for conquest and possession, triumph over all this, triumph, Korin explained, over what Kasser and his companions had seen in the wild eyes of a Pict rebel hiding in the scrub somewhere behind the tower of the fort at Vercovicium, over the state of permanent danger, triumph over the eternal beast in man.