2666 Read Online Free PDF Page A

without anyone noticing, with horizontal pockets on each side, and a
row of four buttons, neither very large nor very small, sewn on with something
like fishing line, a jacket that brought to mind, why I don't know, the jackets
worn by some Gestapo officers, although back then black leather jackets were in
fashion and anyone who had the money to buy one or had inherited one wore it without
stopping to think about what it suggested, and the writer who had come to that
Frisian town was Benno von Archimboldi, the young Benno von Archimboldi,
twenty-nine or thirty years old, and it had been he, the Swabian, who had gone
to wait for him at the train station and who had accompanied him to the
boardinghouse, talking about the weather, which was bad, and then had brought
him to city hall, where Archimboldi hadn't set up any table and had read two
chapters from a novel that wasn't finished yet, and then the Swabian had gone
to dinner with him at the local tavern, along with the teacher and a widow who
preferred music or painting to literature, but who, once resigned to not having
music or painting, was in no way averse to a literary evening, and it was she
who somehow or other kept up the conversation during dinner (sausages and
potatoes and beer: neither the times, recalled the Swabian, nor the town's
budget allowed for anything more extravagant), although it might be truer to
say that she steered it with afirm
hand on the rudder, and the men who were around the table, the mayor's
secretary, a man in the salted fish business, an old schoolteacher who kept
falling asleep even with his fork in his hand, and a town employee, a very nice
boy named Fritz who was a good friend of the Swabian's, nodded or were careful
not to contradict the redoubtable widow whose knowledge of the arts was much
greater than anyone else's, even the Swabian's, and who had traveled in Italy
and France and had even, on one of her voyages, an unforgettable ocean
crossing, gone as far as Buenos Aires, in 1927 or 1928, when the city was a
meat emporium and the refrigerator ships left port laden with meat, a sight to
see, hundreds of ships arriving empty and leaving laden with tons of meat
headed all over the world, and when she, the lady, went out on deck, say at
night, half asleep or seasick or ailing, all she had to do was lean on the rail
and let her eyes grow accustomed to the dark and then the view of the port was
startling and it instantly cleared away any vestiges of sleep or seasickness or
other ailments, the nervous system having no choice but to surrender
unconditionally to such a picture, the parade of immigrants like ants loading
the flesh of thousands of dead cattle into the ships' holds, the movements of
pallets piled with the meat of thousands of sacrificed calves, and the gauzy
tint that shaded every corner of the port from dawn until dusk and even during
the night shifts, the red of barely cooked steak, of T-bones, of filet, of ribs
grilled rare, terrible, thank goodness the lady, who wasn't a widow at the
time, had to see it only the first night, then they disembarked and took rooms
at one of the most expensive hotels in Buenos Aires, and they went to the opera
and then to a ranch where her husband, an expert horseman, agreed to race with
the rancher's son, who lost, and then with a ranch hand, the son's right-hand
man, a gaucho, who also lost, and then with the gaucho's son, a little
sixteen-year-old gaucho, thin as a reed and with bright eyes, so bright that
when the lady looked at him he lowered his head and then lifted it a little and
gave her such a wicked look that she was offended, what an insolent urchin,
while her husband laughed and said in German: you've made quite an impression
on the boy, a joke the lady didn't find the least bit funny, and then the
little gaucho mounted his horse and they set off, the boy could really gallop,
he clung to the horse so tightly it was as if he were glued to its neck, and he
sweated and thrashed it with