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impossible to sell it before a couple of years anyway; Marcos, the man who knew a colonel who was acquainted with an Athens customs official, had imposed the time-lapse as a condition of allowinghimself to be bribed. Somoza took the statue to his apartment, and Morand saw it each time that they met. It was never suggested that sometimes Somoza visit Morand and his wife, like so many other things they did not mention any more and which at bottom were always Teresa. Somoza seemed to be completely occupied with his
idée fixe
, and if once in a while he invited Morand to come back to his apartment for a cognac, there was nothing more to it than that. Nothing very extraordinary, after all Morand knew very well Somoza’s tastes for certain marginal literatures, just as he was put off by Somoza’s longing. The thing that surprised him most was the fanaticism of that hope which emerged during those hours of almost automatic confidences, and when he felt his own presence as highly unnecessary, the repeated caressing of the beautiful and expressionless statue’s little body, repeating the spells in a monotone until it became tiresome, the same formulas of passage. As seen by Morand, Somoza’s obsession was susceptible to analysis: in some sense, every archaeologist identifies himself with the past he explores and brings to light. From that point to believing that intimacy with one of those vestiges could alienate, alter time and space, open a fissure whereby one could comply with … Somoza never used that kind of vocabulary; what he said was always more or less than that, a haphazard language full of allusions and exorcisms moving from obstinate and irreducible levels. For that reason, then, he had begun to work clumsily on replicas of the statuette; Morand had managed to see the first of them even before Somoza had left Paris, and he listened with a friendly courtesy to those stiffheaded commonplaces re: the repetition of gesture and situation as a way of abrogation, Somoza’s cocksureness that his obstinate approach would come to identify itself with the initial structure, with a superimposition which would be more than that because,as yet, there was no duality, just fusion, primordial contact (not his words, but Morand had to translate them in some way, later, when he reconstructed them for Teresa). Contact which, Somoza finally said, had been established forty-eight hours before, on the night of the summer solstice.
    “All right,” Morand admitted, lighting another cigarette, “but I’d be happy if you could explain to me why you’re so sure that … okay, that you’ve gotten to the bottom of it.”
    “Explain?… don’t you see it?”
    He stretched out his hand once more toward a castle in the air, to a corner of the loft; it described an arc which included the roof and the statuette set on its thin column of marble, enveloped in the brilliant cone of light from the reflector. Incongruously enough, Morand remembered that Teresa had crossed the frontier, carrying the statuette hidden in the toy chest Marcos had made in a basement in Plaka.
    “It couldn’t be that it wasn’t going to happen,” Somoza said almost childishly. “I was getting a little bit closer every replica I made. The form was becoming familiar to me. I want to say that … Ah, it would take days to explain it to you … and the absurd thing is that there everything comes in one … But when it’s this …”
    His hand waved about, came and went, marking out the
that
and the
this
.
    “The truth of the matter is that you’ve managed to become a sculptor,” Morand said, hearing himself speak and it sounding stupid. “The last two replicas are perfect. Whenever you get around to letting me keep the statue, I’ll never know if you’ve given me the original or not.”
    “I’ll never give her to you,” Somoza said simply. “And don’t think that I’ve forgotten that she belongs to both of us. But I’ll never give her to you.