Free 2666 by Roberto Bolaño Page B

renown and the
innumerable gaps in his story that remained to be filled, but later, over
dessert, the conversation took a more personal turn, tending more toward
reminiscence, and until three in the morning, when they called a cab and Norton
helped Morini into her building's old elevator, then down a flight of six
steps, everything was, as the Italian reviewed it in his mind, much more
pleasant than he'd expected.
    Between breakfast and dinner, Morini was
alone, hardly daring at first to leave his room, although later, driven by
boredom, he decided to go out and went as far as
Hyde Park
,
where he wandered aimlessly, lost in thought, without noticing or seeing
anyone. Some people gazed after him in curiosity, because they had never seen a
man in a wheelchair moving with such determination and at such a steady pace.
When he finally came to a stop he found himself outside the
Italian
Gardens
,
or so they were called, although nothing about them struck him as Italian, but
who knows, he mused, sometimes people are staggeringly ignorant of what's under
their very noses.
    He pulled a book out of his jacket pocket
and began to read as he regained his strength. Soon he heard a voice saying
hello, then the noise a heavy body makes when it drops to a wooden bench. He
returned the greeting. The stranger had straw-colored hair, graying and dirty,
and must have weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. They sat a moment
looking at each other and the stranger asked whether he was a foreigner. Morini
said he was Italian. The stranger wanted to know whether he lived in
London
, and then what the
book he was reading was called. Morini answered that he didn't live in London
and that the book he was reading was called Il
libra di cucina di Juana Ines de la Cruz, by Angelo Morino, and that it was
written in Italian, of course, although it was about a Mexican nun. About the
nun's life and some of her recipes.
    "So this Mexican nun liked to
cook?" asked the stranger.
    "In a way she did, although she also
wrote poems," Morini replied.
    "I don't trust nuns," said the
stranger.
    "Well, this nun was a great
poet," said Morini.
    "I don't trust people who cook from
recipes," said the stranger, as if he hadn't heard him.
    "So whom do you trust?" asked
Morini.
    "People who eat when they're hungry,
I guess," said the stranger.
    Then he went on to explain that a long
time ago he had worked for a company that made mugs, just mugs, the plain kind
and the kind decorated with phrases or mottoes or jokes: Sorry, I'm On My Coffee Break! or Daddy Loves Mummy or Last
Round Today, Last Round Forever, that sort of thing, mugs with anodyne
captions, and one day, surely due to demand, the inscriptions on the mugs
changed drastically and they started using pictures, black-and-white at first,
but then the venture did so well they switched to pictures in color, some
humorous but some dirty, too.
    "They even gave me a raise," the
stranger said. "Do mugs like that exist in
Italy
?" he asked then.
    "Yes," said Morini, "some
with phrases in English and others with phrases in Italian."
    "Well, it was everything we could
have asked for," said the stranger. "We all worked more happily. The
managers worked more happily, too, and the boss looked happy. But after a few
months of making those mugs I realized that my happiness was artificial. I felt
happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel
happy, but I wasn't really happy. In fact, I felt worse than before they'd
given me a raise. I thought I was going through a bad patch and I tried not to
think about it, but after three months I couldn't keep pretending nothing was
wrong. I was in a terrible mood, I was much more violent than I'd been before,
any little thing would make me angry, I started to drink. So I raced up to the
problem, and finally I realized that I didn't like to make that particular kind
of mug. At night, I swear, I suffered like a dog. I thought I was going crazy,
that I didn't know