•
At noon, when the sun is at its peak and Humbert has eaten all the sandwiches and drunk all the beers, and is thinking of making another trip to the delicatessen to buy more, Marino leaves the building with a woman. That definitely must be Hildegarda. He follows them with his gaze. They go into the garage next door. Humbert starts the car. When he sees them leave in a black Buick Park Avenue, heading in the opposite direction, he finds himself having to make a U-turn in the middle of the street. The man by the curb with a sandwich cart is forced to pull back in a hurry and backs into a passing ambulance, which doesn’t have time to brake and tips him over with a crash.
DelNonno’s car stops in front of a glass-and-steel building. Hildegarda gets out. The car takes off, crosses a double line, passes another car, and vanishes down the street.
Humbert gets out of the car and looks at the door of the establishment Hildegarda has gone into. A large neon sign proclaims in stylized letters that this is a Health and Sports Club, that is, a posh gym. The services offered by the club are detailed in a list on the glass door: swimming, tennis, sauna, gymnastics, dance. Dance? He takes out the notebook and makes a note. He never thought of doing anything on dance. He feels good: he hasn’t taken any notes in so long that, even though he knows that his lack of fertile ideas is due to his investigation, he was half worrying that his brain was rusting. He pushes the door open.
A very blond girl wearing a t-shirt with the name of the club and a short skirt informs him at length about the facilities the center has to offer. Humbert, who has always shunned all types of physical activity, signs up without even waiting for the girl to finish her promotional spiel.
“Can I start right away?”
“Naturally. We’ll be glad to give you a tour of the club.”
He has trouble losing his guide. He goes through all the rooms twice, no longer trying to go unnoticed. He goes into the gym, sees people vaulting the horse, flipping on the bars, stretching their arms on the rings. He makes his way through the steam of the sauna. Pretending to be lost, he goes into the women’s dressing rooms, eliciting shrieks and giggles. At the pool, he watches as a man dives off the board, twisting his body on its axis like a corkscrew. He wanders through the halls, checking all the tables of the small bar-restaurant on the top floor. He finally finds her in front of a mirror, one of the many women lined up at the wall, lifting one leg delicately behind them and thrusting it forward suddenly, as they double their trunks over. . When he sees her face up close, the few doubts he is still harboring are immediately erased: this is Hildegarda, it is unquestionably she. This was the face that had filled all the canvases of Heribert Julià’s final period like an obsession, until he had started drawing himself, getting more and more lost in a maze of self-portraits and men seen from behind, exhausted and leaning on any surface they could find.
How should he approach her? With self-assurance, he could approach her any old way and make a success of it. But he wants his method to be so perfect that, for the first time, he decides to reflect on it. One by one, he discovers the defects in each of the plans he comes up with. His imagination is prolific, though, and he continually conjures up new ones. He imagines and, applying his fine critical faculties, rejects so many that, before he knows it, she is on her way out. Defenseless, he can’t find the wherewithal to follow her and launch right in without further ado. He decides to think about it some more, and more calmly, and puts off any action until the following day.
•
Humbert tells Helena that he roams around the city from one place to another, looking at buildings he has looked at a thousand times and discovering new facets to them. He follows people and watches where they go, how they sit on a bench, how they grab the handle to get onto the bus, how they open the newspaper, how they put their handkerchiefs away after blowing their noses, how they put one foot before the other, time and again, when they walk. Habitual behavior seems more and more strange to him every day, with careful observation.
“And what will come of it all?”
“All what?”
“All this observation?”
Following people will enable him to learn things he will then make use of to advance even farther, to break with what he has created thus far, to take the leap that will put even more distance between him and the crowd, turning meters of separation into kilometers, atop all the tops, an aerostatic balloon soaring over the cupolas of all cathedrals. He realizes that, unthinkingly, he is taking the excuse he invented for Helena for the truth, and even elaborating a theory based on it. He takes out the little notebook and writes: “Tell a lie. Believe it. Elaborate a thought based on the lie, a thought which, brilliant though it might be, is of no use, based as it is on a falsehood.” He is about to add one more detail when he realizes that Helena is sound asleep and he turns out the light.
•
Bright and early the next morning Humbert is on his way to the club. He spends the morning doing simple exercises and checking out the dance studio from time to time, to see if Hildegarda is there. In the afternoon he does laps, drinks soft drinks at the bar, reads the newspaper, and fills a few pages of the notebook with notes.
Around 9:00 p.m. he gives up on waiting. He goes home, has coffee and donuts for supper, gets right into bed, and when Helena gets in at 3:30, he turns over and gives her a hug.
In the morning, at the club, he has a sauna and plays tennis with a fat man with glasses who has asked him to play. Not only does he defeat him soundly, but with his final stroke he smashes the ball and leaves the lenses of his opponent’s eyeglasses in pieces. Once in a while, he goes to the dance studio, hoping to find her there. In vain. That afternoon, at a table in the bar of the club, he fills up his little notebook with a list of possible sports-related paintings. What if he based his January show on the topic? Would it be enough of a novelty, or was it better to pursue the idea of working out the dream series in iron? He makes a note: “January exhibit based on sports? Include allusions to George Bellows?”
At 8:30, he goes home. He has a chicken sandwich and orange juice for dinner. He goes to bed early. Helena is there, reading an Art and Artists from many years before. Scattered about the sheets are issues of Artforum, Arts, two months of ArtNews, one Arts Magazine, and the previous week’s Arts Weekly. For a moment he tries to suss out which articles Helena is interested in, but sleep quickly overcomes him and he falls asleep.
In the morning Humbert lifts weights and, from time to time, stops by the dance studio. Around noon he finally sees her, on the floor, twisted into a knot, spreading her arms and lifting her head. He goes wild with joy, his heart beating like a cuckoo clock.
When Hildegarda gets out of the shower (an hour and a half later, her dance session over for the day), she runs into Humbert (who, meanwhile, had also showered and dressed), who introduces himself straight off. Hildegarda says she has heard of him and, since she, too, is very interested in painting, she’s pleased to meet him. Humbert confesses that he has wanted to paint her since the very first time he saw her on the dance studio floor. Hildegarda asks him if he’s been going to the club for very long, because she’s never seen him before. Humbert says a couple of years, but he doesn’t go very often: work and all. . Humbert thinks of a painting in which Hildegarda appears, languid and pallid, surrounded by trees and plants. . What an effect that painting would have in January’s big show! Forget sports. Now he decides it will revolve around a single person: fifty, sixty, eighty, a hundred paintings of Hildegarda. How mediocre Heribert’s paintings of her would seem in comparison with the ones he, inflamed with a consuming passion, would do! He can already see the titles in the art reviews: “Toward a new romanticism?” To escape such labeling, he thinks, he could do each painting in a different style, forgotten or a bit out of vogue, which could be regarded as new: new cubism, new op (or new figurative perceptual abstraction), new Dadaism (Hildegarda dressed as the Mona Lisa with a landscape of factories in the background, with a mustache like the one Duchamp affixed to Leonardo’s), new neo-classicism (Hildegarda as a Homeric Helen out of a painting by Poussin), new pop (Hildegarda as Wonder Woman, destroying the face of the bad guy with a single blow, in a three meter by three meter comic strip), new baroque (Caravaggio’s Virgin with Hildegarda’s face), new romanticism (Hildegarda as one of the women at Delacroix’s death of Sardanapalus). Hildegarda says she doesn’t know what to say.