Avignon is the setting of a late-1994 postwar European literature colloquium where the four Archimboldi scholars gather not only to discuss the elusive writer but also to inhabit, together, a friendship that has become almost inviolate. The city holds their public intellectual exchange and their private intimacy in the same frame: papers by day, dinners and long walks by night, then the ache of separation on the journey home.

The Colloquium and Archimboldi’s Absence

The colloquium took place at the end of 1994. Liz Norton and Piero Morini attended as spectators, their universities paying for their trips, while Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza presented papers on Benno von Archimboldi’s work. Their different approaches made the writer’s absence the subject’s organizing mystery. Pelletier examined the apparent insularity of Archimboldi’s body of work: it seemed cut off from the German tradition, though not from a broader European one. Espinoza addressed the enigma of the author himself, whose books were gaining readers while the available facts about their writer remained exceptionally scant.

Archimboldi’s public identity was reduced to a German writer born in Prussia in 1920. His books carried no author photograph; his place of residence was unknown; no surviving fellow writer had seen him; and no German biography existed. Even the report that a manuscript had arrived from Sicily offered no reliable route to him. The papers thus turn the colloquium into a study of a literary reputation built around disappearance: the works circulate across Europe and into the United States, while their author remains inaccessible.

The Four Scholars in the Streets

In the evenings Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton dined together. German professors they had known for years sometimes joined them, but the visitors either left early or remained discreetly in the background. The narrative presents the four scholars as a self-contained formation, one outsiders hesitate to disturb. Their shared attention to Archimboldi supplies a subject for conversation, but the group’s unity also exceeds scholarship: the four are drawn together by the pleasure of testing one another’s intelligence and by a practiced ease that gives ordinary conversation the force of ritual.

At the end of the evening they walked Avignon’s streets, as they had walked Bremen’s and would walk other cities in the future. Their arrangements shifted: Norton pushed Morini, with Pelletier beside her and Espinoza on the other side; sometimes Pelletier pushed Morini while Norton walked ahead, backward, laughing. At other moments the four walked abreast and stopped beside a low wall by the river. They talked about their German preoccupation without interrupting one another, and long silences held even when it rained. The river is described as tamed, a storied urban presence beside which the group’s conversation can pause without breaking.

Separation and the Return of Desire

Avignon’s significance continues after the gathering ends. On returning to Paris, Pelletier went through the ordinary motions of arriving home: setting down his bag, pouring whiskey, opening the curtains onto the familiar view of the Place de Breteuil and the UNESCO building, and listening to his answering machine. Only after showering and sitting at his computer did he recognize the force of his absence from Norton. He wanted not simply to speak with her but to be in bed with her, telling her that he loved her and hearing the same from her.

Espinoza’s recognition came earlier, while he was still on the plane to Spain. He had already decided that Norton was the woman he had always hoped to find, and the knowledge brought suffering. His imagined scenes of her included somewhat more sexual content than Pelletier’s, a small but pointed difference in how the two men experience the same attachment. The city therefore marks a temporary convergence: the four are physically together in its streets, but the departures expose distinct desires that their shared fellowship cannot dissolve.