The critics’ visit to the Auguste Demarre Clinic is a meeting with the painter Edwin Johns, but it also becomes an encounter with the limits of what the visitors can learn from him. Piero Morini has brought Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza to see a painter who cut off his own right hand, the hand he used to paint, preserved it, and incorporated it into a multiple self-portrait. Morini eventually asks Johns why he mutilated himself. Johns does not answer in front of the group: he bends toward Morini and tells him privately. By the next morning Morini has disappeared from the hotel, carrying the encounter’s answer out of public view.

A visit arranged around Edwin Johns

The episode reaches the reader as a story told by Espinoza and then continued by Pelletier. In the framing conversation, Liz Norton is surprised that neither man has told her about the visit before. Espinoza explains that Morini had learned Johns was living at the clinic and proposed going to see him; Pelletier and Espinoza accompanied Morini. The account itself hesitates over the details of what Morini had said about Johns, preserving the uncertainty of a recollection retold among friends rather than presenting the visit as a settled report.

Their journey leads from Montreux toward a rest clinic named for a nineteenth-century Swiss politician or financier. The institution’s respectable name conceals what the visitors understand to be a discreet psychiatric asylum. They complete the formal procedures and are led by a nurse through the extensive grounds, without seeing any of the patients. The scale and arrangement of the grounds matter to the visit: Pelletier pushes Morini’s wheelchair down sloping land that he thinks would not be calming for patients who are severely disturbed. Johns is not encountered in the main institution, but in a separate cottage at the rear.

The cottage and its contradictions

The cottage complicates the visitors’ expectations of institutional life. It is comfortable and furnished rather like an English country house: armchairs, a fireplace, an oak table, a partly filled bookcase, a Turkish divan, and a bathroom with a shower. A computer and modem have their own table. The books are mostly in German and French, with some in English. Espinoza’s comment that the residents do not have it too badly follows this inventory, but the scene does not establish that the cottage’s comforts explain or undo the institution’s restrictions.

The visit is framed by the clinic’s iron gate and railings, which appear both to welcome visitors and to block passage. From outside, the asylum’s inert bulk suggests a fortress. Pelletier recalls an odd idea that arose during the journey: that the American continent might never have been discovered, without disturbing Switzerland’s economic, demographic, or democratic development. He describes the thought as pointless, like the kinds of ideas people exchange on a manifestly pointless trip. This brief digression gives the journey an atmosphere of dislocation before the visitors reach Johns: ordinary assumptions about history and progress are made to seem contingent, while the clinic itself remains materially imposing.

Morini’s question and Johns’s private answer

At the cottage, conversation turns to chance, order, and the possibility of redemption. Johns’s account sets faith in humanity and in the order of painting and language against coincidence, which he characterizes as lawless freedom. Pelletier and Espinoza sense that Morini has come in search of a particular answer. Morini leans so far forward in his wheelchair that they fear he may fall, and asks Johns directly why he mutilated himself.

Johns listens without visible agitation and asks whether Morini intends to publish their conversation. Morini admits that he does not know. As dusk settles, the nurse seems ready to turn on the light, but Pelletier signals her to wait. The narrative fixes on the visitors’ shoes—white, black, brown, and white—before darkness overtakes the cottage and the surrounding Alps. In that pause, Johns says he will explain. For the first time, his stiff, martial posture relaxes; he bends toward Morini and speaks into his ear. The explanation is withheld from Pelletier, Espinoza, and the reader. The scene therefore makes the answer consequential without supplying it: the central question is asked aloud, but the response becomes private knowledge shared only with Morini.

Afterward, Johns politely shakes hands with Espinoza and Pelletier, then leaves with the nurse. Espinoza points out that Johns did not shake Morini’s hand at either the beginning or the end of the interview; Pelletier confirms that he noticed. Morini says nothing. The asymmetry of the exchange remains visible after its content has been concealed: Morini receives the private explanation, yet Johns withholds the ordinary gesture of a handshake from him. The visitors are escorted out and told that a car is waiting at the gate.

The morning after

The three return to Montreux and spend the night at the Hotel Helvetia. Although they initially decide not to go out, Espinoza later calls Pelletier because he is hungry, and the two men leave for food. Pelletier asks whether Espinoza has called Morini; Espinoza says that no one answered. They assume that Morini has gone to sleep.

The next morning, however, Morini is not in his room. The hotel clerk reports that the computer shows he settled his bill and left at midnight, while Pelletier and Espinoza were at dinner. Morini had come to reception and requested a car. The clerk cannot say where he went. The departure follows immediately after the private conversation with Johns, but the narrative does not state that the conversation caused it, explain Morini’s destination, or disclose what Johns told him. The visit’s outcome is thus a paired withholding: Johns’s answer remains unknown, and Morini’s whereabouts become unknown as well.