Montreux is a temporary meeting place and a threshold of separation in the critics’ story: Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, and Piero Morini travel there to visit Edwin Johns, but after the encounter Morini leaves without telling them where he is going. The town’s hotels and the secluded cottage near the mountains frame both a conversation about Johns’s self-amputation and the friends’ growing inability to reach Morini. In Morini’s nightmare, the name Montreux is only a possibility glimpsed from a window; the pool that takes over the dream is vast, dark, and empty of Liz Norton.

Setting and Approach

During the visit to Johns, Pelletier looks from the cottage window toward a city at the foot of the mountains. He wonders whether it is Montreux, but cannot be sure: the lake is not visible, and Espinoza thinks the houses belong to a different town. The view offers no firm orientation, fitting a journey whose destination is a private meeting rather than a public landmark.

The cottage itself is unexpectedly comfortable, with pine trees around it, rosebushes beside a low wall, armchairs, a fireplace, and a mixture of German, French, and English books. A computer and modem sit at a separate table, while a Turkish divan jars with the otherwise country-house furnishings. Yet the visitors’ attention gathers around the door. Morini watches it from his wheelchair until Johns arrives, making the cottage’s threshold the point on which the meeting depends.

The Visit to Edwin Johns

Johns enters with a nurse and notices Morini’s wheelchair. Morini, in turn, notices Johns’s missing right hand and the well-made artificial hand concealed at his jacket cuff. He introduces himself as a literature professor from the University of Turin and an admirer of Johns’s work, then presents Pelletier and Espinoza. Johns remains standing at first, shakes hands with the two visitors, and sits facing Morini, as though the conversation has narrowed to the two of them.

As dusk gathers, Pelletier quietly stops the nurse from turning on the light. The scene closes around small, sharply distinguished details: the nurse’s white shoes, Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s black ones, Morini’s brown ones, and Johns’s white running shoes. Johns finally says that he will explain why he did it and bends to speak into Morini’s ear. He later shakes hands with Pelletier and Espinoza, but not with Morini, either at the beginning or the end of their meeting. The explanation itself remains undisclosed to the others and to the reader in this episode; Morini says nothing afterward.

The Hotel and Morini’s Departure

The visitors return to Montreux and spend the night at the Hotel Helvetia. They are tired and initially decide not to go out, but Espinoza later calls Pelletier because he is hungry. Pelletier joins him, and asks whether he has tried Morini’s room. Espinoza says he called, but received no answer. They assume Morini is asleep.

The next morning Morini is gone. The hotel clerk reports that the computer records him as having settled his bill and left at midnight, while Pelletier and Espinoza were eating at an Italian restaurant. Morini had asked the reception desk for a car; the clerk does not know his destination. His departure is deliberate in its practical details, but unexplained to his friends, who had taken his silence for sleep.

Pelletier and Espinoza first check the hospitals in and around Montreux. Finding no trace of Morini there, they take the train to Geneva and call his apartment in Turin from the airport. The answering machine gives them no information, and they fly back to their own cities. For days they leave increasingly hopeless messages, call one another, and consider whether to return to Turin or notify the authorities. Concern for Morini’s mental health is weighed against their belief in his maturity and common sense; uncertainty keeps them from acting at once.

Dream, Absence, and Spatial Motifs

Near the end of 1996, Morini dreams that Norton dives into a pool while Pelletier and Espinoza play cards at a stone table with their backs to the water. The setting initially resembles an ordinary hotel pool, with parasols, deck chairs, and a park beyond it. Gradually the people leave through doors connecting the outdoor area, bar, and rooms until Morini is alone with the two card players. Pelletier appears to be winning, but Espinoza does not seem ready to concede. Morini has no playable cards; he draws four without looking and struggles to set his wheelchair in motion.

At the pool’s edge, its scale becomes impossible: Morini estimates it is at least a thousand feet wide and more than two miles long. The water is dark, with oily patches, and Norton is nowhere to be seen. He calls her name. The dream converts a familiar hotel amenity into an impassable expanse and makes Morini’s physical effort, the other men’s absorption in their game, and Norton’s absence part of one image. Elsewhere, Montreux is the real-world setting where Morini’s unexplained departure leaves Pelletier and Espinoza with unanswered calls; in the dream, the pool gives that separation a spatial form.