Rodolfo Alatorre

Rodolfo Alatorre is a young Mexican writer living on a creative-writing scholarship in Toulouse, where his isolation and uncertain literary ambitions place him at the edge of the international Archimboldi circle. Though the established scholars initially brush him aside, an encounter with Piero Morini leads him into the chain of personal connections through which the vanished writer’s return becomes imaginable: Alatorre’s friend and mentor, Héctor Enrique Almendro, says he has met Archimboldi in Mexico City.

Identity and circumstances

Alatorre attends a Toulouse seminar on Archimboldi after a scattershot course of reading that includes the novelist’s work. He is trying, apparently without success, to write a modern novel, and lives in the city on a creative-writing scholarship. The seminar’s cosmopolitan literary community offers little comfort: the critics and specialists already know one another from previous conferences, while Alatorre faces the choice of returning to his dreary student room, where his books and papers await, or lingering among them as an outsider.

His literary position is marked by both ambition and vulnerability. He has written one novel and is planning another, and he sends long, single-minded emails about the work in progress to friends in Mexico City. In Toulouse, however, his circle is small: it includes a librarian, an Ecuadorian scholarship student he sees only occasionally, and a barman whose idea of Mexico strikes him as bizarre and offensive. The winter days seem short but endless, and his conversation with Morini turns repeatedly toward the melancholy of living far from home.

Rejection and encounter with Morini

Alatorre introduces himself first to Liz Norton and Manuel Espinoza, who quickly dismiss him, and then to Jean-Claude Pelletier, who ignores him. To Pelletier, Alatorre seems no different from the many irritating young European students who gather around the Archimboldi scholars. His inability to speak German further diminishes him in their eyes, making him seem disqualified before his literary promise can be considered.

Left with no place in the conference’s established social world, Alatorre stands in a corner, smiling around the room as if absorbed in thought. That posture brings him to notice Morini, who is confined to a wheelchair and responds distractedly to the greetings around him. Alatorre recognizes in Morini what seems to be a loneliness like his own. After they are introduced, the two go for a walk through Toulouse. Their conversation ranges from Mexican writers Alfonso Reyes and Sor Juana to Alatorre’s novels, the friends he has left in Mexico City, his life in France, and the weariness of isolation. The connection begins not through professional recognition but through a shared sense of forlornness.

News of Archimboldi

During the walk, Alatorre mentions, with what the narration describes as an innocent hint of clumsy boasting, that one of his friends in Mexico City has recently met Archimboldi. Morini is initially inattentive and assumes that Alatorre is bragging, mistaken, or unaware that Archimboldi disappeared long ago. Alatorre has read only two of the novelist’s works, but his modest familiarity is enough to deliver a claim with major consequences for the scholars’ understanding of the disappearance.

The friend is Héctor Enrique Almendro, an essayist, novelist, and poet in his forties, better known among his friends as El Cerdo, or the Pig. Alatorre’s account is that Almendro received a midnight telephone call in German, drove to a hotel near the Mexico City airport, and went with police to a third-floor room. There he found an old German sitting barefoot on the bed, dressed in a gray T-shirt and jeans, with uncombed hair, as if the police had interrupted his sleep. Almendro asked whether he was supposed to have disappeared; the old man answered with a polite smile. Alatorre thus conveys the encounter as a reported story, not as something he witnessed himself.

Mentorship and narrative role

Alatorre and Almendro have a teacher-student or older-brother-younger-brother relationship. Almendro secured the Toulouse scholarship for him, a choice that signals genuine regard: he could have arranged more prestigious scholarships or a cultural appointment in Athens or Caracas. Alatorre would have welcomed such an appointment, but he is grateful for the opportunity he received. He believes Almendro might be more generous to him next time, a small expectation that places literary patronage alongside the larger ambitions of his writing life.

Almendro is little known beyond Mexico City, though his name is familiar, even overly familiar, in the capital and at some American universities. When the European critics later call him, he confirms the essentials of Alatorre’s story to Espinoza. Asked how Archimboldi could have obtained his telephone number, Almendro guesses that it came from the German editor Mrs. Bubis, whom he had met at a Berlin party with German editors. Alatorre is therefore both a marginal young writer and the indispensable link that brings the news to the critics: his casual disclosure turns a lonely conversation in Toulouse into a possible lead on the disappeared author.