Jacopo Belbo’s apartment is the Milan refuge where Casaubon discovers the material traces of Belbo’s disappearance and begins to reconstruct the story of his last days. Its two rooms hold the evidence of an obsessive, solitary labor: a computer and boxes of disks amid crowded books, a neglected kitchen, and whiskey bottles. In this private space, Casaubon moves from uncertainty about Belbo’s fate to the files that will draw him deeper into the Plan they had invented together.

The key and the return

Belbo directs Casaubon to a desk drawer at the office, where an envelope contains two keys. The large key opens Belbo’s country house; the small one is for the Milan apartment. The distinction sends Casaubon to the city residence to read the material Belbo has left, rather than to the country house. Belbo has written on disks for three days and three nights, putting down what has happened during the month while Casaubon was away and he did not know whom else to tell. He asks Casaubon to read everything and decide for himself; the possibility that they might talk remains uncertain, since Belbo has no fixed hotel and says he will call if he can.

Casaubon goes to the office, retrieves the envelope and keys, and rushes to the apartment. This journey gives the room a double function: it is a home that Belbo has left behind, and the place where Casaubon must enter his friend’s account in order to understand the crisis. The apartment does not immediately settle what has happened. Rather, its contents make Belbo’s absence tangible before his files can explain it.

A domestic record of isolation

The apartment’s first evidence is sensory and domestic. The stale, rancid smell of cigarette butts hangs over ashtrays filled to the brim. Dirty dishes crowd the kitchen sink, the garbage bin is full of emptied cans, and three whiskey bottles stand empty on a study shelf, with only two fingers of whiskey left in a fourth. These details suggest an extended period of work without a break: Belbo has eaten only when he had to and has worked furiously, like an addict.

The scale of the space sharpens that impression. The apartment consists of two rooms, with books piled in every corner and shelves sagging under their weight. In the study, a table holds a computer, a printer, and boxes of disks. The work has not been carried out in some remote or grand setting; it has filled an ordinary, cramped home until daily life has nearly disappeared beneath it. The computer and disks are not merely equipment here. They are the means by which an absent man has left a record, and the center around which Casaubon’s encounter with that record unfolds.

Pictures, papers, and withheld intimacy

The room also contains visual traces that do not belong to the working apparatus. A few pictures occupy the small areas of wall and shelf not taken up by books. Directly opposite the computer table hangs a carefully framed seventeenth-century print, an allegory Casaubon realizes he had not noticed when he visited the previous month for a beer before leaving on vacation. Its presence makes the apartment’s past and present sit together: the print was already there, but only now, in the altered circumstances of Belbo’s disappearance, does Casaubon register it.

On the table lies a photograph of Lorenza Pellegrini. It shows only her face, but the look in her eyes unsettles Casaubon. He turns the photograph facedown in what he recognizes may be instinctive delicacy—or jealousy—and does not read the inscription written in a tiny, almost childish hand. The gesture both reveals and limits his access: he is searching Belbo’s private world, yet at this moment chooses not to read one of its most intimate objects. The photograph adds a personal trace to a room otherwise dominated by the evidence of work.

Folders at first yield only accounts and publishing cost estimates. Among those papers, however, Casaubon finds a printout of a file titled “Abu,” which appears from its date to be one of Belbo’s earliest word-processor experiments. The document recalls the early office history of Abulafia: Belbo’s childlike enthusiasm when the computer appeared, Gudrun’s muttering, and Diotallevi’s sarcasm. In the apartment, the named file leads from routine paperwork back to the machine and its longer history as part of the group’s work.

Reading the disks and reconstructing the story

Casaubon eventually breaks into Abulafia. At first, his success brings triumph rather than understanding: he dances, claps his hands, sings an old army song, washes his face, and begins printing the files. He prints them in reverse order, starting with the last things Belbo wrote just before his flight to Paris. As the printer works, Casaubon eats and drinks more whiskey. The act of retrieving the files is therefore not a quiet, detached inspection; it takes place amid the apartment’s existing evidence of excess, and it brings Belbo’s final days into the room through the printer’s output.

The documents leave Casaubon aghast. He cannot decide whether they disclose an extraordinary truth or amount to the ravings of a madman. That uncertainty is bound to the circumstances of their composition: Belbo, by his own account, wrote under exceptional conditions, surrounded by alcohol and tobacco, terror-stricken and cut off from the world for three days. Casaubon also has to measure what he knows of a man he had worked beside almost every day for two years against the instability of the account now before him. The apartment offers access to Belbo’s record, but not an easy guarantee that the record can be trusted.

The apartment as a narrative threshold

Casaubon later describes reading the story in Belbo’s apartment, then rereading it the following morning and during the flight to Paris. The physical room is thus the beginning of a reconstruction that continues beyond it: first in the apartment, then in the travel and recollection through which Casaubon tries to assemble what happened. His feelings change from disenchantment to pity to suspicion, while he wishes he could recover the earlier vacillation between mystical illusion and the sense of a trap. The apartment is where these competing interpretations first take shape around Belbo’s papers.

In retrospect, Casaubon frames what he found there as the story he had lived for twelve years, between whiskey at Pilade’s and the dust of Garamond Press. The apartment’s disorder is part of that larger history, not a self-contained explanation of it. Its rooms gather the people’s shared work into objects—keys, books, a print, a photograph, computer files—and then make Casaubon confront the difference between a Plan they constructed and the dangerous story Belbo believed he had to record. The apartment matters because it is at once a place of absence and an archive, the domestic threshold from which Casaubon begins to read the consequences of their invention.