Unforgiving Years

IV. Journey’s End

THE PASSENGERS on the first ship to leave port the day after the end of a cataclysm in no way resemble the passengers escaping on the last ship… The refugees of the recent past carried the mark of defeat but also the joy of surviving in the middle of the storm. Some of them escaped with nothing but a shirt and a few papers, enriched — as well as ravaged — by ideas. Of another breed altogether were the two dozen passengers of the Swedish freighter Morgenstern (Morning Star). Outwardly, they belonged to a vanished or vanishing world, to a stable world impervious to apocalypses in which bank accounts, business deals, government ministries, compliant women, expensive liquors sufficed to make human existence bearable. A mix of businessmen and envoys, of women, middle-aged and younger — many of the latter sporting rank in various armies. One guessed the women had lovers doubly influential — in the bureaucracy and in semi-legal businesses… The gentlemen, frequently drunk, bandied stories about their times in Cairo, Bombay, Moscow, São Paulo, Ottawa, Tunis, or Sidney as though the globe of the earth were a ball for them to play with. They paid court to a chestnut-haired woman dressed in vibrant colors, who had been parachuted into Lombardy… Now the parachutist exhibited a coarse laugh, a worn-out voice, an athletic bust, and the inability to stand alone at the rail or suffer more than three minutes of conversation if it did not include open allusions to her femininity or valor.

Very different, this crowd, from the people at the front — or for that matter at the rear in the hospitals and shelters, in the railway stations and on the roads. As different as show dogs are different from the cringing, abandoned curs of blasted cities; as different as stallions on a stud farm from the sturdy ponies with matted coats and penetrating eyes patiently pulling an ambulance cart through the mud of the Ukraine under gray lowering clouds. “Domestic animals,” Daria reflected, “also participate in our sociology of iniquity, but they have no choice…” She was thinking too that the organization of today’s world has attained a perfection singularly hostile to men who suffer as well as to better men. The glaciers of the Himalayas, the jungles, deserts, and oceans have been conquered by motors more magical than any flying carpet; but this has not made escape, or the fulfillment of dreams, in any way easier. In order to cross borders, however fluid, you need to possess the mystic bureaucratic passwords of secret services and government stamps — those ridiculous, often sinister talismans; this magic can only be countered by the science of connections and checkbooks. Ordinary people — people, simply — can no longer move from one continent to another, as nineteenth-century emigrants used to do; neither flight nor discovery is open to them, neither enterprise nor mission. The pioneer life is denied them, although half the earth’s surface is waiting to be cleared… If Europeans were permitted to colonize the poles, Uganda, Rhodesia, the Ubanghi, the Matto Grosso, millions of eager daredevils would sign up with a fierce acquiescence — of which perhaps three-quarters would perish; still in a hundred years, the poles and the equator would be rich in scientists, philosophers, and artists, richer than golden-age Greece (which was an age of slavery). A cynical mystification presides over the captivity of peoples and individuals. The barriers against mobility are counterproductive, patently designed to be outwitted by their proper targets. These nets trap none but the anonymous irregular, the stateless refugee, the veteran of selfless struggles (for what could be more suspect than the generosity of idealists?), the fugitive from persecution whose papers were lost somewhere between a lake of blood and a penal colony, the good European thrilling to the call of distant lands, the Jew unnailed from his unimaginable cross. After the barracks of torture and humiliation, who wouldn’t appreciate a vista of palm trees over blue water? It should be an inalienable right… But the pillagers of the wrecks that were once sovereign states, the painted-over citizens of the sham democracies, the traffickers entrusted with profitable economic missions, the spies and the disinformation merchants, these by contrast know all the rules of the game. They fly at whim across the oceans as though the laws of mechanics and the strategic map of the world were theirs by rights (which they probably are). In this still-mysterious mutation of a civilization, it may be that such hybrid beings, their vitality all the more exacerbated in its final upsurge, will prevail for some time…

The freighter was making its way through the unstable element, cleaving the green seas. How many similar freighters and handsome steel submarines lay at the bottom? No one seemed to care… Daria was traveling on her last passport, her last money; outside every law, very possibly pursued, free, free! — but distraught. The last passport, as authentic as it was fake, delivered by her liaison officer, would within weeks be transformed (if it were not already) into a pass into deadly traps. The last dollars were barely sufficient to cover the expenses of this complicated journey, and would run out in three months. If she failed to locate D on the other side of the Atlantic, there was one final resort: a painless injection. Reassuring thought. Because, you see, there’s the philosophical “why live” and the concrete why (and how to) live; there’s the hunted individual, his unfailing will to live, his goals, infinitely greater than himself, his impasse at the end of a barren wasteland, his solitude there, the impossibility of scraping a hundred dollars together… Though not afraid of nothingness in itself, Daria felt unsettled by its approach, for she was delighting in being alive ever since the high seas had filled her lungs with bracing salt air and her senses and mind with an immense, intelligible poem. Suicide is often an act of vitality, and even — if it is not the result of neurosis — the act of a person who is powerfully attached to life. Eminent psychologists might dispute this, but only because they know nothing of the scientific experience of their colleagues who committed suicide in the ghettos… Daria clung to this argument, because she felt attached to too many things.

In a word, she was happy. The frenzied weeks of preparation, the lies she was forced to sow around her, the masks she had to wear, the sleepless nights, the crises of conscience in which true conscience played no part — usurped as it was by fear and a childish docility — all this was blown away by the sea air. She couldn’t stop smiling. Mr. Winifred, a businessman from Oslo, complimented her on her eyes: “They have the very hue of water at the crest of a wave…” “You’re being rather poetical,” she replied inanely, with a pointless laugh that made her look fifteen years younger — younger by one shipwrecked revolution, several descents into hell, and a universal war. Mr. Winifred said there was a poetry of destiny in business; that he had begun to write a play when he was twenty, that he would visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Was it Shakespearian, your early drama?” “No… Closer to Ibsen.” He relished the opportunity to pronounce, for the benefit of the traveler with the eyes (that was it! Ibsen eyes!), a roster of potent names: Brancusi, Archipenko, Chagall, Henry Moore — the very latest in ultramodern moderns, and you’ll never guess the sums they go for! Mr. Winifred confided that, thanks to the war, art was acquiring new value. “I dare say it is,” exclaimed Daria warmly, “a profound value of creation and reconciliation…” Mr. Winifred listened distractedly to things said by women. He was listening to himself. Pillaging had given rise to a black market of minor masterpieces; under the auspices of this trade, the production of forgeries registered an unexpected increase; and some forgeries are themselves masterpieces! The Latin American market lapped up everything indiscriminately, for newly acquired or expanded wealth appreciates old masters and dependable moderns. Mr. Winifred, a specialist in the minerals trade, was expanding for pleasure his collection of mostly religious works from Eastern Europe. Under the Nazi occupation, old families were forced to sell their heirlooms, while representatives of the Great Reich conducted a roaring trade in the spoils of confiscation. Knowledgeable dealers combed the terrain from the mouth of the Danube to the Baltic, swiping the aristocracy’s every precious icon, seventeenth-century portrait, landscape, and battle scene. The treasures of the old worlds are being carried away in the deluge, to the profit of the quick-witted denizens of the new world — a thought that made Mr. Winifred smile slyly, for he was of the new world, and nothing if not quick-witted.

Mr. Ostrowieczki joined them from the bar, and the three of them leaned their elbows on the iron rail over the heavy, lava-slow seas. Mr. Ostrowieczki, an engineer on a government mission, had a broad, pale, fleshy face, a shaved scalp in the Russian style, a taciturn disposition, and pearl-gray irises so pale that they sometimes seemed white. Daria disliked him and he ignored her, preferring to flirt (like a bear in a tweed jacket) with a member of the Women’s Corps of an army that had covered itself in glory. The notion of the wealth of the old and new worlds merging under the pressure of merciless events provoked in him laughter more sarcastic than porcine. His tiny pearly pupils contemplated the waves as he said — congenially, for he too was half drunk — ”Ha! Ha! Lots of artworks will be drowned, not that it matters to me. It’s only old art perishing…” Daria felt a secret jolt. “What do you mean?” she demanded point-blank. “Old feudal art, old religious art, old bourgeois art… I am an engineer, Madame, and for me there’s nothing more beautiful than a turbine.” Daria threw him a sharp look which unsettled him. “The wind is coming up,” he went on, “how about something to warm us up, below?” Daria acquiesced. The technocrat’s bare, high cranium preoccupied her. She was all too familiar with this summary ideology, these doctrines set in polished stone — invented during the age of Einsteinean relativity! Mr. Ostrowieczki avoided speaking to her again, wisely, for she would have found him out. In the mess, they played gramophone records while the sunset glowed through the window frames like a memory of horizons set on fire.

How easy it had become not to question herself about anything without blaming herself for egotism! The vastness of the waves filled the terrestrial half of space; the rocking of the world lulled the soul into a sleepy sense of liberation… Daria mingled sociably, to the point where a lady drew her aside and prayed to be allowed to divine the secrets of her palm. Its lines spelled a shattered destiny (hardly difficult to read, in the palms of our time!). “Ah, my dear! If only you would dare speak to me openly! And you could, I assure you, for I understand every sin, every crime…”

“Do you see many crimes in my hand?” Daria asked curiously.

“Heavens, no! I didn’t say that! I didn’t say anything of the sort, now did I?”

The lady was a young fifty, reading a Charlotte Brontë novel; she was petite, carefully made up, decorated with several ribbons of merit; she was on her way to join her husband, a civil servant posted in the West Indies. (There are dozens of islands in the West Indies, however the lady didn’t name hers.)

“Yes, you did, you were talking about crimes.”

“Oh dear, I didn’t really mean that at all… You’re so nice, so reserved, so silent…”

“Are those the marks of criminality? Or of capital sins?”

“Perhaps,” the lady replied. “To each his marks… Look at that black bird, there, following the ship… Isn’t it romantic?”

A solitary bird alone in the middle of the ocean was “romantic” indeed. For the second time, Daria felt pangs of foreboding; but then dismissed them, charmed by the gentle rocking of the waves and rediscovering through it a love for all things, a deliverance. Daria pushed her anxieties aside. “We’ll see when we arrive.” Everything was simple, in reality; the little social menagerie on board, elementary; Daria did not think she was being followed.

She had to keep moving to economize her dollars. The American cities she glimpsed might well have struck her with awe, had she not settled into a contented torpor, with no other lucidity than the practical — tensed toward the goal… This giant civilization, these vertical cities where the pedestrian feels insignificant, sees himself numberless, suddenly realizes that the real world is his and that nothing is his since he himself is nothing… An atom is all and nothing in the universe; these crowds, so well dressed, so busy, so cheerful, so callous… Atoms are unaware of themselves and unaware of each other, even in the densest steel… Daria kept moving. Mr. Winifred said hello to her on Broadway; hours later, Mr. Ostrowieczki was standing ten feet from her in the subway, though he did not see her. These chance collisions of atoms were enough to make her tremble. The traveler took obsessive precautions, vanished into elevators, fled, alone, quickstep down corridors on sixtieth floors and at one point looked down on the prodigious stalagmite city from a rooftop terrace: this was the wide gateway to a continent into which all of unfortunate Europe would pour if it could… The sky and the sea were as gray as tears. If the shaved head of Mr. Ostrowieczki had chosen that moment to appear on her crag of reinforced concrete, Daria would have vaulted the parapet and dropped into the vast human emptiness. Alone among the rain-swept pedestrians, she felt herself buoyed by an enthusiasm that was stronger than despair. The power of mankind rivaled that of the ocean. All that was needed was to heal mankind…

She saw plains, the empire of wheat; at the smallest bus terminals, the restrooms were luxuriously clean; the newspapers ran to forty pages, offering comfort-enhancing gadgets at bargain prices (sums which elsewhere would represent years of toil or self-denial), the opulence of standardized apparel, the hum of classified ads alongside detailed reports on the famines and massacres which were the dreary staple of other continents… That this could appear normal, acceptable to one who had just changed hemispheres, was disconcerting; but no more mysterious, perhaps, than the physical well-being of a people emerging from the home where someone very dear, someone very great, someone irreplaceable has just died after a long and painful agony… Or was it evidence of total absurdity? Of the irreparable disequilibrium of our souls thirsty for justice, fairness, kindness — concepts alien to the gyrations of oceans and planets? But would there be oceans and planets without equilibrium, necessary rhythm, and musical harmony? What would intelligence, what would pity be, divorced from the quest for a luminous equilibrium expressed by the stars themselves, the structure of molecules, the graceful proportions of a bridge flung over a river? Several times, on buses racing along sleek highways, laundry flapping from the upper stories of tenements, Daria had to hold herself in to keep from laughing and crying, inconceivably happy, suppressing her angry distress, and finding within herself only a childish answer: “They’re alive! Alive! It’s splendid how millions of people are alive while…”

All she had to pin her hopes on were two addresses in the United States. If both of these spider threads broke, what then? Then nothing! Having preserved them in her mind for years, she now fretted over the accuracy of her recall until one morning her memory was a blank. It was only to tease herself, for they were also written down: in code in a notebook and plain but scrambled in the double sole of a shoe. The first, in Brooklyn, had already been ruled out — a wisp of smoke long since dispelled into the steaming plumes of New York. She was all the more happy, if the state of tragic, spellbound euphoria in which she moved could be called happiness. “I consent to my disappearance…” No one needs me over here, I very nearly no longer need myself. To disappear in a world where nothing could disappear, where a suicide’s gunshot was equal in insignificance to the striking of a match, to disappear into this outpouring of plethoric energy might be a bitter outcome, yet not altogether desperate.

None of this slowed her down. The second address led Daria to a small town in Virginia and to a white colonnaded porch that reminded her of the dachas of small Russian landowners in the old days, in Chekhov’s time. She pressed the bell as blithely as a gambler throwing the dice for the last time, nearly certain of losing, having lost everything. A colored butler let her into a vestibule which was overbright, overdecorated, apparently purposeless. The thread is about to break, everything is meaningless. Daria inquired after a certain lady, but instead of answering her: “Nothing left for you but suicide, Ma’am, in approximately four weeks…” the black man inquired, “Are you expected, Ma’am? Whom shall I announce?”

I’m completely unexpected and don’t announce anyone! “Just a minute,” Daria said. She got out her notebook, wrote “D sent me,” and slipped the page into an envelope. “Please give this to the lady of the house…” Good domestics never betray surprise. A woman with over-dyed red hair received her immediately in a small sitting room cluttered with cushions and floral arrangements. Visibly flustered, she was crumpling Daria’s note in one hand while the other plucked nervously at the blue beads of her necklace. Her pupils were enlarged by as if by fright.

“What do you want from me? Who are you?”

“Please forgive my turning up like this… There’s no danger.”

“And who is this D? I don’t know any D.”

What a stupid lie, Daria nearly said aloud. You must know several names beginning with D… Just stupidity. “You’re my prisoner,” Daria thought spitefully, for she hated the cushions, the bouquets, the showy lampshade… The woman tore up the envelope and its contents, brushing the pieces into an ashtray. “You’d be wiser to burn them,” Daria advised hypocritically. Her hostess was pink and blowsy, a shapely little gourmande.

“If you didn’t know D, you wouldn’t have invited me in. There’s nothing to fear, at least not from me… You’ve got his instructions. All I need is his address.”

“This is ridiculous! It’s a mistake! Who are you?”

Daria, as if looking for something, opened the leather-bound book she held pressed against her bag: Leaves of Grass.

“Ah,” her hostess said, her face clearing, “you’re reading Whitman?”

Never, perhaps nowhere, did the poet of “Salut au Monde!” ever dispel such dark suspicions as he did then. The two women looked at each other simply. “Actually, I’ve been out of touch with him for years…” said the red-haired lady. “Take this down. He’s in Mexico… Throw the address away when you’ve memorized it…”

The spider’s thread had held against the storms of earth and history! “I don’t have to write it down,” said Daria, “my memory is good.” She tried to spark a contact. “So is yours, I dare say…” — meaning, we are alike somewhere, we know what no one can know or understand without having ventured down certain dark pathways…

“Are you going to join him?” asked the auburn lady, confidentially.

“Yes.” “For the same reasons?” “Could there be others?” The two women felt that the passing years diminished the reasons for assassination. The red-haired woman took Daria’s dry hands between her satiny palms. A current of intimacy shot between them. The woman began to speak in a low, feverish voice: “How terrible the world is… I used to believe with all my heart and soul… Don’t mention me to him, I’m of no interest now. Do you need funds? Are you sure? Really and truly? Are you sure you haven’t been followed by… by anyone?” “As sure as I can be…” “Well, if ever… you’ll say you only know me from Paris, from the Sorbonne. I’m so scared… !”

“Scared of what?” Daria said casually, not really asking. She shrugged her shoulders, suddenly withdrawn, overcome with distaste for the expensive comfort of the room, the heavy drapes, the Skye terrier that trotted in twitching its ears. What would be so scary if you lost your cozy decorations, your husband or lover or both, if even you found yourself in jail, Madame? The contact was broken. The woman saw Daria to the door. Outside, cars slid over the damp pavement. Tall yellow trees arched elegantly over the avenue; politely inclining their branches, natural conformists, they appeared to following the autumn fashion; the homes spaced at intervals amid shrubberies looked as blandly identical as the different guests at a dinner party.

At the corner of the drive, a young woman was leaning against the door of her car. Had Daria done more than register her without seeing her, she might have detected in this American girl’s eyes the impassioned gaze of her own twentieth year. But Daria only noticed a gray suede jacket, the cut of which she appreciated. The thing we least recognize in the eyes of others is the flame of our own youth…

The white floor of clouds ripped open like magic disclosing sun-gilded hills, the whole living map tilted beneath the plane, a city spread around pink cathedrals, marooned in the arid land — a city like nowhere else on earth, drowsy with sunset, flushed as the sunset, fringed by the desert, abandoned to the sweetness of existence… Donkeys laden with heavy baskets stepped delicately down streets of earth between pastel-washed walls. Windows framed by wrought iron, awnings sloping over narrow sidewalks… Old cobblestones, and every door gave onto another sculpted door, holding back a mass of greenery. Enchanted city. The meat displayed on the counter at the back of a shadowy butcher’s shop exuded a charm of dark blood: the butcher’s shop was called the Flower of Paradise. A small black-haired boy was carrying Daria’s suitcase on his shoulder. He might have been a dark angel, an un-washed cherub with tough little muscles and a little heart that was very violent, very pure… Humble and proud: so must the angels be, who walk on earth as Indian children.

The large rectangular plaza was strung with white bulbs, span-gling the blue translucence as though for a fete of long ago. Stately trees loomed over it, and above them rose the old towers of the cathedral, bathed in a fading radiance that would never wholly fade, it was so pure, so richly infused with the expiring colors of the sky. A chattering broke out as legions of wings, excited by some infinitesimal disturbance, described an aerial arc from one canopy to the next… Cheap bars turned on a rainbow of lights which did not clash with the sunset. Brown heads floated aureoled in wide pale sombreros, black hair cascaded over young girls’ shoulders. Barrows of fruits and sweets trundled by, like displays of massive gems formed by the genius of color itself for caressing the eye… In front of a rudimentary grill heaped with dark organ meats glistening with grease, three hatless men stood in a row. All three curiously shapeless; the first olive-faced, the second lemon-faced, and the last with a solemn death’s-head perched on his neck; violet glints fell as three pairs of sticks flew up and down the wooden keyboard of the marimba and crystalline music poured out. The little dark angel glanced longingly at the marimba. Daria signaled him to stop. They listened for a moment, the visitor from another world of cruelty and the Indio child caked up to the eyes in dirt — to wide eyes as dark as agate, as expressionless as polished agate. The music cradled a canoe floating invisible among festoons of creepers, long ghostly lizards lay in wait beneath tepid waters in darkness… “What’s your name?” Daria asked the dirty angel, to break the spell. “Jesús Sánchez Olivares, at your service.” She heard only his first name of Jesús. Listen to the music of innocence, Jesús, if you can… The boy added in dignified tones, “You may call me Chucho, Señora” — that being the diminutive of Jesús. When the music stopped, Chucho produced a copper coin from a pocket of his torn pants and put it into a musician’s hand.

Daria avoided the tourist hotel, repulsed perhaps by the frigid glance of a blond traveler who stood smoking at the entrance, his Leica dangling on his chest… “Not these creatures, no no no…” “Well then,” proposed Chucho, “I can take you to Don Saturnino’s hostelry…” Where better to spend one’s first night in Mexico than under the roof of Don Saturnino? “It’s clean, and much cheaper,” the boy told her. “So you’re not an American?” “No, I’m not” — but she didn’t say what she was.

The majestic door of the Casa de Huéspedes opened onto a little blue alley which wandered off toward a mountainscape resembling a cloud-covered sea. The lighted patio was nothing less than a green fairyland of tall plants. A fountain whispered. Under the mysterious seclusion of archways, a bare bulb lit what must have been the laundry area: two dark-skinned girls were slowly moving about there, one dressed in beetle-wing green with a glint of red, the other in nuptial white. They appeared as the sacred spirits of this place, but they were simple servants, busy with the ironing.

The voyager found herself face-to-face with an idol standing out against a background of huge green leaves; it was surely very old, made of a gray porous volcanic stone. The hero or god was squatting on his heels, hands on knees, forgetful of movement. Its head was girded by an intricate diadem. The massive face, as large as the torso, was stark, attentive, abstract. “The god of silence,” Daria decided, “the only one of the ancient gods we should think about resurrecting…” The god seemed to answer her: “You are welcome here, Señora.” It was the guttural voice of Don Saturnino, who indeed looked very like the god but with a clipped white mustache, earthy wrinkled skin, two gold teeth, and a short white jacket stitched with green arabesques. He was totally incurious about her. The names and papers of his guests concerned him no more than their itineraries. He sprinkled his laconic remarks with a bueno, bueno that implied nothing in particular; mentally continuing his game of dominoes with Don Gorgono, he quickly sized up this undemanding pilgrim, not rolling in dollars, harmless, one of those forlorn ladies who often retire to a pueblo, to collect the local pottery and write — or not — a book… He showed her to a spacious room covered in tiles, opening directly onto the patio. “The shower is here, Señora.” A tiny light was burning beneath a votive picture of the Virgin in glory. The air was cooled by a breeze like a clear pond.

Daria had her broth, chicken, and rice served to her beside a spindly bush, some of whose leaves were green and others bright red… Don Saturnino ambled over for a smoke. He had the head of a marvelously human, friendly chimpanzee, penetrated with a peculiar intelligence. His straight white hair was cut short. He looked at the voyager with eyes both sunny and remote, as though to say: I have nothing to say to you, but your presence pleases me; I see many things in you that do not concern me. Pleasant cool of the evening! Daria spoke first.

“Your country is very beautiful,” she said.

“Verdad? It’s a magnificent country, Señora, an opulent country…” (Don Saturnino made no attempt to conceal his pride.) “And yet so backward! A country of much poverty, as you will see… Are you planning to visit the Lagoon?”

“I am,” Daria said, startled.

“From here you can only go to the Lagoon, and no farther than San Blas…”

Daria repressed a shudder: San Blas was her goal (just beyond San Blas).

“Are there many ruins around here?” (She knew from the guidebook that there were.)

“We live on top of ruins, Señora. But there are not so many in these parts. The pyramids of Isla Verde, you can reach them by boat from El Águila… And up in the sierra behind San Blas there is Las Calaveras, the Skulls, an ancient altar of sacrifice. Many thousands of years old.”

(According to the books, these Aztec, or Toltec, or other ruins were at most a thousand years old. But here, in the everyday strangeness of this courtyard, exact chronologies — always a chimera — counted for very little. One was closer to the time scheme of rocks, of plants, than to historical time calculated by learned men…)

“Thousands of years,” Daria echoed, entranced.

Don Saturnino liked a woman who was attracted by the centuries. He remembered his youth, and his eyelids crinkled. He said, “I fought for the revolution here, in my country. We made a good stand at Isla Verde, on top of the pyramids…”

“So, you fought for the revolution too,” went vaguely through her mind.

“Bueno, bueno,” went on Don Saturnino. “There’s a tourist at the Hotel Gloria, he’s traveling in a very fine car… a Mr. Brown. Perhaps you could arrange with him? Our buses are so poor, Señora.”

“What tourist? Do you know him? Where is he going?”

The genial brown face dimmed. “He is an American. I saw him in the plaza. He has a fine car… I like horses better, horses are intelligent…” Daria explained that she wished to travel alone, at her own speed. “I understand. Bueno… Good night, Señora…” Don Saturnino went to lock the outside door with a big, old-fashioned key. Some of the bush’s leaves were a beautiful red, the color of fresh blood, of dark blood, of pink blood. It was a nochebuena, “Tree of the Blessed Night.”

Even on a good map, San Blas figured as nothing more than an insignificant circle marked on an ocher stain between the shore of the lake and the hatching of the sierra; no roads passed through, no trace of an Indian settlement. The lake spread out among wooded hills, but here was only rock and sky. The end of the world — in this part of the world. The automobile road ran along the Laguna, passed through the mountain village of Pozo Viejo — Old Well — descended toward San Blas, then cut at right angles away from it. The dotted line of a track seemed to follow the shoreline farther, petering out after a few miles… Bruno and Noémi Battisti were probably living at that spot. From the city to San Blas it was a good five hours by bus. The guidebook discouraged expeditions in that direction: there were no first-class hotels, no unusual fiestas, no famous landmarks, no indigenous crafts to speak of, nothing but harsh mountains, the Indian earth, the ancient race, unembellished… The map brought a smile of reminiscence to Daria’s lips. Far north of the Trans-Siberian, beyond Lake Baikal, the maps would look much like this one, highways bordering desert lands, and the guidebook, if there was one, would inform of another Isla Verde: “On Green Island stands a tumulus attributed to the Reindeer Civilization…” There, too, the years are counted in the thousands. Under a wan Nordic sun, the solitude might be broken by a sinister encounter with a penitentiary work brigade… Special travel permits would be required… Even more essential, a special armor for the heart, to guard against pity. No Trees of the Blessed Night, only dour, rugged conifers, planted along the slopes like a mounting crowd, an austere motionless army, endlessly measuring the harsh grandeur of existence… Earth, our mother, your deserts are sisters.

On the roads around Samarkand you would ride buses much like this one. Now discolored by dirt, scratches, and dents, it had once been blue. The skins of the men and women who traveled in it were bronzed, burned, golden, coppery, ashen, mirroring the hues of sun-soaked boulders and composted earth, revealing the mix of bloods. The taciturn watchfulness of their eyes, the power of their muscles, their human indigence approached the animal — as did their natural nobility. Their antique Asian faces were pleas-ant — more closed than pleasant. Silver crosses on strands of coral beads hung over white embroidered blouses (loose blouses, similar to the smocks worn by Komi women in the upper Volga…). The driver was a frizzy-headed, negroid athlete dressed in a pink shirt; an image of the Virgin and a profusion of ex-votos composed of nuts and miniature revolvers filled most of his visual field. Instead of forty passengers, the heroic rattletrap took on seventy, plus their hens, turkeys, cats, and a fighting cock. A brown child slept in Daria’s lap; beside her the mother suckling an infant, her swollen breasts as matt as sunbaked clay; she must have been about fif-teen, and crossed herself at every pothole like an old woman. So much sweaty flesh, soiled whiteness, patient breathing, and resignation filled the bus that Daria saw little of the ruddy incandescence of the countryside… “San Blas!” The frizzy-haired driver helped two passengers down, a centenarian native woman and the foreigner. The engine hiccupped once and the bus was gone. Balancing her baskets, the old Indian woman was already climbing the slope, following an invisible path between outcrops singed with rust; her bare feet gripping the stones like a faun’s. She plodded steadily on, bent double, toward a bare, gray summit under the reddening sky. When she vanished between the boulders, the solitude was for a moment total.

“Journey’s end,” thought Daria.

She also thought of snakes: of the graceful snakes that must lie coiled everywhere unseen in the rocky wilderness, of the huge stylized serpents of these people’s ancient art, of serpents of fire, serpents of night.

All of a sudden two dark children dressed in white rags materialized in front of her. They pounced on her suitcase. One said, “To Don Gamelindo’s,” since clearly the stranger could be going nowhere else along this stony path, indiscernible at first, then lined with wild nopals, bristling with thorns, pathetically twisted… The path forked toward tumbledown walls. And Don Game-lindo’s store appeared in the corner of a small rustic plaza: arcades, tall trees outlined against the sunset, baroque church set apart on a crest overlooking the lake… Daria had no time to appreciate all of it, so quickly did the night come down. An electric bulb cast a desiccated glare across the store. The counter, the ropes, the candles, the piles of shoes, the rolls of cloth, the bottles were immersed in emptiness and silence… The dark eyes of a thin-necked nocturnal child peered out from beneath tangled hair but said nothing. They seemed to be the eyes of motionless things. Don Gamelindo appeared at Daria’s back, seemingly from nowhere. He moved without making a sound. “Buenas noches, what do you want?” Thickset, unshaven, in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, with a paunch sagging over his belt and a holster on his hip. His complexion was pale, his small greenish eyes shifted watchfully between puffy lids. Daria explained that she was looking for the plantation of Don Bruno Battisti. Even as she spoke, she felt a sensation of total uselessness. Nothing could exist for her here: no past, no present, no continuity and no tomorrow, no questions and no answers. She herself would cease to exist in the eyes of anything that might be knowable. She nearly said, dreamily, “Where are the snakes?” A hostile land, sharp rocks, aggressive plants, oppressive silence, a night for a disappearance. Don Gamelindo answered, “Yes, La Huerta.”

As he studied her — if indeed he was taking the trouble to study her — he seemed to be waiting for the silence to complete its work of destruction.

“But you can’t go to La Huerta tonight. You must spend the night in San Blas.”

“Where?”

“At my place.”

He barricaded the street door. A raw smell of tanned hides filled the air. Don Gamelindo’s hairy pink hand protected a candle from the dead breeze. They crossed a large, dark courtyard under a ceiling of stars. “In there.” Daria obeyed, like a prisoner. She ducked into a whitewashed room containing a prisoner’s pallet, a stool, an earthenware jug, and an altar to the Virgin where he placed the candle. The door of disjointed planks was secured only by a hook and a nail. The candle shed an amazing light.

“No danger at my house,” said Don Gamelindo. “Sleep well. God protect you.”

As he left, he added, ceremoniously: “Don Bruno is my friend. I’ll take you to him tomorrow.”

His friend? Sacha, the man of ardent ideals — what a strange friend for him to have! “Thank you,” said Daria. “Good night.”

She was not offered anything to eat. She drank some cool water from the jug and walked around the yard. The ocean of constellations sparkled sharply. Shooting stars darted between immobile stars. The Milky Way lay like a blurred serpent across the heavens. A murmur rose from the lake, the croaking of toads grew louder, coyotes howled intermittently in the distance. The complaint of silence. Suddenly Daria was faced with a shadowy beast — hairy, bulky, humble. A tiny speck of light, like a fixed star of infinitesimal size, pinpointed the mule’s eye. Comforting presence… Daria rubbed her fist over its warm withers.

“Well, well,” she said to herself, “here we are, saved; here we are, completely lost…”

Almost the same silence as in Kazakhstan, and almost the same firmament; but Daria recognized none of the constellations.

“All the pages of life are torn out…” The fullness of the night remained.

Out early into the yard, Daria renewed contact with a splendidly simple world. Purple sprays of bougainvillea poured over the broken walls. A thicket of menacing nopals — fleshy green — bristled vehemently, and they bore bulbous flowers of a delicate red. A yellow campanile rose above its surround of tall trees, hairy with creepers trailing from every branch. The brightness of the morning was expanding into a vivid symphony of color that promised to intensify almost beyond endurance after this hour of exquisite softness. A monumental joy — not of living, more primordial than that; of existing — conjoined earth and sky in the embrace of the light. Naked toddlers with bulging bellies scattered at the sight of the foreigner brushing her hair at the door of her room.

Don Gamelindo was a different man by day. “Can you ride a horse?” “Oh yes…” Now he seemed reduced to a pair of stumpy legs supporting a disproportionate stomach, with the aid of a belt pulled up from his crotch to his hips. On his holster was incised the round face of the Aztec sun god, with forked tongue stuck out. On his head was a tall white conical hat worn horizontally just over his eyes. His small features, modeled out of the rosy clay of his flesh, were marred by countless small pockmarks. He was laughing to himself, exposing rotten teeth; a friendly effusiveness animated his sly green eyes without relaxing their vigilance. Daria realized that he found her attractive, as had Don Saturnino. “¡Gracias a Dios todopoderoso! Thanks to God Almighty!” he said, thanking the Creator for this morning’s welcome distraction.

Once or twice a year, female American tourists drove up to San Blas in their heavy motorcars, flounced into the store, asked for Coca-Cola, refused to drink from glasses that had been washed in the pure water of the well, drank out of silly paper cups. How stuck-up those fair-haired women were, like their well-groomed dogs who warily sniffed our half-coyote mongrels — so reliable in dangerous situations — from a cautious distance. Don Gamelindo quadrupled his prices. The tourists snapped their cameras at the church, the naked children, the view over the lake… The women’s tight slacks flattered their rumps indecently, so that the village elders were of two minds about allowing these women dressed as men into the church. A wise man carried the day (in favor, there being dollars at stake) with the argument that “since trousers on a woman is the Devil’s doing, let it be the Devil’s business to roast her in the next world.” (All the same, the equestrian statue of St. James the Sword-bearer was kept covered up in the presence of slacks, for he is easily piqued and quite capable of retaliating with a wave of drought or smallpox…) How different was this woman, in her sandals, plain black skirt, white top, and broad-brimmed Indian hat; how different her muscular arms and erect carriage, her face, still young but aging already; the calm severity of that face! Don Gamelindo guessed that she was unlikely to believe in God (may He forgive her), was not especially rich, and had known many men without becoming soiled; some women are like that, like horses caked in lather and the dust of the road, who emerge from the lake cleansed, so noble of form, so glowing with sunshine that you feel proud of them and proud of yourself.

The horses trotted down a narrow lane of emerald green. It could have been the entrance to a labyrinth of vegetation. On both sides tall, rigid cacti raised airy walls traversed by light and breeze, bristling on every side with nasty spines… Planted this way, these órgano cacti were used to fence-in yards. The stony soil was red as rust. There was to be no labyrinth; the countryside opened out, or rather the desert, surrounded in the distance by a broken line of glinting arid peaks… Makeshift crosses leaned here and there by the side of the track. Don Gamelindo remarked, “Our ‘little dead.’ All in the prime of youth. Quick little bullet, quick little death. Youth must have its day, verdad?”

The graves took up very little space under the brilliance of the morning sun. To their left shone the Lagoon, like a sheet of quicksilver.

“It’s not like this in your country, Señorita?” inquired Don Gamelindo, easy and heavy in the saddle, barely remembering back to when he was young himself, lying in wait at sundown behind these rocks to settle family scores with the Menéndezes… He was a better shot than any of them, shooting only when he was sober, whereas they would drink before an ambush, boasting that mezcal sharpened their eyesight. Big mistake. “May God forgive them!” The tombs of the three Menéndezes — Felipe, Blas, and Tranquilino — had long since disappeared, and in the mind of their now-respectable assassin the memory of those treacherous Sunday evening gunfights had become depersonalized into a tale of manly murder among others… Folks nowadays are going soft, there are too many laws, the slightest brawl makes headline news because reporters — ¡Hijos de puta! — need to earn their tortillas and greasy refried beans… Don Gamelindo jogged along, lively yet unhappy to be growing old in an aging world… In some faraway land, for a woman like this — and young! — a few skulls must lie buried by the side of the road… This thought made him swivel gracefully in the saddle toward the woman riding behind him.

“In my country,” Daria answered, “there was the war… And if, in my country, we were to plant little crosses by the wayside for every murder victim, they would spread over the immensity of the continent to the horizons, to the pole…” Even at this image, Daria remained smiling, because her joy — trotting through these spaces of pure barrenness, pure sunlight — was stronger than all else, was pure.

Don Gamelindo encouraged his mount with a soft cluck of the tongue.

“I heard about that,” he said. “The war between the Jews and the Nazis. War is impious. God preserve us from wars and revolutions, eh, Señorita?”

By luck, Daria’s horse made a bound forward, so she didn’t have to answer him.

The sierra was becoming more and more torrid; the lake gleamed like molten metal in a crucible. They rode through the fiery monotony without talking, without thinking, without dreaming, with no sensation other than the furnace above them. The plantation came into view, an oasis of green. They entered the enclosure, a wall of rough stones. They saw a man in white standing under a cluster of big, smooth-barked trees nearly bare of leaves but sprouting white flowers. Hands on hips, he was overseeing the work of two half-naked Indians as they shoveled earth from a trench. From behind Daria’s eyes floated the memory of an illustration from a childhood book or perhaps a propaganda manual: “The Planter and His Slaves.” The planter turned toward them. He raised a hand in greeting. A floppy palm-fiber hat obscured much of his face. Not until they were three steps apart did Sacha and Daria recognize each other, and the look they exchanged was so fraught with apprehension that they had to feign joy at seeing each other, force themselves to smile while shaking hands as though they had parted the day before. The presence of Don Gamelindo, far from being an encumbrance, made it easier for both of them to put the right face on things.

Bruno Battisti’s first thoughts were: Why is she here? To kill me? Unlikely after all these years. I sank into obscurity, I kept quiet. To escape herself? Then she’s probably being followed. Women are never rational enough about covering their tracks. It’s her they’ll be after, but they’ll throw us in for free. Nothing could be easier, in this place… Accustomed to ordinary, everyday dangers, but long out of the habit of those mysteriously organized threats that close in out of nowhere to ensnare you, he shuddered. “Is it really you?” he said to Daria. “What a happy surprise…” “Sacha, I’ve run away,” Daria whispered, aware of his fears, yet ecstatic — as if a cup of joy, downed in one draft, was going to her head. “Don’t look at me like that, there’s nothing to be afraid of…” (Not that assurances made any difference!) His gray eyes brightened the way they used to. He shrugged his shoulders; older, stronger, sunburned.

“That’s magnificent, my friend. Here you’ll be safe. Life. The desert. See how beautiful it is.”

From the height of his velvet-and-silver-decorated saddle, Don Gamelindo, framed in sunlight and by looming green shrubbery, smiled down at them like a grinning Chinese mask. To Daria, back in her picture book, he was the image of their master: “The Foreigner, the Planter, and the Great Cacique.” Banana trees bent their fronds over tumescent fruit. Coffee bushes climbed the slopes. At the end of the avenue of greenery appeared a plain white house surrounded by slender palms. “Please, don’t say anything upsetting in front of Noémi. She’s very vulnerable,” said Bruno Battisti.

“Please dismount, Don Gamelindo, and come see my improvements! We’re piping water in, and building a reservoir…” All that could be seen of the two men digging the trench was their bronze backs, gleaming with perspiration. Spadefuls of ferrous earth, as if tinged with blood, landed noiselessly at the horses’ feet. Daria, in her sad ecstasy, thought of a grave. An Indian led the horses away. Don Gamelindo was saying, “You should finish that reservoir. The rains are coming and the earth is parched. There were clouds over El Águila just now… A good sign.”

He crushed tender coffee leaves between his fingers and smelled them, raising a connoisseur’s eyebrow.

“Healthy plant, that, and the right species of Uruapan… Did you hear, Don Bruno, about what happened at Pozo Viejo the other week? Basilio Tronco killed young Alejo Reyes… That’s more trouble in the making. The Troncos have sent a calf to the chairman of the town council.”

“Ah,” said Bruno simply.

“And in San Blas, the youngest Álvarez girl has got engaged to the son of the lawyer Carbajo. You’re invited to the fiesta.”

“Please thank them for me. I’ll do my best to attend.”

Don Gamelindo took a moment to reflect on what further news was worth sharing.

“Yes… Sunday’s cockfight, you know old Tigre, well he killed the other one in seven minutes flat. I was eleven pesos the richer for it! I knew to bet on the old bruiser, even if he’s only got one eye. He’s crafty, that’s what it is. Not a cock to match him in the country. The loser was Dorado, Don Arnulfo’s little strutter. Evil-tempered, I always said so, but no good at pacing himself, too impetuous on the attack… You’ve got to be able to tell if a young cock’s got the brains, haven’t you, same as with a growing lad, true or not true?”

“True.”

“The fountain’s dried up in the square. People are fetching water from the lake, and there’s sickness about. At least I’ve got my well, though it cost me an arm and a leg.”

“Of course.”

All the news having been told, they fell silent. Great big black-and-yellow butterflies were flying in pairs through the warm air.

Noémi came toward them on the terrace. She had hardly changed: calm, the eyes perhaps a little larger, the sockets deeper; wearing a white embroidered Indian shift. She gave Daria a hug.

“I knew you’d come. Bruno didn’t believe me, he never does.”

“How could you have known, my love?”

“Through Doña Luz. She knows secrets. I don’t trust anyone else… We should be afraid right now, because she is, I can tell… I’m always afraid and I’m happy, would you believe it?”

The question was hanging so obviously in the air between them that Bruno Battisti gave voice to it himself: “So, what has become of me?” His eyes narrowed. He raised his hand and pointed to the contours of the lake and of the mountain. He began: “Listen to me, my friend. The plantation lives by the rhythm of seasons different from those of Europe. Our one earth has many faces. Here life is ruled by two primordial divinities: Fire and Water, Sun and Rain. They are the true mother-deities. The ancient brown race once adored them with a robust sense of reality. The Indios still bow to the maize on entering the field they are about to harvest, and I know they sometimes fertilize the soil with human semen. In the past, they used to regale the gods with their own flesh, their own blood, something which made unimpeachable sense: one nourishment for another, and all nourishment is terrestrial… They drowned small children in this lake so that the god of the water would allow for a plentiful crop. They tore out the hearts of prisoners and offered them up, still beating, so that a fortified sun would be sure to prevail over the darkness. You’ll note that the Nahua were not terribly confident of the power of the sun, whereas they lived in awe of the destructive forces, harboring an exaggerated respect for them rather like ours in some ways… They lived in an unstable cosmos, as we live in an unstable humanity armed with cosmic powers… I subscribe to a modern meteorological service whose bulletins are useless, for they always arrive too late. My real weatherman is Lame Pánfilo, a fellow who can read the path of storms and predict the coming of the rains… When he’s too drunk, I patiently await what no one can change.

“There’s the dry season, when the highlands become a yellow desert. During that time, only the cactuses survive, thanks to their bitter energy and what scarce moisture is condensed by the night… Proof that a humble, resistant victory is nearly always possible, even if it amounts to little more than holding out. There’s the rainy season, when huge clouds gathered over the Pacific suddenly burst open, raining tempests and lightning down over the thirsty land, fertilizing it with magnificent violence. Torrents spill gleaming down the mountain, the lake overflows its banks, life begins to ferment in the soil — where it was only suspended — and in the rocks themselves, if you believe your eyes. The storms calmed and the downpours spent, the green season arrives. From here to the farthest peaks, the country is nothing but an empire of rising sap. Every bit of basalt has its crown of greenery and flowers sprung from lifeless aridity. It’s the miracle of resurrection, like when the snows melt in our cold countries… For months there was nothing to see but a dried-up desert; who could guess that beneath the calcined ground, millions of invincible seeds were concealed, ready to germinate. We observe that the true power is not that of darkness, of barrenness, but of life. All that exists cries, whispers, or sings that we must never despair, for true death does not exist.

“The fire in the sky first blesses the sap, the loves of insects and birds, the euphoria of the herds, the darting quickness of tadpoles in the ponds… Then the fire in the sky turns to a burning hardness, as though the gods were reminding creation that no euphoria can last and that existence is not just the exultation of being; existence is also ordeal, courage, blind tenacity, hidden resourcefulness. The heavens’ severity becomes an outburst of angry luminescence, a vast fierce rapture insensible to being, destructive of beings, sufficient to itself, blazing, mindless, and superb.

“The herds graze the last yellowed grasses, which rasp their throats… Here at the plantation, the perennial problem is water. I drilled a well. The streams dry up… When all else fails I have to get water from the lake, an exhausting job for my peons. You see, the earth is dying of thirst at the water’s edge. And yet we’ve accomplished the miracle of rescuing this small piece of it. After the coffee is picked, I climb into my old Ford and go into town. I make just enough to live on and to order a few books from New York… I could easily get rich, like others do, lending to the poor against the next harvest and stockpiling maize and sugarcane against the inevitable rise in prices. The idea made me ashamed, and I chose instead to pass for a fool. Living among wolves, it would be reasonable to learn how to howl and bite like the wolves, but I preferred another fate, a more dangerous one I suppose because here as everywhere, a kind of sentence weighs upon the man who tries to be a bit more human than the general lot… I won’t pretend I wasn’t tempted to overcome this repugnance and make money so as to return to Europe when Europe is once again the continent of the most amazing germinations. These must come after the desert seasons. We shall see ideas, forces, men, and works sprouting up from the graveyards, no matter the rot and decay… Well, either I’ll never go back, or I’ll go back penniless and old, which is worse, to end in the midst of beginnings.

“Tropical countries are full of aging men who still remember having followed dreams, wanting to become artists, scientists, discoverers, revolutionaries, reformers, sages! But one day they said to themselves: Let’s make some money first, otherwise we’re powerless. And it was all the easier because it was diving into another powerlessness. They became wealthy; disillusioned with themselves and hence with everything, they frittered their lives away in gilding their cages, while a cynical bitterness grew within them. The best of them keep up subscriptions to high-minded journals of literature or theosophy, as a reminder of extinguished passions… They play bridge and continue to speculate in real estate and commodity values, largely out of habit… I know some of these men. We’ve smoked sad cigars together in good restaurants, pontificating about the war — not without flashes of insight. I’ve stopped seeing them, because some of them stupidly admire a dead revolution. They depend on it like an injection to prolong their final breathing.

“I work my peons and pay them well; they steal from me well too, but within reason; they’re aware that I know about it, but not that I judge them to be in the right. If I paid them any more, they’d lose motivation and the local powers would brand me a public menace… I’m up at sunrise, the dawns here are as fresh as the first day of creation. I supervise all the work… In the evening I lie in my hammock with a few books and newspapers, the papers several days old but it makes no difference, filled as they are with layers of lies and nonsense… In books, though, you may still encounter living men. I don’t much care for the literary fabrications in vogue today: they too often feed on baseness, cultivating a false despair. Genuine despair would disdain royalties. Why write, why read, if not to offer, to find, a larger image of life, an image of man as deep as the problems that make up his greatness? I prefer reading scientific works, they have more imagination, they induce in me a sense of dizzying precision.

“I miss everything and that’s another form of captivity, the only one I consent to, the only one that is a healthy part of our nature. I am the owner of this plantation, lush and overgrown as a patch of jungle, and despite this, sterile for me. I tend it with a kind of love. And thus I fulfill an instinctive duty toward the earth, the dead, and the defeats which are great temporary deaths… Thanks to this, I don’t have much time for conscious regret; the other is always present. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the enchantment of plants, but animals are for me more eloquent. I see a big amber scorpion go by, and I think of him as a sort of ancestor to so many creatures in this world, a survivor of Paleozoic ages. The wild ducks come down in droves; as they skid onto the lake, I see an Indio marksman hiding behind the calabash stalks; the birds take off as soon as they see him — a war of ruses between them and the hunter; but they don’t mind me, they know I’m unarmed. I fling a stone at them, they laugh at men: Learn that men are bad!… Or perhaps I’m reading, and a rattlesnake slips over for a look. He rears his fine stylized head, flicks a tongue like a living black needle, shakes his tail, which rings agreeably, decides that I’m a creature like him, a solitary, no worse than he is, sketches a little dance, and goes coolly on his way. He is very beautiful, the rattlesnake… I know the hours when the hummingbird comes flitting among the flowers like a butterfly. The frailest of birds, tiny, dark, and iridescent, with a life experience limited to searching for pollen, making love, and fleeing before huge, incomprehensible dangers from which its tininess protects it; this tiny spark of intelligence has enabled it to weather more than one geological upheaval… I watch for the ungainly flight of the pelican, a bird which seems to me ugly because it belongs to an aesthetic of nature from very ancient times… Such are my daily encounters, full of meaning.

“People are somewhat more dangerous. Crescenciano, the blacksmith, has taken a few shots at me — from a safe distance it must be said, and with no intent to harm. We are on cordial terms, so I assume he was high at the time, maybe on something other than alcohol. It’s so tempting to hold someone else’s life at the end of a barrel, to play with it a bit, it makes you feel powerful, you might even feel good. Crescenciano is a good man, because I’m still alive. A mournful man and a contemplative one — if contemplating is what he’s doing when he squats under the moonlight in his sarape and doesn’t budge for hours. Then he resembles the small black vultures you see all over like perpetually famished monks. His wife assures me he meant no offense and was in fact distressed at the possibility of hitting me, unless it happened to be God’s will (and how to know whether it is His will or not except by pulling the trigger?). All he wanted was to play a good joke on me, shoot a hole in my hat brim. I went over to Crescenciano one night during fiesta; we hung our best hats on stakes in the ground and shot at them, laughing uproariously (that is to say sound-lessly). It was one of my ideas; after that, I felt a little safer… I treat the children’s illnesses. Pancho’s have amoebas, Isidro’s suffer from glands. I administer light doses of sulfa and so am reckoned to be a bit of a sorcerer, even if nothing prevents them from buying the stuff themselves at Don Gamelindo’s… The real sorceress, Doña Luz, knows I haven’t a clue about the secret arts; just as the friendly rattlesnake knows that I have no venom whereas he does. I treat young Ponce when he falls down dead drunk. He also gets epileptic fits, which Doña Luz cures better than me — by letting them run their course, not without burning herbs and powdered bone… Her medicine beats mine by a few centuries, for she is the repository of a knowledge that goes back to Neolithic cultures. Doña Luz has cured me of fevers I couldn’t even identify. She is very good for Noémi.

“You know Noémi’s transparent eyes, their ephemeral, indecisive attentiveness, their luminous panic… Noémi is calm; she pretends, especially to herself, to have forgotten everything, not to know about the war; she pretends she has overcome the fear of fear. She reads the same books over and over, line by line, and I believe she’s not so much reading as abandoning herself to the reveries engendered in her by the words on the page. She does the housework singing to herself. Sometimes she doesn’t recognize me anymore or thinks I’m someone else. She laughs like a child: ‘You think you’re fooling me! You play him very well! I don’t hold it against you…’ I think I do play my characters very well indeed, and that no one should hold it against me. Then she changes, and sees me again. ‘Ah, there you are again, I’m happy!’ But there is a note of resentment in her tone. I believe Doña Luz keeps a double of me, a magic doll, and does to it whatever is required to bring me back from the most mysterious journeys.

“Noémi can sense the approach of earthquakes, which are frequent and harmless. She says, ‘My bones are cold, the earth is going to shiver…’ She wakes me in the night and says, ‘Listen…’ I light the candle, we look at each other and smile, alert as one body to the trembling of the mountain and the whispers of the lake. Her eyes are seldom as beautiful as at these times, and these are precious moments between us… If the earth begins to roll and pitch more, we go out into the garden, stumbling against each other; because I don’t really trust this old roof and the open air is safer. Out under the great stars, we have the sensation of walking on floating ground. Branches whip to and fro, and the birds, alarmed, fill the air with wingbeats and cries. I think of the rattlesnake, who like me must have ventured from his lair, like me reassured to observe that while the firmament seems a little wobbly, the pattern of its brilliant specks remains the same. The great comet we expect in our heart of hearts does not appear. Noémi leans her head against my shoulder… Once she said afterward that the planet must twinkle beautifully in the sky when it shakes like that. In any case, it’s a poetic thought…

“A psychiatrist would say that Noémi is schizophrenic, or that she suffers from manic depression, loss of touch with reality, personality breakdown, and the rest. Yet my feeling is that she’s made contact with a reality she finds more acceptable than the version of it commonly held. And as there’s no psychiatrist within a thousand miles, she has nothing to fear from superfluous diagnoses…”

Bruno seemed glad to be talking. Daria guessed he was releasing himself from a very long silence. Bitterness flooded up to Daria’s brain. She was restraining herself from crying out: “So that’s how you lived while… while… ! Doing nothing for anyone else in the world! And you didn’t even take your part in…” Bruno Battisti looked at her with the knowing eyes of the old days: “I know what you’re thinking. I confess that I suffered over it. That was unfair and useless. Come have supper.”

He asked her no questions. Whenever she brought up the war, he appeared to be listening merely out of friendship, as though he already knew everything. She was starting to tell him about the bombing of Altstadt; while listening, he led her over to a banana tree and pointed out its violet turgescence, the intense sexuality of the ripening fruits. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” The terrible events and their train of anxious thoughts began to lose their sharpness. After a few days, Daria succumbed to a lucid somnolence. “We’ll speak of all this again,” Bruno Battisti said, “when you are delivered. But for now, look at the mountains. Look at the baby chicks…”

“Thought must be delivered,” Daria assented suddenly.

“If it’s possible.”

Solitude shrouded the world in a light yet impenetrable veil. The excess of luminosity became blinding, erasing whatever was not this dazzle of sunlight, this reverberation of sunlight, this burning sunlight on the platinum lake, this humid jungle warmth under the tall sweet-smelling foliage of the eucalyptus trees. Noémi’s white silhouette appeared crossing an avenue of trees or crossing the terrace, present-absent, real-unreal. A cat sprang after a lizard. Doña Luz was glimpsed prowling among the coffee plants, a black silhouette with abundant white hair tumbling over the shoulders of a little girl — who might be a hundred — with bright eyes… Wide-brimmed hats appeared and disappeared atop heads of burned clay whose eyebrows, mustaches, and eyes were intensely black; white rags floating over brown bodies… Fishermen called out from one dugout canoe to another across the glassy lake — a call, a response — and that single voice seemed to reverberate through the stillness long after it died out. The fruit on the mango trees was being impregnated by the sun. Other enormous fruits were ripening inside hard spiny casings. Beautiful black spiders, their abdomens adorned with a scarlet symbol, hung suspended in the architecture of their shining threads. Under the shadow of the trees, orchids revealed their delicate, fleshy complexions. There was no imaginable finality to any of this: only a riotous disorder, stable yet changing, a mayhem of primeval voluptuousness and innocent cruelty, which, swelled by the surging of sap and blood, spilled over exultantly into the plantation and lay surrounded by the desert. No human notions retained their customary meanings.

“So there’s really nobody, nobody to talk to?” Daria asked one evening, as they sat on after supper in the low-ceilinged dining room, watching the cat play with her kittens.

Noémi raised her pale irises whose pupils were always too large.

“Talk, what for, Dachenka?”

“Nobody,” Bruno Battisti said placidly. “We are alone. Like stones being stones. The thing is to wait.”

“What do stones wait for?” Daria thought.

“You’re bored,” said Bruno. “Would you like to play a game of chess? Harris is probably coming over tomorrow.”

Harris came over two or three times a week. This young American lived in a solitude even greater and more parched than their own, a good hour’s trek from the plantation, in the heart of the forest, where he occupied a big, tumbledown adobe dwelling hemmed in by ferocious, resplendent agaves. “As far away from two-legged creatures as I can get,” he’d say. Harris was generally a man of few words, but when in a philosophical mood he might explain: “Man, attempting to change his fate, has come up with only one liberating invention: scotch whiskey!” This gave rise to commentaries verging on the profound, allowing one to recall that the ancient barbarian civilizations, in this land so close to the present, made their liquor by fermenting the milk of the agave plant. “Scotch is better,” Harris declared, “but if that’s the only proof of the white man’s superiority, it’s a feeble one…” Harris was a steady drinker who never lost his self-control. But until he was loaded with “the right dose of gunpowder,” all you saw of him was a big brute with ruddy-brown hair — a rather mournful, listless lout who yawned a lot and sometimes bit his nails. Having been a sailor, he nursed a grudge against the sea, like an old betrayed lover. “A big wet desert, right? The most inhuman place in the world, along with factories. And every ship’s a floating prison or a floating cathouse. Or else a floating fortress, packed with poor dumb suckers. And not easy to sink!” Their being hard to sink seemed to have left him with malevolent regrets. He had fought “honorably” in the Pacific Islands, but whether he had come home with medals or a warrant for his arrest, he did not say. “The sea and the war: two big piles of shit…” You could easily imagine him, with his hard, fleshy face, his round boxer’s shoulders, his cynical expression and clouded eyes, in some mobsters’ dive, as ruthless as the worst of them and as snappy a dresser, with that slightly louche elegance; then later dressed like them in a striped suit breaking up rocks on a chain gang. All purely imaginary, of course, since flipping a coin would be the best way to decide whether his past was ordinary or adventurous… He read nothing but hard-boiled thrillers, the kind with lots of killing, where at the end they’re going to hang the seductive heroine who for three hundred pages seemed to be the most mysterious, the most desirable, the most tantalizing young woman in distress… But on page 287, when her wickedness has emerged beyond any reasonable doubt, the detective gives in and kisses her on the lips, gently takes her hands — and brings out the handcuffs… She’s been had, the vixen, and so have you, dear reader, since only then did you understand that the roots of crime lay here, in this melting gaze, this soft disarming flesh… Harris reveled at the idea of the pleasure he would have kicking in the teeth of that detective or of the author, that dirty “son of a bitch!”[32] When he was finished reading, Harris would toss the book onto the little heap of paperbacks, each offering a detective puzzle to be deciphered for twenty-five cents. This library gathered dust in a corner; the hens pecked around it sometimes, attracted by — what? What could these birds find to peck at in or under all these nasty stories? Harris poured himself a shot of tequila. Harris called out: “Monica! Mon-i-ca!”

Monica showed herself in the doorway, framed between the radiant space without and the shadows within; a beautiful tall girl with a long pleated skirt down to her toes, hair piled on the back of her neck, a Polynesian face with open, level brown eyes. She was scrubbing an earthenware vessel with sand. “¿Qué quieres? What do you want?” In Spanish, the verb querer means both to want and to love, with no possible confusion between them, so that a man might as easily answer “Te quiero” as “Bring me a glass of water.” But Harris often answered nothing at all and simply gazed pleasurably at her, thinking something wordless like: “You’re an adorable creature, Monica, but my god, what real difference is there between you and the jungle flowers who open their crimson vulvas?” In Monica’s eyes he was ugly, as the male ought to be: ugly, brawny, serious, never too drunk, and never violent toward her, with never more than a passing glance for the other girls from the few hovels scattered around here… And rich, because there was never a shortage of maize. To ensure his lasting love, Monica spiked his tequila with pinches of a white powder that was a specialty of Doña Luz. It seemed to do the trick! Harris undressed her when the heat went down (it didn’t take long, she wore only a loose blouse, a loose skirt) and made a charcoal sketch which he soon crumpled and threw into the corner of the “son-of-a-bitch’s library.” Then he was upon her in two short bounds, the naked amber girl as she stood against a slit of window with the mountainside still blazing beyond. He was more magnificently ugly then than at any other time, this laughing, furious white man with the muzzle of a sorrowful beast. Almost all men were like that, according to the girls of San Blas, but none of the local men were acquainted with the drawing ritual, which must therefore have a hidden meaning. Was it an appeal for vigor, for sweetness? For joy? Monica questioned Doña Luz, and she, from the height of her sixty years of experience, handed down an incomprehensible but favorable judgment: “Your man is an artista, my child.” “What’s an artista, Doña Luz, madrecita, little mother?” “I know many secrets, child, but not that one. I can’t be expected to know everything. An artista is an unbeliever, but he is not usually a bad man. Better than most gringos, God have mercy!” Harris had a way of kissing and caressing that the men around here don’t know; it must be another custom of his country, an easy thing to submit to and not a sin to emulate, for you see, Virgin of Wonders, Holy Queen of Heaven, Our Lady of the Lake, you see that he is my man and that I love him! He possessed her on the hard mat with a long, leisurely passion. While they were tangled up in lovemaking, a distracted hen might wander in, or Nacho, the gleaming purple turkey-cock, whose hard, coral-ringed eye made Monica uncomfortable. Rising above the fire of blessed fever within her, she would call out, “Nacho! Nacho! Shame on you! Scram!” The wicked old bird would mince off with the utmost dignity, swinging his purple crop as though he didn’t understand, but he’d be back, the sneak… And when Monica reappeared in the yard he would spread his cartwheel of a tail at her, lifting his feet in a little jig… “Yes, Nacho, you’re beautiful, you are…” she crooned, still smiling at the sweet giddiness inside her. Harris had paid the price of a fine horse to Monica’s parents; he had laid on a fiesta for the whole community, a memorable event enlivened by ten bottles of pulque and two hundred firecrackers; the padre of San Blas, Don Maclovio himself, had been good enough to attend.

Harris was no artist, if truth be told, for all that most artists are frauds. He drew like a schoolboy, for the enjoyment of tracing the shape of a woman or the lines of a landscape; for the humiliation of failure, for the pleasure of destroying what he had made and of making it expressly to destroy. The earth behaves no differently: it makes plants and sentient beings and destroys them, only to start all over again, right? He drew when he was slightly drunk and destroyed when he was sober, pained by the limits of his own lucidity. He hunted hares, quail, wild ducks; if luck was on his side he might kill an iguana, that big blunt-nosed lizard with a sumptuously green skin, which Monica turned into a feast, dressed with hot spices. “In my country,” Harris told her, “there are people who never saw a hare take off from under the rocks, can you understand that?” “Poor people!” said Monica, eyes shining with pleasure because he was talking to her. “They buy their hares ready-skinned in big stores which sell hundreds at a time…” “Hundreds!” Monica repeated, incredulous. “Stores as big as that?” “And the people are bastards, most of them!” Harris concluded, in opaque laughter.

Equipped like an Indian with a machete to clear the way, wearing sandals with thick rubber soles cut from tires and a conical sombrero, Harris would set off along the mountain trail that led to the plantation. It took him past the abandoned gold mine, a bald hump topped by a single candelabra cactus which might be one or more centuries old, nearly forty feet tall, raising its phallic spars above a monstrous trunk in two tones of green: silvery olive and midnight emerald. “You feed off the seams, eh, candelero! But it’s hard to live like that, you get as thirsty as the next guy and you’re even uglier.” Wandering prospectors had tried to chop the monster down so as to delve between its roots, but they soon gave up, leaving the trunk deformed around the base. Some gold mine! A mine of schemes! By dynamiting the rock and sluicing through the sand and clay and god knows what else, you might get a thimbleful of gold dust worth twenty crates of scotch, si caballero! Unless you happened to land plumb on the jolly seam that’s mocking us six inches under this track here. You might just as well send away to Mexico City for lottery tickets, after consulting Doña Luz on the numbers to choose, or choose them for themselves, because the good numbers aren’t necessarily the winners, this being a matter of fate, not of money — Doña Luz is surely right on that score — which means that the losers can be lucky all the same.

Harris’s route now took him past Las Calaveras, the Skulls. Following the lure of the ruins, he deviated from the main track to take a look at them. Did time humanize these anguished stones, or did it dehumanize them? First you walked through a stretch of dry, prickly undergrowth, bristling with dead needles. The rock-strewn slope dipped toward a granite cliff, tinted blue or gold, according to the time of day. If you turned around you had a vista of the lake, calm as a mirror, a divine mirror of water resting on the earth. All that was left of an altar was a base of reddish-gray andesite, the color of dried blood, the appropriate color. Crudely carved skulls protrude from the earth on both sides of worn stones that once might have formed steps. Schematic skulls with clenched stripes of teeth, eye sockets that seemed still to cast a baleful stare into the horizontal sky. Harris felt his life-beat slowing. Expectant, he listened for the thud of drums in the distance, the mesmerizing, muffled tattoo of the forest. To regain his aplomb he always said the same words, aloud: “These cannibals sure knew how to choose their sites!” Twenty paces farther on, a broken column lying half hidden in the brush offered up to the face of the sky another huge face with geometric eyes contemplating the zenith indefinitely. This god of an unknown race, assumed to be Mongoloid, did not present the features of that race but features more refined, European or Malaysian, hybrid in their abstraction. His diadem was broken into pieces. Harris bowed his head, absorbed by the problem of human duration, the problem of… of what, man! You’ll never be able to put it into words, but the problem remains. The sudden appearance of a lizard, gray with emerald spots, startled him. “Well, well,” he muttered. Whistling, he continued on his way. The Battistis and the Harrises sometimes met up here for an evening picnic. Bruno, stimulated by a swallow of rum or by the proximity of the unknown god, told stories about the ruins of Central Asia, the Roof of the World, Pamir’s… Harris would slap his thigh, booming: “Roof of the World! And on top of that, another roof?” There can’t have even been a sky, if it was really the Roof of the World! He laughed even louder: “A stratospheric sleight of hand!” Monica and Noémi discussed the embroidery stitches of Los Altos and the Tarascan country. They understood each other well.

On this occasion, an amusing encounter awaited Harris at Las Calaveras. He found two Indians squatting on their heels, having a smoke. A bald gent, masked by large sunglasses that made him look like a skull himself, sportily clad in a combination of beige and brown, was measuring the unknown god’s nose with a compass. “Hello there!” cried Harris. “I’ll bet you’re half a millimeter off!” Startled, the man jumped up — “How do you do” — and put on a toothy smile like a dog’s. Harris strode nearer, swinging his machete so that the light bounced off its blade. “Who do you think you’re kidding, Mister, with your little compass? The venerable god, yourself, everybody else, or mathematics?” The erudite tourist appreciated the joke. Repressing the giggles, Harris became quite sociable. “These are difficult measurements,” the man said, “but take it from me, they’ll be accurate…”

“Accurate?” went Harris, brimming with ironical glee. “So you’re an archaeologist?”

“Oh, just in my spare time,” the other said modestly. “And you, an artist?”

“Amateur, old pal, like yourself.”

“Care for a drink?” proposed the amateur archaeologist.

Harris brightened. “What are you carrying in the way of bottles?” The expedition’s supplies turned out to include a first-class brandy, and Harris in mounting good cheer became cordially insolent. “So you go around measuring idols’ noses, and probably their backsides, in godforsaken holes like this? Funny! And where d’you come from in the first place, Mister?” “Actually, I’m from Wisconsin…” He was priceless, this archaeologist, amateur or otherwise: the panama hat with the crimson ribbon, the coffee-colored silk necktie over the khaki shirt, the pink skin, the fastidiously clipped blond mustache, those dark glasses which must be hiding the eyes of a learned rabbit… “I’ve been working on my book on pre-Colombian sculpture for the past eight years.” Harris poured himself another brandy.

“If that means carrying around brandy this good, I guess you’ll be forgiven upstairs… Just think, in those eight years you might have slept with a thousand women of all different colors, committed a whole string of crimes, at a profit or at a loss, lost and re-made a dozen fortunes, spent years cooling off in Sing Sing or San Quentin or someplace — no lack of good spots! You could have gone around the world on a bicycle! Crossed the ocean in a rowboat! Got yourself killed eight hundred different ways in the war!”

“Certainly,” said the archaeologist. “Except for getting yourself killed, even once, in the war, I hope you’ve done a fair number of those things yourself…”

“I beg your pardon! I even got myself killed in New Guinea!”

“Congratulations. Life feels so much grander after that, doesn’t it? Well, in exceptional cases it does…”

“Obviously.”

The archaeologist, Mr. Brown, spent every night in his car, which was parked four or five miles away. He invited Harris to partake of his cold chicken, whiskey, and wines. “I have a weakness for fine wines, Mr. Harris…” Harris agreed that fine wines were conducive to the study of old stone carvings. “Take me, for instance. Me who’s never read a single book on the subject — god forbid — well, once I’ve enough of the noble fluid in my belly, I could tell you the authentic history of this old god and describe the dances the young Olmec girls, if there were such girls, used to dance around him on carpets of flowers and decapitated birds…”

“You’re way off,” answered Mr. Brown, shocked. “These monuments don’t belong to the Olmec culture!”

“They don’t? What do you know? Not that I give a damn.”

Mr. Brown was unaware of the existence nearby of a hospitable plantation, owned by an Italian, Bruno Battisti, “a nice old fellow who’s traveled all over. Now he knows the history of the Olmecs and the Tarambiretls and the rest. His wife is a charming woman too, only she’s out of her mind…” Harris invited the archaeolo-gist to go along with him. Mr. Brown was tempted, but hated to be indiscreet… The word “indiscreet” made Harris guffaw as he twirled his machete. Mr. Brown accepted the invitation.

Two or three times a year, the Battistis were visited by tourists on their way to take pictures of each other at Las Calaveras and under the picturesque candelabra cactus on the Cerro de Oro. They had even received copies of such snapshots in the post: sunny girls seated with grinning skulls between their knees, a young sportsman with movie-star looks. “You are a sage…” wrote the prettiest girl to Bruno, with news of her engagement… And yet he was disturbed by Mr. Brown’s dusty automobile the minute he saw it drive up. Harris alighted first. Then the archaeologist appeared, removing his sunglasses and glancing about like a dazzled white rabbit.

“Where did you pick up this specimen?” growled Bruno to Harris.

“A weirdo. He was camped out by the idol, measuring its nostrils. With a hamper full of choice bottles. He’s a complete idiot.”

Nothing abnormal in any of this.

Mr. Brown complimented Mr. Battisti: “Sir, you live in an absolute paradise…”

Mr. Brown placed a pair of blue-tinted spectacles over his gray, anemic eyes. He admired the coffee bushes, the euphorbia, the calabash grove, the mangoes, the eucalyptus, the tall royal palms… He had the gift of inarticulate appreciation. He brought out his field glasses to inspect Green Island, where there were pyramids, one of which was semicircular, a rare and probably very ancient design, between fifteen hundred and two thousand years old. The Cuicuilco pyramid was reputed to be older still…

“Ten thousand years!” declared Harris, all jovial.

“No! Really? I find that hard to believe…”

Harris gave him a vigorous thwack on the back, so friendly that the fellow pitched forward.

“We’re not even close by five thousand years, joker!”

Mr. Brown gave the stuttering laugh of the shy man, slave to erudition, who doesn’t realize he’s being made fun of. Daria found him repellent. “A machine for quantifying calaveras and pickling their statistics in useless file cards…” His magazines, with their recent American fashions, interested Noémi. In the course of a friendly chat skillfully managed by Bruno Battisti, Mr. Brown emerged as the owner of a business in Wisconsin; raised as a Presbyterian but personally an atheist, “scientific” as he put it, though deeply respectful of religion; rather conservative but with liberal leanings. When he completed his study of Mexican antiquities, he looked forward to lengthy sojourns in Peru, where the ruins of Tiahuanaco, in particular, merited close and conscientious description as the first phase of an investigation that would embark in an entirely unprecedented direction, taking account of… Mr. Brown spent several days at the plantation, happy to sleep in a comfortable bed and to lose at chess against Daria or Bruno, in serious games which he began cleverly and usually muffed toward the end, as though some inhibition prevented him from winning. He let fall something relevant to this, one day. “I went toward science because I was intimidated being successful at business… My father was extremely wealthy. Brown and Coldman, you’ll have heard the name?” “Nobody, in these mountains, has ever heard of it,” said Daria maliciously.

“Really?” said Mr. Brown with the look of a marionette that sometimes came over him.

Before the evening meal, he invariably changed into a dress shirt adorned by a floppy cravat the color of dead leaves.

The air at the end of an oppressive afternoon was supercharged with electricity. A ceiling of clouds weighed down on the place. All day, the plantation had been full of the sounds of restless animals; two peons had fought without being drunk. Flocks of lowflying birds enlivened the sunset, swarms of bats fluttered on the fringe of the night, but the immobility of the trees remained vaster than everything. For a second, outlined against the purple glow of the sunset, the tops of isolated palm trees looked like huge, black, curiously unhappy spiders… Daria and Noémi set the table with the maid, Melita, who was clumsier than usual tonight and broke two Jalisco pottery plates. Harris had left. Mr. Brown and Bruno Battisti were sprawled in deck chairs, exchanging desultory scraps of talk. Only the lightning seemed alive. It flashed and sheeted through the clouds, almost unceasing but erratic and freakish, there a stealthy glimmer, here a blinding flash, illuminating with lifeless whiteness a vast, sharply etched panorama void of color and movement. “This landscape,” said Bruno, “seems to be only the memory of itself…” After requesting a repetition of that sentence, the visitor gave a passive “Ah, yes.” With each crackling flash the two men glimpsed their own forms bleached white from head to foot, as though they had been turned into stone. “The storms won’t break for two or three days yet, you’ll see,” Bruno said.

“Ah, you think so?”

“It would be best for you, Mr. Brown, to go to the pyramids at first light tomorrow and return by midafternoon, to avoid being caught in a gale over the lake. The Indian canoes are very well built, but it’s a risk nonetheless…”

“Tomorrow at first light,” the visitor repeated apathetically.

“It’s no more than three hours’ rowing,” Bruno said, vexed by the groundless irritation he felt. “And one hour’s walk as far as the teocalli…”

“I’m thirsty,” said Mr. Brown. “Could you ask for a glass of water, please? I find this bath of electricity enervating.” A splintering glare exposed his livid countenance, mouth wide open gasping for air. Don Bruno reached for the little bell made of volcanic ash, and a gay tinkle rang out. Bare feet padded quickly over the tiles, a swarthy girl was illuminated, like a dancer in the jungle, by a flash of lightning. “A glass of water, Celia, for the señor…” “Thank you,” said Mr. Brown in a satisfied voice. “This tropical climate…”

“A climate of cosmic vigor,” Bruno said. “When you get used to it, you love it. A climate of destruction and fertilization…”

The archaeologist attempted a laugh. “I think we’re getting a darn sight more destruction than fertilization!”

“The opinion of someone who’s impotent,” thought Bruno, who was still beset by an old virility which sometimes tortured him and sometimes exalted him when in contact with young dusky flesh exuding a savage fragrance of sweat. “I disagree,” he said with effort. He was beginning to feel an unreasonable antipathy toward this guest.

The glimmers succeeded one another noiselessly in the sky; stars were coming out, and a distant grumble of thunder was heard. “Ah,” said Don Bruno. “I love this. The storms here are magnificent…” Mr. Brown lit a cigar; his austere profile shone in the yellow glow of the lighter.

It was a relief to both men when Noémi came out to announce that the table was set. Noémi had dressed up and looked ravishing in a long native dress, dark with leafy patterns. The material swished around her hips, her movements seeming to reveal her body’s hidden harmony. Her eyes bathed in lightning shone blue as phosphorus. Mr. Brown took her arm. “I love storms! They terrify me…” she said. “You have a lyrical nature,” he intoned, which made her laugh. “Can’t you find something sillier to say?” “Not really,” Mr. Brown replied, with his self-deprecating smile.

Dinner was a grand affair. Daria carved the turkey by the light of six candles ranged along the mahogany table on which little brightly colored napkins looked like square flowers. Orchids stood in amber goblets from Guadalajara. Safely away from the lightning, Mr. Brown recovered his good humor. “Allow me to fetch the last and best of my bottles…” Bruno offered to go with him. They came back from the car with a California red which was undoubtedly a treat, imitating the most alkaline and yet softly rounded of Andalusian vintages. Noémi apologized for not drinking it because Doña Luz had forbidden her. Her magnetic eyes met the benevolent eyes of Mr. Brown. “You don’t know what you’re missing!”

The first spoonful of soup made Mr. Brown seem almost perky. His voice rose in pitch; his hands, rather overlarge but delicate, traced tiny gestures as he complimented the ladies on everything: the needlework on the linen bought at a pueblo market, the matchless cuisine which would put the best hotels to shame, the coral necklace hung with tiny silver fish which Daria was wearing, the wonderfully barbaric string of chunky clay beads and a jade figurine which so suited Noémi; how young they both looked, and how artful the lighting of the room, positively Rembrandt! “Here we go,” thought Bruno. “The marionette is on the loose.” Bruno preferred silence to the inane chatter that does nothing but add a bit of noise to a bit of vanity. He was so annoyed that toward the end of the meal, lest his contempt get the better of his manners, he drained two glasses of wine in quick succession and felt better at once. Mr. Brown was explaining the many pitfalls involved in transplanting delicate European vine stocks to the New World. No laboratory has yet succeeded in unraveling the secret chemistry, or should we say the wondrous alchemy, of wine. Its components are: the quality of the plant, its health, its capacity for regeneration; the characteristics of the soil; the type of sunlight and the angle of exposure of the vines; one would also have to study the nature of solar radiation and, beyond that, the effect of radiations from the night sky, as well as the nature of the microscopic fauna and flora that assist in fermentation; then of course there is the related science of volcanism, for Mr. Brown was convinced that a thousand subtle emanations are at work above volcanic subsoils, and thus, since Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhineland, or Andalusia are geologically stable, they must benefit from a telluric environment quite different from that of California, with its proximity to the volcanic plates of Mexico… The host was becoming perceptibly moody again. He reached for a bottle. “No, enough of that one, my dear fellow,” said Mr. Brown. “You must sample this other, which is by far the best.” This other was not the best — rather the opposite — but Bruno allowed politely that it was excellent, because he couldn’t care less.

Noémi was the first to retire, toward ten o’clock. Mr. Brown excused himself shortly thereafter. Daria and Bruno wandered out onto the terrace. From the horizon to the zenith the flashing ballet continued. Daria was fighting down tides of dizziness. “I drank much too much, Sacha. What a learned animal he is, of what fossilized erudition! This world mass-produces marionettes and fossils… Elsewhere they turn out automatons, with the instinct for torture and destruction loose in their mechanism… The same stars everywhere. Sacha! But where is hope?” “Everywhere,” Bruno answered evasively. “Remember the beach at Feodossia?”

Myriads of insects, drawn by the light, imprisoned by the light, were lying on the stone sill around the oil lamp that had been burning all evening. “Are they all going to die, having thrown themselves at an incomprehensible light?” “No. Most survive, saved by the sunrise… The banality of daylight. Insects have a strong grip on life.” “Feodossia… I’d forgotten. Do you know, I imagined in those days that I was in love with you, that’s why I was always pushing you away. You couldn’t understand, and I didn’t want to love again, after so many necessary and needless massacres… In another sense, I didn’t understand either. What have we understood since then?”

“Just what remains essential, it seems to me,” said Bruno.

It almost seemed that they might easily touch on some great and simple truth together, but too many lightning flashes surrounded them, passing through brains split between excitation and torpor. “Oh, how sleepy I am!” said Daria. At the door to her room, he gave her a brotherly kiss.

Bruno slept in a spartan bedroom next to Noémi’s, separated by a glass-bead doorway. He was dreaming as he put on his pajamas. He was young, entering a palace. There were smooth-faced soldiers and bearded soldiers, asleep on the marble staircase. He must wake them for this night’s duty, the march along frozen canals, the danger at dawn. Tomorrow some of these men would look the same as they did now, except that they would be asleep forever… “We have achieved justice,” Sacha told them. “We have changed one of the faces of the world, enough to make living and dying worthwhile. Let us consent to everything!” Did they hear him, understand him? They were swearing and grumbling. “We’re coming, Comrade!” What happened after that? One should never consent to everything, there are always non-consentments, refusals to be maintained… Our failure to admit this was the great error, or one of them… What happened after that? A red fox rolling in the sunlit snow — shivering, shivering! I’m frozen to the bone — a brown fox scampering through the sand toward the ruins. Shivering! I’m hit bad… “N’ga! Are you sleeping?” The young Uzbek glided in, as beautiful as a girl. “The water is pure, master, you drink…” Where were the secret papers? The most secret, in the briefcase, the briefcase in the strongbox, the nightmare in the strongbox, the death warrants in the strongbox… Dead, all of them, dead, the greatest, the purest and best, the builders, the lost, the fanatics, the knowing, the unknown, the humblest, in their thousands, their millions, absurdly, iniquitously dead. Why? How did we — insurgent, united, uplifted, and victorious — bring about the opposite of what we wanted to do? Reread the texts… But what use are old texts in the afterglow of cataclysms…? A young woman who resembled N’ga sidled up to the last customer in a café on place Wagram, showed him her pretty hands; he touched her hands with a kind of panicky desire… Troubled, he asked, “Did you pour the poison — the poison into the texts?” Autumn yellowed the Bois de Boulogne, the atrophy of life, everything is lost, everything is sullied… No! No, because I still possess consciousness, sovereign, useless, silent consciousness, tranquil consciousness… Rhetoric or truth? Noémi, Noémi, the ocean…

Had he been sleeping? Feverish, belly knotted with the urge to vomit, cardiac anxiety rising, Bruno called softly: “Noémi… N’ga!” From the next room Noémi answered, “I’m all right, Sacha, are you?” “I’m fine, don’t worry…” He groped for the important objects: flashlight, revolver. Hairy beasts blundered about in his head, predatory ideas with dripping muzzles… “What’s happening, for godsake?” He hadn’t drunk that much! He managed, unsteadily, to get outside. Lightning split the sky. Welcome, comets! Fall, comets! Bruno was trying so hard to think that his facial muscles cramped painfully. A lightning flash revealed the bougainvilleas covered with spume, and he realized he had just vomited. His bare feet dragged over the cool flagstones. “Where did we go wrong?” His heart thundered in his chest, crushing his lungs, hurting the back of his eyes at the place where the true eye lay, the eye that saw into the black chamber of the retina; how does it see without erring? “Check to the queen, checkmate! Be hard, never give in, believe, believe-know! Will! Everything will be transformed… This sick and crazy world…” A flash of relief. I vomited, that’s good, I may be all right. These eternal lightning flashes… What I need is an emetic and there isn’t one in the house… In a flash he understood: it was as clear as the sparkling vision of the lake in an upside-down world, with the sky below. The veins on his hands were hardening.

The door to Daria’s room cracked open at a blow from his shoulder. The advantage of having worm-eaten doors! He entered, shining the flashlight in front of him. “Do you remember Feodossia?” Chestnut-and-ash hair spread around her exhausted face, her head encircled in a halo of light, Daria was smiling, a convulsive smile. There was no mistaking that smile! “Daria, are you dead?” “Yes I am, Sacha…” She was icy. Bruno took her hand; it fell back with rigid finality. With an uncertain forefinger, he eased back her eyelid, observed the motionless eyeball, its sclera yellowed with tiny dark veins. The lid closed back slowly of its own accord. A bluish glimmer of lightning lingered on Daria’s forehead… Bruno’s legs gave way and he sat down abruptly, head bowed, still holding the revolver and the flashlight in dangling hands. The light shone a white circle at his feet. A bug crawled aimlessly in the circle. Was it sleep or did he faint for a moment? When he came to, back from the brink, he shone the flashlight once more onto Daria’s waxen face. Not a hope… He spat a thread of greenish spittle into the circle of light, stood up, and left the room. The lightning flashes were moving off, barely perceptible on the horizon. An illusion! They were all around, playing among themselves, making the gold beads of the stars vibrate, eternity’s chant. Nothing but that chant remains. No more error, no more doubt, only a flickering consciousness about to be extinguished, reabsorbed into lightning, stars, and darkness… Bruno felt a rush of exasperation. Ah! That murderous marionette with his fine wines, not such a marionette after all, not such a learned fossil, Mr. so-called Brown, it’s the end of you, you little bastard, if I have ten more minutes to live… Which I have, because I threw up, I might be saved! The sonorous gongs beating in his heart answered: No.

A ray of light filtered under Mr. Brown’s bedroom door. Good old worm-eaten doors! This one too gave way at the first shove. The guest, clad in a stylish dressing gown, started up from the pillows, one hand under the sheet where his weapon must be. “I say, you gave me a turn, Don Bruno! You don’t look so well… What’s wrong?”

“Nothing wrong with you, I’m sure!” Bruno spat back at him between bared teeth, his mouth foamy. “But I threw up, I’m going to be all right.”

For all his anger, which seemed to him completely lucid, Bruno was growing weaker. Black flashes spiraled around him. Why did I come here? Why did I bring this revolver? Who is this? What is happening?

“Daria’s dead.”

“You think so? That can’t be possible…”

Mr. Brown made as if to rise. “Calm yourself, my friend, it’ll pass, have some water…” He felt for the carafe with a hand outlined in green; his lower jaw trembled, his colorless lips fluttered. “You rotten death’s-head!” Bruno spoke firmly through his black lightning flashes, his burning temples and the blue flame in his cerebellum, where the bullet enters when they execute you. “Don’t move or I’ll…” He raised the revolver. “You see I’m saved. I vomited. I vomited you up, you piece of shit, I vomited you all up…”

Mr. Brown — facing the end of a short, black, steel barrel shakily following the movements of his head — lay back into the pillows.

“That’s good news,” he said. “An organic reaction has taken place… But tell me, Don Bruno, how many glasses did you drink?”

“Three…”

Mr. Brown pouted with regret.

“In that case, my friend, I hate to say it, but there’s nothing more to do for you. Shoot me now, then be patient, it won’t take long…”

The marionette was fading, leaving behind a hard head of washed-out bones, distress, tension. “Shoot quickly,” Mr. Brown insisted, “because in a few moments you won’t be able to…” In his face, Bruno recognized faces from long ago. He lowered the gun and sat on the edge of the bed, brows knitted, struggling against asphyxiation. Each word germinated slowly within him before his pasty mouth was able to deliver it. He conceived of himself as opaque, colossal, disembodied, eternal, annihilated, infinitesimal… The stars were falling into the ocean, consciousness was falling into nothingness. Rhymes. Nothing rhymes with nothing. He closed his eyes, the better to think of himself as dead, and was surprised to hear himself speak from a long way off, from the beyond. He opened his eyes with a decisive effort. Mr. Brown was delicately prizing the revolver from his hand. No more revolver, of no importance, I’m not an executioner. A thing to be proud of in an age of executioners, even if it’s the last thing! Bruno asked, “Are you… from… from the Party?”

“Naturally,” Mr. Brown replied. “I acted under orders, please believe me.”

Bruno shrugged his shoulders. Heavy, heavy shoulders, what were they still carrying? The burning in the marrow of his bones was past endurance, the hammer blows in his chest were slowing, no less violent but widely spaced; between one beat and the next a crack opened — an abyss — these are the last… Noémi sleeping, the ocean, the ocean… He slowly slumped sideways, mouth gaping, fringed with specks of froth.

It was really heavy, this big body, made for a long and regrettable life. Mr. Brown moved over to make room for Bruno, pushed him a little, helped him to lie flat, arms outstretched, watched him sink into oblivion, eyes wide open. Mr. Brown was trembling in every limb. He swallowed some pills and went out to breathe the electric night air. Panting, he dragged the big body onto the terrace and laid it out, still warm, under the dulling glimmers of the sky… After this, Mr. Brown washed his hands with eau de cologne.

Although Mr. Brown — who had become Mr. Brown only for the purposes of this short journey to the ends of obedience — had played his part in certain events, assisted in the destruction of many men, and adopted more than one unsavory disguise before now, he really was not cut out for this kind of assignment, better described as a dangerously reckless adventure, however refined its methods and means. The greatest danger is that which one creates oneself, through an excess of nervous tension; the malignities of chance are thus compounded by an adverse factor which should never be underestimated. While Mr. Brown was personally acquainted with bloodshed thanks to his experiences in another hemisphere, notably under the favorable conditions of Spain and the Balkans, he had been tempted to forget this fact ever since his professional duties had begun to coincide with his personal inclinations. His natural temperament, belatedly brought to the surface by contact with bourgeois society, disposed him to appreciate creature comforts, regular habits, hobnobbing with intellectuals and academics, taking trips through the best-organized country in modern society… As a fake U.S. citizen, he had involuntary assimilationist tendencies; a few years more in this undercover persona and he would become an almost-real U.S. citizen, which would be something of a problem. His abilities equipped him to be of genuine service in two related areas: the collection of hard, indeed scientific, information, and the exercise of a profoundly political influence upon Protestant intellectuals. To risk such gains for the sake of this particular mission could prove a grave misjudgment, should anything happen to him. Putting these reasons squarely before Mr. Ostrowieczki did no more than to reinforce a cast-iron decision that had been taken at the highest level. Ostrowieczki replied that no one was irreplaceable, not in a well-organized service. “In former times, esteemed Comrade, in Sofia…” Thus certifying his comprehensive knowledge of the other man’s history, Ostrowieczki moved smoothly on to the technicalities. “According to our sources, the local circumstances are extremely propitious… Nothing can or will happen to you, provided you carry out your instructions to the letter. The scheme includes a number of possible variations… Unfortunately, personnel is rather limited at present.” This might be true; it could also be the case that Mr. Brown (whose alias was something else at the time of the interview) was considered due for a test, to make sure he was not sliding into the complacency of taking his Americanization too much for granted… Mr. Ostrowieczki calculated lavish travel expenses. “The call we are making upon your dedication represents the highest honor.” Mr. Brown had no choice but to manifest his gratitude.

The plan had gone without a hitch. The bottles lay at the bottom of the lake, while in the kitchen stood a couple of perfectly innocent substitutes. The poisons were recent and obscure, prepared in laboratories that were yet more obscure and would elude the average toxicologist (even if the autopsy were conducted at once). Mr. Brown’s identity was proof against two months’ investigation, and should any inquiry eventually spell trouble for the real Mr. Brown, presently in Honolulu, that was too bad; he would never know the truth… Now what, start the motor and slip away before sunup? Mr. Brown entertained this thought for a second. It would look suspicious, and besides, Mr. Ostrowieczki had stressed the desirability of postmortem pictures for the archives (newspaper clippings would do in the case of having fallen back upon plans A or B). Lastly, the old man — or rather the authentically young man — awakening in Mr. Brown’s soul enjoined him to “face the music,” which was the most sensible course of action and easier to carry off than he had anticipated, in view of the nervous hysteria that overwhelmed him without clouding his judgment.

He paced his room like a caged animal, like certain condemned men as they wait out their last hours. Sweat drenched his body; next his flesh felt so desiccated that he seemed to be burning up. Waves of nausea came, and he was glad to disgorge what had been an overrich meal. A diabolical doubt now took hold: Had he perhaps drunk something of the extra-special vintage? Blood draining from his face, he went back over his recollections of the dinner. Impossible. But what if… But there’d be no problem, if… Confounded America, overcivilized despite its brutalities, how it spoils one for the rough life of our times! This appalling malaise could only be caused by nervous shock which, although humiliating, was useful. Mr. Brown ripped the lining of his dressing gown with satisfaction. He took two potent sleeping pills, checked the mess of the room, assuring himself of his discipline and willpower. The drug was already working its divinely sedative effect when he remembered the revolver he had taken from Bruno Battisti. (So who could he really be, this “Bruno Battisti”? Oh well, none of my business…) He managed to wipe the gun carefully and carry it out into the middle of the coffee fields. But he was unable to shut the door on his return and collapsed, snoring already, onto the cool hard mat at the foot of his bed.

When Mr. Brown regained his senses, it was broad daylight. The room had been cleaned up. A native serving girl was changing the cold compress on his forehead. “Gracias!” he said. “Where am I?” The bewilderment was not entirely feigned, because on sinking deep into slumber he had genuinely thought he was dying, dying happily, it was fantastically great to die while falling asleep… Harris’s ruddy snout rose before him like the moon — or like one of those huge gangster faces on a movie poster. Terribly severe, with a jaw like a hanging judge and eyes like an executioner! He was saying, “There’s only one good medicine in my book. Take a drink, old man!” The voice was full of tenderness. Mr. Brown made no objection and swallowed a shot of whiskey, which happened to be just the right medicine. “Thank you!” he said, stretching. He pretended total amazement. “What’s happening? What are you doing here, Harris? What time is it?”

“Congratulations, pal!” said Harris. “You’ve come back from a long way off. Bring him some hot broth, quick,” he ordered the maid. “And tell Don Gamelindo he’s OK… The lousiest day of a lousy world, my friend. But at least for you it’s the first day again, and all is well…”

Harris turned around, rubbing his hands together, flushed with relief.

Don Gamelindo’s huge sombrero loomed in the doorway silhouetted against the light. Mr. Brown turned pale with thoughts of the police, his fingers fluttered nervously against his throat. Harris said impatiently, “Buzz off, Don Gamelindo, he’s over it… Don’t come in… Take care of the padre.”

“All’s for the best in the best of all worlds…” sang like a jolly jig at the back of Mr. Brown’s head, in the most remote convolutions of his gray matter. If the priest is here, that means immediate burial! The salty broth the servant brought in tasted wonderful, especially when compared to the broth of the drowned. “Let me take your pulse,” Harris was saying. “You know I studied medicine in New Guinea…”

“How was that?” asked Mr. Brown foolishly.

“A tale too long to tell. Your heart’s fine, archaeologist. Too bad. You’ll still be able to go on measuring idols’ assholes…”

“That’s enough,” said Mr. Brown, suddenly sitting up. “Now tell me what all this is about? I overslept, and then what?”

He pretended to try to get out of bed, a movement promptly checked by Harris’s robust hand.

“Hey, not so fast. You’re supposed to take it easy… Dr. Harris’s orders… You’ve had a brief illness which might have been pretty serious, and was, in fact, more than serious for some people… Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Well, all in good time. Meanwhile: bed rest, stewed fruit, glass of beer… Did you hear that, Ramona? Pronto!”

There hung only one shadow over Mr. Brown’s speedy recovery. He kept glancing at Harris’s blunt face, admiring his features deformed by bitterness, the way he dried the welling tears before they overflowed, swelling his hairy nostrils, chewing on something with dull ferocity, all the while acting jovial, tender, fraternal. “How happy he would be to kill me,” reflected Mr. Brown, tranquilly. “And he’d be right.”

Everything is simple in this land of incandescent sunshine. Just a while ago there was drought, the suffering of a thirsty world. Then compact clouds the color of menace advanced over the Laguna, hiding the mountains… The tension is broken by a thunderclap. Warm fat raindrops begin to lash the water gently and raise a mist of dust across the fields. And then a million liquid javelins fall. This is the way things happen. Suddenly. Another time, on the road to Pozo Viejo, a courting couple dashed for shelter under the only nearby tree, a cypress half a dozen centuries old. The rain was pelting down. The lovers clung together, wrapped in the boy’s se-rape. It might have excited their desire, but they were not to be married before the feast of San Pedro. How good it feels, they whispered laughing. A white ball of fire tore through the ancient foliage, drew the sign of the serpent in black upon the trunk, and rebounded off the couple. When the families came to collect the bodies they found them holding hands, both half burned: he the left side, she the right. They nailed two crosses to the old tree. They wrote the names: Ponciano (the rest illegible) and Cristina (the rest torn off), “Pray for their souls.” They were fine, good-looking youngsters. Christians. Such is life. Así es la vida.

Thus the drift of Don Gamelindo’s half-conscious meditation, at the end of a harrowing day. Singularly saddened, grotesquely attired in black for the occasion, satisfied at having been of great service — without charge — because somebody had to organize things. Cars had bumped along the potholed road; horses ridden by half-naked boys (happy to have been entrusted with important missions) had galloped through the sweltering noon. You see it was like this: At around seven in the morning Don Gamelindo had been awakened with the news. By eight he was on his chestnut horse trotting toward Pozo Viejo to fetch Dr. Rigoberto Merino in his gray gabardine jacket, felt hat, and maroon boots, astride his proud Arabian, a bay mare worth three thousand pi-asters, Señor!… Dr. Merino spent more time in consultation with the servants than on examining the remains. Ramona explained that a can of olives that had been opened for last night’s dinner was at least a year old; three years ago, in her home village, several people had expired after consuming a tin of salmon, sí Señor! Melita — too-short skirt revealing muscular knees, sweat in the crease of her arms, wide puffy neck, small teeth pertly aligned in prominent gums — had heard of many similar cases, which she recounted. Dr. Merino interrupted her in order to take a professional look at those gums, brushing the nipple of her breasts with a hypocritical hand as he did so. He summoned her for next Sunday morning, after his regular office hours, for she was evidently suffering from a lack of certain vitamins. Melita promised to come without fail, sneaking velvety glances at him in between sniffles, dabbing her eyes and mumbling, “Santísima Virgen, Virgen purísima…” Before filling in the death certificate, the good doctor had the foresight to collect his hundred piasters from Don Gamelindo. “Struck down by virulent food poisoning” et cetera, in a careful calligraphy decorated by the great flourishes of the signature. Don Tiburcio, San Blas’s town chairman, who had hastened over still wearing his mechanic’s overalls, countersigned the certificate without reading it — because he did not know how to read. Nonetheless, he asked the doctor: “Nothing suspicious, compadre?” The embarrassment of this little man with the noble Nahua profile laboriously tracing the letters of his signature amused Dr. Merino. “What suspicions would you like there to be, compañero?” he replied in a superior tone.

Don Gamelindo rode back to San Blas to purchase the coffins personally, for this task could be entrusted to none but the most dependable friend. Don Cuauhtémoc’s store, The Keys to the Kingdom, made sure to stock, along with ordinary coffins, a pair of deluxe caskets, big ones because a short customer can always be accommodated, whereas there’s no way around the opposite problem, is there? To each his size in this world, but once inside there, a human being’s got to have the room he needs! You can deny a man his rightful space in the sun, sir, but not in the grave! Don Cuauhtémoc knew that the Reaper tends to reap by twos, if not two the same day, then it’s within the fortnight, take my word for it. The twin body boxes were made of good pine lumber logged on the far side of the lake, upholstered in gray silk and embellished with brass handles. Don Cuauhtémoc and Don Gamelindo discussed the price for a leisurely quarter of an hour, taking alternate sips of tequila, for its fiery taste, and Coca-Cola, for its refreshing one; courtesy of the seller, of course. The negotiations were hard-headed but amicable. “That’s genuine silk, Don Game-lindo! Do you know how much real silk is fetching these days in town? No, you do not. Those brass handles, they don’t make ’em anymore! These are my last from before the war, compadre!” By the third little glass, Don Gamelindo had won a reduction of forty-two percent. Had he held out for two more glasses, he might have obtained fifty percent. But while Don Bruno was his dear departed friend, Don Cuauhtémoc had been his compadre for the past nineteen years. It was a good bargain for both of them and one from which Don Gamelindo, out of friendship, took nothing.

A mule cart driven by boys who whistled and sang and chucked small stones at one another or skimmed them over the lake, making as many as six bounces, transported the deluxe caskets under a hard, festive sun.

Padre Maclovio, who had promised to come around four, trotted over on the back of his own mule, balancing the little suitcase with his vestments against the pommel of his saddle. He complimented Doña Luz on her improvisation of a simple altar in the dining room, where the two coffins lay open on the great table, surrounded by candles and flowers; such an abundance of flowers that their savage, heady scents masked the odor of corpses. It was a beautiful funeral, something rare in this parish where many poor folk and too many children die, but rarely people of means. To be fair, the Battistis were not rich, only comfortably off. A more active owner could have made himself a fortune out of that plantation.

Thoroughly estimable people, in any case: naturalized Italians who lived (or had lived…) quietly, never wronging a soul. Padre Maclovio was well aware that they were atheists, from reading too many books — the punishment of a fallacious science; but it is just that the Holy Church triumphs in the end, and it is just that her minister should intercede for the souls of hardened sinners. Once upstairs, these can do their own explaining.

Mr. Brown, whose recovery, quite possibly miraculous, made him the object of unanimous goodwill, faced up to the trying day with authentic courage — maintained by the alcoholic beverages and delicacies Harris made him ingest at regular intervals. He took several photographs of the deceased, promising to send copies only if the roll of film were not spoiled, as he had reason to fear it might be… “He that in life was Don Bruno Battisti” (as they say in this country) — the seasoned traveler, the indefatigable worker, the educated man, culto, the obliging neighbor — lay there, displaying a grave countenance of pacified strength. The dome of the forehead stood out, the acute convexity of imperfectly closed eyes concealed an enigma; the closed mouth suggested a faint expression of disdain. That’s what Harris thought, at any rate, during the hours he spent gazing down at the pair of them, arms folded across his chest, eyebrows knit, concentrating on the two inanimate faces. Daria was beautiful. How could a woman who was no longer young radiate such a youthful beauty, blanched by an invisible frosting of snow, modeled out of purity itself? She was smiling — just barely. It’s common for dead faces to smile, nothing but a muscular contraction apparently, but that glow of deliverance within the smile, where did that come from? Harris found the fragility of it echoed in the pale face of Noémi, who often stood next to him, chin in hand, huge eyes unmoving.

Her eyelids never blinked. Nothing about this sudden denouement had taken her by surprise, as though it were merely the fulfillment of her night’s dream. When Doña Luz carefully broke the news to her, she accepted it with childlike simplicity. Except that she seemed to dry up then and there, like a plant that has consumed its last sap. “It had to happen, Doña Luz, I’ve been expecting it for so long! But why was I left behind, why?” The old woman regarded such prescience as a gift that came naturally to the simple-minded. “You must give thanks to God, my little girl,” she said. “Oh no,” Noémi said harshly, with a peculiar laugh.

The burial took place during the late afternoon, in the desert cemetery where the dead of some thirty families sent into the wild lay sleeping along with several of the plantation workers’ children. It was Harris who insisted that the remains should not be moved to San Blas. “If I croaked here, I’d want them to put me to earth here too… They’d agree with me, you know they would!” The priest made no objection. Our perishable remains can rest anywhere, so long as the soul has been taken care of… It was an invisible resting place halfway up to Las Calaveras. A rugged slope climbing toward the sierra. The hillside contained pockets of soil which were impossible to farm, since they were deposited at random among sharp outcroppings of naked rock. Thus, a very big cemetery for a few scattered dead. Few crosses to be seen. A merciless sun quickly burned the flowers. Cactuses pushing up here and there. After the rains the field was covered in a glorious profusion of wildflowers, submerging the tombs, for this was only intermittently a graveyard! On All Saints’ Day the families who came to share the midnight meal with their dead enjoyed an incomparable seclusion; their fluttering candles seemed closer to other stellar worlds than to one another.

Don Bruno’s workmen dug a single pit. Padre Maclovio, in his white surplice, spoke the prayer. The women and children of the solitudes formed a speechless group. Monica and Doña Luz were supporting Noémi, who had no need of their support but who was murmuring, amazed, “Sacha, Sacha.” (At moments she imagined that none of this was real, that Sacha would turn up by and by, as he always had throughout life… Why should he be there?) Thirty clay-brown faces, tragically concentrated, were massed behind the important people: Don Gamelindo, Mr. Brown, Don Harris, and the elegant doctor in his gray gabardine coat. The rites performed, Noémi cast the first spadeful of earth — since they told her to — clumsily, between the two coffins. Doña Luz, like an ancient fairy with sharp, dark features and a silver mane, told her: “On your husband’s coffin, little girl” and guided her hand for the second shovelful. The oldest friend, Don Gamelindo, came next and acquitted himself like a true gravedigger — and what gravedigger could be better than the truest friend? He grunted “ugh” and the back of his neck turned crimson as he stooped to drive a spade deep into the dry, light earth. “Adios, Don Bruno!” The whole circle heard his authoritative voice and the noble, machine-gun clatter of earth showering onto wood. But now Don Gamelindo realized that he did not know Daria’s first name, so he stepped back and wiped his face with a red bandanna so as to inquire it very quietly from Harris. Then, voice raised, he intoned “Adios, Doña María!” and once again the earth fell nobly. Mr. Brown’s shaky shovelfuls made a stealthy sound, while Harris’s, rageful, produced a dull thud. The peons finished the job off energetically. Vultures circled low in the pink sky.

Don Gamelindo, taking his leave, said humbly to Noémi, “If the Señora is considering selling her land, there’s no one who would offer her a better price than myself.”

“What are you talking about?” said Noémi, vaguely frightened.

“The Señora is not selling anything,” said Doña Luz, squaring her thin shoulders.

Don Gamelindo kissed both women’s hands: the strange white hand, the old brown hand. He swung into the saddle, saluted the onlookers with a gallant wave of his sombrero, reared his silver-studded mount, and made off at a high-stepping trot… The land will be sold off one day or another! I have plenty of time… Life is patience, money is patience, the land is patience! Adios…

Mr. Brown left one hour later, at nightfall. Harris and Monica walked with him as far as the road. A thin crescent moon was rising over the transparent lake. Harris, trying to be friendly, asked, “Will you be returning to Las Calaveras, Mr. Brown? You’d be most welcome at our place… It’s not as comfortable as here, but…”

“I don’t think so,” Mr. Brown replied in a feeble voice. “Anyhow, my work here is done.”

“The main thing is to get your strength back Señor… Adios, Señor,” said Monica with emotion.

Mr. Brown let up on the clutch. The headlights projected their objective glare over the hellish little stone piles.

Harris enclosed Monica — softly resisting — in his arms. The crescent moon shimmered twice, in the sky and in the water. “Monica,” he said in a deep, unknown voice, “Monica.” The young woman felt, as never before, that he loved her. A pulsing surge of joy spread throughout her being. She saw his face disfigured by suffering, and lifted her own broad, dull, massive face toward it in calm exaltation. “If you want to cry, Harris, go ahead and cry… It helps.” She felt a flash of anger harden him. “Me, cry? Are you kidding?”