The Jew

From Stendhal's note "to the curious" preceding his story "The Jew":

"Not having anything to read, I write. It's the same kind of pleasure, only more intense."

From Filippo Ebreo, Stendhal's narrator:

"The fact is, gentlemen, that I no longer loved anything but money. Ah! How I loved it!"

Ebreo recalls his past as a peddler in Venice and a follower of the coalition armies invading France in the wake of Napoleon's defeat.

Panait Istrati's Haiduks in English

It is Romania in the time of the Ottoman occupation. A band of insurgents--the haiduks--has taken up arms against the Turk. Led by the lovely Floarea Codrilor, the haiduks do battle not only with the armies of mercenaries sent by the Sublime Porte, the bashi-bazouks, but also with debased Romanian aristocrats, the boyars and gospodars who would betray their native land to the foreign occupier.

Each of the leading haiduks of Floarea's band recounts the events that prompted his (or her) decision to drop out of civilization and become an outlaw. Here is Movila the Vataf recalling the panicked flight of his countrymen (and women) before hordes of Turks set on pillage, rape, and destruction:

After six hours of travel, at our first long stop, we found ourselves on the heights of Calugareni, overlooking the Danube. The night, dark, like our destiny, was falling heavily. Each cart had lit its lantern. . . . Each creature was seeking support. . . . Even the dogs sought less angry looks. A woman kicked hers away. The wretched animal backed off a ways into the night, stopped, looked around humbly, not understanding anything. The priest saw this scene and, like me, was saddened:

"Why drive it away, my daughter?"

"Because I don't have anything for it, anything at all, not even an ear of corn."

"But it’s not asking you for food. . . . It wants to follow you. . . . Do you have a hard enough heart to refuse it this comfort?"

At this reproach, the woman started crying. I took the priest aside and told him of my plans to become a haiduk:

"I am going to avenge my father, my brothers, my sisters. . . . And still other victims."

"Who will be punished?"

"All of them. Regardless of who they are: Romanians, Greeks, or Turks, all of those who are unjust, cruel, and greedy."

The old man said nothing to me. He held himself tall and erect in the dark night: his eyes were on the Danube, on his church, his village, and his long beard was streaming in the wind. He turned his head slowly toward the lanterns attached to the carts and went lost in thought. Just then, flames, barely visible at first, then more and more widespread, appeared on the horizon. I touched his shoulder:

"Look, Father: Putineiu and Stanesti are burning."

"The marvelous storytelling talent," notes José Carlos Mariátegui, "that Panait Istrati revealed as of his earliest books is confirmed in The Haiduks. The figures of the haiduks, especially those of Floarea Codrilor, Élie the Sage, and Spilca the Monk, are drawn with surreal vigor on the rustic backdrop of the mountains of Romania and their primitive villages."

Rescued from the Ragman

Einaudi, 2009

L’ultimo fronte (“The Last Front”) is Nuto Revelli’s presentation and selection of letters sent by Italian soldiers who didn’t return from the war. In his introduction to a revised edition of the book, he notes that many of the collections of letters he obtained, most sent by alpini serving in the Soviet Union to farm families in the province of Cuneo, happened to be missing the final letters—that is, those posted around Christmas and New Year’s of 1943, just before the Soviets broke through the Axis lines on the Don and put an effective end to the Italian military postal service. But it is perhaps better to let Revelli tell the tale of these missing letters himself:

It has been twenty years since L’ultimo fronte was first published, and yet, for many people, this book is still living and topical. Just as well that, after the research for La strada del davai, I didn’t say, “Enough about the war.” It was gathering the 200 collections of letters for L’ultimo fronte that I entered the peasant world. Without that precious experience, I would never have written either Il mondo dei vinti or L’anello forte.

In the introduction to the 1970 edition, I assert that, covering the length and breadth of my province, going from one house to the next, I collected 6,000 letters—that is, 80 complete and 120 incomplete collections. I then mention 4,000 other letters, those from “Presenti alle Bandiere,” [a fund that made monetary allocations to the family members of the fallen or missing in action in the Second World War], letters acquired, when they had already been sent off to be pulped, in an altogether unexpected fashion. What I don’t say is that I got them from a Cuneo ragman. I had kept this unsettling detail to myself, because I had thought it would humiliate and offend the family members of the dead and the missing. But I realized, as a member of the “Lvov Commission,” that history is still being abused, and I mean to censor myself no longer, come what may.

Bureaucracy is really an awful monstrosity. Lord only knows who the bureaucrat from Rome who forced all of the families of the dead and the missing to go without their last letters was! This was the blackmail: “Show, by submitting your last letter, that your family member was on a battlefront rather than at home or it will not be possible to create an official file that will enable you to receive a monthly allocation equal to the pay or the salary received by the dead or missing combatant.”

It had taken me a while to realize the last letters were missing. I acquired the collections of letters, photocopied them, then saw about returning the originals—I put a lot into this work. I didn’t have the time to take a close look at the documentation I was acquiring day after day.

I noticed something wasn’t right only when I began the second phase of my work. Comparing the collections of letters from the Eastern Front, I noticed that almost all of them came to an end too soon, around mid-December. And the letters from Christmas and New Year’s? The military postal service of the Alpino Army Corps, and thus of the Cuneense Division, had been operational until early January 1943!

I thought that the family members had withheld the last letters, the most precious ones, and I sought confirmation. But all were sure they had given me every single one of the letters. Then, a woman from Malandrè, in Robilante, remembered she might have had to give the last letter to the police. Another woman told me she might have had to turn it over to city hall. “Could they have ended up at the recruiting office?” I wondered, even though such a destination seemed to me not only highly unlikely but also senseless.

So I turned to Lieutenant Colonel Enzo Chiorando, my close friend, who, after a brief inquiry, located the sixteen sacks containing all of the paperwork for the “Presenti alle Bandiere” in an attic of the military recruiting office. Enclosed with each file was the last letter!

How to deal with the problem? Enzo suggested that I go the official route:

“Ask the recruiting office to return the last letter to all of the families that gave you collections of letters. If your request is turned down, we’ll see what we can do to get around the obstacles.”

My request was turned down:

“These are confidential, untouchable documents meant for the archives in Rome,” I was told.

I took my work up again, but my obsession was to be able to add the last letters to my collections of letters. Enzo went on setting my mind at ease:

“Don’t worry,” he would tell me. “I’m keeping an eye on those letters. We’ll solve the problem sooner or later, you’ll see.”

He calls me one morning:

“Nuto, I have bad news for you. I was on holiday—”

“I know what you’re going to say. Where did the letters end up?”

“They’ve been sent to be pulped. A group of alpini on fatigues showed up to clear out the attic and threw everything onto a truck. That’s all I can tell you.”

I made it at a run to a nearby paper mill, where I was told they bought paper sorted by type and color, not mixed. I had to turn to the ragpickers. I found them, finally, the sixteen sacks, in Cuneo, in the warehouse of the first ragman I turned to. They were still intact. The negotiations went on a long time, as complications and fears emerged. Finally, I closed the deal. Those 4,000 “Presenti alle Bandiere” files didn’t cost me much: 25,000 lire in all.

Murder on Via Belpoggio

Giorgio, an out-of-work porter who has just robbed and killed an acquaintance, finds the consequences of his misdeed hard to bear. It's not that he is racked by remorse for having killed, no, not Giorgio; rather, he is terrified to the point of paralysis that, upon his inevitable capture, he will appear as a greedy coward to his fellow townspeople and, above all, to himself. Here he is, then, returning from his mother's house (where he gets the news she has been dead for a week, news that frustrates his plan to get her help in ascribing to his crimes a noble motive--that is, to enable a poor old woman to live out her last years in comfort):

He [had] lost the hope he had cherished so dearly over the last few hours he had ended up clinging to it quite as much as to the hope of not being found out.* It wasn’t grief over the death of his mother that was sending him reeling and clouding his vision. He didn’t see in front of him the now ashen face of the deceased or call to mind the voice he would now never hear again or the gesture so often filled with affection for him. That old lady had died at a bad time, and her death made of him, once again, a contemptible, rapacious murderer. 

Italo Svevo's 1890 tale "The Murder on Via Belpoggio," available here, is the latest translation published as an e-book by Fario.

* Sentence revised in response to the observant comment below!

Dreams of Eça

"Last night I woke up dreaming about Eça de Queirós and lay awake for an hour remembering his novels. I think I remembered them all, even though I read them when I was between fifteen and eighteen. I remembered odd details: for example, that two of them, The Relic and The Illustrious House of Ramires contain in turn other novels, written by the protagonists of the main novels. I remembered the similarities between many of his works and those of Flaubert, whom he admired so much. I remembered his excellent journalistic reports, mainly those from London and from Paris, and the letters of Fadrique Mendes. And his stories, many of them unforgettable, such as 'A Blonde Girl's Eccentricities,' 'The Treasure,' and 'The Deceased Man,' which my father once read to us. And also his lives of the saints, his least good work even though it was his last. This confirms for me the indelible nature of the readings of adolescence and their influence on you. I would have to reread his work now to see if it is as good as it is in my memory. In any case, for me he is still a great novelist, unfairly forgotten. I don’t think I’ve ever seen his name or one of his books mentioned in a magazine or a literary article in France, and I haven’t seen translations of his books into French, either. Temptation to write a short, remonstrative article about him." 

This entry from Julio Ramón Ribeyro's diary, dated 2 November 1976, has inspired the publication of Fario's latest translation, of Eça de Queirós's brief tale "O tesouro."

One would also quite like to publish a translation of Ribeyro's excellent diary. His work, alas, unlike Eça's, is not yet in the public domain. And when it is (in another fifty years, perhaps) one is not much more likely to be in a position to publish it than the three rancid brothers of "The Treasure" are to make safely off with the chest full of doubloons they chance upon in a cave in the forest of Roquelanes.

Don't Talk to Me about the Weather

Italo Svevo

The latest ebook published by Fario is a recent translation of work by Italo Svevo. Two Plays includes An Unpublished Play, in which Elena ("My husband exists only insofar as he bores me") bemoans her broker husband's plan for their move to Venice, and Before the Ball, the entire text of which appears below.

Before the Ball

CLARA (towards the entrance). Yes, Mother, I will be modest, I won’t make a fuss, I’ll say I like everyone and everything, and I won’t dance a lot. (Towards the audience.) At boarding school people said I was a good daughter, and as such when mother tells me to do something it’s my duty to listen and to promise to obey. That way, she sleeps easy here, and I dance with a clean conscience there. It’s just my second ball, but our experiences are so different we don’t understand each other anymore. She has been to so many balls… and has never understood anything about them. Unless the balls and the dance partners of her time were different.

(Listening.) The carriage! No! It went by. My aunt, to be chic, is in the habit of turning up late at balls, and because of this idea from the old days or from fools of the present day, you miss the real dancers, who, to tell the truth, are fairly rare.

I was so modest and respectful at the other ball I got bored. I didn’t have any great hopes for it, and even before I was laughing at the naivety of my mother, who was describing, in her way, the good time I was going to have. But I was surprised by the reality. The men don’t know how to woo or don’t want to; they go to balls to escort their sister or their sister-in-law or maybe their wife or they get dragged along by a friend who has a sister or a sister-in-law or a wife there. They are never dragged along by a desire of their own. Put them in front of a modest and quiet young girl and they will ask for nothing better. They’ll leave her in a corner and go about their business.

And it’s not just my experiences that make me think this way, even though they alone would also be enough. I watched how the girls people say are the most pursued get treated. They have a lot of men around them, but the men seem more eager to be wooed than to woo. Finelli, for example, one of the girls people mention most often. She said to an old woman who was beside me that she had no preference and that she was indifferent to all of them, and since her tone was angry I believed her. The ways she must be wooed! I bet a quick look from my literature teacher at school is worth more. It’s true that Finelli is very stupid, or so they say, but there aren’t any other girls to pay court to. Ah, yes, that corn-colored blonde whose name I don’t remember has a reputation for being stupid, too, and so does that other girl whose figure, a real broomstick, people admire. Because modern men, when they finally reveal their preferences, reveal at the same time a certain taste. Signor Mastroni was praising all three of them to me, and I interrupted his enthusiastic words to say: “Yes, she dresses well, very well.” Then I said I liked the Finelli girl’s nose, an odd nose that guards her mouth, the broomstick’s prominent ears, and the other girl’s forehead, because, covered as it as by a disheveled mass of hair she tries in vain to get into people’s eyes, at least you can’t see it. (Touching her head.) It’s not as if you need that much hair when it’s the desired color.

For a first ball, and bearing the burden of mother’s advice, it wasn’t too bad.

As for me, I have the consolation of not being wooed either well or badly. Here is my dance card from the other ball; poor little skeleton! Two empty contra-dances and the others badly penciled in. I want to keep to savor all the more the revenge I will take. (Tries to read the dance card.) An illegible name, my first partner, but an unforgettable person. Yesterday, modestly, but with absolute determination, I snubbed him to keep from having to waste my dancing time with him. Imbecile! He led me to the dance floor without opening his mouth, but smiling as if he were promising very witty things. During the first figure, he said to me: “Are you enjoying yourself?” Then he went quiet for half an hour. Then he said to me: “This is the first quadrille.” And again he went lost in thought. And, finally, just before taking leave of me, still smiling wittily, he said to me: “I really like dancing.” And I thought: “You wouldn’t know it.” There was nothing to say, but my mouth was still tired from the long period of inactivity.

(Reading.) Rialti. Another person to avoid. Before he had even taken my hand as a token of having made my acquaintance, he started complaining, yes, complaining, and in such a whiney voice it was awful to listen to him. He complained about his management for one reason and about his partners for another, and then about the color of the room, and that the company was better in the arcade than in the ballroom and that the reading room wasn’t located by the other entrance and that the girls were engaged a month beforehand…

“A pity I can’t change all that,” I burst out.

It didn’t do any good. Shortly afterwards, he started whining about excessive luxury and about how people nowadays no longer know how to dance or be witty. It was a lancers… a real torture.

The others (looking at the dance card), neither good nor bad. A little wit, a lot of presumptuousness, and when they know something they try to bury the poor girl who has been entrusted to them under it.

But Mastroni—oh!—the most hateful of them all. He gets introduced to me at the start of the ball by a director who later tells me he had been asked explicitly for the introduction.

“Good start,” I said to myself, “it’s one at least.”

Deceiver! The unspeakable tedium of the first hours is lessened by the surprise of not seeing signor Mastroni turn up anymore. Did he perhaps dislike my voice? It would be another sign of the impoverished taste of the times. No! After dinner, I see him, in a corner of the room, putting on his gloves, looking at himself in the mirror, and then making a move. I couldn’t tell which person he was moving towards, because I was watching him in a mirror, and descriptive geometry has never been a strength of mine. All at once I see him in front of me, and only then do I understand: before dinner, he hadn’t had the courage, and to muster it up he had needed a glass of Marsala. There was no reason to bear a grudge against him. On the contrary!

I respond kindly to his greeting:

“Are you enjoying yourself, Miss?”

“Not with any help from you, you bumpkin,” I thought, saying to him instead: “Yes, very much.”

“I’m not,” he said sincerely. “I don’t like dancing.”

“Then don’t come,” I think, and I say, looking at him with interest, because you could tell it was what he wanted: “Ah!”

“I dance reluctantly; if you allow me to keep you company for a bit, the ball will take on a different aspect for me.”

“Here’s a fellow who’s about to offer me his hand,” I thought.

And I looked desperately around in search of a friend from whom I could get information about that gentleman’s station. Instead, and even though he had seen one free on my dance card, he didn’t even ask me for a contra-dance.

That gentlemen was a good talker, but he wasn’t fooling me. You need only to have read a novel or two by Kock to be a good talker at a ball. He told me that he regretted deeply being unable to have a good time, but that it wasn’t his fault.

“I am of my time, which is serious,” he told me, which meant: “My brain is too developed for me to be able to have a good time, and you who dance are fools.”

This evening, if he says the same things to me, I will say frankly to him:

“Let people who are cut out for studies alone stick to studying; it’s a pity for their studies if they leave them.”

And modesty with these people? Let them bore you that way? We’ll see how it goes tonight. Even people who aren’t expecting them will get some insolent remarks. If anyone talks to me about the weather, for example, I’ll say: “It’s my second ball, and I already know everything there is to know about winter weather. Wait for summer and we’ll talk about it again.” We’ll try that method.

The problem is that my dance card is still empty, except for the first quadrille, which I have to dance with an old friend of father’s. These old men! I’d sooner not dance at all: dancing with old men, I run the risk of becoming too respectable. If only I could get rid of it…

Here’s the carriage. I’m coming! (Remains lost in thought.) That’s enough! If I find a nice young man right away, I’ll leave father’s friend in the lurch. Heaven knows! Maybe a duel will come out of it. A pity if the old man turns out not to be too willing to risk his hide. I get the shivers when I think he may be dancing for his health.

  Original title: Prima del ballo

Pisco in the Dunes

Julio Ramón Ribeyro himself suggested that he drank little other than Bordeaux, but his story "La casa en la playa" is remarkable for, among other things, its celebration of a particular pisco.

In the story, Ribeyro's narrator and his friend Ernesto take several trips south of Lima in search of a deserted beach ideal for a small house. An excerpt from the account of their third trip, no more successful than the first two, is included below:

Laguna de Huacachina (Ica), Peru

From "La casa en la playa"


I will say beforehand that this third excursion was also a failure and so break all the rules about creating suspense in a story. But this time the failure had nothing to do with the difficulty of finding deserted beaches. It was simply because of the demijohn. 

Everything had begun promisingly. Our two young friends Carol and Judith were going with us. We also had the good luck to be able to stay for three days at the Pesca Peru club, a small resort close to the Hotel Paracas reserved for the executives of the company. The club was nice: a dozen bungalows, a pool, a sauna, a ball court, lounges, a dining room, and the entire staff at our service. Since we were there during the week, we had the place to ourselves. 

We liked the place so much we spent the whole first day swimming in the pool and savoring the excellent dishes prepared for us by the Japanese cook. Our plan was to take Ernesto's truck and head out the next day for beaches south of Ocucaje--the theater of our last expedition--this time without either guide or recommendations, just playing it by ear. 

At dusk we decided to go to the Hotel Paracas for a change of scenery and some pisco sours. That was when the demijohn first showed up, not in its real form, glassy and cylindrical, but in the person of Don Felipe Otárola, who could be called cylindrical but not glassy and in any case was a reputed local grape grower. He was an old friend of Ernesto's; he sat down at our little table and invited us to spend the next day at his small Ica vineyard, the only thing left to him after the land reform. Ernesto tried to explain to him that we were in Ica only for three days and only to find a deserted beach, but Otárola was unbending and ordered us to come by his farm at ten in the morning. Then he would leave us free to go on with a search that, in his view, was completely idiotic. 

Carol and Judith couldn't care less about enology and they refused to go visit Otárola's vineyard the next day, choosing instead to stay at the club sunbathing by the pool in thong bikinis. So Ernesto and I had to face that engagement alone and stoically cross the fiery, hundred-kilometer plateau between Paracas and Ica. Sweltering, we arrived at Otárola's house close to noon. And we still had to visit the vineyard! Otárola led us down a dry and dusty road through the outskirts of the city until he stopped in front of a gate in a long adobe wall. We went though the gate and found ourselves in the vineyard: barely five or ten hectares but very well cared for. Lined up along irrigation furrows, the vines grew as high as a meter and a half and were supported by stakes and protected by cane arbors overgrown with intertwining vine shoots. The grape bunches weren't ripe yet. Ernesto and I thought the visit would be limited to contemplating the vineyard from the entrance and listening to a few comments from our host. But grape growers are fanatics, single-minded men with violent passions, so Otárola didn't just give us a panoramic view of his vineyard; instead, he had us tour it furrow by furrow, vine by vine, bent over on account of the low cane covering, suffocating in the heat, breathing dust, and listening to technical explanations that our desperation prevented us from understanding. When we got out of the place, Ernesto and I were hunchbacked and exhausted, but Otárola was proud of his demonstration. 

There had to be some recompense for that torture. Back at Otárola's house, dying of hunger and thirst (Carol and Judith were waiting for us at the club to eat lunch), our host offered us a farewell pisco sour. Yet another delay! But not in vain: the pisco sour he put in front of us in big glasses seemed to be a gift from the gods. Not only did it banish our hunger and thirst, it also endowed us with uncontainable happiness. We asked for another one and yet another, but the third one was denied us. Otárola was a responsible man. We had to drive back to Paracas and it was better to do so sober. It was finally time to go.

"The wine I make isn't that great," Otárola told us frankly, "but my pisco, the pisco I make for my own use, has no match here or anywhere else in the world."

Next thing, he went to the kitchen and came back with a big bottle that must have had ten liters of pisco in it.

"Here you have it. So you can take it to Lima or Paris and remember this poor farmer."

The demijohn!

From then on the afternoon devolved into the absurd. Carol and Judith were still sunbathing by the pool, but angry with us for being late. To mollify them we showed them the bottle as if it were a trophy and asked the Japanese cook and bartender to prepare us a pisco sour before lunch, which, according to the reproaches of our girlfriends, had been ready for more than an hour. But the pisco sour was so good that we had another one and just after that the four of us were in the pool, euphoric, splashing around and shouting, while the Asian kept bringing us new rounds of his concoction and reminding us, without our paying any attention to him, that the cebiche was getting warm and the rice with duck was getting cold. Only as the afternoon went on did we recover a bit of lucidity and realize: 

Primo: we hadn't eaten lunch. 

Secondo: for the second day in a row we had put off the excursion that was the object of our trip.

After showering we ate quickly and decided to set out for the deserted beach, even if it meant spending the night in unfamiliar terrain. We threw some food and other things into the truck, among them, very well-corked, the demijohn. 

We had barely gone twenty kilometers when it got dark and we started to wonder where exactly it was we were going. We were at a crossroads: the Panamericana heading to Ica and another road that presumably went to some cove. To decide which way to go, we uncorked the pisco and drank straight from the bottle, helping each other to lift it, so heavy it was. Straight like that, without any ornament, that pisco was heavenly dew, thick nectar that filled our mouths with fragrant warmth and the taste of mythical vineyards, to the point that we almost saw Bacchus drinking and Silenus dancing. 

"That way," said Ernesto. And he turned onto the secondary road that, as we noticed a few kilometers on down, led not to the ocean but into the sand dunes. And what dunes! On that moonless night, they undulated endlessly under the light of nothing but the stars. A low voice seemed to be coming from the dark plain. A bit farther on we yielded to its summons and agreed that we should get out of the truck and brave the inhospitable dunes on foot. Ernesto parked the truck on the side of the road and we headed into the darkness, the demijohn our only provision. 

The sand was warm in spite of the hour, and our feet sank noiselessly into the softness. We went on very close together, following the lay of the land, dips and rises, all of it under the soft light of the stars. But as we went forward (halting regularly to take swallows from the bottle, which Ernesto was carrying), we began to feel an intoxication that, more than from the alcohol, was coming from the powerful spell cast by the desert. We were walking faster and faster, farther and farther apart, as if absorbed by an unseen force, until at last we broke into a run and our group split up. Ernesto and Carol disappeared in one direction and I found myself alone with Judith under the immense dome of the sky. 

"Wait," I told her, before she disappeared like the others, and grabbing her by the hand we stood still listening to the silence. 

What a marvelous sensation! I felt Judith's heart beating in my hand and in unison with us the distant pulse of the sidereal world. The two of us sat down on the sand and then lay face up looking at the sky in astonishment. At that late hour the spaces between stars, planets, and constellations had been filled in with more and more lights so close to each other that they formed a milky blur and at last the sky turned into one sparkling silver dome. A sky like that I hadn't seen even on the highest Andean plateaus or on the driest coasts of Almería or North Africa. Now I understood, only now, why the ancient inhabitants of these bone-dry, cloudless plains were bound so closely to the stars and learned so much from that window that opened every night onto infinite space. Astronomers, prophets, potters, weavers, farmers, fishermen, builders of roads, temples, and cities were for centuries educated in the school of the cosmos. 

Judith and I, still holding hands, merged into the desert and the night and became fused to the heavenly bodies blinking in the silvery sky; we were in a state of exaltation that disembodied us and melted us into the immensity of the universe. And we would have stayed that way if it hadn't been for the distant cries we heard. 

". . . to!"  

". . . ol!" 

It was Ernesto and Carol looking for each other in the desert. We stood up right away to go look for them and set off running over the rolling plain, but as we chased those voices we too ended up losing each other. Each one of us was running around shouting for somebody else. I went backwards and forwards or ran in circles, guided by a shout and distracted by another in a space that was neither dark nor light but bathed in phantasmagoric light. I realized then that I didn't have to shout the whole name, just the last syllable, it was louder that way and took less effort. And the others must have made the same discovery: 

". . . it!" 

". . . to!" 

". . . ol!"  

". . . lio!" 

At last I heard a "to" next to me and I ran into Carol.  

"I've been looking for Ernesto for hours," she said. "Where in the world were you? Let's stay together, please." 

We kept going into the darkness, guided by Ernesto's and Judith's shouts, which resounded anxiously from separate, distant points. In that soft light and on that uniform terrain it was impossible to get oriented. At last, after countless twists and turns we ran into Judith. Only Ernesto was missing. The three of us, not straying too far apart this time, shouting each other's names to indicate our position, tracked the plain, and when we came around a dune we spotted Ernesto standing on top of a small rise and gazing at the sky, his arms raised. 

"Damn!" he said when he saw us. "I was just about to blast off for the Milky Way!" 

We were tired, excited, but happy to be reunited. Now it was a matter of finding the road where we had left the truck. The only information our poor knowledge of astronomy could give us was the Southern Cross, which was shining triumphantly in the stellar map. We followed its orders and fifteen minutes later made it to the road; then, walking along the road, we made it to the truck. Ernesto turned on the headlights and we saw a marker indicating kilometer thirty-three. Only when we started back for the club did we realize we had forgotten something in the desert: the demijohn.

The demijohn is eventually recovered, of course, but the story of the recovery is perhaps for another day.