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the bottom of the sea and the manta ray watching us from above, halfway between the sea floor and the surface.
    Then I heard the Bolognan and the Libyan saying they were fine, and how are you, Mr. Bruno? and Maciste, who wasn’t up above anymore and whose voice no longer echoed with infinite shades of fragility, replied:
    “Plagued by ailments, my friends, that’s the way of it.”
    And he said this in a voice in which there wasn’t a hint of ailing, a voice that boomed in the darkness as if it, the darkness, was a muzzle, and he was straining at it furiously, itching to come out on the porch and gobble up my brother’s friends, who just then, the cowards, were saying that their business here was done, they hoped everything would go well, and then they left, wishing us goodnight, Maciste and me, and as they were backing away almost at a run to the garden gate, the door to the house closed and since I didn’t see any shadow cross the threshold, I deduced that Maciste had closed the door with some kind of remote control.
    Then, for the first time in a long time, I was plunged into total darkness.
    What happened next is hard to describe. Maciste’s voice guided me to a room on the second floor, lit by a dim bulb half-hidden in a corner. I know I went up some stairs, but I know I went down some stairs too. Maciste’s voice was always ahead of me, guiding me. I wasn’t afraid. I crossed a dark room with a wall of windows that overlooked the back garden and the tall ivy-covered walls separating the house from the building next door. I felt calm. I opened a door. It wasn’t Maciste’s room, as I had imagined it would be, but a kind of gym. His private gym, the one my brother’s friends had told me about.
    I turned on the light. On a wooden table there were several bottles of liniment and various lotions. I took off my jacket and waited. After a while the lights went out. Only then did the door open and I saw Maciste.

 
    All of this is hard to describe, as I’ve said. What happened, what I felt, what I saw. What might have happened, what I might have seen, and what I might have felt. What he felt, I don’t know. I’ll never know.
    He was big and fat. But that wasn’t really Maciste. He was big, yes. Tall, broad. He was also fat. He had been a world bodybuilding champion and a tiny part of that glory still lived on somewhere, not in his body, maybe, but in the way he moved. His body was the pallid color of bodies that never see the sun. Either his head was shaved or he had gone totally bald. He was polite. He was wearing an old black robe that fell to his ankles, and sunglasses that looked small on his big face.
    I remember that he advanced toward the middle of the gym, where I was standing, his steps so slow that I could tell he was nervous or uncomfortable too.
    He asked me how I was, and how old I was. I lied to him, as we had agreed I would, and in turn I asked him why he was called Maciste.
    “Are you comfortable?” he asked.
    “I’m fine and I’m nineteen. Why do people call you Maciste?”
    He felt for a chair and then I knew, without a doubt, that he was blind.
    He murmured that in his day he’d played a character called Maciste in a few movies.
    I didn’t know what to say, not because of his response, but because I realized that I had a blind man in front of me. My brother’s friends hadn’t warned me about this. Assholes, I thought angrily, and I moved to grab my jacket and go running out of the house. But then I thought: what if they didn’t know? Was I going to spoil an ambitious plan, ambitious by our lights, I mean, just because of a mistake? Would my brother be left wandering the streets of Rome just because of a misunderstanding of no consequence in the end, anyway? And what if no one knew that he was blind, or hardly anyone? Because Maciste’s life was a mystery, or so I’d been told, and neither the Bolognan nor the Libyan could be said to be part of his inner circle, if such a circle