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made by the Fates, or at least two of them, the spinner and the weaver, with no third sister to cut and stop the thread. How vast the ocean. Could the world really hold it? Would the world itself explode? But the great liquid cloth kept unfolding.
    She slept terribly that night, unaccustomed to the motion of the ship and wrenched out of her dozes by her bunkmate Fausta’s vomiting, and her own. Nothing had prepared her for the effect of the night sea on the body, the whorl of her insides when she lay down. Fausta, a matronly and grave-faced woman about ten years her senior, vomited first, flooding the floor. Before she could rise to clean it up, Leda did it for her, using the sheets from her own bed to dispatch the mess. She bundled the dirty sheets in the hall outside their door. The pile joined other crumpled heaps of linens scattered along the hall. The stench was overpowering. She returned to the room.
    “I’m sorry,” Fausta said from her bare mattress.
    Fifteen minutes later, Leda vomited into her chamber pot. The smell filled the tight space, there was no escaping.
    “You all right?” said Fausta.
    “I will be.”
    “I can’t take twenty nights of this.”
    “You won’t. It’ll get easier, you’ll see.”
    “How do you know it’ll get easier?”
    “Because it has to.”
    It was an unfounded assertion, invented on the spot, yet it seemed to comfort Fausta. Her eyes closed and the muscles of her face relaxed. She had the square, strong-jawed face of a woman born to grow old early, Leda thought. That evening, when they’d first met, she had told Leda about her husband, who had been in Buenos Aires for ten years now; he had left Italy after they’d been married for one year in which they’d hoped but failed to have a baby, and when he’d left to make América , as they say, to make his fortune, he’d promised to return very soon, after a year, two at most, with money and a new foundation for the family they’d raise. But he didn’t return. The years dragged on. Finally Bruno wrote a letter saying that it would be better for her to come and join him in Buenos Aires. She balked, at first. She wrote back, I don’t want to go, I can’t imagine, can’t you please come home? He wrote back, simply, No . It was the shortest letter she received from him in all their years of separation, devoid of explanations or even the usual expressions of love. And now, here she was, already twenty-eight years old and childless, crossing the ocean to meet him in a strange new land. And are you glad to be going? Leda had asked her. Of course I am, Fausta had said, that is to say, I want to stay in Italy, but what I want more is to be with my husband, and to start my family before it’s too late.
    She had seemed so sure of herself, as she said it. She had spoken in the tone of a nun who didn’t question her faith in God.
    Now, Fausta had fallen back asleep. Leda shifted her body on her stripped bed and thought about water and land and the impossibility of human crossings. We are not made for a journey like this one, she thought. These modern ships go against what we are. She wondered how it had been for Dante, during his crossing, whether he had slept thefirst night, whether he’d needed bowls. She would have to ask him when she arrived. She had so very many things to ask him.
    When Leda finally drifted off to sleep, she dreamed of Vesuvius. She was climbing the side of the mountain. Her feet were bare, and they bled as she walked, but she did not slow down. I will arrive . The walk seemed endless and her belly churned with nausea. Suddenly she was at the highest point, right at the lip of the crater. She bent down toward the blackness. It was vast and seemed to have no end. She stared down, petrified. Something flickered in the depths, a pale spark, two sparks, three: the lights of lamps at windows; and then it came into view, Alazzano itself, her village trapped in the crater, and she too high to reach it or get