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agreeable he was when they talked about contemporary Italian poetry (Girau had translated twenty-five poems by Dino Campana into Catalan), what a good listener he was, and how sharp his opinions usually were. In bed it was a different story, he was a late-blooming queer and he neglected the practical, neglected it badly. Though in the end, thought the poet Pere Girau bitterly, he’s more practical than we are, because he’ll always be a literature professor, which means he’ll be protected financially at least, while we’re plunged into the vulgar and savage fin de siècle.

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    During the flight each of them realized that the other was afraid, though not very, and each of them understood with a sense of fatalism that all they had was each other: Planet Amalfitano began with Óscar and ended with Rosa and there was nothing in between. Or maybe there was: a succession of countries, a whirl of cities and streets that brightened and darkened arbitrarily in memory, the ghost of Edith Lieberman in Brazil, an imaginary country called Chile that drove Amalfitano mad—although every so often he tried to find out what was going on there—and that Rosa, born in Argentina, couldn’t care less about. If their plane went down in flames over the Atlantic, if their plane exploded, if their plane disappeared in the boundless space of the Amalfitanos, no memory of them would be left in the world, thought Amalfitano sadly. And he thought: we are two gypsies without a tribe, reviled, used, exploited, with no real friends, a clown and his poor defenseless daughter. Which led him to think: if instead of both of us dying in a plane accident only I die, of a heart attack or stomach cancer or in some gay brawl (the possibilities made Amalfitano sweat), what will happen to my angel, my darling, my wonderful, clever girl? and the carpet of clouds he could see if he craned his neck a little (he was in an aisle seat) opened up like the door to a nightmare, like an immaculate wound, Israel, he thought, Israel, let her head to the first Israeli embassy she can find and request citizenship, her mother was Jewish, so it’s her right, let her live in Tel Aviv and study at Tel Aviv University, where she’ll probably run into Skinny Bolzman (how many years has it been since I saw him? twenty?), let her marry an Israeli and live happily ever after, ah, he thought, if only it could be Sweden I would breathe easier, but Israel isn’t bad, Israel is acceptable. And he thought: if neither of us dies but things go badly in Santa Teresa, if I lose my job and can’t find another one, if I can only give private French lessons and we have to live in a seedy boardinghouse, if we start to shrivel up and succumb to our basest instincts in the middle of nowhere with no money to leave and no place to go, if we’re smothered and numbed in a time that moves with endless slowness, without hope or prospects, if I end up like that Spanish widow I met in a café in Colón, the perfect victim, that mental Justine who worried every day that the Panamanians (the black ones, those big, athletic black men) would rape her delectable fifteen-year-old daughter, and she would be helpless, a woman with no husband and no money running a tiny café that made no profit, with no hope of returning to Spain, trapped in a Buñuel film from the ’50s, what will I do then? thought Amalfitano, bewildered, trying to block stray images of Padilla and desolate, schematic New World landscapes in which he was the only cat among packs of hounds, a hoopoe among eagles and peacocks.

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    A month after they were settled in Santa Teresa one of the secretaries from the rector’s office gave Amalfitano a letter from Padilla that was addressed to the university. In the letter Padilla talked about the weather in Barcelona, about how much he was drinking, about his new lover—another one—a twenty-eight-year-old SEAT auto worker, married with three children. He said that he had left the university