A seven year drouth plagued East Texas in the ’50s. The rich, black, river bottom land crusted and cracked like a near-emptied paint can. Boll weevils scourged the cotton fields year after year and the farmers grew dry and tired and hopeless with the land.

It was the middle of January and there was nothing to look forward to.

His name is Tan Salaam, self-bestowed since he was dis- missed from the Tanzanian civil service for illegally dealing in four elephant tusks.

All night the sleeper sleeps close to a board, irons rattle, a violin played aft vibrates along the side, the body of the ship rises and falls, the engines beat on through seven hundred sleeps. The first day, yellow cliffs, blue coasts, next day, the steep green island south; a new world. Homeward bound on that ship in 1928, a Lithuanian woman in grey knitted skullcap, fifty five, short, sour, salty; a tall English woman, eighty-four in black, small hat and scarf, who stands for hours by the lounge wall waiting for the Great Bezu to rise; a missionary woman, thirty-nine invalided home, worn by tropical disease, her soft dark skin like old chamois; she is going back to the town, street, church she left eighteen years before, because of a painful love-affair with the pastor: his wife now dead, he has just married a girl from the choir, “Just as I was then,” she says.

My old friend Charley that I’ve known for 20, 25 years stopped me in the street. He said, I’ve got something to tell you. Now, sit down. Right here.

I met the Russian group again at the home no, he is already dead at Hemingway’s Museum. Always the same thing. We hadn’t been there even five minutes when a penetrating stench of life also entered and began to gesticulate: “Comrade, please. There, one minute, please, a photograph.” I looked at him, half attracted, half repelled; he was blond, with an enormous round face with his small black camera dangling over a checked shirt. 

while expecting my gash, declaring
tnat this _f^curious _M^distress
was after me, and having to face the question (to her

At first the darkness sometimes forms the vague outline of an ace of spades: from a point in front of you two lines recede, diverge and, after tracing a vast curve, turn back towards you.

The light that dripped through the Venetian blinds was so inviting that the doctor, waking up, wanted to lick it like caramel syrup. He slid away from the sheets, lowered his naked feet onto the rug

It is a country where you can touch nothing: the food, the toilets, the people. The flies are everywhere. You come with your pockets stuffed with money, but there’s nothing you can buy for fear of contamination, and nothing you can let touch you.