By Night in Chile

lasted right up to the present, if only in the most colorless and polite form, namely the punctual exchange of Christmas greetings by post. The first port of call was Arica, where, from the deck, I took a photograph of our heroic headland, then El Callao, then Guayaquil (when we crossed the equator I had the pleasure of saying mass for all the passengers), then Buenaventura, where, as the ship lay at anchor among the stars, I recited José Asunción Silva’s
Nocturno
by way of an homage to Colombian
    letters, and was warmly applauded, even by the Italian officers, who, in spite of their imperfect grasp of Spanish, were able to appreciate the profoundly musical strains of the bard who died by his own hand, then Panama, the wasplike waist of the Americas, then Cristóbal and Colón, the divided city, where some rascals tried unsuccessfully to rob me, then industrious Maracaibo, redolent of oil, and then we crossed the Atlantic Ocean, where, by popular demand, I
    celebrated another mass for all the passengers, many of whom wanted to confess their sins during three days of storms and heavy weather, and then we stopped in Lisbon, where I got off the boat and prayed in the first church in the port, and then the
Donizetti
put ashore in Malaga and Barcelona, and finally, one winter morning, we arrived in Genoa, where I said goodbye to my new friends, and said mass for a few of them in the ship’s reading room, a room with oak
    floorboards and teak-paneled walls and a large crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling and soft armchairs in which I had spent so many happy hours,
    absorbed in the works of the classic Greek authors and the classic Latin authors and my Chilean contemporaries, having at last regained my passion for reading, my literary instincts, completely cured, while the ship went on parting the waves, faring on through ocean twilight and bottomless Atlantic night, and, comfortably seated in that room with its fine wood, its smell of the sea and strong liquor, its smell of books and solitude, I went on happily reading well into the night, when no one ventured on to the decks of the
Donizetti
, except for sinful shadows who were careful not to interrupt me, careful not to disturb my reading, happiness, happiness, passion regained, genuine devotion, my prayers rising up and up through the clouds to the realm of pure music, to what for want of a better name we call the choir of the angels, a non-human space but undoubtedly the only imaginable space we humans can truly inhabit, an
    uninhabitable space but the only one worth inhabiting, a space in which we shall cease to be but the only space in which we can be what we truly are, and then I stepped on to dry land, on to Italian soil, and I said goodbye to the
    Donizetti
and set off on the roads of Europe, determined to do a good job, lighthearted, full of confidence, resolution and faith. The first church I visited was the church of St. Mary of Perpetual Suffering in Pistoia. I was expecting to find an old parish priest, so I was more than a little
    surprised to be welcomed by a clergyman not even thirty years old. Fr. Pietro, as he was called, explained to me that Mr. Raef had written to inform him of my visit, and went on to say that in Pistoia the principal threat to the major examples of Romanesque and Gothic architecture was pollution caused not by humans but by animals, specifically pigeon shit, the numbers of pigeons in Pistoia, as in many other European cities and villages, having increased
    exponentially. A radical solution to this problem had been found, a weapon that was still undergoing tests, as he was to show me the following day. That night, I remember, I slept in a room that opened off the sacristy, and I kept waking up suddenly, not knowing if I was on the boat or still in Chile, and supposing I was in Chile, was it our family home or the dormitory at school or a friend’s house, and although I sometimes realized I was in a room adjoining the sacristy of a European church, I didn’t quite know which European country that room was in and what I was doing there. In the morning I was woken by a woman who worked for the parish. Her name was Antonia and she said: Father, Fr. Pietro is waiting for you, get up quickly or you’ll incur his wrath. Her very words. So I
    performed my ablutions and put on my cassock and went out to the patio of the presbytery, and there was young Fr. Pietro, wearing a smarter cassock than mine, his left hand clad in a stout