The Journey. Miguel Collazo

were unable to resist. Catal had no doubt that someday, in the future, they’d be ready to break down these psychological barriers and pierce the mystery. The man felt overawed in the presence of his leader. He remained silent. Then he looked out across the desert and, at three widely spaced points in the distance, through the afternoon mist that was rising up from the sand, he seemed to see three long silver threads swiftly intertwining.

      Then, a short while later, he heard the rumbling of thunder.

      5.

      They were leaving, Teles announced, but neither Borles nor Bímer dared so much as to peer out the door.

      Catal had talked with him at great length, but the conversation had been so chock-full of incomprehensible phrases that Teles couldn’t recall it; he only knew that the Ammes had decided to leave because of something.

      “Something?” asked Borles. “Just like that?”

      “Just like that,” Teles said despondently.

      Borles fidgeted in the darkness.

      “It’s a trick,” he said. “Aren’t you an awful lot like Jalno? He also tried to pull things. Especially things that would put a person in harm’s way. Just like you. Well, after all, he was your father’s father. Get lost, Shrew, Noahsark! Scram, Etruscan! That must be what you are, an Etruscan. Get lost and watch it! You better not be tricking me.…”

      “They left,” said Teles, banging on the door. “Didn’t you hear all the noise?”

      Bímer shouted that they hadn’t heard anything, that there’d never been so much silence as now.

      “And the lightning?” Teles insisted.

      “What lightning?” said Borles. “We haven’t heard any noise or seen any damn lightning. How were we supposed to see it!”

      “The point is, they’re leaving,” said Teles.

      “They’re leaving, or they’ve left?”

      “They’re in the middle of it.”

      “Maybe so,” said Borles. “Maybe.… You say they’re really leaving? Remember, someday I might come out of here!”

      It’s no use, thought Teles. But he had seen it: the houses were disappearing, one after the other. Probably into the ships; they were storing them in there.

      “A trick!” Borles yelled from the darkness. “How can stuff like that happen?”

      “It’s like I’m telling you,” Teles maintained. “They were sticking them inside the ships. Though I can’t remember seeing anybody doing it.”

      “A trick! How can you do something without doing it? Have you ever heard of anything like it, Bímer? Of course not. It’s Jalno’s head that’s thinking for him. I’m surrounded by people who make stuff up, make it up for the sheer pleasure of making it up. Hear me, Shrew?”

      But his shouts no longer annoyed Teles. He had other things on his mind. He was thinking about Orna and the Ellipse. Her face appeared to him sometimes in his memory and made him suffer; he’d see her hair, her entire pale body, her mouth … Orna’s mouth! He felt like shouting. Then he calmed down, reproached himself; he remembered her as wicked, her eyes as evil, her laughter as cruel and mocking. Larte and Bumis. Yes, hate her! But that was no use; all it took was imagining just one of her caresses. Everything around him, moving or still, reminded him of Orna. If the Ellipse was leaving, wouldn’t he lose Orna forever? She and the Ellipse were one and the same thing. The Orna of today was Orna because of the Ellipse. Before the Ammes showed up, Orna was just Orna, Borles’s daughter, with her two disagreeable brothers. And she, too, was disagreeable, with no scent, tiny, with a mouth for eating and screaming; she would cross his path and he wouldn’t even see her, nor would he care whether he saw her or not. And now what had Orna become? Why was she so great, so irresistibly beautiful, so full of scents? Yes, it was the Ellipse, no doubt.

      Teles returned to Catal’s base; a storm caught him on the way there and he sheltered under some rocks. When the storm passed, he hurried to where the ships were. But there were no ships there, not a trace of those men; it seemed as if they’d never been there. Everything was untouched: the damp grass among the sand; the black fields covered here and there with moss; the rocks still in the same spots, bleached on top by the sun, stained by the damp underneath; the long, spindly stalks of ancient plants, standing tall, covered in dust as if nobody had ever touched them. Not a footprint, not a single insignificant depression in the ground. Nothing! He raised his eyes; just the thick gray sky, and perhaps a trembling in the clouds. They’d left, or they’d never been there; it amounted to the same thing: there was no Ellipse.

      Teles walked in silence. He felt lighter, but he couldn’t tell if that made him feel better or worse.

      It’s all over, he told himself.

      On the way back to his father’s house, he found the bed of dry leaves where he’d had such a good time with Orna. He lay there for a moment in ecstasy. He began to think of her; he thought so much, saw her so clearly, there at his side, felt her so real in his arms, that he jumped up shouting, pressing himself down between the legs with his hands. The air smelled of Orna. He breathed deeply, coughed, and cursed himself. Orna is the world, the world is Orna’s. Anything else was a dream.