“Someone asked me if I was sad, because last night I was drowsily resting my hands over my eyes. No, I wasn’t sad. My father left me in the care of the chief steward and a family with a strange name that I keep forgetting. The day the boat was leaving the bells were ringing from on high, and the scent of fresh flowers filled the dining room. The many embraces pushed my hat so far down that all I could see were feet dancing the steps of a goodbye. My father removed my hat so he could see my eyes, and only then could I see just how many pairs of eyes were surrounding me, crying. I understood that this was a moment in life when you had to cry. I rubbed my eyes and kept my handkerchief in my hand as a symbol of tears until everyone had said good-bye.”

“When they had given me the last hug, bells rang that sounded like the ice cream cart on the street.” The loud siren made the boat shake as if it were going to break three times, and afterward the silence of the water was suffused with lights and the three chimes of the English clock tower. Buenos Aires was already far away. That’s how travel is,” thought Claude Vildrac, “so different than what you imagined.”

Sitting on the bed in her cabin, she was reading her passport like a prayer book. A week had already passed since she had boarded the transatlantic ship called the Transvaal, brand-new with its stars and banners. Before embarking, she and her mother had visited the boat, chosen her cabin, and run around searching for the corresponding lifeboat in case of a shipwreck. Terror gave Claude the face she is making in her passport, her eyes intensely widening, filling with the waves of storms that sink ships. Her mother had laughed, which to Claude seemed like a deadly omen. She remembered they had eaten lunch that day at a restaurant called La Sonámbula. On each plate was a little girl wearing her hair down with arms extended, sleepwalking across a bridge; that sleepwalker was actually a woman emerging from a shipwreck, who’d lost her passport when she was fourteen years old, along with her home and family.

She looked out the porthole: the sea was an inky navy blue, and the boat was softly creaking from side to side. How incredibly different the sea was when you were at the beach swimming in it than when you were aboard a ship looking down at it, hard and impenetrable as a marble tabletop streaked with green. Claude had wet hair after a swim in the pool that lasted more than two hours. Elvia had scolded her. Who was Elvia? She didn’t know her last name or anything about her mother and father, yet Elvia was the person she followed around the ship all day: she was the person Claude would give her life vest to the day of the shipwreck. She cherished a piece of ribbon that Elvia had used to tie her hair the day the ship crossed the boundary line. The dining room was lit up that night, and the circus music had turned sentimental. Even the tables were dressed up, and the cookies were a sea-green color, decorated with wide butterflies and racehorses and ballerinas and hunters. But Elvia wasn’t in a ball gown: she wore a dress that screamed loneliness in the shining night. The five bottles of perfume she used on herself made a kind of garden around her, which she kept locked.