“Women are always having to get themselves ready,” he said. “You’re fine just like that. You could pass for the Virgin of Lima. Nothing could be more fitting. You’re completely ready. Come on, we’re going on a magic stroll.”

So she gave the hoops to the boy who was carrying her baggage, and she gathered her dress up in big handfuls. “All right, let’s go,” she said.

“Here we are,” he said. (After a hundred yards, they were hidden in the mist.) “Look. Everything has disappeared, there’s nothing left: no carriage, no inn, no people. Forward, march!”

“Look at you now, sailor, full of swagger. Don’t forget that I’m walking with fifteen feet of fabric around my legs. Forward, then, but not too fast.”

“Try a little harder. I’m not giving you my arm, because you have to be really lost. Are you really lost?”

“I’m perfectly lost. My dress is wrapped around me like a layer of bark. Five minutes from now, I’ll be lost and marooned at the same time, like a tree in the middle of a field.”

“All right then, everything’s going well. This is exactly what was required. . . . When my mother lost a couple of pennies (she was a remarkable person, my mother), when she lost a couple of pennies, she used to say—of course, only after she’d searched everywhere, sometimes for weeks—when she finally gave up, she used to say, ‘They haven’t been lost for everyone.’ When I was a little boy, this way of seeing things had a great influence on me. I assure you, if you’d known my mother (I wish you had known my mother), you’d have been convinced, like me, that when it came to pennies—their zoology, their anatomy, their astrology—my mother knew everything. She was the Cassandra of pennies. She had the gift of seeing their future through thin air. I’ve wondered for a long time. . . . (Could you take a few more steps, in spite of it all? We don’t need to have the mist, but if we are going to have it, at least it should be thick.) For a long time, I’ve wondered where that place was, where even my mother couldn’t find two pennies. Because it was real, and from the moment she said so, there was no reason to doubt it might also be a place where people could hide. Have you never longed for a place where you could escape from worldly powers, a kind of refuge, like the Merovingian churches? Now, take my arm.

“I’ve often thought: Someday it could happen, while you’re walking along any kind of a road, that you cross over a mysterious barrier, without suspecting it. It looks to me like this is exactly what you and I have just done, at the very same moment. Together we put pressure on a kind of membrane in the air, and it burst when we passed through. Look out! From now on it’s just the two of us, alone, inseparable. It made a sound you could barely perceive, but didn’t you hear it too? I wish you’d answer me. No, don’t let go of my arm.