It was eleven o’clock already. One of them lit the lantern: the signal that they were ready to be collected and taken aboard the steamer. When he extinguished it again, the darkness seemed even thicker and more menacing. But just a few minutes later, from the relentless breathing of the sea a more human, domestic sound emerged from the water, like that of buckets being rhythmically filled and emptied. And then came the sound of voices, a muffled chatter. They found themselves in the presence of Signor Melfa, which was the name they knew the organizer of their great adventure by, even before realizing that the boat had touched land.

‘Is everyone here?’ he asked. Signor Melfa turned on a torch and counted heads. Two people were missing. ‘Maybe they’ve had second thoughts, maybe they’ll turn up later … Either way, so much the worse for them. What’s the point of waiting for them, with the risks that we’re running already?’

Everyone agreed that it was not worth waiting.

‘If any of you doesn’t have the cash ready,’ warned Signor Melfa, ‘they might as well start walking home again right now – because if anyone thinks that they’re going to spring that little surprise when we’re already on board they’re making a big mistake. If that happened I swear I’d drop the whole lot of you back off again. Then everyone would suffer, thanks to one person, which isn’t fair – and that person would be made to pay with a beating from me, and from his mates too, that he’ll remember for as long as he lives. If he’s lucky, that is …’

Everybody swore that they had the necessary cash, down to the last lira.

‘Get aboard then,’ said Signor Melfa. And suddenly each of the travellers became a formless mass, a confused bundle of luggage.

‘Christ! – and have you brought the kitchen sink with you as well?’ Signor Melfa began to blurt out curses, only stopping when the whole cargo – men, bags and baggage – had been bundled into the boat, at the risk of persons or luggage ending up overboard. For Signor Melfa, the difference between a person and an item of luggage was that the person had two hundred and fifty thousand lire on him, stitched into his coat or held between his shirt and skin. He knew them; he knew them only too well: these peasant bastards, these louts.

The journey did not last as long as expected: eleven nights, including the one on which they’d left. And the nights were counted rather than the days, because they were nights of suffocating, atrocious overcrowding. They felt submerged in the combined reek of fish, diesel and vomit – as if in a hot, black, bituminous liquid. They were oozing it at daybreak, exhausted as they climbed on deck seeking light and air. If for them the idea of the sea was associated with a verdant, undulating plain stirred by the wind, the real sea terrified them: their insides clenched and knotted, their eyes were painfully blinded if they so much as attempted a glance towards the horizon. But on the eleventh night Signor Melfa ordered them on deck. At first they thought they could see dense constellations that had descended on to the sea, like flocks – but these turned out to be towns; the towns of wealthy America glittering like jewels in the night. And the night itself was enchanting: calm and gentle, a half-moon sailing amidst a transparent fauna of clouds, with a lung-clearing breeze.