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camping tents on the banks of the rushing stream, Teresa’s shadow walking in the moonlight under the olives, and it was as though Somoza’s voice now, echoing monotonously in the almost-empty studio with its sculptures, would come to him again out of that night, making part of his memory, when Somoza had confusedly intimated his ridiculous hopes to him, and he, between two swallows of retsina, had laughed happily and had accused him of being a phony archaeologist and an incurable poet.
    “There are no words for it,” Somoza had just said. “At least in our words.”
    In the great tent at the bottom of the Skyros valley, his hands had held the statuette up and caressed it so as to end by stripping it of its false clothes, time and oblivion (Teresa among the olives was still infuriated by Morand’s reproach, by his stupid prejudices), and the night turned slowly while Somoza confided to him his senseless hope that someday he would be able to approach the statue by ways other than the hands and the eyes of science, meanwhile the wine and tobacco mixed into the conversation with the crickets and the waters of the stream until there was nothing left but a confused sense of not being able to understand one another. Later, when Somoza had gone back to his tent carrying the statuette with him, and Teresa got tired of being by herself and came back to lie down, Morand talked with her about Somoza’s daydreams, and they asked one another with that amiable Parisian irony if everyone from the Río de la Plata had such a simple-minded imagination. Before going to sleep, they discussed what had taken place that afternoon, until, finally, Teresa accepted Morand’s excuses, finally kissed him, and everything was as usual on the island, everywhere, it was he and she and the night overhead and the long oblivion.
    “Anyone else know about it?” Morand asked.
    “No. You and I. Seems to me that was right,” Somoza said. “These last months, I’ve hardly stepped out of here. At first there was an old woman came to clean up the studio and wash my clothes for me, but she got on my nerves.”
    “It seems incredible that one could live like this in the suburbs of Paris. The silence … Listen, at least you have to go down to the town to do the shopping.”
    “Before, yes, I told you already. Now nothing’s missing. Everything that’s necessary’s here.”
    Morand looked in the direction that Somoza’s finger pointed, past the statuette and the reproductions abandoned on the shelves. He saw wood, whitewash, stone, hammers, dust, the shadow of trees against the windows. The finger seemed to indicate a corner of the studio where nothing was, hardly a dirty rag on the floor.
    But these last two years very little had changed between them, there’d also been a far corner emptied of time, with a dirty rag which was like all they had not said to one another and which perhaps they should have said. The island expedition, a romantic and crazy idea conceived on a café terrace on the boulevard Saint-Michel, had ended as soon as they discovered the idol in the valley ruins. Perhaps the fear that they would be found out finished off the cheerfulness of the first few weeks, and the day came finally when Morand intercepted a glance of Somoza’s while the three of them were going down to the beach, and that night he discussed it with Teresa and they decided to come back as early as possible, because they guessed that Somoza, and it seemed to them almost unfair, that he was beginning—so unexpectedly—to be falling for her. In Paris, they continued to see one another at great intervals, almost always for professional reasons, but Morand went to the appointments alone. Somoza asked after Teresa the first time, but afterward she seemed to be of no importance to him. Everything that they should have been saying weighed heavily between the two, perhaps the three of them. Morand agreed that Somoza should keep the statuette for a while. It would be