by Silvina Ocampo & Adolfo Bioy Casares

THE CAPTAIN AMIANA! He’d been there for ten years. There were people in the world who had given him up for dead, people who had known him. Not the rest of us. We didn’t know anybody. Amiana used to keep a two-master over in Havana when he was busy hauling illegal immigrants to the United States. Poles, Syrians, Russians, Czecho-Slovaks, Germans, Armenians, Galicians, Portuguese, Jews. From all over. Amiana charged them for hundred dollars a head and then threw them overboard. Overboard, just like that. He knew the coast guard was out there somewhere watching, through gunscopes, and he couldn’t put them ashore. That happened sometimes. Then it was uncovered and Amiana had to take off. He unfurled his sails and disappeared. The papers said the coast guard had nabbed him and they published his picture. And meanwhile….

Ten years before, I mean. A crew went with him and they sailed leeward due west, and came upon the Island. There he folded his wings and never again was a bird’s cry heard on that island. The ship ran aground on the way in and he didn’t realize it was running on land until it beached in the mud, where some little branches, too green and too dry, were growing, spying like vermin, and farther on, the mangroves. The ship was stuck there to the hilt. Amiana gave orders to lower the topmasts and to cut a path inland to the bush. A path to nowhere. Everything was the same there, and there was nowhere to go. It was like cutting paths in the sea. The bush was low there, a little taller than Amiana, very thick and uniform. It wasn’t the jungle, with musical scales, with undulating terrain. It was the sea, a watery tortoise afloat on other water. To walk through that land men had to go by their inner compass, or by the stars. The men who weren’t sailors had to go out moored to a cable like divers, to be able to get back to the beached ship, their only guide. Which is why it all happened. Because the Island was not alive. It was an apparition, like the undead. One felt that beneath it something was fluttering that did not flutter, that did not have a dead life, that saw things through other eyes….

by Adolfo Bioy Casares

ON THAT JUNE night of 1540, Doctor Faust was perusing the shelves of his extensive library in the tower chambers. He paused here and there; he would take up a volume, browse through it nervously, and replace it. Finally he selected Xenophon’s Memorabilia. He placed the book on the lectern and settled down to read. He looked in the direction of the window. Something was shaking outside. Faust said under his breath: A gust of wind in the forest. He arose and abruptly opened the curtains. He saw the night, to which the trees lent a more imposing air.

Under the table, Lord slept. The dog’s innocent breathing, serene and persuasive like dawn, affirmed the reality of the world. Faust thought of Hell.

Twenty-four years earlier, in exchange for an invincible magic power, he had sold his soul to the Devil. The years had passed swiftly. His time was up at midnight. It was, however, not yet eleven.

Faust heard footsteps on the staircase; then three sharp knocks on the door. “Who is it?” he asked. It is I,” answered a voice whose monosyllabic “I” did not give it away. The doctor had recognized it, but he felt somewhat irritated and repeated the question. His servant answered in a bewildered and reproachful tone: “It is I, Wagner.”

Faust opened the door. The servant came in with the tray, the glass of Rhine wine and slices of bread, and cheerfully remarked on how addicted his master was to that refreshment. While Wagner explained, as so many times before, that the place was very lonesome and that those short chats helped him through the night, Faust thought of those agreeable routines that both sweeten and hasten life, drank down a few sips of wine, ate a few bites of bread, and for a moment thought himself safe. He reflected: If I do not stray from Wagner and the dog, I am shielded from danger.