“Navarino?” I replied, trying to remember. “That’s right, Navarino!” he said. “The big island to the south of the Beagle Channel. They need someone there who can turn his hand to anything.” This offer caught me on one of those days when you can set sail in any direction, and at a moment in which I was wandering the harbor as if separated from myself, like those scraps of cloud that linger in the sky after a storm and that blow away as soon as the first wind arrives. Something like a storm had indeed occurred inside me, but all that remained of it was the memory of a woman and a touch of darkness in my heart that every now and again ran through my veins. When I signed the contract, however, I didn’t feel the same joy I’d felt on other occasions when I had made some life-changing decision. I was free and I was unemployed, and perhaps I was losing something by abandoning that limbo of idleness and agreeing, for some obscure reason, only half-conscious of what I was doing, to accept that offer to go to Navarino.
