Foreword

If you ask how I came by this nineteenth-century story, I am afraid I cannot give you a convincing answer. I did not invent it. I merely transcribed a peculiar little notebook that my grandmother brought back from a pilgrimage to a mountain temple. You know the sort of woman she is: superstitious, always convinced that the purity of her faith at the summit can alter her grandson's life. Every year she brings home some embodiment of that faith. In previous years, it was red thread, a jade bangle, the cuff of a monk's robe, twigs from their brooms. This year, it was the notebook. She said she had found it behind a statue of the Buddha in the temple, its cover already blanketed in dust.

She had not dared open it, for fear the good fortune would escape at the instant she did. She guessed it was an ancient object, perhaps a sign that the God of Literature had descended to earth. And so, with great solemnity, she handed it to me, her grandson struggling at the edge of subsistence. When I accepted it, I could tell it had probably come from a M&G stationery shop. I did not tell my grandmother.

The handwriting inside was disorderly but not old. It told the story that follows. Yet on the first page, the notebook's writer had added several long footnotes claiming that he, too, was not the author. He had "heard" the story during a chance excursion. He wrote that he was an amateur field recordist, and that this was a low voice he had recorded in open country. Following the voice's instructions, he divided the account into three acts, bound them into a volume, and named it Notes of a Follower, after the title the voice mentioned repeatedly. At the moment the notebook was finished, the voice vanished from the memory card.

I read the story with interest and, for a time, sank so deeply into it that I forgot to be wary of its truth. Put simply, it is the confession of a ghost from the nineteenth century. The ghost seems to sense that its long day is ending and hurries to tell the story of its life. It tells of a young man who grew up in the collapse of an old world, fled St. Petersburg for Paris, sailed from Paris to South America, returned from South America to Europe, and finally traveled from Europe to China, where he dissolved amid the glory and ashes of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Faith and fear, the two great themes of his life, both betrayed him.

It is difficult to say what this story has to do with us. We have, after all, entered a new epoch, one in which people have lost faith in every history and every narrative. They complain about, and take pleasure in, the sensation of floating in midair. I imagine it was out of disappointment with the people of today that the notebook's author hid it behind the Buddha, awaiting cultivation by posterity. Yet when I reached the end, I discovered that this had also been the ghost's unfulfilled wish. During his life, he wrote a thick manuscript of his own, also called Notes of a Follower. He, too, had intended to hide it behind a statue of the Buddha and wait for future archaeologists to restore his name. He did not succeed.

By making this manuscript public without permission, I have presumably violated the intentions of both authors. If you insist that I confess my motive, I can only say that, like you, I understand that all light has dimmed, that the past has become an anecdote to laugh over. But like you, I still harbor fantasies. I still hope stories will be retold and words will endure. Do we not all live by fantasy?

—The curtain rises—

Act I

I think I am ready to leave.

What follows is my final record. I will go on murmuring until it ends. It will brush past your ear like an old wind. At the moment it ends, I will disappear like fire—not extinguished, but flickering, ascending. Like a ballet dancer with a twisted body vanishing into space.

I come from the nineteenth century and have wandered the earth for two hundred years. Half a century as a man, a century and a half as a ghost. I was born on a winter day in 1810, in St. Petersburg. I died on a summer night in 1863, in the Dadu River in Sichuan. Mitya was the name by which people once called me.

When I was alive, I kept a journal. I had hoped it might survive. It was a gray-yellow volume filled with dense Russian script. On that day in 1863, it sank to the bottom of the Dadu River along with weapons, gold and silver, and human heads. Several river fish nearly ate it.

There is seldom any rule to what the world chooses to keep and what it loses. My manuscript vanished without a trace, while I remained. No one ever read my words. My voice ran aground on its way to arrival. My testimony was discarded beyond the iron laws of history.

For the past century and a half, I have dragged my soul through the world. The body is light—something the living often misunderstand. As trees are light, as earth is light. But rippling fire, splashing rivers, racing clouds, the sight of an eagle, beams of light, souls: these are heavy. What people often fail to see is that regular, finite breath is a blessing, while freedom and infinity are burdens.

And so I dragged my soul through the world. One step, two. I slipped into a farmer's carrying basket. I boarded Elgin's ship. I clung to the steel handle of a steam train. I walked from the failure of one revolution to the failure of another. I passed from a world bound by blood into a world breaking into pieces. At first, after my long breathing stopped, I rose from the Dadu River still carrying the residual warmth of life. I checked whether my senses remained intact and tried to move by means of phantom limbs. One step, two. I left no mark on the wild grass. The river held no reflection of me.

Later, existence became a sensation. Lying in wait. Sleeping. More often, it was through two hundred years of memory—not witness or creation—that I confirmed I existed. Until the memories grew so numerous that the opening of my life and the present moment fell into disorder, appearing superimposed like ghost images... I foresee that soon a deranged weaver will weave them together in a trembling technique without discoverable rhythm. Memory becomes the present. The present is memory. I will babble in delirium, then, like fire—flicker! rise! disappear—

Now I will concentrate and try to begin at the beginning.

First I remember the heavy snow of St. Petersburg. A white curtain, slowly torn into little pieces. Behind the snowflakes, Uncle Uvarov's mansion comes into view. It is the winter of 1820. I am ten.

Uncle Uvarov, of all people, why do I remember you first?

My circling gaze bends down and flies into the house. It winds past tall golden candlesticks, portraits of silent great men, gray-white statues of Greek women, chandeliers impossibly far above, and stops at the door of your study. A small shadow trembles, hidden behind it. Before a window flowered with frost, you stoop, your great belly straining your buttons almost to bursting. You are dissecting a hare, holding a dark red pellet from inside it between your forceps. The hare's opened pelt looks like a patch of pale grass growing on a sheet of glass. I recoil with a shudder. You look up, steam still rising from the mustache above your lips. You say, "Mitya, don't be afraid."

"Uncle, what is that?"

"That is the hare's heart. This heart gives it life and lets it run fast."

Uncle Uvarov. How ardently I once followed him, waiting for him to deliver the secrets of civilization.

He had not yet become the Russian Empire's minister of education. His friends called him Uvarov, not Count. Uncle Uvarov was an exemplary son of that radiant age. He read and discoursed without pause, dividing the twenty-four hours of every day by scientific method. German, French, Spanish, Latin—there was no language he did not know. Chemistry, mechanics, machinery—every science fascinated him. The world was a sea still awaiting exploration; reason was humanity's guide. "Goethe, the greatest German genius of our day," he boasted to me more than once, "corresponded with me in his own hand." He kept Goethe's reply pinned at his waist.

In the winter of 1820, Mama deposited me at Uncle Uvarov's home. In the carriage, she told me Papa had died at a card table in Paris. The corners of her eyes were like the forests of Yunnan, damp year-round, nearly ready to sprout colored mushrooms. I thought I was merely going to my uncle's for the winter. I never saw my mother again.

In my uncle's mansion, I followed him often. I leafed through books he had just closed. I listened secretly to his gatherings with friends. I hid behind a curtain, where I could hear everyone speak. The visitors were often young officers of noble birth. Once, even Pushkin came. My uncle was always first to begin chattering about some new French invention he had heard of—

"Uvarov, stop. Stop for a moment. Can you ever be quiet?" an officer said. "You have made a fundamental mistake. Our problem is not that too few of Europe's novelties have been imported. Who has not read Voltaire and Rousseau by now? Our problems are Russia's own: the tsar, the Orthodox Church, and serfdom."

Uncle Uvarov answered loudly: "Ha! You people always think the problem can be solved by abolishing this and abolishing that. Abolish the tsar and Orthodoxy—then what? What happens to the people? Do you expect them meekly to submit to your so-called progressive reforms, or will they rush into the arms of another idol? Orthodoxy is a Russian symbol, a principle—"

The officer said, "Ha! Uvarov, what part of our Russian principles deserves to survive?"

"Too much knowledge does indeed inflate a man until he imagines everything can be doubted," Uncle Uvarov replied. "Listen: the existence of Orthodoxy affirms the eternity of life. It affirms the immortality of the soul. Suppose the day comes when people no longer believe in anything above this life, when they think life ends at death and there is no need to answer for evil deeds, no eternal punishment to bear. What order could Russia have then?"

The officer said, "Uvarov, if order rests on a lie, one day the lie will be exposed."

My uncle shrugged. "Are you telling me that the soul's immortality is a lie?"

The officer leaned closer. "Uvarov, this one life is all we have. You have dissected so many hares. Is that not self-evident?"

At ten, through the stitched threads of the white curtain, I breathed softly and listened. My legs ought to have ached, but I did not notice. Ironically, this memory from the age of ten would echo for years and occupy the vision of a future ghost, as though the curtains of childhood were slowly covering my eyes... Behind the gauze, the figures of my uncle and the officer paced and flung their arms as if performing onstage, like the shadow play I would watch decades later in an enormous palace.

My uncle knew I hid behind the curtain. One night, as I read his books by candlelight, he suddenly appeared behind me. "Uncle!" I jumped. He placed a hand on my shoulder. He had something to tell me. "We are fortunate to have been born in an age of knowledge. But knowledge is infinite," he said, stating the point he had deliberately or inadvertently omitted from his debates. "One day, Mitya, you will understand that what a person needs is not knowledge, but an answer. You need an answer in order to live."

My uncle's gatherings with the officers stopped abruptly in 1825. Only much later did I learn that, with the exception of my uncle, every one of those officers had taken part in the coup at the end of that year. Emperor Alexander died. They rose in the square in Petersburg, demanding the abolition of serfdom and autocracy. The artillery that brought Nicholas I to the throne shattered them. Most of the rebels were exiled to Siberia. Five traitors remained in St. Petersburg to be hanged.

On the day of the hanging, my uncle led me to the front of the crowd. He rubbed his palms and observed the execution with the concentration he brought to the study of animals. The five prisoners waited restlessly for their sentence, rolling their shoulders now and then, as proud as they had been when arguing with such confidence in the drawing room. They treated death's conclusion like a game. The soldiers slipped nooses around their necks. The execution happened very quickly—the boards beneath their feet were pulled away. But three of the men were so heavy that their ropes snapped and they fell into the ditch. A laugh rose from below: "What a miserable country! They do not even know how to use a gallows!"

My uncle kept his eyes fixed on the scaffold.

The soldiers jumped about, refastening the ropes to the frame. Others bent over with their hands behind their backs, inspecting the prisoners in the ditch. The hanging was carried out a second time. All the prisoners' legs went rigid at once, then fell slack. The mockery stopped. A soldier kicked one corpse, and it swung like an inverted pair of compasses. The crowd dispersed. A newspaper boy burst into the flow, crying the news: "Englishman George Airy invents spectacles to treat astigmatism." My uncle remained at the execution ground without speaking. He was waiting for the hare to appear. No hare. No hare. He waited a long time before turning. He asked the young man who brought the news, "What kind of lens did Airy use?"

I am looking for an answer. I have watched many faces at the point of departure, when life is about to burn out and they return their expressions to nature. I ask them, what is your answer? What is it? They do not reply. I say I have drifted through this world for too long; I need only one answer, and then I can leave. Almost begging, I prostrate myself in devotion. I kneel before them for a long time, hoping they will bestow the clue of a single word upon me. They do not reply.

I left Russia at twenty-three. I left Uncle Uvarov and his magnificent mansion. As I went, I swore I would never return. The angry words of youth became prophecy. By the time I died and became a ghost, Uncle Uvarov—fortunately, he did not live to endure his failure—had become one of history's vanished courtiers. The Decembrists, dead young, had instead drawn open history's new curtain. They were commemorated and surrounded by admirers. Yet no one had won the debate.

At the time of the October Revolution, I had already wandered the world as a lost soul for half a century. When I heard the news, I returned to St. Petersburg, traveling half on foot and half aboard one of the new trains. By then the city had been renamed Petrograd, and its face bore little resemblance to my childhood memories. People wore plain military dress. As if waiting to grow taller, they accepted one state of emergency after another with tremendous enthusiasm. Brief sorrows rushed between sewers and makeshift tribunals. The air was heavy with the musk of answers.

I drifted through my old city. The street sweepers had done excellent work. From Russia to the Soviet state, from Nicholas II to Lenin, every rupture had been cleared of fragments. People gathered in newly built or newly renamed squares and cheered, without pause, from one promise to the next. I came to the Sheremetev family's former residence, the Fountain House. As a child, I often heard its legends: Petrovich's crystal ball, Praskovia's singing. Now the newly formed housing committee had divided it into apartment units for ordinary people. The residents enthusiastically remade the palace's interior, piling buckets, axes, and coal in corridors that had once stood empty. Small rooms in the wings were retained as museums of the old age, crowded with oil paintings, sculpture, and musical instruments.

In the entire Fountain House, only one woman mourned what had happened. She was a young poet named Akhmatova. She lived in a small apartment in the south wing with a husband who envied her and burned her manuscripts. Her neighbors noticed that in summer she often leaned against an iron railing, one foot braced on the black metal, staring at the peeling yellow-and-white exterior of the Fountain House. That year, news arrived that her former husband had been executed. It kept her awake for long stretches of the night. When she could not sleep, she sat in the center of a room that could scarcely be called a parlor. Alone on a little wooden chair. She let the damp of towels and the mildew of wallpaper envelop her. She felt the Fountain House was filled with classical ghosts, circling, murmuring at her like horseflies. "Tell me why," she whispered, repeating her auditory hallucination. Wrong. There were no others. Every classical soul had been exterminated. Only I wandered around her through the night, while everything else I said brushed past her ear like an old wind. She was immersed in the glory of poetry. As dawn approached, her eyes lit before the distance did. She hummed a new poem:

Beneath the roof riddled through, we slowly freeze,
while water whispers from the cellar:
"We will abandon the grave and wake everyone.
Clearly, it is nearly time for our blue waves
to govern this city."

I reached Paris in 1833. I was twenty-three. On the outskirts of the city, I found my father's grave. Its headstone leaned crookedly in the earth. Presumably, when he was buried, someone had tipped him into the pit with equal carelessness. His bones were curled absurdly together, calling for warmth in their pitiful posture. The nerves connecting his addictions to cards and alcohol still ached. Someone at a tavern remembered him: "the man who spoke many languages." He refused to speak Russian and never told anyone about the education he had received, the mission he once believed he would bear, or how he had arrived on this continent full of aspiration and awe, his blood surging at the revolution that had just taken place in France. Upheaval! Upheaval! He returned to Russia, fathered a son, and was just preparing to make his mark when he found that the dead tree entrenched in the wilderness had already sealed itself tight. Its eyelids half lowered, it wore the smile of mutual destruction, resisting accelerating decay through enclosure... He became a superfluous man. Very well. He set foot once more on the continent of his dreams, drank in great gulps, gambled, made clever remarks to women of every color, while news of shattered revolutions fell one piece after another behind him. "Je suis mort," he informed a stranger at the tavern near the end of his life, as softly as if making a private request for a loan.

I fled Russia in 1833. By then Uncle Uvarov had become Nicholas I's minister of education and was vigorously reforming the curricula of Moscow and St. Petersburg, adding courses in patriotism. He had developed some new ideas about Russia and often shared them with the family over dinner. Russia suddenly possessed a definite meaning. "Listen—" Russia meant Orthodoxy. It meant the Slavs, the iron cavalry trampling Warsaw, the tsar, the present state of things. He no longer mentioned Goethe. Instead, he diligently leafed through Russian documents and advanced laughable arguments, claiming to have discovered Slavic poetry from the fourth century and lost folk songs from the sixth. "Mitya, Russia is greater than you imagined, isn't it?" he asked me at the end. I said nothing. "Isn't it?" he pressed. I said nothing.

During my eight years in Paris, I was often penniless. The occasional income from tutoring émigré families barely kept me fed. I had already more or less mastered French in Russia, and having inherited my father's gift, I found other languages no trouble. Paris then drew together a great population of émigrés and refugees. Speaking their various mother tongues, they appeared in cafés, perfume shops, and salons, boasted of former glories clearing a path for Napoleon's generals, and complained about the temperamental transfers of power in the Tuileries Palace, as if only the discussion of events far removed from them could console the foreigner's heart. At one of Madame George Sand's noisy salons, I noticed a young man playing piano in a corner. He was thin and proud, his fingers soft as the gills of a fish. The guests' grand talk did not concern him. He was not even in the present. He played memory, the past, every childhood moment of desolate longing. I wept. I went over and asked his name. I also asked whether he came from Russia, because his music made me remember my long-lost homeland beneath heavy snow. In almost inaudible French, he answered politely that his name was Chopin, and that Russia had destroyed his homeland.

In August 1837, the first railway station in Paris was completed. The whole city had only just recovered from a long cholera epidemic. Aristocratic young women and fashionable young men crowded the platform to watch a steam train arrive. I bought a ticket and boarded with the others. At first, it was no different from a dying horse. It gave several sharp cries and sluggishly shifted two steps. But soon it gathered power, and we discovered there was no way to stop it. We pressed around the carriage's little windows and clutched in terror at anything resembling a handle. Fields and woods flew past with a rustle. I feared it would run forever, its burning coal growing ever more excited, following the rails into the ocean, where we would fall to the seabed like an iron-skinned whale. Amid scattered screams, I suddenly thought: I will begin a novel. It will be a great Russian novel, one that survives through the ages. Tomorrow, its first word will settle onto a brand-new white notebook. It will tell of a two-hundred-year-old man looking back over his life, his bewildering childhood, the century in which he lived, caught between old and new and unable to tell where it was going. His voice will be like a train that cannot stop; words will accelerate at his lips. He wants to stop. He wants to find an endpoint, and then stop. Nothing more.

And so, on the rue de Rivoli, I bought a white notebook. It was so clean it seemed it could die openly, without waiting for the next moment. I remember a faint scent of ambergris on its cover, a new creation by the perfumer next door, Pierre Guerlain. He housed his inventions in peculiar bottles like the vessels of a chemical laboratory, keeping well-dressed young men and noblewomen lingering in his shop. People poured perfume onto their wrists, necks, behind their ears, at the hems of their skirts, so that for several minutes or several hours they, too, might approach beauty—or what they claimed was heaven. In that age, people were beginning to fall in love with fugitive sensation. Beauty became a weightless illusion.

When the eye is filled with illusion, what can a person leave behind? With this question, I opened the notebook to its first page. By then the ambergris had evaporated from the cover, and Guerlain and son had begun developing their next product. I held my pen carefully in the air and composed the first sentence. It mattered. It would establish the tone of the entire book. The old man was two hundred. Two hundred years later, everything on the rue de Rivoli had collapsed. The enveloping fragrances and young people's laughter had dispersed, while this manuscript might lie in a glass case in some museum, flooded with a special gas to keep it from turning to ash the instant it touched the air. The two-hundred-year-old man, an outsider forgotten by time, an old fool unable to distinguish memory from reality—in what tone would he begin his long account? I swayed the point of the pen and tried to imagine that impossible character. If I were the old man. If I were he, I think I am ready to leave.

The impulse to write that I felt then is still dear to me. Ah, all my other memories have faded. Once you become a ghost, there is not much you can feel. But recalling that impulse always stirs some faint sensation. A novel, a word, a vowel. I sincerely believed these were things I could leave behind. And in those days, the more I feared death, the more fervently I hoped to extend my life through them.

Today, the manuscript has disappeared, and I still wander the world. Just as Guerlain's descendants long ago forgot their ancestor's formulas, while their business survived and prospered to this day. By the twenty-first century, I had seen immense Guerlain billboards in many countries. Sometimes there was a vast field of blankness, with only a small line bearing the brand name at its center to occupy your sight. Sometimes it came with a sensual woman, her gaze full of ambition but not happiness. This is one of the marks of the age: people generally believe that they consume, trade, and attract one another not for happiness, but for desire. They have separated the two. They believe desire can be grasped, while happiness remains beyond reach.

The technology, resources, and institutions of this age are organized around desire. Greece is no longer a point of reference. People do not seem to suspect that desire may be every bit as insubstantial as happiness—or that desire is graspable only because it has been grasped. First they conquered the limits of daylight, and so came the electric lamp. Then the narrow reach of sound, and so came the telephone. Then the bounds of imagination, and so came cinema. Then the limits of thought, and so came computers and the internet. At the moment I speak, people have invented chips that connect to the brain. And before conquering the final problem, death, they also proclaim that they have eliminated desire's second-greatest obstacle: with the newly invented technology of the blockchain, we will abolish forgetting. The irony is that the more people conquer a thing, the more completely it devours them.

I wander through the world alongside them. I walk with them, ride with them, sit or run with them. I watch their fingers repeat the same movements, their eyes drift up and down, catching complex information on screens. I watch them grow angry, then laugh a moment later. I watch them force themselves to remember, then forget a moment later. In a crowd, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish who is the ghost. Over two centuries, the technology of producing illusion has matured tremendously. In the near future, people will be able to live entirely inside illusion. Writing will be unnecessary. Books will grow thin as phones. The past will become an anecdote to laugh over.

In 1841, at the mouth of an alley, I encountered a slightly stout man from the provinces. He stood on a step and from time to time swept his right hand into the air, speaking without pause in a voice that belonged to the future. A sizable audience had gathered below.

"In the barbarous age, people asked themselves a question: what is God? Which religion is best? They asked and asked, and could not escape!" His voice rang out. "Fortunately, Kant helped us avoid that bottomless pit. He did not ask what God was. He asked why humanity produced the idea of God. The answer had already appeared before our own age arrived: what we see in religion and in God is really humanity itself. Without man, there is no God."

An uproar rose from below.

"Kant took the first step for us. Today, we must take the second!" he said. "As with religion, we ask: what is government? Which government is best? But in the question, what we see can only be ourselves, can only be the freedom of the individual! The best government, like the best religion, is a false promise. The real question is not who should govern us, but whether we need governing, whether freedom can be realized under any form of rule. For thousands of years, governments, states, and authorities have been treated as self-evident. They are the greatest myths of all! Today is the first day on which we break the spell: there should no longer be states in this world. There should no longer be governments."

Now some people began shouting, What? Someone else cried, Vive la France! More left in displeasure. But the declarative passion in his language, the fervor of an unfinished enlightenment, captured me. When the speech ended, I followed him out of the crowd. "Sir, sir!" I called behind him. "Your speech was deeply moving, but I still do not know your name." He turned. His face was broad, though worry and responsibility had drawn its features inward and caused his hair to depart too soon. He told me his name was Pierre Proudhon. If I had time, we could talk in a café.

At the café, swept up by a sudden warmth of trust, I poured out my history to him. I told him I came from Russia, that I was the son of a drunk, a man in flight, that I had lived without direction in Paris for eight years... I looked at him with feverish hope and spoke incoherently. "Sir, you do not understand. When you spoke just now about freedom, tears rushed into my eyes. Suddenly I knew what I have spent ten years searching for. It is freedom! Freedom struggling out of foul, cowardly, clinging ideas. But I cannot do it..."

"You can. Everyone necessarily will," Proudhon vowed after hearing my account. "I will take you somewhere."

He led me to a nearly abandoned theater. Its dome had split, and light fell through the fissures. Red curtains thick with dust lay draped across the front rows. His belly trembling, he nimbly avoided wood splinters and pools of water and led me upstairs. He turned into a little room. It was where important people had once watched performances, with a direct view of the stage and a commanding view over the audience. Now six or seven ragged young people had gathered there. They stood around a small binding machine assembling pamphlets. Hardwood boards, bedding, and dirty undershirts were stacked by the wall. "Welcome to the Mutual Aid Society," Proudhon told me.

"Did you buy this place?" I asked. All the young people laughed.

"My friend, no one can buy anything from anyone else," Proudhon said. "Property is theft, just as slavery is murder."

"In the Mutual Aid Society, no one can become anyone else's master. Whatever we possess, we share."

"My friend, you spoke of freedom," Proudhon said. "Ever since the Great Revolution, everyone has spoken of freedom. Fifty years have passed. What have the liberators of that time become? Why is the oppression of the liberator always twice as savage as the oppression of the oppressor? Why do those who claim to speak for the people care so little how many heads fall when they become despots themselves? My friend, history has pushed us into this condition: everything has collapsed, yet most people still cannot hear the summons. We have only ourselves. We must find a new justice and trample every former concept and form underfoot! The true liberator does not merely stare at the shackles. He must first liberate himself."

"My friend, you will discover that nothing can stop the future that belongs to us," he whispered as I left.

Back at my lodgings, I still trembled inside a dazed vertigo. Several days later, I read an item in the newspaper. In South America, an Italian sailor named Garibaldi had led a company of fourteen to defeat several hundred Brazilian soldiers and defend a newly founded republic on the Brazilian coast. The newspaper called the mysterious Garibaldi the Odysseus of our age. In his youth, he had joined Mazzini's failed revolutionary uprising in Italy. Since then, he had crossed the Atlantic like a pirate, with no fixed home, sailing freely, bound by heroic loyalty. I put down the paper. That night I packed my luggage. The next day, I boarded a ship for Brazil.

(End of Act I)

—Intermission—