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None of them knew anything about Chile. Years later, Neruda was to define it as a long petal of sea and wine and snow…with a belt of black and white foam, but that would not have left the migrants any the wiser. On the map, it looked slender and remote.
It was here in Panama that the migrants felt definitively cut off from Europe; the canal separated them from their homeland and their past.
Whereas Roser imagined a bright future, he saw shadows all around them. “At twenty-seven I’m already an old man,” he would say, but whenever Roser heard that, she would berate him fiercely. “Why don’t you have more guts? We’ve all been through hard times. If you keep complaining you won’t be able to appreciate what we have: there’s a ghastly war on the other side of the ocean, and yet here we are living in peace with full stomachs. And I’m telling you we’re going to be here for a long time, because the Caudillo, curse him, is in very good health and evil people lead long lives.”
He complained that at his age it was impossible for him to adapt, that he wouldn’t live long enough, but Roser argued that if at sixty he could make love like a youngster, to adapt to this wonderful country would be easy. “Relax, Victor. Going around in a sulk will get you nowhere. Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional.”
Entropy is the natural law of the universe, everything tends toward disorder, to break down, to disperse.
People get lost: look how many
vanished during the Retreat; feelings fade, and forgetfulness slips into lives like mist. It takes heroic willpower ...
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