Yet the particulars of this useless voyage—the river currents, the encircling jungle, the stultifying heat, the grimy details of the barge's operation, the repulsive personality tics of those aboard—are rendered so vividly as to furnish a metaphor for life, as a colorful voyage to nowhere. Maqroll is in midlife; his consciousness is a web of past adventures, of old loves and tortuously failed enterprises, and his dreams figure as importantly as his present perils. His next adventure, "Ilona Comes with the Rain" (a less melodious equivalent of "Ilona Llega con la Lluvia"), has a heroine, and the muddy Xurandó is replaced by the torpid urban landscape of Panama City, where Maqroll is deposited by the suicide of the captain of the bankrupt tramp steamer on which he has been serving. He is sinking into squalor and petty crime in Panama's constant downpours:

**{: .break one} ** A curtain of rain fell into the filthy waters of the Pacific, and from my window the city seemed to dissolve, before my indifferent eyes, into fierce whirlpools of mud, garbage, and dead leaves spinning around the sewer openings. **

At this low point, good fortune strikes, as is its habit with Maqroll:

**{: .break one} ** A ritual was being enacted, one that occurs with such punctual fidelity in my life that I can attribute it only to the impenetrable will of those tutelary gods who lead me through the obscurity of their designs by invisible but obvious strings. **

He meets up with Ilona Grabowska Rubenstein, a dynamic, leggy international con artist who in the past has shared her favors and her illegal schemes with Maqroll and his Lebanese soul mate and sometime partner Abdul Bashur. Swiftly she takes Maqroll to bed, spruces him up, and appoints him her partner in an inspired venture, a whorehouse staffed with women dressed in the uniforms of airline stewardesses, thus catering to the fantasies of international travellers. The idea makes a fortune, but success bores both partners, and one of their filles de joie, who lives in a wrecked boat on the beach and imagines she has uniformed lovers from the time of Napoleon, fascinates Ilona fatally. This episode is less of a poem than the first, and more of a story, with the storyteller's vice of sentiment; the conclusion invites a donation of tears, of sympathetic sorrow.

"Un Bel Morir" appears to kill off Maqroll, after enlisting him, while he moldered in the seedy river town of La Plata (not the Argentine city), to run guns and explosives to rebels up in the cordillera. Both rebels and government eventually want to kill him, but he makes a getaway, albeit into the river's swampy estuary with a failing engine. Things look grim, yet we suspect that Maqroll, like the hero of a comic strip, leads a charmed life, with as many panels to come as his creator wishes to produce. Women—of whom a select few "filled his days with meaning and exorcised the demons of tedium and defeat whose attacks he feared as he feared death"—keep bestowing their magic potion. When Amparo María, a peasant girl, sleeps with him, we are told:

**{: .break one} ** The girl's feigned ecstasy became real, the result of her grateful admiration for the stranger who carried the burden of his years and the desolate, consuming experience of unknown lands and their intoxicating dangers and delights. **

Possibly alert to the dangers of doting on his hero, Mutis next provides a tale in which Maqroll hardly appears, except as a cherished acquaintance of the principals. In "The Tramp Steamer's Last Port of Call," the shortest of the lot and one of the best, the narrator relates an experience he himself has had, in a voice close to what we know of Mutis's own life: "I had to go to Helsinki to attend a meeting of directors of internal publications for various oil companies." In Helsinki, he asks to be driven to the point from which he can see across the Gulf of Finland to St. Petersburg, a shimmering sight passingly eclipsed by the transit of a decrepit tramp steamer:

**{: .break one} ** The captain's bridge, and the row of cabins on the deck for crew members and occasional passengers, had been painted white a long time before. Now a coat of grime, oil, and urine gave them an indefinite color, the color of misery, of irreparable decadence, of desperate, incessant use. The chimerical freighter slipped through the water to the agonized gasp of its machinery and the irregular rhythm of driving rods that threatened at any moment to fall silent forever. **

He sees the wretched, plucky ship, which fragmentary letters on its bow identify as the Halcyon, three more times—in Costa Rica, in Jamaica, and in the delta of the Orinoco River. Its apparition invades his dreams. While on another errand for the oil company, travelling downriver to a strike-threatened seaport refinery, he occupies one of the two cabins in a small tugboat; the other is occupied by a Basque sea captain called Jon Iturri, who, it turns out, was the captain of the ghostly tramp steamer, which broke up and sank in the Orinoco. Its owner, Iturri relates, was a Lebanese woman, a younger sister of Abdul Bashur, named Warda. At their first meeting, he says, he was stunned by her "almost Hellenic" beauty:

**{: .break one} ** "Her blue-black hair was as dense as honey and fell to shoulders as straight as those of the kouros in the Athens Museum. Her narrow hips, curving gently into long, somewhat full legs, recalled statues of Venus in the Vatican Museum and gave her erect body a definitive femininity that immediately dispelled a certain boyish air. Large, firm breasts completed the effect of her hips." **

As he got to know her better, his admiration intensified: "Warda, when she was naked, acquired a kind of aura that emanated from the perfection of her body, the texture of her moist, elastic skin, and that face: seen from above, when we were in bed, it took on even more of the qualities of a Delphic vision." But the lovestruck captain was fifty, and a non-Muslim, and Warda was twenty-four and, the longer she lived in Europe, ever more approving of the conservative ways of her native Lebanon. The tramp steamer, which she inherited from an uncle, was financing her European sojourn with its hard-won profits; she flew to Iturri's ports of call and spent rapturous days in hotels with him, but their romance could last only as long as the fragile tramp steamer did. Warda's perfect, elastic, symmetrical beauty was one with the listing, disintegrating body of the ship as it conveyed her aging lover from port to port. The story, Mutis tells us at the outset, "has something of the eternal legends that have bewitched us over the centuries"; he ends by assuring us that "there has been only one love story since the beginning of time." Not a happy one.

The remaining three novellas—"Amirbar," in which Maqroll mines gold and performs buggery on his slavish, infatuated digging partner, Antonia; "Abdul Bashur, Dreamer of Ships," in which Maqroll's oft-mentioned partner in skulduggery searches the world for a perfect steamer; and "Triptych on Sea and Land," in which Maqroll's friendships with the fisherman Sverre Jensen, the painter Alejandro Obregón, and the child Jamil Vicente are described—all have their charms and excitements, and sustain the rueful mood, but we sense the author challenging his own ingenuity as he weaves cross-references and knits in dangling ends and patches some of the holes in the dreamily loose fabric of Maqroll's adventures. A kind of stiffening didactic brocade accumulates. These later tales expand the rolls of his acquaintanceship into, if not quite an Arthurian Round Table, a gallant brotherhood, "a small band . . . who have lived their lives under the sign of chance and adventure, and at the periphery of laws and codes created by men who, like Tartuffe, wish to justify their own paltry destinies." The brothers enjoy boozy reminiscences, hairbreadth escapes, and an amount of casual wenching that ill prepares us for the revelation that some of them, like Obregón and the narrator, are married. An elegant international machismo offers itself as a palliative for life's existential agony. Men with the right stuff can be recognized by their "inbred decency and . . . inflexible desire to respect the privacy of others," a "gentilesse de coeur" built on a rich past: of a one-legged German sea captain it is said, "His hard-won astuteness was concentrated in his eyes, where innumerable experiences, transgressions, compromises, things forgotten, and things remembered were carefully stored." The brotherhood includes not just Maqroll, Obregón, Abdul Bashur, and the narrator but the masculine-minded girl gangster Ilona, a lean tall waitress Maqroll calls the Governor, and a few actual persons, of whom Gabriel García Márquez appears at some length and Alastair Reid, the admirable Scots poet and translator from the Spanish, is mentioned once; a list of key nautical data includes "the speed at which you maintain the engines in order to enter the bay of Wigtown and anchor across from Withorn when you visit Alastair Reid." No doubt other real names and personal allusions are secreted in this increasingly chummy text.