As far as deceptions go, the one described in this story is perhaps among the most trivial. It’s a classic tale: people desperate to escape poverty entrust their lives to a smuggler. Having paid him for a passage from Sicily to America, after eleven torturous days on a boat, they are put ashore. “Are you sure it isn’t some other place?” one of them asks – not because the landscape looks wrong, but simply because the long crossing was so incomprehensible: “neither roads nor even tracks across the sea…it was left to the Almighty to steer the ship without error between sky and water to its destination”.
Did the travellers ever arrive? In a sense, they did.
Originally published in Italian as ‘Il lungo viaggio’, 1973. Collected in The Wine-Dark Sea, Granta, 2014
A Personal Anthology 