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THE STOLEN MANUSCRIPTOnce he had finished reading the manuscript, the little professor – as they called him in the city, because he was blonde, thin, almost childlike, with a lock of loose hair always hanging over his eyes – placed it on the table. It was bizarre that that woman hadn’t seen anything but old age and death in that industrious Italian colony. She hadn’t written about his city, but rather about the colony’s capital – which lay roughly a thousand miles away; roughly because precise measurements were careless in Africa, and those spaces – the ruthless southern winds that seemed to want to obliterate everything in their path to restore the landscape’s primeval innocence – made any notion of precision nothing but wishful thinking, if not in fact ridiculous. Whenever he looked a
