“Of course you do,” he said. “Every man wants a woman like this, whether he knows it or not.”

     At sundown a ship's officer said a rosary over the P.A. system. I stood beside Bembo at the rail outside our cabin, watching the sky purple overhead and the water go black.

     The engines thrummed under our feet. Bembo had called it a ferry, but it was a ship, and not a small one. In the morning we had watched the passengers push up the two gangways and disappear below. I had guessed two thousand, Bembo said closer to three, and I believed him after I went down there in the afternoon, to get sandwiches at the canteen. Through an open hatchway I glimpsed a huge cavern full of triple-high bunks, each occupied, lit by pale green fluorescent.

     The prayers were tinny on the loudspeaker. I held the rail as a long strip of an island slid along to the east. The island seemed a very lonely place, no other land in sight, and I wondered if it had a population, a name. I was suddenly conscious of places and their names. Until two weeks before I had never known of Bacolod or Negros.

     That morning Bembo had brought me a color brochure from the Ministry of Tourism. It showed green panorama, wide cane fields that lapped into the horizon. A red steam locomotive hauled a shaggy load of cane stalks. Two lovely women beamed on a city street.

     Negros Occidental, it said, Bounteous Sugarland of the Philippines.

     Bacolod, it said, City of Smiles.

     I turned to say something to Bembo and found his lips moving with a Hail Mary.

     From page three of the next day's Bacolod Daily Star: