ABSTRACT
In his film of hopeless liaisons, Beyond the Clouds, Michelangelo Antonioni has one of his heroines, in a Paris café, approach a strange man and tell him a story. She read in a magazine, she says, about some explorers in Mexico who hired native Indian porters to help them find an Inca city in the hills. (It can’t have been an Inca city—or the story was set in Peru, not Mexico.) After a long march the porters insisted on stopping. It was not that they were tired, they explained, but that they had gone too fast and had left their souls behind. They had to pause and wait for the souls to catch up.
