It soon became clear that Scranton’s celebrity was as threadbare as his shirt cuffs. Few tourists visited him, and often a whole afternoon passed without a single customer. Then the waiter would scrape the chairs around Scranton’s table, trying to distract him from his reveries of an imaginary moon. Indeed, on the fourth day, within a few minutes of Scranton’s arrival, the waiter slapped the table-top with his towel, already cancelling the afternoon’s performance.

‘Away, away… it’s impossible!’ He seized the newspaper that Scranton had found on a nearby chair. ‘No more stories about the moon…’

Scranton stood up, head bowed beneath the awning. He seemed resigned to this abuse. ‘All right… I can take my trade down the street.’

To forestall this, I left my seat and moved through the empty tables.

‘Mr Scranton? Perhaps we can speak? I’d like to buy you a drink.’

‘By all means.’ Scranton beckoned me to a chair. Ready for business, he sat upright, and with a conscious effort managed to bring the focus of his gaze from infinity to a distance of fifty feet away. He was poorly nourished, and his perfunctory shave revealed an almost tubercular pallor. Yet there was a certain resolute quality about this vagrant figure that I had not expected. Sitting beside him, I was aware of an intense and almost wilful isolation, not just in this foreign city, but in the world at large.

I showed him my card. ‘I’m writing a book of criticism on the science-fiction cinema. It would be interesting to hear your opinions. You are Commander Scranton, the Apollo astronaut?’

‘That is correct.’

‘Good. I wondered how you viewed the science-fiction film… how convincing you found the presentation of outer space, the lunar surface and so on…’

Scranton stared bleakly at the table-top. A faint smile exposed his yellowing teeth, and I assumed that he had seen through my little ruse.

‘I’ll be happy to set you straight,’ he told me. ‘But I make a small charge.’

‘Of course,’ I searched in my pockets. ‘Your professional expertise, naturally..

I placed some coins on the table, intending to hunt for a modest bank-note. Scranton selected three of the coins, enough to pay for a loaf of bread, and pushed the rest towards me.

‘Science-fiction films -? They’re good. Very accurate. On the whole I’d say they do an excellent job.’

‘That’s encouraging to hear. These Hollywood epics are not usually noted for their realism.’

‘Well… you have to understand that the Apollo teams brought back a lot of film footage.’

‘I’m sure.’ I tried to keep the amusement out of my voice. ‘The studios must have been grateful to you. After all, you could describe the actual moon-walks.’

Scranton nodded sagely. ‘I acted as consultant to one of the Hollywood majors. All in all, you can take it from me that those pictures are pretty realistic.’

‘Fascinating… coming from you that has authority. As a matter of interest, what was being on the moon literally like?’

For the first time Scranton seemed to notice me. Had he glimpsed some shared strain in our characters? This care-worn American had all the refinement of an unemployed car mechanic, and yet he seemed almost tempted to befriend me.

‘Being on the moon?’ His tired gaze inspected the narrow street of cheap jewellery stores, with its office messengers and lottery touts, the off-duty taxi-drivers leaning against their cars. ‘It was just like being here.’

‘So…’ I put away my notebook. Any further subterfuge was unnecessary. I had treated our meeting as a joke, but Scranton was sincere, and anyway utterly indifferent to my opinion of him. The tourists and passing policemen, the middle-aged women sitting at a nearby table, together barely existed for him. They were no more than shadows on the screen of his mind, through which he could see the horizons of an almost planetary emptiness.

For the first time I was in the presence of someone who had nothing — even less than the beggars of Rio, for they at least were linked to the material world by their longings for it. Scranton embodied the absolute loneliness of the human being in space and time, a situation which in many ways I shared. Even the act of convincing himself that he was a former astronaut only emphasised his isolation.

‘A remarkable story,’ I commented. ‘One can’t help wondering if we were right to leave this planet. I’m reminded of the question posed by the Chilean painter Matta — "Why must we fear a disaster in space in order to understand our own times?" It’s a pity you didn’t bring back any mementoes of your moon-walks.’

Scranton’s shoulders straightened. I could see him counting the coins on the table. ‘I do have certain materials…’

I nearly laughed. ‘What? A piece of lunar rock? Some moon dust?’

‘Various photographic materials.’

‘Photographs?’ Was it possible that Scranton had told the truth, and that he had indeed been an astronaut? If I could prove that the whole notion of his imposture was an error, an oversight by the journalist who had investigated the case, I would have the makings of a front-page scoop… ‘Could I see them? — perhaps I could use them in my book…?’

‘Well…’ Scranton felt for the coins in his pocket. He looked hungry, and obviously thought only of spending them on a loaf of bread.

‘Of course,’ I added, ‘I’ll provide an extra fee. As for my book, the publishers might well pay many hundreds of dollars.’

‘Hundreds…’ Scranton seemed impressed. He shook his head, as if amused by the ways of the world. I expected him to be shy of revealing where he lived, but he stood up and gestured me to finish my drink. ‘I’m staying a few minutes’ walk from here.’

He waited among the tables, staring across the street. Seeing the passers-by through his eyes, I was aware that they had begun to seem almost transparent, shadow players created by a frolic of the sun.

We soon arrived at Scranton’s modest room behind the Luxor Cinema, a small theatre off Copacabana Avenue that had seen better days. Two former storerooms and an office above the projection booth had been let as apartments, which we reached after climbing a dank emergency stairway.

Exhausted by the effort, Scranton swayed against the door. He wiped the spit from his mouth onto the lapel of his jacket, and ushered me into the room. ‘Make yourself comfortable..

A dusty light fell across the narrow bed, reflected in the cold-water tap of a greasy handbasin supported from the wall by its waste-pipe. Sheets of newspaper were wrapped around a pillow, stained with sweat and some unsavoury mucus, perhaps after an attack of malarial or tubercular fever.

Eager to leave this infectious den, I drew out my wallet. ‘The photographs…?’

Scranton sat on the bed, staring at the yellowing wall behind me as if he had forgotten that I was there. Once again I was aware of his ability to isolate himself from the surrounding world, a talent I envied him, if little else.

‘Sure… they’re over here.’ He stood up and went to the suitcase that lay on a card table behind the door. Taking the money from me, he opened the lid and lifted out a bundle of magazines. Among them were loose pages torn from Life and Newsweek, and special supplements of the Rio newspapers devoted to the Apollo space-flights and the moon landings. The familiar images of Armstrong and the lunar module, the space-walks and splashdowns had been endlessly thumbed. The captions were marked with coloured pencil, as if Scranton had spent hours memorising these photographs brought back from the tideways of space.

I moved the magazines to one side, hoping to find some documentary evidence of Scranton’s own involvement in the space-flights, perhaps a close-up photograph taken by a fellow astronaut.

‘Is this it? There’s nothing else?’

‘That’s it.’ Scranton gestured encouragingly. ‘They’re good pictures.