According to my father, some of whose stories I jotted down in the last decade of his life, his paternal grandfather and grandmother, born in Istria in Albona and Flanona, now Labin and Plomin, went to Argentina to find several barrels of gold stolen from one of their ships. The gold was purportedly stolen by the first and second officers from the island of Veglia or Krk. Their names were Šustović and Banac. My great-grandparents disappeared under mysterious circumstances someplace in Rio della Plata, where they were looking for the gold. But before they went missing, they sent a letter to my grandfather and cursed him because he did not marry a woman they had found for him. Instead, he married a Croatian woman, the first in the Venetian family. It just crossed my mind that the old curse could still have some power after almost exactly a century.