Haven’t you ever wanted to go back to Brazil? I asked Fernando.
I’ve thought about it a few times.
So why haven’t you ever gone back?
There isn’t much for me in Brazil.
What do you mean, there isn’t much for you in Brazil? You’re from there. You left because you had to.
Truth be told, Vanja, I wasn’t forced to leave. I left because I wanted to. I know I once told you that, that I had to leave. But no one sent me away, and other people in the same situation stayed. They’re still around. Some are in the government. They paid a price, of course. But I did too.
Fine, but if you didn’t leave you might have had problems. With the police. The army, I mean. You said so yourself.
He sighed.
If I were in Brazil today I might very well be working as a security guard and cleaner too. Who knows. But life would be a little more difficult.
You could do something else. Maybe you’d be in the government too. Imagine! You might be a federal deputy, a minister.
He laughed.
I don’t know if I’d want to do anything else. Or if I’d be able to. Maybe serve beers in a bar.
That’s not the only thing you’ve done in your life. You studied geography.
I did a year of geography.
But you’ve done other things.
Sure. I attended the Peking Military Academy. And I was a communist guerrilla. That’s the most important part of my CV.
I didn’t say anything.
After a time he added: I don’t need to tell you that these things have to stay between us, right?
He didn’t. We overtook a car carrier transporting a cluster of cars with dents in different places and to different degrees. One of them was missing its front bumper, which made it look like a mutilated face, the sort you see close-up in horror movies, a bulging headlight like an eye in a bed of live flesh. I liked talking to Fernando.
A black car overtook us. There was a National Rifle Association sticker on the back window, with an eagle perched on two crossed rifles against a red background.
There is something intermediary about deserts. Many travelers have said it. It is as if they weren’t destinations, just routes. Great inhospitable landscapes where you don’t dawdle, you just travel from one more affable point on the map to another. And yet people live there. People live in the world’s deserts and arid and semiarid wildernesses. In these places between parentheses. Where all things — sounds, distances — inhabit other semantics. It seems like a desperate gesture. Or perhaps an abandonment.
I hate this place, Nick once told me.
What place? School?
Colorado.
You hate it? Why?
You walk and there’s nothing. You drive for hours and hours and there’s nothing. Just some bushes on the ground. I wish I lived somewhere where there were trees.
There are the mountains, I mused.
The mountains, he said. A bunch of pine trees and ski stations. Rich folk’s mansions imitating Swiss chalets. No thanks.
I made a mental note that Nick wasn’t interested in pine trees, ski stations or rich folk’s mansions imitating Swiss chalets.
This all used to be underwater, I said, happy with the knowledge I had recently acquired from the Science Museum. You know, thousands of years ago. It was all ocean.
As far as I’m concerned it might as well still be, he said.
In the car with Fernando, I thought about the Colorado sea, and what animals might have lived there, in that deserted terrain that the highway cut through in an infinite straight line as if to say, OK, if you want to keep going, it’s your problem — let’s see what you’re capable of. What shells of Mesozoic dimensions, what strange animals living inside them.
What are you to me? I asked Fernando.
What?
What are you to me? Because according to my birth certificate you’re my dad, but you’re not my real dad, so what are you?
He looked at me, then back at the highway, the persistent gray strip of highway and the tufts of scorched vegetation that flanked it, and the blobs of snow here and there, where the sun allowed it.
I don’t know. Whatever you want me to be, he replied.
The man at the motel reception desk had gray hair tied back in a pony tail and nicotine-stained teeth. He said there was a heated indoor swimming pool that was open until 9 p.m.
On the side of the counter was a collection of pamphlets about the attractions of Las Animas County. Carlos took one of each and tugged on my arm to show me what they said about the ghost towns. He read out their names: Berwind, Delagua, Ludlow, Morley, Primero, Segundo, Tabasco, Tercio.
And he appeared to like the sound of those words, in that exact order, because he repeated them a few more times. Berwind, Delagua, Ludlow, Morley, Primero, Segundo, Tabasco, Tercio. Berwind, Delagua, Ludlow, Morley, Primero, Segundo, Tabasco, Tercio.
The motel pool was a giant slab of warm water next to the reception, behind a dirty glass wall. There was a young woman with two little boys there when we arrived. The boys stared at us. They were wearing inflatable orange armbands and had skinny legs sticking out of their shorts, and thin chests out of which jutted skinny arms and thin necks and startled oval heads.
A sign said NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY.
Carlos jumped into the water, a stocky little torpedo with a crew cut. The boys kept staring, unabashed.
Fernando sat on the edge of the pool and didn’t take off his shirt. He didn’t take off his shirt until the young woman and the little boys had gone, dragging dirty white towels behind them — miniature ghosts exiled from the ghost town, souls in Las Animas, trying to recover their lost privacy. Then Fernando got into the pool and taught Carlos how to do underwater somersaults, which Carlos ended up mastering after inhaling a decent amount of warm, chlorinated liquid through his nostrils and emerging hurt and confused.
In the bedroom, we had two beds. One for Fernando, one for me and Carlos.
Fernando ordered pizza, beers and sodas. The three of us distractedly watched a film for adolescents on TV as we ate, Carlos and I lying belly-down on our bed and getting ketchup and mustard on the bedspread, Fernando at a round table with one leg shorter than the others that rocked back and forth every time he leaned on it.
Carlos put on his space-themed pajamas. It had astronauts and stars against a black background, and six-legged extraterrestrials with tufts of antennae on their heads and goofy smiles. He brushed his teeth with his new toothbrush, which he had bought specially for the trip.
Later, in the dark, I heard his heavy, just-fallen-asleep breathing.
On the other bed, Fernando was an indistinct shape, motionless, as if he had ceased to exist. As if he had left his body there and gone off to do something else.
On the highway outside night trucks and cars carrying tired eyes behind steering wheels drove past. Each of them was a broad noise and a flash of light. Low-pitched noises and king-size flashes of light for the trucks. Higher-pitched noises and more discreet flashes of light for the cars.
I fell asleep and dreamed of a pool, at the bottom of which were tunnels leading to other pools. The water carried Carlos’s liquid voice repeating the names of the ghost towns of Las Animas County.
I leapt out of the dream and fully woke up a short time later, when I heard someone knocking on the door of the room next to ours. Fernando was still in the same position, the same inexistence. I realized he was awake, because sleeping bodies tend to be easier, more abandoned objects — like Carlos beside me. I rolled over in bed and leaned on my elbow.