The sun has now begun to redden; its circumference is sharper, and the flaming disc seems to have cooled and smoothed, losing its look of boiling metal and gaining a sort of gentleness. But the afternoon that is repeated on the plain has something solemn and disquieting about it, and an unmistakable impression comes suddenly and destroys every illusion, that the place where we thought we were living is another, larger, and this destructive realization removes every known sense of the verb to live. Our experience, which we thought so intimate, becomes foreign, and life reveals its remote and tiny quality, a momentary spark in an immense, igneous storm. The smooth surface of the red disc now emits magnetic vibrations in which cold and torrid shades alternate. In the absolutely cloudless sky, the disc, which appears to have been drawn with a compass, grows as it falls toward the horizon, and on the plain a reddish glow haloes the grass, the foliage of the trees, the fences — cows and horses, abstracted, graze unhurriedly, as though they don’t realize that the night is rising from the east, from the side of the river. In a small pond the water has turned red, and a few motionless herons have their backs to him, as though that change of color upset them and they prefer to ignore it. Along a dirt road perpendicular to the highway, a rider, mounted on a dark horse, moves toward the red disc at a slow trot, and Tomatis senses that when he reaches the horizon he will intercept the reddening form and the rider will enter into it, submerging himself into the magnetic, quivering substance contained within the perfect circumference, the fluid mass of metal in fusion that will swallow him forever unless the horse and rider, triumphant, emerge on the other side of the road, leaving a ragged hole in the center of the disc, sabotaging the fraud or revealing the illusion. But if suddenly the sun were to stop, touching the horizon tangentially, the trot of the horse, in the distortion of space and time that the detention would cause, would be frozen, without advancing, in the same point in space for all eternity, halfway along the road between the highway and the red disc, incredibly immediate and enormous. Maybe the horse and the rider are phantasmal, incorporeal figures separated from the expired and corrupted flesh that for the past few hours has been lying vacated in a field, on their way, blurrily and hastily, to the kingdom of the dead, which as everyone knows is clustered at the far edge of the west, to the left of the world, Tomatis thinks, raising his left hand and touching the window glass, cold because of the air conditioning. The publisher will have arrived by now, and he’ll have started negotiating with the authorities, trying to convince them of the utility of the Fourth Estate for explaining government policy to the public, and the need for a free press in a kingdom of the dead privileged with new institutions that affirm democratic values and consolidate individual liberty and economic progress, informing them, in addition, that for a kingdom of the dead in constant demographic shift, a rigorous communication strategy is essential; he is willing to put his experience in communications at their service, of course, in addition to his contacts with the vital forces of society and his relationships among marketing and public opinion experts. Tomatis shakes his head with a smile that is both indulgent and mocking, and, looking away for a few seconds from the red disc falling toward the horizon, he observes the ochre shadow inside the bus. The passengers in the front seats are almost invisible, and the ones closest to Tomatis are only black silhouettes encircled by a reddish halo; whenever a head moves, its dark profile is outlined in the shadow by that luminous line that emphasizes it with meticulous exactitude. But the heads that stick out above the seat backs are motionless, as if their owners had abandoned them in their seats before beginning their trip to the edge of the west, the left end of the world, following the dark rider trotting slowly toward the red disc that is now almost touching the horizon, and toward the publisher of La Región, who at that very moment is offering his communications strategies to the authorities of the kingdom of the dead. Behind him, on the other side of the aisle, the two boys, possibly medical students, sprawled out on their seats, have fallen silent, with their eyes wide open, possibly due to a sudden stupor or an absorbing memory, and their pupils, exposed to the sun by the excessive stillness of their eyes, glow dark red, phosphorescent, as if distant bonfires, brought to the present by the intensity of their recollection, burn as intensely in their memory as the tiny flames reflected in their pupils. But the kingdom of the dead, Tomatis tells himself, isn’t at the edge of the west, on the left end of the world, but rather within everyone, inside us, it’s a burden carried on the shoulders of everyone that, unnecessarily and miserably, is born and dies. Those of us traveling in this bus carry that burden, that cross. And at this very moment, everyone who squirms, from morning to night, awake or asleep, in the nest of humanity, in the ball of mud in which they struggle, overwhelmed, bears it. The living and the dead share the same indivisible kingdom.
He’s overcome by a kind of ephemeral rage, of indignation possibly, against the whole universe, against the red disc that now begins to dip into the horizon, condensing the shadow inside the bus. But almost immediately he calms down. He doesn’t think about anything. Now, as the horizon swallows the red disc more and more quickly, the night, rising from the east, submerges the plain. At around eight thirty he’ll be at home, and in order to rest from the long day, the early morning trip, the walk with Alicia along the downtown streets, the return trip, and wake up refreshed and ready for the Sunday at Gutiérrez’s — as long as it isn’t raining in the morning — he’ll get into bed with a book at around ten and will try to get to sleep early. With any luck, his sister will have cut up some slices of the second cylinder of delicious mummified meat, the local chorizo that Nula gave him the other day. He’s safely guaranteed the luxury of death, Tomatis thinks, ironically, all he has to do is keep on living. In the waning, reddish splendor, erased by the growing shadow of the bus, he checks the contents of the briefcase to make sure he has everything and then closes it after pulling out the alfajor and dropping it into his coat pocket, in order to give it, along with some coins, as he usually does, to one of the kids begging at the entrance to the terminal, near the taxi stand.
Where the circle was there’s now a red stain spread across the horizon, and the entire plain is black except, here and there, in the puddles, in the marshes, in the lakes, there’s an equally red surface that, with a bit of imagination, could seem to be the sun, which has disappeared, tinting the water from below, from the antipodes. But in fact it’s the unpredictable trajectory of the light that, from the horizon, lingers on whatever surface will reflect it, resisting the invasion of the night. As the minutes pass, the red stain contracts, like a wound that closes little by little, leaving only the final bloody fissures, until finally the even blackness covers the entire space, and the diverse shapes that the world assumes are erased completely, deconstructed by the smooth, abstract, uninterrupted blackness. Artificial lights restore them at moments, in vivid, fragmentary, and fleeting bursts of reality into which, almost immediately after lighting up, improbably, they dissolve. The vehicles coming in the opposite direction are just as phantasmal, and their headlights sweep across the shadow of the bus as they pass, allowing him to see, for a few seconds, the motionless or swaying heads that extend beyond the upper edge of the seats, the grandmother’s, Tomatis remembers, though the grandson’s is invisible just now, the middle-aged couple who, judging by the labels hanging from their suitcases that he saw on the platform before they were loaded, seem to be returning from a long trip. At the last toll, before the exit for the airport, the bus was forced to slow down and stop, reintroducing, for several moments, the rough present that, when the bus starts to move again, accelerating, is left irrevocably behind, circulating endlessly in a past ever more archaic and distant until it finally drifts into the night of time. Soon, in the distance, the lights of the city will be visible. Abandoning the highway, the bus drives into the suburbs of Santo Tomé. From his seat on the upper deck, Tomatis looks down on the poor houses of the outskirts, as if the night, the melancholy streetlights, and the poverty especially, miniaturized them. But when they reach the center of Santo Tomé—several houses, occupied or empty, display the ubiquitous sign ANOTHER MORO PROPERTY FOR SALE — he notices its liveliness: the bars, which are still empty, have set up tables on the sidewalks, and many stores, groceries, bakeries, ice cream shops, and even offices still have their doors open and their shop windows illuminated. The fever of the hot night is visible on people’s clothes and faces, but some kids, recently showered and changed for the Saturday night, talk and laugh on the corners, or walk in groups along the main street. Though they seem to still be ignorant of it, and though some of them may pretend not to know it, every one of them already bears that crushing, agonizing burden. For now they move, healthy and careless, through the quiet of the evening, confusing their desires and their dreams with the unexamined reasons for their existence. They think they exist for themselves, but all they are is bait, tempting the thing that makes them exist. They think they’re displaying themselves, but what they don’t know is that they’re being displayed by the archaic design that brings them to the world, gives them an attractive shape, and then, without cruelty or compassion, casts them into the abyss. The bus leaves Santo Tomé and turns onto the road bridge over the two branches of the Salado, glowing briefly under the lights of the bridge before it disappears. The city is on the other side. Tomatis sees its lights, unfolding in long rows of brilliant points, and imagines himself coming off the bridge, entering the avenues, arriving at the terminal. The anticipated exhaustion of the return suddenly overcomes him, and his home becomes a place at once strange and familiar, immediate and remote, where the living carry the dead on their shoulders, only liberated of the burden by their own death, and so on until the end of time, which is not at all infinite, but rather condemned to end with the final exhalation of the last human breath.