The highway crosses empty fields now, and in some parcels, where the corn and sunflower have already been harvested, the truncated stalks remain, brown, ragged, and scorched, like a field of ruins. But the grass is green along the shoulder and on the strip of ground that separates the two sides of the highway. Against the pale, cloudless sky, there’s considerable agitation among the birds, coming and going, landing on the ground, on the posts, on the barbed wire, on the trees, then taking off again and landing again, as though, intuiting that the light is fading, they are accelerating the rhythm with which they live out the last hours of the day, trying to get ahead of the night. Inside the bus, the angle of the rays that filter through the edges of the curtains is less severe, declining to the horizontal, without reaching it of course, and while sometime earlier they projected onto the floor, in the middle of the aisle, now they touch the seats on the other side. Tomatis checks his watch: it’s six sixteen. After forty minutes on the road, the dusty afternoon light is now concentrated in the rays that, all at the same angle, indifferent to the movement or the displacements of the vehicle, and despite the vibrations that the force of the engine and the inconsistencies of the road transmit to the bodywork, impassively cross the penumbra of the bus, only changing position because they’re changed by the distant, flaming disc from which they come. A momentary estrangement comes over him, the sense of being in two planes of space and time at once, the first in a typical bus driving down the highway between Rosario and the city on a Saturday afternoon, and the second in an embalmed stretch of time in which motion is stillness and all known, familiar space is a universe in miniature, enclosed in a crystal ball, cast about, without its inhabitants noticing, within an igneous whirlwind swirling in a infinite blackness. It’s an estrangement without panic, a possible image of what, wrapping us in its cocoon of flammable gasses and fusing metals, accompanying us from our imperceptible birth to our imperceptible death, is our true home. He’s pulled from that daydream by an external contingency, a slightly more conspicuous bump tells him that they’re passing over the Carcarañá, in La Ribera, and he turns toward the window in order to see it better, narrow, turbulent, and swift between the pale banks populated by shrubs and weeds, and higher up, in the surrounding area, by weekend houses built in the shade of the trees. The river is revealed and then disappears, a flash of moving water that, because it flows at the bottom of a bank, enters into shadow long before the flat, exposed earth dominated by the overwhelming afternoon light. Tomatis leans back against his seat again, and for about a minute he doesn’t think of anything, his hands crossed at his belly, his eyes open but not looking directly at any object, his expression calm and empty. Now he’s aware that he’s getting hungry: the salad he had that afternoon, despite the indisputable variety of ingredients laid out on a table, meant to give the clients complete freedom to serve themselves as much of whatever they choose, in fact reveals an deft sophism, because it’s obvious that in order to prepare a salad with some rationality not all of the elements on display are mutually compatible, and only a few make sense to combine, one always chooses between lettuce and chicory, between cured or fresh pork, between hard and soft cheeses, between sardines or tuna in oil, and though he no longer remembers all the ingredients that he chose, he can tell by his sensation of hunger — actually agreeable for the moment — that the salad, though they ate pretty late, wasn’t enough to keep him till dinner, at around eight thirty, assuming that the bus arrives at the terminal at eight, and adding the time it takes to get to the taxi stand and then to his house. He could eat something at the grill house or at the outdoor bar across from the terminal, but because he got up early this morning he wants to get to bed soon, then read a while, to be fresh and rested tomorrow morning for the cookout at Gutiérrez’s. He remembers that one of the two chorizos that Nula gave him the other day when he picked him up downtown is still in the fridge; he’d eaten part of the first — exquisite — with his sister that same night, and the rest of it yesterday, but the second was intact. Tomatis hopes that his sister hasn’t invited over her friends for lunch or to drink vermouth today, serving them the salami in slices, on a cutting board, with pickles and olives, as she usually does. But he doesn’t worry: despite her constant criticizing, his sister always keeps the best food for him, at least when Alicia isn’t around, and so, especially because she knows that he’ll arrive tired and hungry from Rosario, he’s almost sure that, after the praise they showered on the salami that they ate on Wednesday night, his sister will have all or part of the second waiting for him when he gets back.