For a long time I drove along the grey strip connecting Gуmez Palacio and the motel. When I reached the motel, I didn't stop. I looked at the director; she was smiling, she didn't mind me driving a bit further. At the start both of us had stared at the highway in silence. But when we passed the motel she started talking about her poetry, her work, and her insensitive husband. When she had said her piece, she turned on the cassette player and put in a tape: a woman singing rancheras. She had a sad voice that was always a couple of notes ahead of the orchestra. I'm her friend, said the director. I didn't understand. What? I said. She's a close friend of mine, said the director. Ah. She's from Durango, she said. You've been there, haven't you? Yes, I've been to Durango, I said. And what were the writing workshops like? Worse than the ones here, I replied, meaning it as a compliment, although she didn't seem to take it that way. She's from Durango, but she lives in Ciudad Juбrez, she said. Sometimes, when she's going back home to see her mother, she calls me up and I reorganize things so I can go to Durango and spend a few days with her. That's nice, I said, keeping my eyes on the road. I stay at her house — her mother's house, actually, said the director. The two of us sleep in her room, and spend hours talking and listening to records. Every now and then one of us goes to the kitchen to make coffee. I usually take cookies with me, La Regalada cookies, her favorite. And we drink coffee and eat cookies. We've known each other since we were fifteen. She's my best friend. On the horizon I could see the highway disappearing into a range of hills. The night was beginning to approach from the east. Days before, at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid rhetorical question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering. One afternoon, at the writing workshop in Gуmez Palacio, a boy asked me why I wrote poetry and how long I thought I would go on doing it. The director wasn't present. There were five other people in the workshop, the five students: four boys and a girl. You could tell from the way they dressed that two of them were very poor. The girl was short and thin and her clothes were rather garish. The boy who asked the question should have been studying at a university; instead of which he was working in a factory, the biggest and probably the only soap factory in the state. Another boy was a waiter in an Italian restaurant, the remaining two were at college, and the girl was neither studying nor working.
By chance, I replied. For a while none of us said anything. I considered the possibility of taking a job in Gуmez Palacio and staying there for the rest of my life. I had noticed a pair of pretty girls among the painting students in the yard. With a bit of luck I might manage to marry one of them. The prettier one also seemed to be the more conventional. I imagined a long, complicated engagement. I imagined a dark, cool house and a garden full of plants. And how long do you think you'll go on writing? asked the boy who worked in the soap factory. I could have said anything, but opted for simplicity: I don't know, I said. What about you? I started writing because poetry sets me free, sir, and I'm never going to stop, he said with a smile that barely hid his pride and determination. As an answer it was too vague and declamatory to be convincing, yet somehow it gave me a glimpse of the factory worker's life, not as it was then, but the life he had led at the age of fifteen, or maybe twelve. I saw him running or walking through the outskirts of Gуmez Palacio, under a sky that looked like a rockslide. I saw his friends and wondered how they could possibly survive. Yet, one way or another, they probably would.
Then we read some poems. The only one who had any talent was the girl. But by then I wasn't sure of anything. When we came out of the classroom, the director was waiting with two guys who turned out to be civil servants employed by the state of Durango. For some reason my first thought was, They're policemen, here to arrest me. The kids said good-bye and off they went, the skinny girl with one of the boys and the other three on their own. I watched them walk down the hallway with its peeling walls. I followed, as if I had forgotten to say something to one of them. And from the door I saw them disappear at both ends of that street in Gуmez Palacio.
The director said: She's my best friend. That was all. The highway was no longer a straight line. In the rearview mirror I could see an enormous wall rising beyond the town. It took me a while to realize it was the night. The singer on the cassette began to warble another song. The lyrics were about a remote village in the north of Mexico where everyone was happy, except her. I had the impression the director was crying. Silent, dignified, unstoppable tears. But I couldn't confirm this impression. I had to keep my eyes on the road. The director took out a handkerchief and blew her nose. Switch on the headlights, I heard her say in a barely audible voice. I kept on driving.
Switch on the headlights, she repeated, and without waiting for an answer she leaned forward and did it herself. Slow down, she said after a while, her voice stronger now, as the singer reached the final notes of her song. What a sad song, I said, just for something to say.
The car came to a halt by the side of the road. I opened the door and got out. It wasn't yet completely dark, but it was no longer day. The land all around us and the hills into which the highway went winding were a deep, intense shade of yellow that I have never seen anywhere else. As if the light (though it seemed to me not so much light as pure color) were charged with something, I didn't know what, but it could well have been eternity. I was immediately embarrassed to have had such a thought. I stretched my legs. A car whizzed past honking its horn. I told him where to go with a gesture. Maybe it wasn't just a gesture. Maybe I yelled, Go fuck yourself, and the driver saw or heard me. But it's unlikely, like most things in this story. In any case, when I think about the driver all I can see is my own image frozen in his rearview mirror: my hair is still long; I'm thin, wearing a denim jacket and a pair of awful, oversize glasses.
The car pulled up several yards in front of us. The driver didn't get out, or reverse, or honk the horn again, but his mere presence strained the space that we were now, in some sense, sharing with him. Cautiously, I walked around to the director's side of the car. She rolled down her window and asked me what had happened. Her eyes were bulging more than ever. I said I didn't know. It's a man, she said, and slid across into the driver's seat. I got into the seat she had left empty. It was hot and moist, as if the director had a fever. Through the windshield I could see the man's silhouette, the nape of his neck; like us he was looking forward, at the line of the highway beginning to wind its way towards the hills.
It's my husband, said the director with her eyes fixed on the stationary car, as if she were talking to herself. Then she flipped the cassette over and turned up the volume. Sometimes my friend calls me up, she said, when she's touring in towns she doesn't know. Once she phoned from Ciudad Madero. She'd been singing all night at the Oil Workers Union building and she called me at four in the morning. Another time she phoned from Reinosa. That's nice, I said. Not especially, said the director. She just calls. Sometimes she needs to talk. If my husband answers, she hangs up.
For a while neither of us said anything. I imagined the director's husband with the telephone in his hand. He picks up the telephone, says, Hello, who is it? Then he hears someone hang up on the other end and he hangs up too, almost by reflex. I asked the director if she wanted me to get out and say something to the driver of the other car. There's no need, she said. Which seemed a reasonable answer to me, although in fact it was crazy. I asked her what her husband was going to do, if it really was her husband. He'll stay there until we go, said the director. Then we better go right away, I said. The director seemed to be lost in thought, although much later I surmised that, in fact, all she was doing was shutting her eyes and listening to her friend from Durango, drinking that song down to the very last drop. Then she turned on the ignition, pulled out slowly and passed the car parked several yards ahead. I looked out the window as we went by, but the driver turned his back to us and I couldn't see his face.