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darkened highway

And we headed back to Santiago on a highway where night had fallen at six in the evening. What did you think of Genaro? I asked, my bare feet over the heater. What about you? And the questioning stopped there. Already Genaro was crawling off with his lover toward the past that was a select social club; we were fleeing that closed circle, we were going forward and not looking back, we were present, hurtling into the future at hundreds of miles per hour along a road that had pretensions of being a highway. I opened the window and sniffed the air for the singed smell of burning. But there were no garbage bonfires at that hour. Not even flies. But we were traveling with a swarm in our heads, going back over conversations that wouldn’t be repeated, anticipating situations. For an instant I had the impression that Ignacio was nodding, though I also thought he might be shaking his head no. I heard him shift ever more clumsily, felt him slow down sharply, put on the brake; I noticed we were zig-zagging. What’s happening? Why are you speeding up and slowing down? It’s pitch black, there’s fog, you can’t see a single light out there, and, as if that weren’t enough, I can’t see a damn thing in the dark. So don’t go weaving in and out and passing cars. But I’m not passing, that’s not it, said Ignacio, raising his voice. It’s just that I don’t understand a thing in this goddamned country, the road just melted into a high-speed throughway, and we almost ended up, just now, stuck under a wagon — a wagon pulled by cows on a highway! Explain that to me! Cows? I sighed, buying time to think. Cows or oxen or donkeys or idiot peasants or whatever you call those damned animals that almost killed us! They didn’t have lights and they were going very, very slow through an impossible fog. And wait,

joder, I can’t believe it, there ahead of us is a truck right across the road, trying to make a U-turn! Are all Chileans crazy? Crazy, I murmured cynically, of course we’re crazy, so better be careful with us. I must be even crazier, he said, shifting badly for the umpteenth time, braking, going around the truck’s tail. Crazy to go on vacation with a blind woman. I bristled at Ignacio’s head-on blow, but he started to laugh and that was his way, bewildering as it was, of apologizing for the anger he felt sometimes, for feeling sometimes like a prisoner of the Chile that was me, and then I also started to laugh and cry a little from the laughter and above all from exhaustion. Ignacio went on reading the signs and driving in a straight line, and only when we were getting close to the city did I have to tell him what would be the next marker to look for, which exit, which ascent, which right turn to reach the house on a desolate Sunday at midnight. My parents were resting on their pillows, resting their skulls one against the other, their glasses on, the newspaper spread out, the computer propped against my mother’s knees turned on. Asleep with the door open, whispered Ignacio. Olga was sleeping, on the other hand, locked in her room with the TV on full volume and the radio on as well. We reached the second floor and threw our sandy shoes as far from us as we could. We smelled of the ocean, of shellfish, of dirty socks, of Ignacio’s sweaty feet. Are you tired? Yes, he said, exhausted. And then he lit a cigarette that ended up being for both of us, and inhaling slowly he started to tell me, between pauses, aspirating his words, how that afternoon. During that lunch. Between the clams and the chupe de loco. And the chopped onion and the hallullas, Ignacio, we can’t forget those. Then, he said. Then? I asked. Then I started to think, he said. (What would it take for you to stop thinking so much, all the time?) It was nebulous at first and I kept thinking it more clearly after we went through the toll, while I was driving next to you, he said. The ideas wandered from one point to another, and I felt I was driving in the air. And then. Then the word possibility emerged. The phrase the possibility exists, although I know it’s remote. Remote, I said, it’s still remote. And I know, we shouldn’t think about it, about this thing we’ve talked about so many times. Only that it’s one thing to talk about it, I thought, and something very different to suddenly open your eyes. Ignacio went on laboriously, saying maybe. Maybe never. You understand? Yes, I answered, of course I do. You’re the one who took a long time to understand. And I said to him, so what do you want to do? And without giving him time to answer I told him it was going to rain. There’s going to be a storm, a torrential downpour. Can’t you smell it? I said. It’s in the air.