If he had, he would have been surprised to see that the car was still there, just where its silhouette had been traced by a butterfly wing. Inside the car was Silvia Balero, the drawing teacher, mad with anguish and half asleep. She followed Siffoni’s red truck because it was the last thread connecting her to her wedding dress, the seamstress, and she had just seen it disappear before her eyes. The moment when the atmospheric tide made the truck invisible found her in bad shape. Like all candidates for spinsterhood, she was very dependent on her biorhythms, and after midnight she was always, always asleep. Never in her life had she gotten past that hour. Night was an unknown quantity for her; she was a diurnal, impressionistic being. So at midnight, which by a strange coincidence was the moment when the moon acted on the truck, she went on automatic pilot, like a sleepwalker. As if in a nightmare she felt despair as her prey vanished before her eyes. In her state, this disappearing act was the trick that hid all of reality from her.
“I’m hungry,” thought Ramón Siffoni, who hadn’t had dinner. Up ahead, he saw a kind of little mountain under the moon, and on its peak a hotel. In spite of the hour lights could be seen in the windows on the ground floor, and he thought it was not unlikely that there was a dining room. The supposition became much more plausible when he saw, as he came up to it, several trucks parked in front of the hotel. Any traveler in Argentina knows that where truck drivers stop, one eats well; therefore, one stops.
As soon as he stepped on the ground, a woman came walking toward him, although at the same time she appeared to flee from him. He wasn’t sure, because what captured his attention was the little blue car she’d alighted from.
Silvia Balero noticed that he didn’t recognize her, even though he opened the door for her on her daily visits to the seamstress. All women must have looked the same to him. He was that kind of man.
“I’m sorry to bother you, heaven knows what you’ll think of me, but may I ask you a favor?”
Siffoni looked at her with an expression that seemed impolite but was actually intrigue, because she looked familiar and he didn’t know from where.
“Could you walk me in? I mean, as if we were colleagues, traveling salesmen. Since you’re going to stay here. . I’m nervous about going in alone.”
Finally he reacted and took off toward the door.
“No. I’m just going to have dinner.”
“Me too! Then I’m getting back on the road!”
She wondered: Where could he have left the truck? It looked like he’d climbed out of empty air.
But the door was locked; through the curtains the lobby could be seen, dark and deserted. Ramón took a few steps in front of the building, with the woman following behind. The windows of a room that might have been the dining room also showed a black space on the other side, but from somewhere a few rays of smoky light reached him. Ramón Siffoni retreated a few feet. From the road he’d seen lights on, but now he didn’t know from where. He tried to make sense of the structure of the building. He couldn’t concentrate because of the perplexity his company was causing him; by the light of the moon, the woman did not look very lucid. Might she be drunk, or crazy? That kind of man is always thinking the worst of women, precisely because they all look the same to him.
The difficulties he encountered were due to the fact that the hotel’s floor plan was really unintelligible. It was a hot springs establishment whose ground floor had been adapted to the stone wellsprings in the earth; which, being bedrock, could not be removed.
But finally, coming around a sharp corner, he found himself before a lit window, and could see inside. His surprise was superlative (but his surprise was enormous every time he looked at anything that night). He stood before a scene he knew all too welclass="underline" the poker table. Now, in a flash, he remembered having heard talk of this hotel, a requisite stop for all gamblers headed south, smugglers, truckers, aviators. . An old hot springs hotel, its clientele extinct, a legendary den. He’d never thought that one day — one night — he’d see it for himself.
Before this spectacle he forgot everything, even the woman who stood on tiptoe behind him to see. The men, the cards, the chips, the glasses of whiskey. . But he didn’t forget absolutely everything: there was one thing he noticed. One of the gamblers was from Pringles, and he knew him very well, not only because they were neighbors. He was the one everyone called Chiquito, the truck driver. It meant everything to see him, and understand that the trip had not been in vain, or at least that he hadn’t gone the wrong way. If he got what he wanted from him, he wouldn’t have to keep going.
He knew perfectly well how to get to a gambling table, even if all the doors were closed. His movements became confident, and Silvia Balero noticed. She followed him. Ramón knocked a few times on the window, and then on the closest door. Before anyone came to open it, he searched in his shirt pocket and pulled out a black mask. He’d had it there for some time, and he hadn’t expected to use it so soon. He put it on (it had an elastic band that tightened around the back of the neck). In those days it was common, as it is now, for gamblers in poker dens to hide their identities with masks, so the hotel porter who came to open the door only had to look at him to know what he wanted. They entered. Silvia Balero tugged on his sleeve.
“What do you want?” he snapped. He couldn’t believe how inconvenient it was to have a strange woman begging for his attention when he was about to make the bet of his life.
She wanted a place to sleep. She was already half asleep in fact, somnambulant.
Without answering her, Ramón signaled to the porter to guide them, but the man told them they had to speak to the owner of the hotel, who happened to be seated at the card table. So they did. Those present threw an appreciative look at the young teacher, and the porter took her to a room not far from where they were and came back. The new arrival was already in place, they had recited the rules for him, and he was requesting chips on credit. Counting the owner, there were five of them. The porter watched. Two were truck drivers, Chiquito and another suspicious-looking man; the remaining two were local ranchers, cattle men, very solvent. Chiquito had won a lot. At that hour they were already playing for thousands of sheep, and entire mountains.
Why linger over a description of a game, the same as any other? Queen, king, two, etc. Ramón lost, successively, his truck, the little blue car, and Silvia Balero. The only thing left was to pay for the two whiskeys he’d drunk. He dropped the cards on the table with his eyes half-closed behind his mask and said:
“Where’s the bathroom?”
They pointed it out. He went, and escaped through the window. He ran toward the place where he’d left the truck, pulling the keys out of his pocket. . But when he came to his spot among the other trucks in the lot, all of them big and modern (and Chiquito’s, which he knew well, with a strange black machine stuck to the back wall of the trailer; he didn’t stop to see what it was) there, on the flat ground, he didn’t find his truck. He thought he was dreaming. The moon had disappeared as well, and all that was left was an uncertain brilliance between the earth and the sky. His truck was not there. When he’d bet it, the second trucker, who was the one who’d won, went out to see it, and on returning had accepted the bet against ten thousand sheep, which had surprised Siffoni a little. Could he have moved it then? Impossible without the keys, which had never left his pocket. At any rate he couldn’t look for it for very long, because discovery of his escape was imminent. . He tried to get into the little blue car, but he didn’t fit; he was a corpulent man. He heard a door slam, or thought he did. . Panic disconcerted him for a moment, and then he was running across the open ground, in every direction, coming down the mountain to the plain, while dawn was breaking, at an impossibly early hour.