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* * *

It’s late. I’m writing. The city is convalescing, but little by little the sounds of any other end-of-summer night are resuming. I think naively, intensely, about suffering. About the people who died today, in the south. About yesterday’s dead, and tomorrow’s. And about this profession, this strange, humble and arrogant, necessary and insufficient trade: to spend life watching, writing.

* * *

After the Peugeot 404 my father had a light blue 504 and then a silver 505. None of those models are out on the avenue tonight.

I watch the cars, I count the cars. It’s overwhelming to think that in the backseats children are sleeping, and that every one of those children will remember, someday, the old car they rode in years before, with their parents.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alejandro Zambra is a poet, novelist, and literary critic who was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1975. He is the author of two previous novels, The Private Lives of Trees and Bonsai, which was awarded a Chilean Critics Award for best novel. He was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá39 list.

A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Megan McDowell is a literary translator living in Zurich, Switzerland. She also translated Alejandro Zambra’s The Private Lives of Trees.