Two boys and two girls who were traveling in a Renault 5 picked up a woman dressed in white who signaled to them at a crossroads just after midnight. The weather was clear, and the four kids—as was later verified ad nauseam—were all in their right minds. The lady traveled in silence for several miles, sitting in the middle of the back seat, until just before the Quatre Canaux bridge. Then she pointed ahead with a terrified index finger and yelled, “Careful, that curve is dangerous,” and there and then she vanished.
This happened on May 20 on the Paris-Montpellier freeway. The police commissioner of the later city, whom the four kids woke up to tell of the frightening event, admitted that it was neither a joke nor a hallucination, but filed the case because he didn’t know what to do with it. Almost all the press in France commented on it in the following days, and numerous parapsychologists, occultists, and metaphysical reporters gathered at the place of the apparition to study its circumstances, and exhausted the four chosen by the lady in white with rationalist questions. But after a few days, all was forgotten, and the press as well as the scientists took refuge in the analysis of an easier reality. The most understanding among them admitted that the apparition might be true, but still, faced with the impossibility of understanding her, they preferred to forget her.
For me—a convinced materialist—there is no doubt that it was one more episode, and one of the loveliest, in the rich history of the materialization of poetry. The only fault I find in it is that it happened at night, and, worse still, around midnight, like in the worst horror movies. Apart from that, there is not a single element that does not correspond to the metaphysics of roads we’ve all felt pass close by during the course of trip, but before the disturbing truth of which we refuse to surrender. We have ended up accepting the marvel of ghost ships that wander all the seas searching for their lost identities, but we refuse that right to so many poor souls in purgatory left scattered and aimless at the side of the road. In France alone they registered two hundred deaths a week a few years ago in the most frenetic summer months, so there’s no reason to be surprised by such an understandable episode such as that of the lady in white, who will undoubtedly continue repeating herself until the end of the centuries, in circumstances that only heartless rationalists are incapable of understanding.
I have always thought, on my long road trips in so many parts of the world, that most of us human beings these days are survivors of a curve. Each one is a defiance of fate. All it takes is for the vehicle ahead of us to suffer a mishap after the curve for us to forever thwart our opportunity to tell the story. In the early years of the automobile, the English enacted a law—the Locomotive Act—which required all drivers to be preceded by a person on foot, carrying a red flag and ringing a bell, so pedestrians would have time to get out of the way. Often, at the moment of accelerating to immerse myself in the unfathomable mystery of a curve, I have regretted deep in my soul that the wise English arrangement has been abolished, especially once, fifteen years ago, when I was driving from Barcelona to Perpignan with Mercedes and the boys at sixty miles an hour, and suddenly had an incomprehensible intuition to slow down before taking a curve. The cars behind me, as always happens in these situations, overtook us. I’ll never forget it: there was a white van, a red Volkswagen, and a blue Fiat. I even remember the shiny curly hair of the healthy-looking Dutch woman driving the van. After passing us in perfect order, the three cars disappeared around the curve, but we found them again an instant later one on top of the other, in a pile of smoking wreckage, embedded in an out-of-control truck in the oncoming lane. The only survivor was the Dutch couple’s six-month-old baby.
I have passed that place many times since, and I have always thought of that beautiful woman who was reduced to a mound of pink flesh in the middle of the highway, completely naked due to the impact, and with her lovely Roman emperor’s head dignified by death. It would not be surprising if someone found her one of these days in the place of her misfortune, alive and whole, making the conventional signs like the Montpellier woman in white, so she could be taken out of her stupor for an instant and given the opportunity to warn with the yell nobody let out for her: “Careful, that curve is dangerous.”
The mysteries of the road are not more popular than those of the sea, because there is no one more distracted than amateur drivers. Professional ones, however—like the old mule drivers—are endless sources of fantastic stories. At roadside diners, as at the ancient inns along bridle paths, the weathered truckers, who seem not to believe in anything, tirelessly recount the supernatural episodes natural to their trade, especially those that happen in broad daylight and on the busiest routes. In the summer of 1974, traveling with the poet Álvaro Mutis and his wife along the same freeway where the lady in white now appeared, we saw a small car pull out of a long line of a traffic jam in the other direction, and drive straight toward us at a foolish speed. I barely had time to dodge it, but our car went over the edge and got embedded in the bottom of a ditch. Several witnesses managed to see the image of the fugitive car: it was a white Skoda, the license plate of which was noted down by three different people. We made the corresponding report at the police station in Aix-en-Provence, and after some months the French police had verified that the white Skoda with the designated license plate without a doubt existed in reality. However, they had also verified that at the time of our accident it was on the opposite side of France, parked in its garage, while its owner and sole driver was dying in a nearby hospital.
From these, and many other experiences, I have learned to have an almost reverential respect for roads. For all that, the most disturbing episode I remember happened in the very center of Mexico City, many years ago. I had been waiting for a taxi for almost half an hour, at two in the afternoon, and was about to give up when I saw one approaching that looked empty at first glance and also had its flag raised. But when it was a little bit closer I saw beyond doubt that there was a person beside the driver. Only when he stopped, without my having waved him down, did I realize my error: there was no passenger beside the driver. Along the way I told him of my optical illusion, and he listened with total openness. “It happens all the time,” he said. “Sometimes I drive around all day, without anyone stopping me, because almost everyone sees that ghost passenger in the seat beside me.” When I told this story to Luis Buñuel, he considered it as natural as the cab driver. “It’s a good opening for a film,” he said.
August 19, 1981, El País, Madrid