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I left Santiago without leaving, or without believing that I was really getting out. The ash was coming down even heavier as we made our way out of town and towards the foothills. Behind us, the road disappeared in a cloud of dust. Crouched on the floor to my right, Felipe was humming a vaguely familiar tune, which I soon recognised.

‘The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round …’

He had put on his little-boy voice and was reliving the memory of being in the back seat of the car, banging my mother’s headrest euphorically (‘shush now’, ‘seatbelt’, ‘calm down, Felipe’). It was always the same. First he would tell me to sit right back in my seat.

‘Let’s try something, Ique, let’s play hangman,’ he would whisper in his little-boy voice, so that only I could hear it. And I would shrug my little-girl shoulders, convinced that he was about to pull out a pencil and pad and that our game would entail guessing the right vowels or burning at the stake. But Felipe never wanted to play that hangman; he wanted to play the version he’d invented himself, back in Chinquihue, which is why he would pull out a pencil and a long piece of black thread from his rucksack.

‘Stretch out your fingers, Ique. But don’t move,’ he’d say, splaying my short, stubby fingers.

With my hand resting steadily on his knees, palm facing upwards, on each of my fingertips Felipe would painstakingly draw two black dots for eyes, a circle for a nose and a straight line for the mouth: five mean-looking faces. Then we’d switch roles: now it would be my turn to draw figures on his fingers. I’d give them little ties and curls, and together we’d snicker, wave our hands as if saying goodbye, and tickle one another. And then came ‘Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe’.

‘… if he squeals, let him go, Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe!’

One of Felipe’s fingers – the selected one – would come to the front, and the other fingers would bow in solemn reverence while my hand – my five obedient soldiers – took hold of the thread, the long rope, and tied it firmly.

‘Tighter, Ique, tie it tighter,’ he would say (his voice revitalised, high-pitched; impossible, that voice).

And I would watch as the blood built up at the tip of his strangled finger, those drawn-on eyes bulging as the thread cut deep into the top joint, a head on the brink of bursting, and our stifled laughter, because we mustn’t make a peep, that’s what my mother would say, ‘Stop that racket, for heaven’s sake, there’s a special bulletin.’ (The drums, the gross persistence of those drums.)

Back in the present, the cordillera was looming over us like an apparition. I said something to the others about how dark the sky was, the fields buried under a carpet of ash, the wind’s texture now visible somehow: a grey shroud over Santiago. I had to pinch myself to believe that I was really leaving. It’s a trip, it’s real, I thought, putting my foot down to the max and feeling another flutter in the pit of my stomach. Felipe was engrossed in a pile of newspapers and Paloma had taken charge of the map, as if she’d been planning to rent a funeral car and cross the cordillera ever since she was back in Germany.

‘Take Route 5 northbound, then Route 57 heading for Río Blanco and Guardia Vieja.’

I followed her instructions until I noticed the incorrect names, the altered distances, the geography of a bygone city (she was directing us out of a city from another time).

We stopped for petrol a couple of kilometres before the border. The pump attendant was killing time, dozing beneath an awning with his legs stretched out and a newspaper for a hat. Felipe got out to buy something at a vending machine (one coin, two coins, he himself an automaton) and the guy leapt up, and gave Felipe a peculiar kind of bow. Once again, the condolences were for him. Then the attendant came over and, giving the hearse the once-over, even peering into the rear window, he enquired about the coffin (the corpse, the sarcophagus, the casket, the house). He didn’t seem particularly interested in the answer. He’d spent the whole day on his own and wanted to talk.

‘It’s dull as hell, imagine. So you guys are headed for the snow, are you? You’ve never been to the mountains? Seriously? Just go, you’ll see. It’s really something,’ he said and then gazed upwards, hypnotised by those ash-cloaked peaks.

The bends in the road were getting sharper and I regretted having given in to Felipe’s pleas. Now I was the one crouched on the cushion and he was behind the wheel. The photo of Ortega Junior was swinging from side to side, as was I, barely managing to keep my balance. The road was one interminable zigzag and my heart was in my mouth as Felipe took each bend without braking.

‘Don’t you girls slip into a trance now,’ he said as we climbed that never-ending corkscrew.

We couldn’t laugh. With her right hand Paloma was clutching the door handle. Her left one was resting on my shoulder, either to stop herself from toppling sideways, or to stop me from rolling around on the floor. After a dozen or so bends, she couldn’t take any more.

‘Let’s stop for some air,’ she said. ‘I feel sick.’

From the roadside, perfectly still, the valley of Santiago stretched out before us, a sunken basin between the mountain peaks with the odd light dotted around. The road we’d just come from showed not a trace of either the hearse or us; the ash was falling so heavily that it was impossible to leave tracks. Paloma was struggling to breathe and had covered her nose with one hand, holding on to my arm affectionately with the other. Or perhaps it was merely to prevent herself from collapsing. If she’d only taken a few deep breaths she might have been able to calm down. Felipe and I had no trouble breathing that thin air. He wandered off in the direction of a cave that had somehow managed to cling on to some snow, even after the heat of the preceding days. He moved swiftly through the ash, just as he used to dash along the beach when we were children, ripping his clothes off despite my mother’s cries of ‘No, Felipe! Put your clothes back on right this minute. The flag’s red, it’s not safe!’. Felipe would strip off and run bone naked into the waves, hurling himself at the sea the only way he knew how: like a wild animal. He didn’t dive in to swim, but as if to drive his scrawny body into the spray, or rather the waves: to pierce them. I pictured Felipe running – sprinting at lightning speed – across the black pebbly sand of Chinquihue, picking his feet off the ground as he reached the water’s edge, taking off. With his legs still in the air his body gradually disappeared into the water, until the inevitable happened; until, from where I stood waiting (from the dry shore, from the obedient shade of the shore), I could no longer see anything but his hands, his fingers breaking the waves that in turn broke him, tossing him into a whirlpool, swallowing him up for fifteen seconds (fifteen seconds exactly, which I counted, terrified), until he emerged again shaking and spitting. He was soon back again, tumbling into the water, slicing through it until, eventually, he came out, numb, breathless and blue, his eyes sore and his teeth chattering, telling me how wonderful, how refreshing the water was.

Felipe approached the cave where the enduring snow held on, completely impervious to the ash, and from there he shouted back that there was still some left. ‘Come and see! I’ve never touched snow before,’ he said with his back to us. Then he turned to face us and held out his arms, smiling. His hands were cupping a horrible grey mush, slushy droplets of which were dripping through his fingers.

I pleaded with Felipe for us to get back on the road. It was getting dark and the ash was driving me mad, sticking to my skin. I wanted to make a move before I got stuck there, buried in the stuff. Felipe glared at me, challenging me to put up with fifteen minutes of ash on my shoulders. After some time trying to persuade him I managed to get us all back into the hearse: Felipe annoyed, Paloma indifferent, and I calmer, although my sense of relief was short-lived. The road ahead was a black horizon. Most of the street lights had burnt out and the route to Uspallata had become impassable. We had no choice. Felipe came off the main road and, heading deep into the valley, losing himself there in the middle of the mountains, he stopped the car and turned off the lights.

Night fell for the first time.