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We decided to park up and try to get some sleep down in a valley, where the night had engulfed every last trace of ash. I could only make out a few sounds: the whistle of the wind, Felipe’s fitful breathing and the crackle of the crisp packet he’d bought at the petrol station, the contents of which Paloma was shovelling casually into her mouth. I waited, convinced I’d soon adjust to the darkness, but after a while I rubbed my eyes to force them into focus: there was the photo of Ortega Junior hanging from the rear-view mirror, and that day’s newspaper crumpled at my feet (ONCE AGAIN, it read, ONCE AGAIN). Paloma was now holding the map, drawing it in towards her nose and then back out again. Getting nowhere, she finally took out her lighter to shine over the page.

‘Los Penitentes,’ she said, before letting the flame go out. ‘I think we’re in Los Penitentes.’ (The penitent, the mournful, the grief-stricken.)

I explained that Los Penitentes was a valley beyond Cristo Redentor, crossing the Paso Los Libertadores, whereas we were on an unknown high plain, stuck in the middle of nowhere. Paloma unfolded the map and passed it to me, determined to prove we’d chosen to spend the night in Los Penitentes, that this was some kind of omen, but she could no longer find the valley on the map. Felipe was sitting silently in his seat, steeling himself for the long night ahead, the mere thought of which was probably driving him crazy. I realised that it was my turn to convince them. It made no sense for us to spend hours cooped up in the front compartment, wide awake, staring out at the nothingness, so I suggested we all climb into the back.

‘We’ll be way more comfortable,’ I said, ‘don’t be so superstitious.’

Ortega’s ominous caution didn’t bother me; not after the ash, the lost corpse, and now Felipe’s increasingly agonised sighs.

So we clambered into the back compartment, Paloma acquiescent and Felipe bordering on autistic. For my part, I was quite enjoying myself. We settled down in a sort of semicircle, trying out different positions and doing our best to avoid the two parallel rails running across the floor (a coffin-gliding device). I found it roomy back there, and I was pleasantly surprised by the silky soft floor: a velveteen or even velvet lining. In the middle of the ceiling I could just make out a small light fitting (the strange urge to illuminate coffins). Just as my eyes were beginning to make sense of the interior layout, Felipe switched on the light to reveal a rear window, a dark sheet of glass separating us from the front compartment and the telling absence of windows down the sides of the hearse.

There were barely a few centimetres separating us from one another, and the solitary landscape, the isolation and the darkness supplied the perfect conditions for a kind of forced intimacy, a confessional intimacy. Paloma couldn’t contain herself any longer.

‘We’re still so far away,’ she said, ‘and what if the engine gets clogged with ash? And what if we don’t get to Mendoza? Where will I look for her then?’ And she cracked her knuckles one after the other (ten wasted seconds).

Her fear caught me by surprise, and I turned away and stared out of the rear window. The ash was still coming down, now illuminated by the light inside the hearse. And certainly the night was unfolding before our eyes, but the nightmare scenario of actually getting stuck there seemed unlikely to me.

‘It’s not such a big deal,’ I told her, stroking her leg, which was so cold it took me aback. ‘It’s only ash, Paloma. It’ll soon stop,’ and I left my hand on her thigh, not quite knowing how it had got there.

Felipe shuffled back suddenly, forcing Paloma to move to the side, and whipped open his rucksack. Three glasses and a bottle appeared as if from a magician’s hat. Felipe served the drinks – his measure bigger than ours – and we immediately took him up on his offer: the sheer pleasure of a neat pisco.

It was my idea to play the categories game. I suggested we turn off the light and lie down on the floor, face up, Paloma sandwiched between us.

‘To keep our mind off things,’ I said, emboldened by the pisco. ‘Why not?’

Categories with no pens, no paper and in the pitch black.

We each came up with one category. I proposed Volcano Names. Paloma suggested Cemeteries in Chile. Felipe initially refused, but, having thought it over for a moment, came up with the category: Ways of Killing or Dying. Paloma took off her shoes and nestled in between us with her legs stretched out and her right shoulder grazing mine. One of the metal rails separated us, digging into my arm and leg. The cold of that steel didn’t bother me for long, however, and soon the only things I felt were the letters for our game drawn on the floor, the velvet rubbed against the grain, where I encountered Paloma’s hand. I placed my own on top of it and left it there, as still as a statue.

‘I’ll start,’ Felipe said. ‘A,’ and he ran through the alphabet in his head until I stopped him.

‘Stop,’ I said.

‘G.’

‘General Cemetery.’

‘Gassed.’

‘Gonorrhoea.’

‘Güelén.’

We threw out letters and called out our answers, trying to one up each other.

‘Huelén is a hill, Paloma, not a volcano. And besides, you spell it with an H. H for huaina, for hacked, for hollowed out.’

‘No one ever died from being hollowed out.’

‘Oh, but from being hacked they did?’

‘OK, fine … Stop.’

‘M.’

‘Metropolitano.’

‘Maipo.’

‘Murdered.’

‘So you can die of murder, Felipe? No way.’

‘Of course you can!’

‘Mm … OK, next.’

Paloma kept laughing at random moments, clearly playing some alternative game of Scattergories in her interloping German. Every now and then she came out with a German word, which she would then translate into a Spanish word that never began with the letter we were on. With every mistake, she squeezed my hand.

‘Stop.’

‘P.’

‘Lots of cemeteries begin with Park,’ she said. ‘It’s true, not even the cemeteries call themselves cemeteries.’

‘Peteroa.’

‘Puyehue.’

‘Puntiagudo.’

‘Pecked.’

‘Pecked? Jesus, Fräulein! Who was ever pecked to death?’

‘Stop.’

‘T. T for tent. T for twat. For Tacora. For Tutupaca. For torture.’

Sometimes I repeated back Paloma’s German, sounds that caught in my throat and were lost on me but for their friction. Maybe I was trying to gain a little time by repeating the words back to her, and perhaps it was the chafing feeling that seduced me. Because with each syllable spoken in German Paloma’s fingers would rub against my hand, a repetitive and painless back and forth which brought back another memory: the memory of my skin hurting; of another time when I used to go through this same ritual. A very shy little girl had shown me her secret. Camila, she was called, and we were classmates for just one winter, long enough for her to teach me the scratching game. Like a drop of water dripping steadily on your head, her finger would move to a constant beat. She scratched. My skin came apart. She and I could spend hours doing it: my hand still and hers moving from side to side, over and over until there was no more space left under her nail, because it would be packed with my flayed skin and congealed blood. And the nail would keep moving, ‘faster, Camila, go on’, every sound another layer of my skin, ‘go on’, gaping pink, red, white, ‘harder, don’t stop’. My hand would take weeks to heal, but at least it offered a real kind of pain: a pain that was visible and mine. And when the first signs of a scab began to show and the wound threatened to heal over, we would start all over again. My left hand still carried a trace of that scar and Paloma was stroking it without even realising.

I tried to bring my mind back to our game, but I was trapped in that old memory (the gaping wound an escape hatch). Paloma seemed to be having fun and, now a little tipsy, she was repeating tongue-twisters.

‘Red lorry, yellow lorry … Betty Botter bought some butter but she said the butter’s bitter … How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? … Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers …’

Her tongue couldn’t quite find its way around the words. Felipe, though, didn’t correct her. He was lying face up, gnawing away at his fingernails, driven half mad by the darkness and claustrophobia, so I had to be the one to shake him, drag him in towards me, propose some other game that might protect him from himself. Just like when we were kids and, crouched on the woollen rug, he would propose we play pin the tail on the donkey.

‘It’s really fun, Ique. Go on, please, rub my eyes. Hold your finger on my sclera for as long as you can.’

Felipe insisted on playing this game, where I was to put my finger in my mouth and then, with the same finger, the tail, touch the white of his eye, the donkey. According to him, his eyelid was the enemy.

‘We have to fight against the curtain that wants to come down on us, Ique. It wants to block us out, to board us up forever.’

And so, ever obedient, I would suck my forefinger and tell him to lie back on my lap with his head on my thighs and open that white eye nice and wide for me.

‘Go,’ he would say when he was ready, ‘touch it, Ique,’ and I would hold the very tip of my finger against his slippery socket, gingerly stroking that wet surface, first to one side, then the other, until his eyelid could take no more and began to quiver, his whole eye flooded with red labyrinth patterns, spiderwebs that wove themselves beneath my finger.

‘Let’s keep going, Ique. The other eye, Ique, the eye inside.’

In the back of the hearse, Felipe still hadn’t said a word and was struggling to breathe, as if he might forget to inhale and it were my role to remind him.

‘And again, Felipe, take a deep breath in.’

Our game fizzled out. Felipe’s silence was unnerving me, it’s true, but it also presented the perfect opportunity for me to ask Paloma about Berlin, about the names of the trees and parks there, anything so long as Felipe didn’t interrupt with one of his endless diatribes. I began with a question about her photography and trips: the typical conversation of two people who have nothing in common. What could we talk about? What could we ask each other? I barely remember her answers. I know she rolled out the names of some cities and different foods, a long list that did nothing to temper the coldness I felt when she stopped talking and a long silence fell, which I didn’t know how to break.

‘And your dad?’ Paloma came to the rescue.

I’m not sure if she was really interested or if she just thought it was the proper thing to ask, like two people exchanging hellos, jackets or dead parents. Whether it was courtesy, my increasingly drunken state, or perhaps just relief that someone had filled the silence, I told her the short version first; the haiku version, as Felipe had once called it when he tried to protect me from my schoolmates’ interrogations. They wanted a heroic, bloody story and Felipe was an expert.

‘Tell them you don’t have a dad and be done with it, Iquela. Kill it with drama.’ But they wouldn’t leave me in peace. That’s why we invented the haiku version.

‘He died of cancer. It was winter in Chile. Soon after you came,’ I blurted out to Paloma, as if ripping off a plaster.

I bunked off from school for weeks after we buried him. It was Felipe’s idea. He’d wait for me half a block along from the gates and we’d go wandering the streets, getting lost. His Grandma Elsa had left him with us that month, but he refused to come to class. We’d walk around following stray dogs, washing them in the public fountains, whiling away the time. Only when darkness fell, after hours of drifting, would we go home, exhausted, and anxiously await the cross-examination that never came. It was midwinter and by all accounts the Santiago cold should have soaked right through to our bones, but I remember not feeling a thing: no hunger, no cold, no grief. After all, my father had already died once before.

‘They lined me up and shot me in Chena,’ he would tell us in the elevated tone he reserved for that line.

A special voice for a special line. A voice born to speak those nine words. Then he would lift his shirt up to his neck and proudly show off the scar that ran from his chest right round to his back, my mother watching from the dining-room door, her eyes glazed before that erect statue in the middle of the house. With time I learnt to tell other stories. I invented suicide attempts, gory accidents, memorable deaths, just to see what reactions I could provoke in others, to see the pain in their eyes, to try to retain it, copy it, and, later on, repeat it.

Felipe hadn’t uttered a word and Paloma joined him in this pact of silence. We’d already covered dead fathers, dead mothers, climate disasters, and I was on my sixth or seventh chewed fingernail when I couldn’t bear it any longer.

‘Why didn’t your mum ever come back. I mean, come back for good, from exile?’ I asked, already regretting the question as Felipe let out a snickering yawn.

My own voice sounded brusque (another voice was prising open my mouth: ‘go faster, don’t stop’). My indiscreet question, which would no doubt lead to a key answer, was straight out of my mother’s book. But my mother couldn’t hear me now. She would be at home, still staring at those black-and-white photos, sweeping death from the door each morning (the telephone ringing for days). Felipe grunted and turned to face me.

‘Give it a rest, Iquela. You’re such a bloody bore,’ he said, blowing his boozy breath into my face and switching on the light above us (his eyes blind with rage). ‘What the hell does it matter why the woman didn’t come back to Chile? That’s seriously your chat-up line for our German friend?’

He almost spat his words out, breaking an old promise that in truth he’d already broken. He’d deserted me, left me on my own with everything (with the weight of all that past).

Paloma sat up, served us some more pisco and suggested we both calm down; it wasn’t a big deal. She sounded calm herself, as if two days with me were enough to work out that I’d never get into a full-blown argument with Felipe. She breezily handed us each a cup. She was enjoying herself. There was a hint of condescension in her eyes, that unbearable neutrality of the mediator.

‘Let’s toast,’ she said, raising a solitary cup, leaving it in haughty suspension. ‘In German we say prost. That’s it, prost! Guys, it doesn’t matter.’

But Paloma had no idea what Felipe and I were really arguing about; or that it ‘mattered’ so much more in her presence.

‘Give me a break, Felipe. You can talk,’ I shot back.

I told him it was pitiful watching him with his little notebooks. I said Paloma couldn’t be overly happy about him prattling on about death the whole time and that maybe he should go and stretch his legs (take a long walk with his eyes closed, out into the night where it made no difference if they were open or closed). Felipe didn’t even reply. He just opened the rear door and got out, laughing a hollow cackle, as if in an empty theatre.

Paloma changed the subject and began telling me the story of her mother in exactly the same way she’d devoured her artichoke leaves: methodically, routinely. I barely followed what she was saying. Felipe’s sudden outburst, his pain, my rage, my mother at home drenching the plants and all the forced questions (weren’t there other questions we had to ask? did it really rain ash during my childhood?) made me feel more alone than ever. Paloma’s forefingers were running up and down my arm but I only noticed it once it had begun to annoy me, once her touch became irritating.

‘Relax,’ she said.

Paloma got onto her knees, moved her face up to the rear window and, taking my hand, drew me in closer. On the other side of the glass, with our faces pressed against it, we saw an inky flatland, and beyond it, moving away from us in a swaying motion, a minuscule red dot: the tip of Felipe’s burning cigarette. Paloma wanted to know why Felipe was like that. ‘Like that,’ she said, and I was at a loss what to reply. ‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

And she was right: it didn’t matter. Not that night, not in the long silence that opened up between us which, this time, I didn’t attempt to fill. I moved in towards her and placed my hand on the back of her neck (stroking the body back to front: the inside of the eyelids, the cornea, the creases in the skin). I held my fingers still, nervously, until I noticed her pulse racing under her skin, which was stippled with beads of sweat. I didn’t move my hand away, looking for her in the reflection of the window (and her irises dyed the valley blue: the sky turned blue again and disappeared in a blink). Paloma turned towards me, bringing her face close to mine before swiftly pulling away and groping around on the floor about me, lightly grazing my leg as she found one of the plastic cups. She brought it to her lips, tipped back her head and, having drunk the last drop of pisco, raised her arm and turned off the light.

Lying back on the floor, she told me to come and join her. Her voice sounded sweet but aloof: it was too formal, that ‘lie down next to me, Iquela, let’s get some sleep’. But then another order, in another, more playful, tone, chased away my disappointment.

‘Undress,’ she said (one booze-soaked word). I didn’t take long to respond, but in the brief lull between her order and my reaction, in the couple of seconds in which I thought I’d misheard her, thought it impossible, in which I waited for her to give me another sign or undress me herself, my mind was flooded with dozens of other orders (‘come here, ‘be quiet’, ‘don’t forget’, ‘sit down’, ‘let it out’). I lay down on my side maintaining a space – barely a rail’s width – between us, and I inched my face towards hers.

‘You first,’ I heard myself say. ‘You undress.’