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It happened not long after we buried my father, back when I would spend entire afternoons glued to my bedroom window telling people, perfectly calmly, that I felt fine, absolutely fine. Felipe and I went to the same school that winter and at the end of one break time, a few minutes before the bell called us back to class, he froze on the spot in silence, his eyes fixed on some kids playing a few metres away from us. It was his idea and he wouldn’t shut up about it.

‘Let’s collect scabs, Ique. We need to give the other pain a break. Choose one of them, Ique, any one,’ he said, pointing to a group of girls skipping together. ‘Choose one and sock it to her,’ he went on, aiming his hand like a gun at a fat, red-headed kid who was in goal and sweating profusely. ‘Smash her nose in, Ique. Pull her eyes out of her sockets. Stick pins under her nails. Clench your fist, close your mind and just punch. And don’t worry,’ he whispered in my ear, hammering home each syllable, ‘self-defence is a reflex and they’re definitely going to hit you harder.’

I told him I wasn’t interested in fighting. I didn’t know how to punch, and besides, I felt fine (nothing, I felt nothing). But there was no dissuading him. Felipe looked straight through me as if seeing me for the first and last time, like a stranger, and he didn’t utter another word. Gathering himself and shutting those eyes (shutting his mouth, shutting himself off entirely) he shoved me with all his weight, and the next thing I felt was the ground under my body. My head hit the concrete and my hands scraped the gritty asphalt. I heard the dull thump of my back against the ground. I opened my eyes. The excited faces of dozens of children were arranged in a circle around me: the redhead was crying with laughter; three older kids were pointing at me. I saw lots of tiny teeth, some stained, and heard shouts that sounded like they were coming from a fight near me, no, over me, across my body, because Felipe had thrown himself on top of me and, still staring through me with those blank eyes of his, he hit me like nobody has ever hit me before. He pulled my hair with all his might. He kneed me in the stomach. He drove his fist right into my chest. Only after a few seconds did my instincts start to kick in. I struggled desperately to free myself, to make him unclench his fists and release his knee lock, and when at last I was able to wriggle out from beneath him, I took a deep breath (dirt, snot, fear), I took a deep, deep breath, turned around and using every ounce of strength I had (a dangerous strength I hadn’t known I had), I hauled myself on top of him, pinned him down and with my eyes open, not thinking about what I was doing but moving exactly as he’d told me, swiftly and sharply, I hit him as you could only hit someone you really love. Now I was pulling his hair and scratching his arms. I sunk my nails into his face, buried my knees into his groin and my teeth into his shoulder. I hit him until I felt nothing but a sharp pain and a sticky dampness on the palms of my hands and all over my hot, mucky face. He didn’t move once. It wasn’t true what he’d told me: self-defence isn’t a reflex. Felipe remained still with his eyes open, enjoying it, as if by receiving my punches and spits he felt less alone. Cradled in my rage, covered in dirt and blood and breathing very slowly, Felipe just smiled. Nobody separated us. It was purely the exhaustion, after so much, that forced me to stop and slump down at his side. My knuckles were burning and I felt an uncontainable burst of sadness. We never spoke of our fight, but something was sealed in that moment, in the long pause in which he and I caught our breath as the other kids moved away, disappointed, and the branches of some reddish trees swayed in the breeze above us.

And there, cooped up in the hearse, in that hearse that had become our roving home, on that simulacrum of a search that had brought us together again, one last time, lying in wait for that dead woman, accelerating to escape the terrible blue sky and listening to the distant rustle of leaves, I was struck down by a very similar feeling of vertigo.

As we approached the cargo area at the airport, after a morning spent in silence, feigning a truce, I spotted a man guarding the entry to the runway. He was wearing orange high-vis overalls, a black beanie hat and enormous headphones to protect him from the noise of the turbines. He was waiting in a cabin next to a metal barrier, which he raised to let through a tanker and then closed again the moment he saw us heading that way. A sign warned us that it wouldn’t be an easy job persuading him: RESTRICTED AREA. AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. Felipe stopped the car and Paloma asked me to speak to the man; she was too wound up, and, after all, it had been my idea to come to the airport.

The man looked me up and down, a look that forced me to search for some kind of sign (a raw word stuck to my mouth), and he didn’t bother greeting me. Acting as naturally as I could, albeit with a forced grin, I asked him where we could find the cargo from the cancelled flights (it seemed better to say ‘cargo’ than ‘remains’, ‘cadaver’, ‘dead woman’, ‘Ingrid’). He didn’t say anything for a long time and I kept talking to fill the awkward silence, telling him that this situation with the ash demanded an urgent response and that the daughter had travelled from Germany, no less. He rubbed his chin and frowned.

‘What situation?’ he shouted over the roar of nearby engines.

‘The ash in Chile,’ I replied, raising my voice (an inaudible voice).

‘Say again?’ And from the pocket of his overalls he removed a packet of cigarettes, lit one and let himself be engulfed in a large cloud of smoke, which was nothing for those of us who’d come from the other side of the cordillera. I insisted we’d travelled all that way precisely for this reason, to pick up the remains of a woman.

‘Ingrid …’ I said, surprised at my block, my blank, which Paloma took no time to fill.

‘Ingrid Aguirre,’ she said leaning out of the hearse window.

Aguirre.

Until that moment she hadn’t had a surname. All those stories were either about Rodolfo, Consuelo, Ingrid, Hans or all those other names: Víctor, Claudia, those doubles of our parents from back before they were parents. Rootless names with no antecedents or surnames, which made them feel fictional, lent them a certain lightness that allowed me to believe, if only for a second, that the whole thing had been one big lie. Only characters from novels had just a first name. A Víctor or a Claudia alone couldn’t exist. Ingrid Aguirre, on the other hand, really had died.

The security guard’s face was scaring me. I was afraid he would tell us where she was, or that he would point to a coffin in the middle of the runway (an errant coffin doing the rounds in the empty hangars). I was afraid of finding her and having to go back to Chile, where I’d tell my mother that I had her friend, her comrade, her Ingrid Aguirre. The man raised his right arm (and I thought his finger was pointing somewhere, to the end of our search).

‘Papers,’ he said, holding out his palm to Paloma, who was leaning half her body over Felipe. ‘Did you bring the form?’

And then I remembered the established procedure, the normal channels, the rules about repatriating the mortal remains of a deceased person. We didn’t have any papers, and no papers meant no body.

‘I can’t give you any information,’ the man said before closing his open hand and the barrier that would have given us access.

‘Oh, that’s all I needed,’ Felipe snapped, before hitting the steering wheel.

‘Scheiße,’ Paloma said.

I did my best to hide my relief and suggested we return to the city as soon as possible. It made no sense to harass the guard, who by now was shooing us away with his hand, telling us to clear the entrance.

We drove back to the centre of town and wandered around Mendoza, unsure what to do next. People were out walking their dogs, walking their children, walking their dogs and their children (with no ash or dead mothers or mothers who wouldn’t answer the phone). Everything appeared suspiciously normal, though Felipe still wasn’t talking to me and Paloma had that doleful look again. She seemed dejected, wrapped in the grief that kept swinging her back and forth between disbelief and despair. Perhaps by this point she was regretting having travelled to Chile instead of burying Ingrid in Berlin, in a cemetery where her surname was unique, where it would be easy to spot her tombstone among the others. Or perhaps she was regretting not having cremated her and brought her ashes back to Chile on the plane. Who knows. Ash on top of ashes would have been too much.

I seemed to be the only one capable of enjoying that stroll. We would spend at least one more day in Mendoza (one more day with no phones, no pouring ash, no eight and a half blocks to cover), so I moved cheerfully from one street to the next, marvelling aloud at the width of the pavements, so wide for such a small city, and commenting on the buses, the turtle doves, the poplars, the shops. But there was no distracting Paloma. Even when I went in to give her a hug I got nothing more than a discouraging stiff smile in return.

We were entering San Martín Park, through two huge monumental doors, when I decided to give it one last shot. Moving right next to Paloma, I told her in a concerned voice that maybe her mother had been mislaid, that maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t be able to bury her in Santiago after all and that we should wait for the bad weather to pass before carrying on the search. Paloma picked up her step, leaving me trailing metres behind (and I counted three sparrows taking flight from a gnarled old cypress). Only as evening began to fall, after more than an hour spent wandering around the park, did Felipe break his ridiculous vow of silence from the night before to suggest that we find a bar.

‘No time to waste, I say,’ he said, ‘And besides, the air here is weird. Can’t you feel it?’ and he flapped away some non-existent insects with his hand.

‘There’s too much of it,’ I replied, and he nodded.

‘Too much air, that’s it,’ and he walked off in the direction of a woman who was smoking near the park’s exit. Her lips were painted dark red and appeared almost black in the darkness, making her look sullen, and her mouth seemed to come unstuck from her face with every puff on her cigarette (and her lips remained imprinted on the filter: woman with mouth, woman without mouth). Felipe asked her for a cigarette, but not even his winning smile could do the trick. She refused and pointed towards a door where, she said, ‘we could buy anything we could possibly want’.

The wooden door led us to a second door, this time made of tin, which was dented at foot level, clearly having received its fair share of kicks. On the other side, tucked away, was a dingy underground bar that reeked of sweet and sour, beer-soaked floor, and where it felt like three in the morning.

The barman bombarded us with questions as he made our drinks. He took a bottle off the half-empty shelf behind him and, without even looking at the glass, he poured out perfect measures of whisky by heart and asked us if we were Chilean, what we were doing, where our boyfriends and girlfriends were, such a good-looking bunch, what a waste.

Paloma was quick to point out that she was German and didn’t add much else. Instead, she wandered off in the direction of a pool table and gestured at me to follow her. We drank our first whisky there while deciding whether to play a game or simply watch Felipe, who had now draped half his body over the bar and was in deep conversation with the barman. They had to shout to hear one another, and they laughed as the man passed Felipe an array of bottles, which he sniffed suspiciously. At one point they shook hands and the man handed him a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of aguardiente. Felipe served himself a glass, refilled it twice more and then made a beeline for Paloma, offering her the bottle directly to her mouth.

‘This tune’s dedicated to you,’ he said, removing the camera, which I hadn’t even noticed, from around her neck.

I recognised the drums, and I noticed a woman was watching us from afar. I remembered her black nails, which she now was tapping on the bar, and I waved at her and smiled. She was looking through me, at something behind me: a very pale and thoughtful Felipe was over-egging his drunken state and crooning, or rather wailing, along to the song and playing with the zoom on Paloma’s camera. He came over to me and bellowed in my ear as if all the voices in his head had woken up and he was trying, unsuccessfully, to impose his own. I don’t remember what he said, just his hands holding my face, drawing it in towards his, pulling me towards him and the blaring music drowning out his words despite his mouth moving right in front me. I guessed he was talking about our argument, but that didn’t matter any more.

‘Forget it, Felipe,’ I shouted, recoiling from his cold hands and taking two swigs of aguardiente. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, and I watched as the woman with the black nails approached us and draped her body all over Felipe, rubbing up against him and then taking Paloma’s hand to whisper a word in her ear. Paloma was dancing with her eyes closed in the middle of the bar, her arms raised high and her hips swaying. I went up to her with more enthusiasm than I felt, trying to get into it by following her lead, but it was useless. She was dancing out of time, following a secret, internal rhythm completely at odds with the music. The woman went back to the bar and I felt Paloma’s hand grab my wrist and watched her take Felipe’s arm, pulling us both towards her. We left the main room and headed down a corridor. Paloma locked the door behind us and switched on the bright lights (interrogation lights).

The song faded into the background and we found ourselves huddled together in a cramped toilet, the smell thick and bodily, paper spilling over the bin, wallpaper plastered in graffiti, shit marks in a toilet with no seat and a maddening dripping sound. Paloma said she had a surprise for us (‘just a little one,’ she said, making light of it) and with a wicked glint in her eyes she opened her rucksack slowly and pulled out a round wad: a navy ball of thick socks. Felipe and I exchanged glances. Paloma was lapping up the attention, a wide smile spreading across her face to reveal some tiny teeth, as well as the silver barbell in the middle of her tongue.

She took that blue ball and unpeeled it very carefully, ceremoniously, standing before us as if we were about to behold the miracle of the five thousand. Finally, deep down in the centre of the ball, a silvery object appeared: a tiny, doll-sized bottle.

‘Well, what do we have here?’ Felipe asked, snatching the bottle from her hands and swilling it around so that its contents formed a vortex like an enormous tornado.

‘One of my mum’s potions, for her cancer,’ Paloma replied, but I heard something else. I didn’t hear ‘potions’, I heard ‘poisons’, ‘one of my mum’s poisons’, and the bottle remained firmly in Felipe’s hand, the liquid a mad whirlpool.

Felipe asked Paloma what kind of potion it was, what kind of drug, what did it do. He was trying to decipher the German on the label, with its red circle crossed out, its health warning. Paloma didn’t answer. She looked at me smugly, squinting her eyes as she had done all those years earlier, and then took the bottle back off Felipe, held it up, toasted the air and without even pulling a face, she drank more than a third of the liquid.

‘Prost,’ she said.

One of her mum’s potions. A poison she’d brought with her in an attempt to get rid of everything, to make sure she was left with no trace of her mother. Or maybe she’d stolen it before Ingrid died, to drink a toast, to cure herself. Felipe snatched the little bottle back out of her hands, closed his eyes, took two sips and passed it to me. The liquid inside the bottle was still whirling around. I held it to my nose (an innocuous smell), and without a second thought I downed what was left. The dregs, the remains, that’s what I took: the sweet remains with a bitter aftertaste, so bitter it stripped the inside of my mouth and made me clench my eyes together.

Nothing for the first few seconds. Everything existed in perfect balance. I asked Paloma what kind of cancer her mum had died of.

‘You’re about to find out,’ she replied, but now another person entirely was speaking, a voice wrapped in cotton wool. ‘Hold on a minute and you’ll see what kind of cancer it was.’

A second went by, and another, and another. I read the scribbles on the wall. Pequi, I luv you. What r u lookin at? Get the fuck outta here. I wanted to know the exact illness in order to guess at the remedy: what did you take to cure confused, upset cells? I wanted to know what Paloma wanted to cure us from. Get the fuck outta here. What did you take to offset those invasive cells? What r u looking at? Then, all of a sudden, something happened to the walls, to the smell, to the brightness of the light.

The tips of my fingers. The same sensation as those mornings when certain parts of my body don’t want to wake up and stay numb. My fingertips, hands, wrists, all numb. A faint dizziness. My arms, then my neck and chest. My entire body was withdrawing, coming away from me, or perhaps I was the one abandoning my body in order to float a few centimetres above it.

‘Nice, eh?’

A warm current heating me up, erasing me.

‘Oh you’ve really outdone yourself, blondie.’

My blood slower and thicker, the colours brighter. The colours.

‘Take a look at those colours, Fräulein. She must have had cancer of the everything.’

(Cancer of the eyelids, the eardrums, the nails.)

I told Paloma I wasn’t feeling anything, but when I spoke I heard another voice coming out of me. She remained silent, her freckles blue, her yellow eyes saying incomprehensible things, letters hanging on the walls, hanging from the threads of a language I wasn’t taking in, or rather couldn’t, because I didn’t understand it. Nor could I read all the messages being shouted by the walls. Everything was a blur; those walls were spying on me and I myself was as light as vapour. I couldn’t count the objects around me. My thoughts were slipping away from me. Not feeling a thing: the remedy for that illness.

Felipe went to turn out the light but Paloma stopped him. I thought I heard her say, ‘Let’s watch the fire’, but I couldn’t be sure. She came over to me, took my hand, held it up to her face and slipped two of my fingers in her mouth. I should have felt her soft tongue, the slippery steel of the barbell buried there, but what I felt was the opposite: her fingers inside my mouth, that screw driving into my tongue. She moved in slow motion, touching my arms and hands that seemed no longer to belong to me, all the while staring at me with a neutral expression, freckles dotted all over her forehead. Felipe was muttering unintelligible commentaries, something about how good the water was, the dry water, he said before falling quiet again, also coming over to me, where he took me by the back of my neck and kissed me. I thought I felt the graze of his moustache, the tension of his lips against mine, or maybe it was something else. Maybe he kissed Paloma and that kiss landed on my lips, or it was the swirling lights that kissed me, kissed and obliterated me (swirls of lights that lit me up, that set me alight).

‘Look at me,’ Felipe said then and I looked up and saw his arms and hands shaking, about to shatter into a million splinters. ‘Look at me,’ he repeated, out of himself and shaking. He wasn’t speaking to me or Paloma. ‘Look at me,’ he screamed, and I realised he was talking to the mirror. ‘Look at me, for fuck’s sake. Written all over my face, is it?’

Paloma went over to him as if the order had been directed at her. She appeared in the reflection, but without her eyes; she aimed and pushed the button on the camera, the only solid object now in that toilet, making the same sound over and over. Click. Click. Click. (Three wasted seconds.) Click. Click. Click. And Felipe went on spitting the same order at his own reflection.

‘Look at me.’

I floated towards that mirror until his face appeared. His two eyes weren’t quite in line, his eyebrows were arched and black, and his dark skin was flaky around the nose, that aquiline nose that was ever so slightly too big for his face. His pupils were dilated, couched within his glassy, slanting eyes, and his skin was incredibly firm and soft, with no beard or moustache. That’s what I saw. Not a trace of that new moustache on his face. Because it wasn’t Felipe’s adult face that I saw looking back at him from the mirror; it was his pinker, rounder face, his childhood face. That’s what I saw and I was scared. I couldn’t feel it in my stomach, but I could sense my fear. Nonetheless, I put it to one side and carried on moving in, desperate to see myself, convinced that I would find myself locked inside that mirror: my taut black mane, my drowsy eyes, my sad eyes observing me from the other side of the mirror. And, despite my fear, I moved in closer still. I moved in until I was standing directly in front of the mirror. I stopped right next to Felipe and with my heart pounding in my chest, with my mouth dry and hands clenched, I opened my eyes (I longed to count myself, take stock of myself, to reinvent myself).

But I wasn’t there.

There was nobody looking back at me.