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It took a while for me to work out what had happened. The metal doors to the hangar were still lashing against the lintel and the hearse was speeding away across the airport tarmac when Paloma took me by the wrist, demanding an explanation.

‘I don’t believe this,’ she said. ‘She’s mine.’

The General disappeared into the horizon and it didn’t take long for Paloma’s surprise to turn to rage. It had to be a bad joke, or we were just trying to put the wind up her, or maybe Felipe and I had planned this whole sick game. Her voice sounded strange, childish, like she couldn’t control it, and I did my best to explain to her that I understood even less than she did what had just happened. Felipe had gone and this was merely his way of forcing me to catch up with him as soon as possible (to be his witness, his shadow).

An old image of Felipe (a dusty, almost obsolete image) suddenly came back to me, as if I’d buried it years earlier and it had now been dredged up to force me to think about it again: Felipe a few yards from me in the front garden, crouched down in front of the thick bars of the gate that separated us from the road, waving at me to get on my knees next to him, on our marks.

‘Ready, Iquela?’ he asks in his increasingly hostile voice, a voice that I had tried to forget so as to erase the whole memory (or at least not waste it).

‘You ready, Ique?’ he asks, slapping me on the back, daring me, goading me for the last time to see if I had it in me, if I was strong enough, if I was sure that I could do it. And I nodded mutely from the ground, my mouth dry, my saliva tangy, my teeth chattering away the fear, anticipating the pain, waiting for the instruction that would launch us into our race.

‘On your marks, get set, go! No cheating, Ique! No hands and no standing up. Only on your knees!’ Felipe cried, trying to gain ground and already through the gate, ahead of me. Only our knees were allowed to bear the brunt of that trail of rocks he himself had laid out along our race course. Because a few minutes earlier, Felipe had walked the length of the street with his pockets bursting with rocks, scattering them.

‘An assault course,’ he’d said, while I’d looked on in horror at the little stones strewn along the pavement; tiny shards of glass that glinted in the sun before digging into my skin, step by excruciating step, over and over again. Until finally I was forced to give in, stop and let Felipe speed ahead on his sacrificial race, his pilgrimage, the winner’s trophy encrusted in his knees. One lap around the block and then his triumphant return to our finishing line, the door to my mother’s house, the woman herself peering down on us from the garden where she was watering the plants, making secret bets with herself as to who would win the race (drowning the lawn, the path, flooding my memory). Felipe arrived back to the house teetering on the edge of laughter and tears, panting, coughing, his nostrils flared and his face dripping with sweat, driven in a terrible state of agitation that only my mother could ease.

‘Go inside, Felipe. Dust off that dirt, clean your cuts with salt water, change your clothes and smarten up. It’s your turn to choose dinner, whatever you like.’ (Felipe had returned, repatriated himself on his knees.)

I’d let myself be carried away by that memory and was surprised to see it was getting dark as we left the hangar. The guard from the security cabin approached us inquisitively, looking for the hearse and trying to gauge with his eyes something he couldn’t bring himself to ask. Paloma stormed right up to him and bombarded him with questions. He seemed genuinely upset. Biting his lower lip, he shook his head and, after a long pause in which his eyebrows knitted together in one bushy line, he said he hadn’t known. He’d never imagined that the coffin belonged to her mother. He’d assumed that the relative (the child, the bereaved) was the young man. He explained, apologetically, that he’d bumped into Felipe at the bar the night before.

‘I was just having a few drinks when this kid staggers out of the bathroom, off his head drunk or high, what do I know, and he comes over looking for a fight. Obviously I thought he was a pain in the arse, but a piss-up beats a bust-up any day, so I offered him a drink.’ (A sip, two, the liquid swirling madly.) ‘And that’s what we were doing when the kid flips out, starts to shake and goes as pale as a ghost telling me that he’s lost someone important.’

Paloma glared at him, as if he’d taken something very precious from her.

‘Felipe, that was his name,’ the guard said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his overalls. ‘The kid had lost someone called Felipe. I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying at first, but after a while I knew it had to be someone important,’ he went on, lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag as if all the world’s air were contained in its filter. ‘Don’t think I ever saw a kid that desolate. He was reeling.’

The guard exhaled, hiding his face behind the cloud of smoke.

‘He said it had been a horrible death.’ (Drowned in the river, hanged from electrical cables, choked on ash.) ‘The poor kid was mumbling something about dying being horrible, horrible, and he told me to avoid it at all costs, that no way was he going to die, and that comment seemed a bit odd to me, but the worst thing was what he told me about some empty tombs and some sort of count, or countdown, subtraction, he called it, but then what do I know?’ (Nothing, he knew absolutely nothing.)

Paloma listened in silence, her eyes popping out of their sockets. I didn’t interrupt him either. A plane flew overhead, towards an imprecise point in the sky, and the guard filled the time it took for that din to fade by offering Paloma a cigarette.

‘It’s my last one, sorry,’ he said to me, striking a match to light it.

They smoked in sync, an excruciating break in the story’s action, a pause filled only by the blast of turbines. And then the guard picked up where he’d left off.

‘That’s why I left the hangar unlocked. I told the kid about those coffins and I told him he could find them in number seven,’ he said, pointing back to the doors. ‘Long story short, he was going to do me a favour in return. The thing is, those coffins have been left there for days. It looked like no one was coming to claim them, and us lot working here are stuck with the stench, this stench of shit, pardon the expression,’ he added to Paloma, flaring his nostrils. ‘It’s stomach-turning and I don’t know what to do. The powers that be don’t know what to do. No one seems to want to claim responsibility for them. I mean, what are we meant to do with all those bodies?’

The man dropped his cigarette, stubbed it out with his shoe and, without taking his eyes off the ground (the glowing tip now mere ash), he asked Paloma to forgive him.

‘It never occurred to me that it wasn’t the kid’s coffin. Who would go around like that, like a crazy person, looking for someone else’s corpse? Although, I suppose, what does it matter whose dead they are, right? That’s not the issue,’ he went on, frowning. ‘No, the issue is something else entirely,’ he added, now more sure of himself. ‘When it comes to the dead we’ve got to help each other out. There are just too many of them.’

The guard headed in the direction of the hangar, took the metal chain, locked the doors and reluctantly offered to drive us back into town. He said that in Mendoza we could rent a car to get back to Santiago and that with any luck we’d catch up with Felipe along the way; that’s all he could do for us, the rest fell outside his remit (or really, the remains did). Without consulting me, Paloma accepted his offer. I had nothing to add, in any case. I was distracted by another plane taking off and the invasive echo of my thoughts. Maybe we should do something about all those coffins; maybe each one of those piled-up caskets and the endless list of names and surnames – the whole hangar, even – was somehow also mine (like the ash and the unavoidable cordillera).

I gazed up at the setting sun, at a complete loss as to what to say. And there, standing before the runway, imagining that never-ending road, as drawn out as our search had been, I foresaw everything that was going to happen: just like before, the two trails of blood emblazoned on the pavement marking out the least painful route, the one Felipe had already cleared; just like before, my body collapsing to my knees and my mother’s disappointment boring into my back; and just like before, Felipe dragging himself towards her, his knees grazed and filthy like two bloody badges of honour.

I was sure that all I had to do to earn that look from her (that glinting knife-edge of a look, ‘now clean up your cuts with salt water’) was to get down on the ground and crawl on my hands and knees to the guard’s van, sit between him and Paloma and lead us home with the map.

As if something were forcing me to get to the end of that old memory, of that race lost from the starting line, or as if it were my duty to fill in the holes in it, each detail of my homecoming appeared then in crystal clear sequence, opening up a chasm into the past (a slip, a typo). I pictured myself going back along that mountain road, taking days, weeks to scale those peaks on my knees, making my way through all those mountain chains and the thick curtains of ash, determined to reach my goal. I pictured the leaden light dimming the skies, the curves and crags of Los Penitentes, the vineyards obliterated by all the grey, and the fields caked in dust. And I saw myself entering the city, back in my city at last, my eyes looking up at the ash which would still be falling, that terrible powder plastered over parks and homes, burying everything I’d ever known beneath its blanket of crushed stone (cities shrouded in white sheets). And once there, I would look for traces of Felipe in the horrendous stillness of the footprints. And following the deepest tracks, having wandered lost for hours, I would find him, the hearse parked sidelong across the Alameda, and inside, as still as a statue, Felipe lying face up, waiting. And I would walk over to talk to him and tell him to come with me, to forget about everything, absolutely everything, but something strange would hit me then. As if I’d never met him, as if that man lying on his back in the hearse were completely unrelated to Felipe, as if he were embodying another man altogether, Felipe would appear before me as a perfect stranger, as a vaguely familiar face accompanying a coffin, his meek hands lying across his chest (a chest covered in words like ‘hollow’, ‘niche’, ‘extinguished’). And only then, from the middle of the street, in the wake of that missed encounter, would I sit behind the wheel of the General and dare to look one last time at the watchful cordillera. And I would see words like that, like ‘watchful’, discarded along the mountain road. From there I would see each phrase abandoned along the way. Words like ‘decisive’ and ‘arsenal’ would be left up there at the summit; abandoned words like ‘rails’ and ‘scar’ (and ‘howl’ and ‘tear’ and ‘splinter’). Because only by ridding myself of it all would I be able to face going back; only by shaking off the ‘scars’, ‘grief’, ‘sorrows’, and repaying, syllable by syllable, that incalculable debt, a debt that would have rendered us mute. Exhausted and nervous, I would drive right up to those iron gates and find the lawn flooded in dirty water (the water rotting words and letters, a whole language drowned). I would park up the hearse in front of the door and right there, blocking the gate to the house (on our marks, under the threshold of our finish line) I would leave that black, rectangular offering in the front garden where my mother would be watering the plants. Because I’d find my mother there, always with that hose, and I’d look at her for a moment (her feet buried in that mire with its smell of old earth; old, but mine). And I would creep towards her without making a sound (‘because we mustn’t make a sound’), very carefully (‘because we’ve good reason to be afraid, my girl. Always prepare for the worst’). I’d walk towards my mother, gazing at her affectionately, carrying the weight of all the things she’d ever seen (carrying remains, debts, sorrows). And in an old voice – no less mine for being inherited – using frail and untranslatable syllables, final words which, once spoken, would leave me empty and alone in a desert full of new lines (to be spoken in a timeless language), I would say to her with a hint of sadness, ‘I’ve brought you Ingrid Aguirre, and here is Felipe Arrabal.’ And I would hold her (her skin so close to her bones and her bones so close to mine), and only then, from within that perfect parenthesis of our interwoven bodies, would I open my mouth to tell her:

‘Mother, I’ve done all this for you.’

I felt a wave of dizziness, as if all the air in my body had suddenly left me and I were tumbling into the void. A horn honked a few metres away where the guard was waiting, waving at us from inside a van. Paloma was telling me to get a move on, they were waiting for us, there was no time to waste. And behind her, beyond the tarmac, lighting up the edges of an untouched landscape, a purple sun disappeared behind the mountains: not drowning in the sea, but tucking itself back down behind the cordillera where it came from.

Paloma made off towards the guard but then stopped, walked back, took my hand and said she wouldn’t know where to start looking on her own.

‘Iquela, come on, please.’

The horn fell silent and in that pause I heard a murmur in the red sky, the wind rustling the branches of a faraway forest. Paloma did her best to persuade me to go with her, to get in that van and together cross the mountains, to find the other two, wherever they were. She was growing increasingly exasperated. As she spoke (from afar, and moving further and further away) I noticed, in the near distance, dozens of birds preparing for flight, their wings blazing in the glow of the van headlights.

I shook my head from side to side, making my refusal clear as I calculated the distance between us and those birds. And I heard myself speaking calmly, decisively (a new voice, a newly born voice).

‘I’ll see you later,’ I told Paloma with a kiss. ‘I’ll catch you up,’ I added, pulling her in for a hug, remembering our first encounter (wondering if it was a new kind of longing beating inside of me, or if it was still the steady pulse of our parents’ nostalgia).

Paloma got into the van and waved me goodbye. And I watched as she drove away, leaving only those wings beating in steady unison before me, the perfect harmony of birds in flight, taking off to the sound of a strange lullaby, a murmur that burst suddenly into an uncontainable din.