The red car stopped on the sidewalk and the driver got out, clearly relieved to have finally found a place to buy cigarettes. He left the engine running and didn’t even close the door behind him. I know because just minutes earlier I had parked my car a few metres away to buy two packs of cigarettes and a case of beer that would make it easier for me to bear the inevitable defeat of my team in the football match that night.
As I took a second drag on my cigarette I saw the woman in the back seat of the red car. She sat with her hips turned and she was craning her neck. She seemed to be focused on watching the cars go by, as if she were trying to find some sort of migratory pattern among the models and colours that came and went along the cactus-strewn road.
I gathered that the woman had just been crying, not for a few minutes, but for weeks or even months. Her face was not in tears, but it had been shaped by tears. It wasn’t sad, even – instead it was petrified in a past where it had been accustomed to crying. It was a face that seemed to have been redrawn with that unique effect of copious tears that have carved out their own courses, with their pools and their tributaries.
The man from the red car decided to smoke his cigarette just outside the store, with ceremonious drags, as if he were immune to the raging sun that would soon warm the beers I had just bought. I couldn’t stay there any longer myself, and I drove off so the wind would cool me off even though it meant my cigarette would burn out faster.
A few blocks later the memory of the woman was fading away and when it had nearly vanished into thin air I took one last drag on the cigarette. The tobacco – and her face – left an acrid aftertaste that eventually dissolved into the heat.
Several traffic lights later the red car passed me. It wasn’t going excessively fast. Probably the driver had made a series of small decisions (running a yellow light, not letting another car in, cleverly avoiding a pothole, changing gears at just the right moments) that allowed him to close the gap and again place the woman in my field of vision, this time at a diagonal. She remained in the same posture, but now I could see her from a new angle. I might say it was more beautiful, although I don’t know if it was because of my point of view, or the re-emergence of the sun’s rays, or because it was the second time I’d seen her: that second glimpse that – now free from the euphoria of the first encounter – allows for an unhurried pleasure of the senses. But it wasn’t her beauty that interested me. It was her posture, which was even more striking; she held herself with such elegant simplicity. And even more than her posture, what intrigued me the most was the way she kept looking backwards, ignoring the road that stretched out ahead, clinging to the wake of images that were seamlessly superimposed in a perfect inverted progression.
For the next half hour the woman remained in my sight. I wasn’t following the red car. We were just taking the same route. And so were lots of other cars, only the rest of them (since they didn’t have a woman in the back seat trying to resist the bonds of time) were merely decorative spectres. At times those cars would move forward and block her from view, and then they would retreat and the woman would emerge again. And every reappearance, like a stubborn miracle trying to prove itself not by being spectacular but just by being obstinate, made me crave another hit – so much so that when the red car began to slow down to turn onto a side road that wasn’t on my way home, I slowed down too. Not because I wanted to follow them, I told myself in an absolving whisper, but because I sensed that the woman needed to see something and – I said to myself, silently this time – I wanted to know what it was.
Now that I was following them on purpose and not just with the ebb and flow of chance, I was overcome with the feeling that I was committing a crime. I decided to maintain a sensible distance, which I’m not sure was necessary because the man was glued to the steering wheel, and the woman, in her petrified state, ignored me. Although I believe she noticed my presence a couple of times, she did so as if I were just another object in the scene, and in effect I was – we all were.
After another half an hour of driving, the red car stopped on a street lined with topiaries. The man got out. He rang a doorbell, the door opened halfway and across the threshold he had a short conversation with someone I couldn’t see because this time I stayed back a considerable distance, nearly a full block away. As the man walked back to the car I got ready to go again, and to avoid suspicion I passed him before he could drive away, just like I’d seen in movies that illustrate the art of pursuit. But the tactic failed me: in my rear-view mirror I saw that the woman had got out of the car and was standing on the sidewalk.
I turned at the next street and drove around the block to end up exactly in the spot I’d been parked in minutes earlier. The red car was gone and the woman was still standing there, looking in the same direction she’d been looking when she was sitting in the car – backwards – towards the done and the undone. She had a large cloth bag over her shoulder and across her chest. It was threadbare and with one of her hands she was clutching the strap with what seemed like excessive care. Standing there she looked less elegant than before; she’d lost the sculptural posture I’d become accustomed to. It was like seeing Michelangelo’s David buying a metro ticket or pushing a shopping cart.
I decided to turn off the engine and light another cigarette. When I closed my eyes to take the first drag I feared that when I opened them the woman would be gone, which would almost have been a relief because the safety of my apartment walls, my now warm beers and the match awaited me.
But when I opened my eyes the woman was still there. Since I didn’t have a radio or a newspaper or a donut and coffee to pass the time, I just kept smoking my cigarette meticulously. When it was half-gone I decided that when I finished it I would light the next one, and then another, and another. (Predicting minuscule future actions distracts me from the impossibility of foreseeing big life events.)
Before I could get to the last drag a black car stopped in front of the woman and she meekly climbed into the back seat. I perked up, loosened my tie, tossed the unfinished cigarette out of the half-open window and started the engine. I followed the black car without hesitation, as if my usual routine were to follow cars that pick up women who look backwards, a job I was performing with a level of efficiency that made me slightly proud.
After half a dozen kilometres the black car abandoned the woman on another street. The driver knocked on a door and left, and she waited with her cloth bag. About ten minutes later a beige car pulled up and she got in without any signal from anyone. Cars of various makes and colours repeated this chain of events over and over with the density of a nightmare, one where you want to wake up but you also want to find out how it ends. In my car I repeated myself as well, cigarette after cigarette: start the engine; follow the car.
After seven cars I decided to put an end to this series of nearly identical episodes. And just as I’ve managed to do before in disturbing dreams, I chose to speak, because the sound of words can sometimes tear through veils.
While the woman was waiting, I pulled forward in my car and parked just on the other side of the intersection, several metres ahead of where she was. I was afraid inertia would compel her to climb into my back seat and turn her back to me while I drove, glued to the steering wheel, only to abandon her on another street after a few kilometres.
I shut off the engine and walked towards her. The furrows on her face were very deep, and her expression of lament, far from moving me, terrified me. It scared me in the way that someone else’s pain sometimes does: as if I’d seen a mirror covered in boils. I didn’t manage to say anything meaningful to her. ‘Waiting for someone?’ I muttered. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. Her posture relaxed slightly and although out of the corner of her eye she continued to look behind her, which was where I usually was with respect to her, she was paying attention to me. She wasn’t completely gone – some thread of sanity kept her tied to a plane where we could commune.
I told her that if she needed to go somewhere I could take her and she said no, what she needed was several changes of clothing. ‘Clothing?’ I repeated like a diligent echo. She explained, clutching her bag to her chest, that she had found them naked like this, that right now it didn’t matter because it was warm, but at night the temperature would surely drop, and she was worried because she didn’t know if they could survive the cold. ‘I don’t think it will get that cold,’ was all that occurred to me to say to follow the same line of thought she’d extended to me. She seemed bothered, as if my observation were just nonsense that was meant to trick her. She opened her bag and indicated that I should lower my head to see the contents it was protecting. Although they appeared to be a pair of tiny, sweaty and trembling puppies, it was impossible to say for sure that it wasn’t actually a single body with two heads; it was also impossible to look at the palpitating, whining jumble and be sure they were even dogs. I think my indolence upset her. She told me, raising her voice, that the cold was going to kill them. ‘Look, they’re not wearing anything, they can’t stay like this.’
More to comfort myself than her, I went to my car to look for some sort of cloth or rag in the glove compartment. In the meantime a silver car picked up the woman. I followed them and the nightmare resumed, only now the knowledge that she had company filled me with much greater apprehension. I began to wonder about whether the right clothes for those puppies would be the same as what infants wear or if it would be better to get something from a special shop for animals.
I decided that at the next stop, when they abandoned the woman on the street, I would make her come with me and we would solve her immediate problem, which – besides her pained face that had been shaped by tears – was those tiny trembling animals’ lack of attire. But then the grey car abandoned the residential areas and started down the road that leads to the border checkpoint, and I wouldn’t be able to go through. I stopped on the side of the road and didn’t turn back until the silver car had shrunk to the size of a fly and was swallowed by the horizon. On this side of the threshold I had football waiting for me, clothes in my wardrobe, and feverishly hot drinks that I’d have to chill with ice cubes – a handful of small certainties, a somewhat clean mirror.