On the map the Interstate 25 led honestly south, until it ran into the dotted line where Colorado met New Mexico, eye to eye, foreheads aligned.
We had five or six hours of driving ahead of us. We stopped to fill the tank at the first gas station and Carlos wanted to buy some chocolate with some of the twelve dollars of spending money he had brought with him. Fernando bought three bottles of water and a bag of really bad salsa chips. The packet said: MADE WITH REAL AVOCADOS AND TOMATOES. But they tasted like anything but real avocados and tomatoes. I bought a pair of slightly embarrassing sunglasses with pink and blue frames. Then I waited for the sun to come out so I could wear them. But the morning was taking its time, as if dragging itself out of an autumn night with wintry aspirations was slow and a little painful.
Carlos had telephoned the previous evening to list off the items in his suitcase and ask if I agreed. His mother had helped him choose them, but he wanted to be extra-super-sure that his suitcase contained everything necessary. He didn’t want to have to reuse underwear or socks on such an important trip.
Such an important trip: for the surprise-reasons nestled in the days to come, waiting for their moment to leap out. Panting trapeze artists with drums beating down below.
Carlos didn’t know anything. We hadn’t told him anything about anything. But the trip was important according to his own personal parameters. It was an event. It was the first time in his life, for example, that he had been away from his itinerant family.
It was a little after seven o’clock. Fernando had hauled me out of bed at six-thirty and pushed me out of the house at seven. It was still dark when I got up. In the merciless cold that preceded the dawn, the world was full of placid suspense; supernatural minus the ghosts. It turned its face unhurriedly toward the sun that would appear when it had to, no sooner, no later.
We stopped the Saab in front of Carlos’s house, before a mosaic of sparse plant-life and small puddles of hard snow. Carlos walked down to the street holding hands with his dad. His face was solemn: he was perhaps a brave little soldier setting out to save the nation. A pre-hero in a stocking hat and gloves. He smelled vaguely of aftershave. As we greeted one another, pale steam came out of our mouths. The sky was a two-dimensional, milky, dull surface.
The two adults made pale, steamy comments about the weather. There was no snow predicted for that week and it was going to be a good week, and the roads would be good. The red Saab rumbled quietly, its motor running, a testament to its serenity and discipline.
Carlos’s dad told us to have a good time and to call to check in. The two adults shook hands, Carlos jumped into the car and the moon remained steadfast in the colorless sky, entirely oblivious to whatever was going on beneath it.
After a little while, Carlos asked to see the map and was elated when he realized that before getting to Santa Fé we would pass through Las Vegas.
Fernando had to explain that it wasn’t the Las Vegas he was thinking of, which was in Nevada not New Mexico, and Carlos lowered his eyes to the map again, vaguely disappointed.
Then, mentally inaugurating an improbable chapter of tourism in our lives, he suggested that we go to the real Las Vegas the next time there was a long weekend. Or to New York, another city he’d heard a lot about.
Half an hour later, he was asleep in the back seat of the Saab, lying down with his knees pulled up to his tummy, glasses crooked on his forehead.
The Saab broke down near Starkville, in the county of Las Animas. We were about twenty minutes from the state border. Fernando swore in Portuguese and Carlos may have understood him. We had traveled two hundred miles in three and a half hours, taking into account the pee-stop we had made outside Pueblo.
At the beginning of the trip, Carlos slept for over an hour, while I tracked the Saab’s freefall down the map. We left Castle Rock and Larkspur behind us. In front of the Air Force Academy at the entrance to Colorado Springs, I noticed that the highway took on the name Ronald Reagan Highway. Pikes Peak loomed above us, a proudly tall mountain in a land of tall mountains. We left the city and its Saturday morning behind.
Haven’t you ever wanted to go back to Brazil? I asked Fernando.
I’ve thought about it a few times.
So why haven’t you ever gone back?
There isn’t much for me in Brazil.
What do you mean, there isn’t much for you in Brazil? You’re from there. You left because you had to.
Truth be told, Vanja, I wasn’t forced to leave. I left because I wanted to. I know I once told you that, that I had to leave. But no one sent me away, and other people in the same situation stayed. They’re still around. Some are in the government. They paid a price, of course. But I did too.
Fine, but if you didn’t leave you might have had problems. With the police. The army, I mean. You said so yourself.
He sighed.
If I were in Brazil today I might very well be working as a security guard and cleaner too. Who knows. But life would be a little more difficult.
You could do something else. Maybe you’d be in the government too. Imagine! You might be a federal deputy, a minister.
He laughed.
I don’t know if I’d want to do anything else. Or if I’d be able to. Maybe serve beers in a bar.
That’s not the only thing you’ve done in your life. You studied geography.
I did a year of geography.
But you’ve done other things.
Sure. I attended the Peking Military Academy. And I was a communist guerrilla. That’s the most important part of my CV.
I didn’t say anything.
After a time he added: I don’t need to tell you that these things have to stay between us, right?
He didn’t. We overtook a car carrier transporting a cluster of cars with dents in different places and to different degrees. One of them was missing its front bumper, which made it look like a mutilated face, the sort you see close-up in horror movies, a bulging headlight like an eye in a bed of live flesh. I liked talking to Fernando.
A black car overtook us. There was a National Rifle Association sticker on the back window, with an eagle perched on two crossed rifles against a red background.
There is something intermediary about deserts. Many travelers have said it. It is as if they weren’t destinations, just routes. Great inhospitable landscapes where you don’t dawdle, you just travel from one more affable point on the map to another. And yet people live there. People live in the world’s deserts and arid and semiarid wildernesses. In these places between parentheses. Where all things – sounds, distances – inhabit other semantics. It seems like a desperate gesture. Or perhaps an abandonment.
I hate this place, Nick once told me.
What place? School?
Colorado.
You hate it? Why?
You walk and there’s nothing. You drive for hours and hours and there’s nothing. Just some bushes on the ground. I wish I lived somewhere where there were trees.
There are the mountains, I mused.
The mountains, he said. A bunch of pine trees and ski stations. Rich folk’s mansions imitating Swiss chalets. No thanks.
I made a mental note that Nick wasn’t interested in pine trees, ski stations or rich folk’s mansions imitating Swiss chalets.
This all used to be underwater, I said, happy with the knowledge I had recently acquired from the Science Museum. You know, thousands of years ago. It was all ocean.
As far as I’m concerned it might as well still be, he said.
In the car with Fernando, I thought about the Colorado sea, and what animals might have lived there, in that deserted terrain that the highway cut through in an infinite straight line as if to say, OK, if you want to keep going, it’s your problem – let’s see what you’re capable of. What shells of Mesozoic dimensions, what strange animals living inside them.
What are you to me? I asked Fernando.
What?
What are you to me? Because according to my birth certificate you’re my dad, but you’re not my real dad, so what are you?
He looked at me, then back at the highway, the persistent gray strip of highway and the tufts of scorched vegetation that flanked it, and the blobs of snow here and there, where the sun allowed it.
I don’t know. Whatever you want me to be, he replied.
The man at the motel reception desk had gray hair tied back in a pony tail and nicotine-stained teeth. He said there was a heated indoor swimming pool that was open until 9 p.m.
On the side of the counter was a collection of pamphlets about the attractions of Las Animas County. Carlos took one of each and tugged on my arm to show me what they said about the ghost towns. He read out their names: Berwind, Delagua, Ludlow, Morley, Primero, Segundo, Tabasco, Tercio.
And he appeared to like the sound of those words, in that exact order, because he repeated them a few more times. Berwind, Delagua, Ludlow, Morley, Primero, Segundo, Tabasco, Tercio. Berwind, Delagua, Ludlow, Morley, Primero, Segundo, Tabasco, Tercio.
The motel pool was a giant slab of warm water next to the reception, behind a dirty glass wall. There was a young woman with two little boys there when we arrived. The boys stared at us. They were wearing inflatable orange armbands and had skinny legs sticking out of their shorts, and thin chests out of which jutted skinny arms and thin necks and startled oval heads.
A sign said NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY.
Carlos jumped into the water, a stocky little torpedo with a crew cut. The boys kept staring, unabashed.
Fernando sat on the edge of the pool and didn’t take off his shirt. He didn’t take off his shirt until the young woman and the little boys had gone, dragging dirty white towels behind them – miniature ghosts exiled from the ghost town, souls in Las Animas, trying to recover their lost privacy. Then Fernando got into the pool and taught Carlos how to do underwater somersaults, which Carlos ended up mastering after inhaling a decent amount of warm, chlorinated liquid through his nostrils and emerging hurt and confused.
In the bedroom, we had two beds. One for Fernando, one for me and Carlos.
Fernando ordered pizza, beers and sodas. The three of us distractedly watched a film for adolescents on TV as we ate, Carlos and I lying belly-down on our bed and getting ketchup and mustard on the bedspread, Fernando at a round table with one leg shorter than the others that rocked back and forth every time he leaned on it.
Carlos put on his space-themed pajamas. It had astronauts and stars against a black background, and six-legged extraterrestrials with tufts of antennae on their heads and goofy smiles. He brushed his teeth with his new toothbrush, which he had bought specially for the trip.
Later, in the dark, I heard his heavy, just-fallen-asleep breathing.
On the other bed, Fernando was an indistinct shape, motionless, as if he had ceased to exist. As if he had left his body there and gone off to do something else.
On the highway outside night trucks and cars carrying tired eyes behind steering wheels drove past. Each of them was a broad noise and a flash of light. Low-pitched noises and king-size flashes of light for the trucks. Higher-pitched noises and more discreet flashes of light for the cars.
I fell asleep and dreamed of a pool, at the bottom of which were tunnels leading to other pools. The water carried Carlos’s liquid voice repeating the names of the ghost towns of Las Animas County.
I leapt out of the dream and fully woke up a short time later, when I heard someone knocking on the door of the room next to ours. Fernando was still in the same position, the same inexistence. I realized he was awake, because sleeping bodies tend to be easier, more abandoned objects – like Carlos beside me. I rolled over in bed and leaned on my elbow.
Fernando?
Hmm?
Aren’t you sleepy?
No.
Want some gum?
No. Thanks.
Nick didn’t like people who chewed gum and he could never find out about the little strawberry-flavored packet that lived in the bottom of my bag.
Did you tell my mother what happened to you when you left Brazil?
Fernando was fully dressed, lying on top of the bedspread, the bed still made. His shoes, on the ground, looked like giant sleeping beetles, with the appendages of their laces hanging at their sides.
Some of it, he said. Not everything.
Do you think much about it?
I used to. Not so much anymore.
Don’t you like to think about it?
At this stage, it doesn’t make much difference. You know? Thinking about it or not thinking about it.
We stayed there like that, awake and silent for a while, listening to Carlos breathe. Listening to the noises from the highway. A digital clock with scarlet letters on the bedside table showed 23:11.
Could you pass me a beer? Fernando asked.
I got a beer from the dwarf fridge that was snoring with its dwarf asthma next to my bed. Fernando opened the can with a metallic sneeze and took a sip.
Do you want me to tell you the things I never told your mother?
I was quiet and listened. For a good while, I just listened.
I never asked Fernando why he decided to talk that night. If, by any chance, he had decided to indemnify my mother for the things he hadn’t told her by telling her daughter. But if I asked he probably would have said: at this stage, it doesn’t make much difference.
I was awoken shortly after 8am by Carlos tugging on my big toe. I felt like hitting him. But I just grumbled and pulled my foot up and rolled over to keep sleeping.
He and Fernando were already up, dressed and groomed. Fernando was wearing the birthday T-shirt. The coffee-maker was making coffee as it always did, as it was condemned to do for countless guests, day after day, gurgling and blowing out steam on the counter between the toothbrushes. The coffee came in sachets, the sugar and sweetener in little packets.
I knew it must be time to get up. We ate a trio of bagels in the motel foyer on Styrofoam plates and used plastic knives to spread on the cream cheese and jam that came in tiny individual plastic packages. We drank a little processed juice from Styrofoam cups and more coffee in other Styrofoam cups. By the time we had finished we had three Styrofoam plates, six Styrofoam cups, three plastic knives, three plastic spoons, a few empty packets of sugar and some empty cream cheese and jam packages to throw in the trash. After that, we had a car to get from the workshop and a trip to resume.
Las Animas bordered on New Mexico. At the top of Raton Pass, Carlos wanted to stop, get out of the car and take photographs at the state border. Then he asked Fernando what New Mexico had to do with Mexico.